Oxford University Press's Blog, page 308

The relevance of the Russian Revolution [video]

This year, 2017, marks the centennial of the Russian Revolution, a defining moment in time with ripple effects felt across the world to this day. In the following video, author Laura Engelstein sits down with Oxford University Press editor Tim Bent to discuss the history of the revolution, its global impact, and her book  Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921.

Featured Image Credit: [Revolution, Leningrad (Petrograd), USSR], LC-USZ62-75789. Distributed via Library of Congress.

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Animal of the month: Bats and humans around the world

Bats are one of the most ubiquitous mammals living on this planet. Only humans are more widespread. So it would not be an impossible assumption that humans and bats have interacted for as long as the two species have inhabited the world. Bats are found in almost every type of habitat, apart from the most inhospitable.

As this is the case, we’ve taken a look at some interesting cases of human-bat interaction through the ages.

Map background: Map by maps-for-free. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

Featured image credit: Bats by fapro1. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Stage fright and mental ghosts: managing stage fright as a growth process

William made an appointment with me to discuss his stage fright. I meet him for the first time in my waiting room.

JJN: Good morning William. I am glad to meet you. Come in.

W: Hi Dr. N. Thanks for seeing me.

JJN: What led you to call me? Just begin anywhere you want.

William: I played in a violin recital a couple of weeks ago. I had played the music many times before but in that concert I really messed up my finger work passages – one in particular – and then I started feeling that my memorization was shaky. I was a nervous wreck and couldn’t wait to finish. I cannot figure this out. I feel haunted that it is going to happen again and again.

JJN: This sounds terribly upsetting – both your concerns about your playing and your worries about trying to figure it out on your own and not being able to do that. Has this kind of thing happened before? Do you typically try to figure things out on your own?

William: Yes, it has but not to this extent. I’ve read a lot of self-help books about stage fright and tried various exercises to deal with it. Sometimes they have given me ideas that are helpful, but then the nerves always return.

JJN: I understand what you are saying. Self-help can be helpful up to a point. But often these books tell you what has helped others and “one size fits all” advice does not “fit all”. Then you start to worry that what has helped others (assuming the reports are accurate) isn’t helping you, and then you get more upset. Stage fright is complex, and it is healthy to feel that you can benefit from reaching out for some professional assistance.  It is not always easy to do that.

William: That’s a relief to hear you say that – in my family, people who were in therapy (or wanted to be) were considered “crazy” and “not intelligent” because smart people were supposed to figure out things on their own. You are saying what I am feeling and asking for is normal.

JJN: Yes, I am saying exactly that. It is not only normal, but healthy.

William: (visibly relieved) Whew!! That’s a relief already. I’ve tried relaxation, focusing, and some cognitive strategies. I am frustrated, scared, and now I feel really worried about what to do next.

JJN: Relaxing and meditation and other strategies can help lower anxiety. At other times they do not help enough. But everyone is a separate individual with particular past experiences and feelings that you bring to the stage and to your life in general. I find it helpful to explain to performance anxious people that you take your entire “life” with you when you go on stage. Stage fright is more complicated than playing the music or giving a speech, or writing a paper. What is frustrating is that you know you can do something because you hear yourself in practice, but your strong emotional feelings interfere in public. Stage fright can become chronic and interfere with your performing and with your pleasure. Even when you try hard not to feel these emotions, there is a psychological underground in your mind where mental ghosts live, and they do not forget what has occurred in your life before you started to perform. They come alive and haunt you when you go on stage.

William: Is there another way to deal with my anxiety and these ghosts? I feel desperate now. Playing the violin is my life’s work. I have played the violin and performed since I was a young child. I cannot have a career if this keeps happening. I am having self doubts. I feel humiliated. But I do not know what else I want to do, much less what I can do since I have focused on a music career since I was a young child.

JJN: Musicians have a life-long “investment” in playing their instrument – particularly when they decide to make music their career. Yes there is another way to manage performance anxiety. I think you may be looking for the “right’ way, but remember, “one size does not fit all”. Musicians are very concerned, of course, with right notes and also finding the right therapist whom they wish has all the “right answers.” You may wish for that with me.

William: That would be very nice to find right answers and for you to have them to share with me.

JJN: But the right answers need to be your answers that are right for you. However, there are additional coping strategies you can add to your performance tool box. To do this, we need to consider performance anxiety is not just the obvious symptoms (shaking and memory worries) that occur when you go on stage, but more pervasive thoughts, feelings, and experiences that reflect your entire life history that accompanies you on stage.  You see, our minds are dynamic – which means they are always in motion and processing thoughts and feelings – even when we sleep. Unfortunately, the mind does not separate out the “good” and “bad” feelings (though no feeling is good or bad.) Your negative feelings and early life experiences often can haunt you like a ghost when you need to be competent on stage.

William: Are you saying that these feelings are like skeletons in my mental closet? How do you manage skeletons?

