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Truth and truthfulness in democracy (and the problem of Brexit)

When it comes to democracy, the cynics are having a field day. Whether it’s Brexit or Trump – it’s currently popular to be a pessimist, or – more politely – a “realist” about democracy. Let’s call this view the “tribal theory” of democracy. The tribal theory takes democracy as a contest of wills, a fight for power conducted within the confines of democratic institutions. For the tribalists, there are no better or worse, correct or incorrect answers. How to choose which tribe to join? Reflective voters choose in line with their interests, but others make identity-based choices.

The alternative is the “epistemic theory” of democracy. The epistemic theory takes democracy as the joint pursuit of correct or better social choices. Choices can be better or worse because there are plausible external standards to assess them. For example, some policies lower while others raise unemployment. Some choices reduce the risk of a nuclear war, others increase it. Some governments promote the welfare of its people, others don’t. And, crucially, the citizens are able to judge governments or policies according to shared standards. These judgements are not perfect. Still, citizens are not hopeless in judging democratic outputs and voting is a plausible mechanism to promote the public good by making the best choices.

What’s the upshot of the tribal/epistemic distinction? Your analysis of democratic decisions will diverge dramatically, depending on whether you take the tribal or the epistemic perspective. Let’s take Brexit as an example and run through some aspects of it.

First, consider the tightness of the outcome. From the tribal perspective, politics is about winning, and winning is about mobilizing the right people to vote with you. For a tribalist, the big success of the Brexit campaign was the successful mobilization of voters that allowed them to win narrowly despite the many surveys suggesting they would not.

From the epistemic perspective, tight outcomes raise questions about the confidence we can have in the result. Tight results may simply reflect the fact that the average voter is only a little better than random in making a correct choice – that would not put into question the collective result. But some probing questions are in order. Let’s assume that the 52% selected the better option. Is there something valuable about Remain that the 48% spotted? Or are the 48% systematically misled by some factor? Is there perhaps a third option that was missing on the agenda that would have been even better? And then, there is the other possibility: that the 52% were wrong. For example, if 5% of the voters were misled by incorrect claims about a “Brexit dividend”, perhaps a falsehood swung the decision. The point here is not to assert any of these claims. The point is that the epistemic theory raises questions about whether the vote took place in circumstances that allowed the facts to guide the decision and voters decide for the best option. And if it did not, the legitimacy of outcomes can be questioned.

Second, the issue of lies in politics. Both the tribal and the epistemic theory condemn lying in politics, but for different reasons. The tribal theorist is concerned about lies that make voters vote against their tribal preferences. The epistemic theorist, by contrast, worries about lies because they make it harder for voters to choose the alternative in the public interest. Many claims made by the different Brexit campaigns turned out to be false, and some were lies. If you voted for Brexit because you wanted to increase the National Health Service budget, you were probably misled by a lie. Is this bad because it frustrated your interest, or is this bad because it made it harder for you to choose the option that best promotes the public good? It depends on whether you see democracy in tribal or in epistemic terms.

Let us now turn, third, to the quality of public debate in the run-up to the vote. Most believe that debating politics is good for democracy. Tribal theorists maintain that talking achieves two things: first, finding out what is in your tribe’s interest; second, persuading others, if you can, that your interest is theirs. Epistemic theorists disagree: for them, debate is about uncovering evidence, testing arguments, and following them to their logical conclusion. Depending on your perspective, you are likely to see the public debates leading up to Brexit either as a gripping competition to win over voters or as a sorry affair driven by emotions and falsehoods.

Finally, under which circumstances is a new vote about the Brexit options sensible? “If the interests or tribal affiliations have changed,” say the tribal theorists. “If the circumstances were not truth-conducive then but are now,” say the epistemic theorists. Both sides have arguments in favour and against a new referendum. First, the tribal arguments. It is plausibly true that interests have changed, for several reasons. Some voters may have realized that Brexit is against their interests. Also, the electorate changed with young voters added and old voters dying. Tribal theorists (but not members of the tribe that won the first time!) have reasons to consider a new vote if changes in the electorate are substantial. This is a big “if”, of course, and the argument could also run the other way.

Epistemic theorists might support a second vote for different reasons. They look at the lies, misinformation and biases and conclude that the first referendum was epistemically compromised, hoping that the new referendum campaign might be less so. From the epistemic perspective, democracy is a learning system, and when learning took place, voting again makes sense.

There are, however, also important epistemic arguments against a second referendum. A new vote needs more truth-conducive circumstances, with more accurate information, better-quality public debate, less emotional bias. It is true that, three years on, people know more about Brexit. But it is also true that many voters have entered a hyper-tribal state of mind. Brexit supporters have emerged as a new tribe in UK politics and many members are sticking to their tribe. Not only that, many “Brexiters” have become suspicious of the motives of “Remainers”. Are the fancy epistemic arguments perhaps just a cynical ploy to trick the majority into a new referendum? Is the high-handed rhetoric just tribalism in disguise? In this climate of tribal suspicion, one may wonder whether a new referendum campaign would be conducted with more commitment to the pursuit of truth than the previous campaign. For an epistemic theorist, whether you want a new vote depends on how truth-conducive a new campaign will be.

When democracies have fallen into hyper-tribal traps and their epistemic functioning is diminished, the best advice is often to take a break and calm down rather than keep going. Under normal circumstances, the best course of action would be to delay the decision for a few years. But in the case of Brexit, it is hard to see how the debate would calm down, given how important the issue is and how polarizing it has turned out to be. What options are left? In uncertain times, keeping options open is often a good choice because one can change course after learning new facts. A Brexit that keeps the UK in the customs union and close to the single market would at least allow the UK to rejoin if life outside the EU turns out to be unattractive.