JJN: Yes, that is a good analogy. Skeletons and ghosts are scary – you are haunted by thoughts and feelings from your present and your past. By discovering these ghosts you are in a better place to manage them more effectively. Everyone has ghosts in their mental closets. The kind of therapy we would use to help you is based on this simple but very complex idea. We would not assume the first thing you say or think is the last thought on a subject. We need to explore your thoughts in a process that is like a mental improvising – where you can talk about anything that comes to your mind.

William: So you are saying that to better manage my stage fright, I need to spend a long time analyzing it?

JJN: Let me try to reply with this idea: as a musician, you realize that you did not get to the level you are at now quickly, and you do not learn a piece of music overnight that is ready to take on stage. You know from your experience that it takes time, working through troublesome passages, and perseverance. The pay- off is worth it musically and personally.   Can you say more (or freely associate) about what you are thinking when you ask about how long it takes to manage anxiety?

William: Well I know that it takes time, but I still hoped that since you were a performer and that you experienced stage fright, you could tell me what worked for you. I think that would be helpful for me.

JJN: I understand your wish and believe that our work on performance anxiety is a healing process. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Additionally, it is important for you to find out what contributes specifically to your particular stage fright symptoms and then discover what can work for you to better manage them when you are under pressure. In doing that, you build greater emotional security. I also believe that it would be arrogant for me to assume they way I’ve lived my life is relevant for how you should live yours. We are entirely separate people with separate backgrounds. I can help you learn how to explore your stage fright about some things you may not have thought about previously. That can be very healing for you.

William: I guess that I was wishing for magic.

JJN: I understand that wish – and I also see already that you can use other ideas to let yourself reevaluate some thoughts and feelings you are having here with me. If you would like to work together, we would explore your family history and many things about your life that could have an impact upon your current anxiety. We can explore how some of those forgotten events and feelings become activated in the present when you walk on stage. From what you have told me already me, you seem to feel conflicted about performance – you want to perform but you also fear performing due to the shame you experience when you believe you have not played well. You envision the audience as judges who are going to disapprove of you. These are exactly the kinds of feelings that will be helpful to understand in order for you to better manage your stage fright.

My first session with William was about to conclude. I asked if he had questions that had arisen during our session and invited him to schedule a second meeting to further discuss his thoughts about working together. I also hope that you, readers, will think about stage fright in greater depth since stage fright is part of a person’s entire life history that accompanies the performer onto the stage. Anxious feelings do not stay in the wings.

The mind is invisible like a ghost, but the mind also is transparent and emotionally visible when one learns how to listen, observe, and respond appropriately to another person. Listening and responding with psychological understanding are some skills teachers can add to their pedagogical tool boxes and, in turn, help students learn how to do so as well. The ghosts in our mental closets can be better understood. Those people who experience stage fright need not continue to be haunted by them in performance.

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Etymology gleanings for October 2017

Grammar

♦Singular versus plural. What feel(s) like failed relationships…. The dilemma is as old as the hills: English speakers have always felt uncertain about the number after what. An exemplary treatment of this problem will be found in the old editions of H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (the entry what 2). Fowler quotes many sentences and corrects them, but even he does not risk saying that one of the variants (what is versus what are) is wrong: he only says that his variant is better. If I may add my observations from the examples collected over the years, practically everybody says: “what we need are more books” as against “what we need is more money.” In other cases, the norm becomes fluid: the opposition between what matter is ~ are books does not look rigid. A curious example of agreement is the use of the word percent, as in 30% of this population is poor, but 30% of these people are poor: the verb depends on the word that follows. All the rest is trivial. The use of the plural with collective nouns, as in my family are early risers and the couple were seldom seen together, seems to be rare in American English, though some words are uniformly plural (cattle and police, for instance). Many other confusing instances, words ending in -s but treated as singulars among them (a chemical works, at a crossroads, let alone mumps, measles, rickets, and molasses), are discussed at length in dictionaries and manuals.

What feel(s) like failed relationships. The couple were early risers and were seldom seen together.

♦The advice write standard, speak dialect is fine only in theory, because most people follow the second and tend to disregard the first half of this precept. Standard is an elusive concept: learners are expected to give up their habits and obey the rules with which they inwardly disagree. (The most usual comment: “Yes, the mood of the tales are gloomy is probably wrong, but it flows.” And it certainly does.)

♦As to grammatical cases, when I said that English has no cases, I meant nouns. I am indeed aware of the he—him, I—me, and other similar forms; I even distinguish between who and whom.

Back to the animal farm

When we can reconstruct the origin of an animal name with some certainty, we end up with roots like gwō– (for cow), owi– (for ewe), and su- ~ sū- ~ suk– (for sow “pig”). They may be onomatopoeias, and it is therefore pointless to ask whether they are related. Bird names are especially often sound-imitating, but fish are silent creatures, so that peiskos, the putative protoform of fish, should be kept apart from the likes of owi-. The initial meaning of peisk– is a matter of dispute. Greek ikhthús “fish” (known to English speakers from ichthyology), whose cognates have survived in several languages, including Lithuanian, is also a word of unclear origin. In any case, fish names and the names of the quadrupeds mentioned above have nothing in common.