Epistemic democrats like me think democracies are about the joint pursuit of the public good by making the best choices. If we want our democracies to be more than just tribal competition, we need to search for the common good together. However, some populist politicians and campaign managers aim to convince voters that all politics is tribal, and that the joint pursuit of the common good is mere rhetoric. The problem with this view is that it tends to become true when voters start believing it. We must make sure that this cynical view does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Feature image credit: “European Parliament” by ChequeredInk . Public domain via Pixabay.

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Is there room for creative imagination in science?

Not just once, but repeatedly, I have heard something like “I just didn’t see in science any room for my own imagination or creativity,” from young students clearly able to succeed at any subject they set their minds to. It is a tragedy that so many people do not perceive science as a creative. Yet it doesn’t take an Einstein to observe that without that essential creative first step of re-imagining what might be going on behind a natural phenomenon, there can be no science at all.

Einstein had something to say on the matter. As he wrote in his book with Leopold Infeld, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Every scientist knows this, but for two centuries we have been quiet about the imaginative first step of science, preferring stories that stress the empirical method or the logic of scientific discovery. Science education is full of it, focussing on final results, rather than the journeys toward them. Human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas, and glorious moments of illumination thread through the lives of all who actually do science. No wonder my young colleagues became disillusioned.

If scientists are somewhat shy about their experiences of imagination, then I found that the artists, writers, and composers with whom I spoke to could be equally reticent about their repeated need to experiment. Scraping the paint from the canvas, re-drafting the novel for the tenth time, rescoring the thematic musical material is, as every artist knows, the consequence of material constraints. Artists, as well as scientists, make initial hypotheses about how their material, words, or sounds will achieve the goal in mind. The simultaneous birth of the English novel and the experimental method in science turns out, for example, to be no coincidence. Without making the naïve claim that art and science doing the same thing, the similarities in the experience of those who work with in those fields are remarkable.

The project of listening to anyone who creates—be it with music or mathematics, oil paint or quantum theory—and the creative power of the constraints creators encounter, became a fascinating project.

A pattern of three modes of creative expression emerged.

The first mode is visual imagination. This is, of course, primary for the artist, but the same mode of creative expression is also important for many scientists, from molecular biologists to astrophysicists. Astronomy creates the first artists canvas. If the observer of a painting is asked to re-create a three-dimensional world from a two-dimensional picture, then the same is true of understanding the universe from the picture that we call the sky.

A second mode is textual and linguistic. Its threads tie together science and the written word, in prose or poetry. They possess a principle knot at the birth of the novel, but its story is a much longer one. Science and poetry also have an alternative history, envisioned by William Wordsworth in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballards: “The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us.” With notable exceptions (such as R.S. Thomas and occasionally W.B. Yeats in poetry, and the ever-present fluttering trespass of Vladimir Nabokov’s beloved butterflies from his scientific work into his novels) this early-Romantic vision has sadly yet to be fulfilled, frustrated by the very desiccated presentation of science with which we began.

Imagination’s third mode appears as both pictures and words fade away. For there, when we might have expected a creative vacuum of nothingness, we find instead the wonderful and mysterious abstractions of music and of mathematics. This shared space is surely why these two have something in common. It is not their superficial sharing of numbers that links music with mathematical structure, but their representational forms in entire universes of our mental making.

Other disciplines can help make sense of all this. The anthropology and cognitive neuroscience of creativity is fascinating, the one taking us to the stone tools of our distant ancestors at the dawn of humanity, the other to the delicate balance between the different functions of our brains’ left and right hemispheres.

Philosophy is equally illuminating. Emmanuel Levinas teases out, for example, the difference between the visual and musical modes of imagination: the first distances us from the object, the second immerses us within it. Theology applies its critical tools to the role of purpose in human creativity. Both the artistic and scientific modes of re-imagining nature seem to have been part of what drives activities special to our species’ search for meaning. They embody the rich tradition of humans understanding themselves.

As George Steiner wrote in his wonderful account of art and meaning, Real Presences: “Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter.” Precisely the same could be said of science.

 

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Why do homo sapiens include so much variety?

The past is a mess. To pick a path through the mire, historians have appealed to providence, progress, environmental determinism, class struggle, biology and fate.  No explanation has worked – so far. But try shifting perspective: look for the broadest possible context, the most suggestive comparisons. Climb the cosmic crow’s nest. Imagine what history might look like from an immense distance of time and space, with objectivity we cannot attain. The Galactic Observer  – I suggest – would notice some of the other cultural creatures with whom we share our planet. “You,” she will say, “are a puny, short-lived species on a dreary little rock. But by comparison even with other very similar species, you have an amazing range of culture: vastly, astonishingly more ways of living, getting food, communicating, worshipping and dealing with each other.”

Before we get to her conclusion, we might pause to acknowledge that, thus far, she’d be right. Early in the 1950s Japanese, primatologists made one of the most subversive but least acknowledged scientific breakthroughs of modern times. Observing macaque monkeys’ feeding habits, they knew that the monkeys scraped the dirt off sweet potatoes with the fingers. But a two year-old female, whom they called Imo, discovered the superiority of washing the vegetables in a stream. Her siblings and mother learned the technique and passed it to the rest of the tribe, until only a few unteachably old males clung to former methods. The macaques had acquired a tradition undetermined by environment or genes. They had culture. Ever since, discoveries of similarly cultural behaviours outside the human realm have multiplied. Orang-utans’ games, for example, differ among different communities. Humpback whales learn and pass on new hunting techniques. Culturally speaking, we are not alone. But we are still unique – not in having culture, but in having more of it than other animals.

Macaque Monkey by 4976789. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

“Your story, therefore,” the Galactic Observer resumes, “is of how you humans came to be so anomalous: the story of your cultural divergences – of how differences have multiplied in the way your communities behave, over your two hundred-or-so millennia on your planet.”

To understand the peculiarities of our human past, study of our fellow-apes is especially instructive: what can they teach us about our own distinctiveness? Three great lessons emerge.

First, environment, though it determines nothing, influences everything – shaping lives the way wind shapes a tree. Humans occupy a vastly bigger environmental range than any comparable animal. Other great apes – and we should never forget that we are just well adapted apes – inhabit continuous or contiguous niches. Apart from some extinct hominids, we are the only apes to have spread over almost the entire land surface of the globe. Every shift to new physical surroundings demanded adaptations in our ancestors’ ways of life, opening chasms of culture across physical boundaries.

Second, psychic qualities matter. Humans moved out of their East African environment of origin because they were exceptionally imaginative animals, capable of envisioning life in an unexperienced world. Imagination or, more simply, the power of seeing something that isn’t there, is what biologists call a “spandrel”: an unevolved consequence of our ancestors’ evolved power of anticipation – the power of seeing what is not yet there – which our ancestors needed to make up for their physical deficiencies in competition with stronger, faster, more agile animals with better teeth, talons, jaws and digestions. Our bad memories helped. Humans who congratulate themselves on their supposedly superior memories are wrong: in quantifiable ways, chimps and gorillas outperform students in some kinds of memory-test. The unreliability of witnesses proves our shortcomings. If anticipation is seeing what’s not yet there, memory is the ability to see what’s there no longer. Both overlap with and contribute to imagination. Every false memory is an innovation added to experience.

Finally, divergence is not the whole story. At intervals in history, human groups have re-established contact, exchanged culture and, at least in some respects, grown more like each other. So convergence threads into the story of divergence. Cultural contagion accelerated about half a millennium ago, reaching across the globe, as explorers, colonizers, conquerors, merchants and missionaries crossed previously unnavigated oceans and united formerly sundered civilisations. We are now in a peculiarly intense phase of convergence, which we usually call globalization: all over the world, people want to adopt the same politics and economics, wear the same dress, eat the same food, buy the same art, listen to the same music, even talk the same language. Convergence crushes the life out of some societies, extinguishes some lifeways, makes some languages and religions vanish. Can it put an end to divergence?

So far, it just seems to overlay global culture on top of persistent differences. In part, like every agglutinative episode in history, it provokes reactions, with people reaching for the comfort of tradition and trying to conserve threatened lifeways, like eco-enthusiasts rallying to the defence of threatened species and landscapes. Cultural exchange, moreover, can stimulate divergence by blending old ideas into new ones and by encouraging imagination. Are we heading for cultural fusion, in a world of arrested change, or for more of the divergence that impressed the Galactic Observer?

Featured image credit: Shibuya Nights by Andre Benz. Worldwide Copyright License via Unsplash. 

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The “sl”-morass: “slender” and “slim-slam-slum”

Several years ago, I devoted a series of posts to the origin of English kl-words: cloud, cloth, clover; perhaps there were more (June 29, 2016, July 13, 2016, and August 10, 2016). Cleave, clay, and many other such words contain the idea of clinging to some substance or clutter. It is hard to miss the sound symbolism that unites them. Some other technically unrelated words also form groups. For example, fly, flow, flatter, flutter, and flicker suggest unsteady movement, even though each of those verbs has its own history.

A special case is the sl-group. In looking through the list slight, slim, sleazy, sliver, slick, slip, etc., one cannot avoid the impression that in some way they too belong together. Surprisingly, when we open a dictionary, we discover that the origin of most of them is unknown. They behave like a rootless but powerful gang. As in dealing with kl– and fl-words, we wonder: Are they related, or do they, by beginning with sl-, influence one another and our understanding of them?

Slender success. Image credit: Chess King by falconp4. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

At least two sl-words—sleeveless (in the puzzling phrase sleeveless errand) and slang—have been discussed in this blog (September 28, 2016 and April 26, 2017). A few more deserve our attention. One of them is slender. It appeared in texts in the fifteenth century. As if to mock us, a French word and a Dutch one that look like the sources of the English adjective either never existed or were too obscure to be borrowed by English speakers. Yet English sl-words do often go back to Dutch, so that, in principle, there may be no mystery, and Walter W. Skeat disagreed with the OED and traced slender to Middle Dutch via French.

The Century Dictionary followed Skeat and cited Modern German schlendern and schlenzen, both of which mean “to loiter.” Low German (Low in this term means “northern”) had the verb slendern “to glide,” that is, “to slide” (!), but we need an adjective, and it is precisely the early Flemish adjective slinder whose status raises great doubts. Yet, if we follow Skeat, it migrated to French, where it had a most shadowy existence but managed to gain popularity in English. Understandably, etymologists look for other possibilities. The great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) suggested that slender is a blend of slim and tender. Several good scholars supported this derivation.

Authoritative dictionaries shy away from such conclusions. They want verifiable hypotheses. Also, they have a reputation to live up to. Both occasional users and some professional students of language history tend to take the conclusions in such sources as the OED, Webster, The Random House Dictionary, and one or two others as definitive. They may not realize that even the greatest dictionaries are written by insecure, fallible human beings, that every new edition revises the verdicts of the previous one, and that the compilers of such works prefer to be safe, not sorry. “Origin unknown” is certainly safe, even if uninspiring. The existence of a blend can be demonstrated only if the process of blending occurs in full view. For instance, blog is indeed web + log, smog is smoke + fog, webinar is web + seminar, and so forth. But how can we “prove” that slender is slim + tender? We cannot. Our guess has merit, but that is as far as it goes.

 

Slums, unfortunately, still exist. Image credit: Habitat 02 by NadègeNN. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My interest in sl– words is old. For years, I have been trying to discover the origin of the noun slum. In addition to the sense we all know, slum has been recorded as meaning “room” and “gammon, blarney, gipsy jargon.” No pre-1819 attestation has so far turned up. The word is said to be “of cant origin,” which means that it arose somewhere in the depths of low street slang, where it could have existed for any length of time. The Century Dictionary also cited slum(s), a term from metallurgy, “light gravel, etc., passing off through the waste flume at every upward motion,” the same as slime “ore reduced to a very fine powder and held in suspension in water, so as to form thin water-mud,” mostly used in the plural. It probably follows that the word originally meant “trash, waste, litter,” whether in reference to language, habitat, light gravel, or whatever.

Fuzzy, historically, sleazy cloth. Image credit: Blanket by Efraimstochter. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

Its neighbors are slim and slime. Some such words are said to have a respectable pedigree. However, slim was recorded only in the middle of the seventeenth century. It meant “slanting”; surprisingly, its German cognate schlimm developed the sense “bad.” Likewise, Engl. sleazy “fuzzy, flimsy” yielded “corrupt, immoral,” while the old sense is forgotten. Apparently, once a word gets into the orbit of sl-, its meaning tends to deteriorate. I suspect that even Engl. slanting, another word of questionable antecedents, developed from “not straight; not right,” but later, contrary to the usual trend, attained a measure of respectability. Slime is old, and so is German Schlamm “mud.” For slime a Latin cognate seems to have been found; Schlamm is of unknown origin. An uneasy feeling remains that all those sl-words belong together and have always denoted things bad, unsteady, sordid, or muddy.

Even the verb slam appeared in English only in the eighteenth century and is presumably of Scandinavian origin. Indeed, many sl-words came to English not only from Dutch but also from the northern quarters; however, English very rarely borrowed common Scandinavian words so late. Perhaps slam referred to an offensive bang? Can it be native? For the moment, I’ll leave slam “prison” out of the picture. Slam, a card term, is earlier, and its possible original meaning “trick, hoodwink” belongs with “bad” and “oblique.”

The mainstay of all Indo-European languages is ablaut, that is, a vowel alternation, as in ride–rode–ridden, fly-few-flown, give–gave, speak–spoke, and the like. Ablaut, when it was a living process, followed rigid rules. Today we neither remember the intricacies of the ancient processes nor care about them. Yet Modern English and its Germanic siblings reproduced the old game, but play it according to new rules, because they allow vowels to alternate freely and capriciously. Given the aura surrounding the sl-m group, nothing is easier than to form words like slim-slam-slum. I would risk suggesting that slum goes back to this language play. Here is another sl-noun and it denotes something ugly. Like slums in metallurgy, slums “a squalid district” is used mainly in the plural.

Featured image credit: Salt Lake City smog by Eltiempo10. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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9 books to help us reimagine international studies

The 60th International Studies Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition will be held in Toronto from March 27th – March 30th. This year’s conference theme is “Re-visioning International Studies: Innovation and Progress.” The meeting will feature writers from around the world, whom collectively or individually speak to pressing issues like conflict and inequality. If you are attending this year’s meeting, drop by the OUP booth (#102, #104, #106, #108) to visit and to see our newest books — including leading work in the field and ISA award winning titles.

If you are not able to attend this year, but want to learn more about several of the topics being featured, we’ve compiled a brief reading list highlighting books that focus on the conference theme.

Just Responsibility

Brook Ackerly’s book explores a political theory of global justice and human rights that is deeply rooted in human rights activism, while examining the difference between moral responsibility and political responsibility.

Read a free chapter online here

Symposium on Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility:  Wednesday 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM

Break all the Borders

Ariel I. Ahram’s book examines the Southern Movement in Yemen, the Kurdish nationalists in Syria and Iraq, and the eastern federalists in Libya with a focus on the linkage between the sub-national, regional, and global order.

Theorising Coercion and Migration in World Politics: Emerging Research Agendas, Comparative Perspectives: Friday 4:00 PM – 5:45 PM

Women as Foreign Policy Leaders

Sylvia Bashevkin provides critical insight on women’s leadership roles in contemporary foreign policy and highlights the diverse and transformative contributions that Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Rodham Clinton made during a series of Republican and Democratic administrations.

Read a free chapter online here

Author Meets Critics: Wednesday 10:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Of Friends and Foes

Mark Crescenzi provides a new theory that shows how reputation affects both cooperation and conflict in similar ways.

Read a free chapter online here

Innovations in the Study of Reputation Dynamics: Wednesday 8:15 AM – 10:00 AM

Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things

Elizabeth R. DeSombre brings theory and research together across the social sciences to explain environmental behavior. She provides an accessible exploration of why good people regularly do things that cause environmental harm and how to change it.

Read a free chapter online here

Environment: Junior Scholar Symposia: Thursday 10:30 AM – 12:15 PM

The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism

Erica Chenoweth’s book introduces scholars and practitioners to the state of the art approaches, methods, and issues in studying terrorism and counterterrorism.

Methods of Inquiry in the Study of Nonviolent Resistance – Saturday 10:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Legitimacy in Global Governance

Jonas Tallberg offers a comprehensive treatment that covers sources, processes and consequences of legitimacy in global governance and argues for a sociological approach to legitimacy, centered on perceptions of legitimate global governance among affected audiences.

Read a free chapter online here

Informal Governance in World Politics: Thursday 4:00 PM – 5:45 PM

Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space

Laura J. Shepard’s book examines the ways women, gender, and civil society are constructed in UN peacebuilding discourse.

Read a free chapter online here

New Directions in Women, Peace and Security: Saturday 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM

Cyber Strategy

Following the theme of the conference, Brandon Valeriano and Benjamin M. Jensen’s book argues that cyber coercion complements rather than replaces traditional instruments of statecraft and power and challenges the popular discourse that cyber conflict is a useful and novel way to achieve coercive effects in international affairs.

Read a free chapter online here

Crisis Dynamics and Cyber Statecraft: Simulating Cross National Perspectives:  Wednesday 8:15 AM – 10:00 AM

While these are only a few of many events taking place at ISA, the conference program is fully searchable online.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Feature image credit: Toronto by Jplenio. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Can we solve environmental problems without international agreements?

Between 11 March 2019 – 15 March 2019, the nations of the world will gather in Nairobi for the fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly. This is world’s highest-level decision-making body on the environment. One of the themes of this year’s meeting is transforming economies toward sustainable consumption and production. Many of the environmental challenges we presently face are a result of the goods we consume and the manner in which they are produced. Be it toxic materials in our drinking water or the decline of Sumatran tigers in Indonesia, the culprit, in both cases, is human consumption (via cell phones and palm oil, respectively).

While the problems associated with consumption are well-known, international agreements to address them have fallen short of expectations. Cooperation through international organizations has been limited, insufficient, or entirely absent across many environmental issue areas. The Wealthy industrialized countries have been reticent to curb their consumption citing economic and quality of life concerns. As George H. W. Bush said at the 1992 Earth Summit, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” For their part, poorer developing countries have avoided signing any international agreements that may hinder their economic growth. Progress in international negotiations has therefore been incremental. Even when breakthroughs have emerged, countries have repeatedly reneged on international agreements.

Perhaps for these reasons, a range of innovative solutions to environmental problems have emerged outside the modern state system. One of the most promising of these solutions involves using market forces to address environmental challenges through sustainability standards, eco-labels, and third-party certifications. Eco-labels leverage the power of global supply chains to change the way goods are produced. They do so by establishing and enforcing voluntary standards that guide and constrain businesses across national borders. In essence, when a large company like McDonald’s determines that it will only source certified sustainable seafood (as it did for American branches in 2013), all of McDonald’s suppliers must obtain certification or risk being replaced. In this way, the economic leverage of large corporations in global supply chains becomes a useful instrument for exporting and enforcing environmental regulations across borders.

In recent years, eco-labeling has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Today, many of the world’s largest brands use eco-labels to manage the impacts of their complex global supply chains. Lipton Tea, the single largest purchaser of tea leaves in the world, currently sources all of the tea for its tea bags from Rainforest Alliance certified farmers. Unilever aims to source all of its palm oil from certified suppliers by the end of 2019. By some estimates, one in every five products that crosses a border is now certified to a third-party standard of some sort.

Jason Clay, a Senior Vice President at World Wildlife Fund, estimates that production of just 15 priority commodities generate some of the most pressing environmental issues like deforestation, pesticide use, and over-fishing. Within these 15 commodities, 70% of cross-border trade is controlled by fewer than 500 companies. In some cases, single companies control a quarter of the entire market (e.g. Cargill with palm oil). If NGOs can convince these major players to purchase only eco-labeled goods, then there is the potential to transform entire global supply chains in a very short period. As Gerald Butts, former president and CEO of WWF Canada observed in The Globe and Mail:

Coke is the No. 1 purchaser of aluminum on the face of the earth…The No. 1 purchaser of sugar cane. The No. 3 purchaser of citrus. The second-largest purchaser of glass, and the fifth-largest purchaser of coffee. We could spend 50 years lobbying 75 national governments to change the regulatory framework for the way these commodities are grown and produced. Or these folks at Coke could make a decision that they’re not going to purchase anything that isn’t grown or produced in a certain way – and the whole global supply chain changes overnight… Coke is literally more important, when it comes to sustainability, than the United Nations.

So can eco-labels provide the environmental outcomes that have eluded international agreements? That remains to be seen. They can certainly provide timely responses to urgent environmental challenges. They do, however, have significant limitations. Principally, while some eco-labels are credible and capable of transforming global supply chains, others are little more than greenwash used to burnish corporate brands. The problem is that there is often very little to separate credible eco-labels from greenwash. It is important to distinguish credible third-party eco-labeling organizations from non-credible ones. Separating the real from the fake is an essential first step in determining whether non-state governance more broadly is capable of achieving better environmental results than conventional international negotiations.

Feature image credit: “Forest” by SplitShire. Public domain via Pixabay.

 

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Rediscovering Francesco de’ Medici’s private Renaissance room

Between 1570 and 1575, Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, commissioned a private studiolo – a small room – in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Four centuries later, a discovery in the archive changes our understanding of one the last great Renaissance studies.

Francesco’s studiolo was a jewel box-like space decorated with over 40 works of art and featuring built-in cabinets displaying the Grand Duke’s collection of art and natural specimens. A sumptuously decorated cabinet of curiosities, Francesco’s studiolo is open to the public but often overlooked by tourists. Visitors who discover the space may admire the decorations but be disappointed to learn that the objects originally stored in the cabinets have long since been dispersed. Until recently, scholars could only make educated guesses as to the types of specimens displayed. That is, until the summer of 2014, when I discovered the only known inventory of the room, buried within millions of archival documents at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. This find changed what we know about the types of objects displayed in the room, allowing scholars and visitors to more completely imagine how the space looked in the 16th century.

Using a common Renaissance trope, the studiolo celebrated Nature’s inventive capacities. Francesco would have entered the darkened space to examine his objects in solitude, as – with only a few exceptions – he prevented anyone but himself from entering the room. This privacy has limited scholars’ knowledge of what kinds of objects were displayed. The inventory, taken in 1574 after the death of Francesco’s father, Cosimo I, provides valuable information about both the individual objects on view and how the objects were grouped together by cabinet.

Image Credit: Studiolo of Francesco I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo by the author, used with permission.

Generally, objects are organized by material. The first two cabinets were dedicated to specimens of stone, such as “one roundel [or sphere] of oriental alabaster in a white chest.” Rare and unusual stones had long been a focus of Medici collecting; Lorenzo il Magnifico amassed a legendary collection of hardstone vases, and Francesco’s brother and successor Ferdinando I would later commission the Cappella dei Principi, an ostentatious funerary chapel decorated with inlaid stone.

The third cabinet contained objects and works of art in metal, including “two crosses, one of bronze with Christ in relief.” Within the studiolo’s program, man’s ability to shape and mould elemental metals represented a key illustration of man and nature working together to produce ingenious creations.

Cabinet number six featured arms, examples of man’s ability to fashion natural elements into deadly weapons. Specific objects included “one German rapier with a courtly point and its sheath and hilt.” Stiletti, maces, swords, and a club rounded out the menacing arsenal.

Cabinet number eight contained a variety of objects, ranging from musical instruments to printed matter, including “four imprints in iron for impressing medals… and their reverses, in four red leather sacks.” While it is difficult to assign an over-arching type to these objects, which also included seals and horns, they tended to be objects serving an official or ceremonial purpose.

Cabinet number eleven held objects believed to have curative powers, including over 40 pieces of coral, a jaw-dropping specimen collection. Some of the coral, believed in the Renaissance to ward off malevolent spirits, had been worked into figural or decorative objects, such as those “in the form of a crucifix and other figures,” while others were left in their natural state. The inventory also listed numerous vials in this cabinet, which presumably contained potions of assorted powers. Some of the products appeared to baffle the inventory compiler, as he recorded with admirable honesty objects such as a “round box, within which is a vial of oil and one does not know what it is.”

Cabinets five, seven, nine, and ten are the most significant entries when it comes to giving modern scholars a more accurate understanding of the items displayed. These four cabinets all contained paper. Cabinet number five featured works of art, with at least six books of paintings and drawings. The entry for the seventh cabinet is only one line long, describing a sack of approximately one bushel’s worth of pages with assorted writings on them. Cabinet number nine’s papers included “twenty-three books of music of many sorts and sizes.” The inventory lists only one entry for cabinet ten, “eleven little sacks full of written pages.”

While the inventory does not give specifics regarding the subject matter of these pages, it makes it clear that the ideas embodied in the collected objects on display in Francesco’s studiolo were as important as the objects themselves. The possibility that the myths and technologies illustrated in the studiolo’s decorations could correspond with written accounts, rather than physical objects, related to their subject matter has not previously been explored − perhaps we needed to find this inventory to even consider it.

The surprising realization that four of the eleven cabinets in Francesco’s studiolo contained writing and art on paper demonstrates the value of archival research, especially for scholars who desire a more complete understanding of the kind of objects collected and displayed by the most elite patrons of the Italian Renaissance.

Featured Image credit: “Florence, Italy” by OpenPics. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Is Trump’s assault on international law working?

For centuries, international law has functioned as an instrument of nation-states working in concert, acting out of a sense of legal obligation. Since World War II, this combination of state practice driven by legal obligation—in the form of both treaties and customary international law—has served as a prime mechanism for shaping and addressing complex global responses to pressing planetary challenges.  In practice, international law has helped to construct a system—exemplified by the United Nations, Bretton Woods, and NATO regimes—that has functioned as a critically important, system of global governance resembling that urged by Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace. It’s not a system of world government, but a community of free law-abiding nations trying to live together in a law-governed international society, collectively explicating shared moral commitments.

The time-tested approach—applied by most administrations before Donald Trump became president—called upon the United States to invoke multilateral compliance with international law rules as a source of smart power and global leadership. By so doing, the United States has traditionally: (1) engaged with allies around common values to forge a rules-based order for global governance; (2) translated from existing rules in situations where the legal rules are unclear, rather than pressing power-based solutions that rest on national interest; and (3) leveraged legal approaches with concerted multilateral diplomacy and hard and soft power tools to generate proactive solutions to challenging global problems.

But Trump’s tumultuous two-year presidency has persistently pursued the opposite approach: “disengage – power politics – unilateralism.” Wherever possible, Trump has sought to disengage from global alliances, claim that no meaningful rules constrain or guide U.S. power, and eschew cooperative diplomatic approaches. Moreover, Trump has asserted a broad authority unilaterally to withdraw from the institutions of the postwar global order, which I have argued is not supported by law.

This disruptive strategy —sloganized at populist rallies as “America First”— rests on Trump’s conviction that the United States has lost competitiveness vis-à-vis other countries in what he perceives to be a zero-sum game. He believes that globalization has left the American working class behind by allowing immigrants and foreigners to steal their jobs. Because America now bears too much of the burden of global leadership, to “make America great again,” he claims, the United States should offload much of it so that other nations pay their fair share. And because America has enough trouble dealing with its own problems, it should not waste energy judging or helping to solve the problems of others, particularly when other regional hegemons such as China and Russia are able and eager to take care of those issues. The resulting framework less recalls the Kantian system of global governance we inherited than the brutual “spheres of influence” approach depicted in George Orwell’s 1984.

Viewed in global context, what becomes clearer is that Trump is not so much a cause as a symptom of a global trend taking hold not just in the United States, but around the world. The global rise of populist authoritarians and the global challenge to human rights and the rule of law have reached crisis proportions. A prominent global rule-of-justice index reported that fundamental human rights had diminished in almost two-thirds of the 113 countries surveyed in 2017. The same index assessed that since 2016, rule-of-law scores had declined in thirty-eight countries. In Austria and Italy, China, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Venezuela, new global authoritarians have copied his playbook. These politicians demonize immigrants, disparage bureaucrats, intimidate judges, reward cronies, intimidate journalists, and claim that constitutional checks and balances must give way to the “will of the people.” Their concerted effort to undermine the rule-of-law institutions of the post-war legal order — whether the United Nations and its human rights mechanisms, the European Union, or global institutions of trade and security—has called the continued stability of the postwar system of Kantian global governance into question.

The tumultuous rule of Trump and his ilk have put international law on the defensive. But international law is fighting back. Thus far, Trump is not winning.  Across a broad range of policy issues—immigration and refugee law, human rights, trade diplomacy, climate change, North Korean and Iranian denuclearization, cybersecurity, Russian adventurism, and America’s wars—the law is pushing back against his assaults, leaving largely intact an uneasy status quo ante.

Thus far, the resilience of domestic and international law and American civic institutions have largely checked Trump at home. But that resilience has been battered over the last two years, and might eventually give way should Trump be re-elected.

So who ends up winning in the longer term—Trump or international law—will depend not just on who is stronger or more determined in the moment, but also on what is more resilient in the long run. How strong are America’s enduring civic institutions? Even in an age of rising authoritarianism, international law remains the prime mechanism for shaping and addressing complex global responses to pressing  challenges. Perhaps one bellwether is the counterintuitive way in which the Trump administration has chosen to respond to the crisis in Venezuela. At this writing, the administration has engaged with allies and translated traditional international law to recognize Juan Guaido as interim president, trying to leverage diplomatic pressure to bring about a new election where Nicolás Maduro’s rule can be re-evaluated by the Venezuelan people. In short, in a crisis, Trump has resorted to “engage-translate-leverage,” the very Obama-Clinton strategy he has repeatedly disdained. Even if his commitment to that approach proves to be fleeting, it nevertheless shows the enduring influence of the durable notion that international law is smart power.

Featured Credit Image: Protest In Trafalgar Square by M_B_M via Unsplash

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The brave new world of cannabis: chronic vomiting

A young patient, let’s call him Chad, goes to the doctor. He complains of attacks of nausea from the moment he wakes up in the morning. Sometimes his belly hurts as well. It’s been happening, on and off, for years. He gets cold and shaky. At times, it will progress to full-fledged vomiting, uncontrollable with any medications. The nausea is unbearable. Sometimes, getting in a very hot shower will take the edge off the nausea, but not always. In many cases a trip to the emergency room is needed for rehydration and intravenous anti-nausea medications.

A medical worker would need to know a bit more about this story before making a diagnosis, but the next question would typically be: Do you use cannabis?

With liberalization of the cannabis in many countries—including the legalization of recreational use in Canada—use has increased substantially. Finding people who smoke cannabis daily, for many years, has also become much more common when the use is for medical reasons. Chad, for one, has been smoking cannabis daily since his mid-teens, and suffers from a relatively newly described disorder called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome.

The syndrome is a disorder of cyclic vomiting associated with chronic cannabis use, and may include morning nausea and abdominal pain. Patients typically have a history of daily cannabis use, often for years, before the onset of symptoms. Although only based on small numbers of patients, studies suggest that it is one of the most common causes of recurrent nausea and vomiting in younger people who are seen in emergency departments.

The precise cause of the disorder is unknown. Some speculate that chronic use may affect the functioning of the receptors for the active compounds in cannabis (called cannabinoids) in the body, while others suggest genetics of the user may play a role. Researchers have reported the disorder all over the world, in both men and women. It does not appear to be due to contaminants in the cannabis, and does not appear to be an overdose-like reaction either. However, as the strength of the cannabinoids in cultivated cannabis has grown cannabis hyperemesis syndrome has also become more common.

Cannabis has been used for centuries for treatment of various ailments, but has been illegal throughout the Western world for generations. It shows promise in treating many symptoms, especially ones related to the gut such as nausea or diarrhea. It’s not clear that cannabis works to actually treat diseases of the gut, such as Crohn’s disease, colitis, or liver diseases. Part of the reason for this is due to the difficulty of doing research on illicit substances. Another problem is that people can’t patent a naturally growing plant.

Stopping cannabis completely appears to be the best treatment for the disorder. But it remains unclear how long a person needs to abstain, as it could likely be months before their system readjusts. Doctors have also used antipsychotic medications and hot chili pepper ointment to treat the disorder. Researchers have not yet studied any medication for treatment of the disorder in a controlled clinical trial.

Guidance for physicians remains unclear about the benefits of cannabis use for illnesses and symptoms, and especially where patients may see a benefit but where they are at risk of harm from it in other ways. Most doctors believe that medical cannabis use should not replace approved medical therapy for treatment of any diseases of the gut if the approved therapy is available and has not been used.

The public is enthusiastic about cannabis legalization. Many people appear to believe that marijuana is both harmless and effective. For many chronic users, it strains credulity that a naturally occurring plant so well known for treating nausea could paradoxically cause it. Those factors can make it difficult for people to stop cannabis, especially if they feel it is helping them in some other way.

For Chad’s part, he hasn’t been able to stop completely. I’m sure part of it is due to long-ingrained habits, but also distrust of my medical advice. The addition of some other medications has been able to temper the attacks, but he is not cured. One thing is clear: we need more research on this disorder.

Featured image credit:  Matthew Brodeur . CC0 Public Domain via  Unsplash .

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Fanny Burney in her own words

Born in 1752, Frances Burney (better known as Fanny Burney) was well known as a satirical novelist in her time, anonymously publishing her first book, Evelina, in 1778. Despite her literary influence, Fanny Burney is a name unknown to many aside from the most ardent scholars. Did you know, for instance, that the title of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice comes from the pages of Burney’s Cecilia?

In the eighteenth century, female authors were uncommon due (in part) to social expectations for proper female behaviour. Fanny herself experienced this pressure. Although she wrote her first novel – The History of Caroline Evelyn – at the age of ten, Burney later destroyed the work in a bonfire. It is likely she did this due to the disapproval of her father. Thankfully, Burney’s tenacity (and cunning) won out in the end when she submitted the manuscript for Evelina to a publisher via her brother. The novel was a huge success, generating conversation for many months following its publication as well as receiving praise from Samuel Johnson, leaving London booksellers unable to keep up with demand.

At the age of 23, Fanny Burney received an unwanted marriage proposal from a man she had only met once: Thomas Barlow. After sending two letters, to which Fanny didn’t reply, the persistent Barlow visited her to get an answer. Here, after attempting to persuade Barlow she had already sent him a letter with her answer (she hadn’t), Fanny finally refused his offer in person and later narrated the event in her journal:

I am much obliged to You, Sir, for the great opinion You are pleased to have of me—but I should be sorry you should lose any more Time upon my account—as I have no thoughts at all of changing my situation.

After he left, Fanny sat down to write the letter that she had claimed to have already sent to Barlow. Even though her father attempted to persuade her not to be too hasty in her refusal, Fanny remained true to her heart, and sent Barlow a short but firm letter refusing his proposal.

Image credit: Portrait of Madame D’Arblay (Fanny Burney) engraved from a painting by Edward Francis Burney. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Later in life, at the age of 41, Fanny married a man she did love: an exiled French aristocrat named Alexandre D’Arblay. Together, they had one son, and a happy marriage until Alexandre’s death in 1818.

In addition to being a successful author, Fanny had a short-lived career in the court of King George III as Keeper of the Robes. Fanny was reluctant to accept the position as she found the court restrictive and dull, finally relenting due to her lack of options as an unmarried woman in her thirties. She expressed her frustration with the court through a letter to her sister, in which she composes the satirical “Directions for Coughing, sneezing, or moving before the King and Queen”:

In the first place, you must not Cough. If you find a cough tickling in your throat, you must arrest it from making any sound.

…

In the 2d. place, you must not sneeze. If you have a vehement Cold, you must take no notice of it; if your Nose-membranes feel a great invitation, you must hold your breath.

…

In the 3d. place, you must not, upon any account, stir either hand or foot. If, by chance, a black pin runs into your Head, you must not take it out: If the pain is very great, you must be sure to bear it without wincing.

In 1811, Fanny Burney was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an age before chemotherapy and the other treatments available to us today, Fanny was advised to undergo a mastectomy. Without the benefits of anaesthetics – which were also unavailable in the early 19th century – Fanny was forced to remain conscious, and in pain, for the entirety of the operation. Fanny gave a detailed account of this traumatic surgery in a letter to her sister.

I bore it with all the courage I could exert, & never moved, nor stopt them, nor resisted, nor remonstrated, nor spoke.

I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—& I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony…the evil was so profound, the case so delicate,& the precautions necessary for preventing a return so numerous, that the operation, including the treatment & the dressing, lasted 20 minutes! a time, for sufferings so acute, that was hardly supportable—However, I bore it with all the courage I could exert, & never moved, nor stopt them, nor resisted, nor remonstrated, nor spoke.

Although she experienced great agony, the surgery was a success: Fanny was not pained by cancer again and outlived her younger husband, son, and her older sister, living to the age of 87. She left behind a legacy of four published novels and eight plays, along with an abundance of journals and letters which reveal intimate details from this all but forgotten author’s life.

Featured image: Malvern Hall, Warwickshire (1820-21) by John Constable. Public domain via Yale Center for British Art.

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