Peaceful coexistence.

Sheep is not related to shear (though that would have been a perfect fit), for one root ends in –p and the other in –r. Last week (18 October 2017), I avoided details in my discussion of sheep, but, since the question arose, I’ll summarize the story as I find it in a paper by Garry W. Davis (1991). At the earliest stages of civilization, people used sheepskin for clothing; they learned to pluck (not shear!) wool later. Shearing, as we know it, became possible only when iron shears were invented, presumably in the Near East, about 1000 B.C. As far as Germanic is concerned, two verbs—shape and shave—converge in our reconstruction. Their oldest forms were skap–jan and skab-an (in the latter, b, presumably from bh, was pronounced as v). The German reflex (continuation) of skapjan is shaffen “to create” (from “cut out, shape”); its English cognate is shape. Skaban continued into Modern English as shave.  The relatedness of skapjan and skaban is probable rather than certain.

If sheep and its cognates in West Germanic have the root of the verb meaning “to shave” and if the iron shears became known only about three thousand years ago and in the Near East, the word sheep is younger than three millennia. The protoform of ewe, a widespread Indo-European word, was feminine. When the sheep was domesticated, it was used for milk and various dairy products. As a general rule, the ancient words for domestic animals, when they applied to both males and females, were neuters (as are Old Engl. scæp and German Schaf). If the root of ewe has something to do with “wool,” the ability to breed lambs could not have been looked upon as primary in female sheep. But then why the feminine gender? I also wondered why, if the root of ewe is related to some word for wool, as many linguists think, people coined a special word like sheep. Did they do so to emphasize the new process? Characteristically, Old Icelandic fær “sheep,” from fahaz, is related to Latin pecto and Greek pékō “I comb”; Lithuanian provides a similar reference. It looks as though fær is an earlier word than sheep and reflects a more primitive stage of getting wool. Yet both seem to have been coined to emphasize the progress from wearing sheepskin to obtaining wool, first by plucking, later by shearing.

This is what can be called progress!

Can the word sheep be a borrowing? Yes, but it hardly is. Every borrowing should be accounted for. We seem to know why sheep was added to the vocabulary of West Germanic. To say that people borrow words even when there is no need to do so explains nothing. After all, there always is some reason for importing a foreignism. The existing etymology of both ewe and sheep is far from ideal, but, since the source from which sheep was allegedly borrowed is just “some substrate (definitely not a Near Eastern!) language,” I prefer to stay away from this hypothesis.

Lamb has been convincingly compared with several words outside Germanic. They mean “antelope; deer.” The word must have meant “small cattle” or “fawn,” but not “the young of the sheep.” The root (e)len is not sound-imitative, but what it meant has never been discovered. As for the Greek word, according to the best dictionaries, in Homer, próbaton in the plural refers to sheep and goats, while in Hesiod, the singular means “sheep; ram.”

Abstract thinking and borrowing

Words like know were coined in the remotest past, but the names of abstract concepts usually appear in language with concrete senses. To know probably developed from “to perceive, to recognize, to be acquainted with.” However, in order to borrow such words, people have to reach a stage at which the native word is not sufficient. Know did quite well and should be treated as a Germanic verb of Indo-European origin, rather than a loan from Greek.

Know thyself. Socrates was Greek, but the verb “know” is English.

I was most pleased to be advised to try some easy etymology and will soon follow this advice!

To be continued.

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Hannah Arendt and the source of human values

Hannah Arendt was a literary intellectual, defined by Thomas Pynchon as, “people who read and think.” Like Socrates, Hannah Arendt thought and went where thought took her. Arendt’s thinking led her many places, but one of the more interesting topics she thought about was the source of human values. Arendt shared Nietzsche’s and Marx’s belief that moral values are made by humans and not, as the Enlightenment believed, independently existing principles of right and wrong. As Nietzsche and Marx are both earlier in history and more forceful in their language then Arendt (and also, notably, men), Arendt’s own thinking on how values are made gets less attention than it merits.

Arendt devotes much of her most important book, The Human Condition, to elaborating three different categorical distinctions important for how she thinks our experience of existence shapes how we make human values. She calls the first distinction the social/private/political distinction, the second the labor/work/action distinction and the third the earth/world distinction. To understand these three distinctions correctly is to follow Arendt’s thinking on human values, and they are best taken in reverse order.

The earth and the world distinguish the physical reality of human existence (the earth) and the interpretive, incomplete, collectively built mental picture of human existence that each of us walks around with in our mind’s eye (the world). The earth and the world both allow for our experience of individual existence while at the same time benefitting from cultivation by coordinated groups.

Labor denotes the endless, repetitive cycle of human activity necessary to keep ourselves alive on the earth. We need food, drink, shelter, and health in order to survive. Work, by contrast, refers to deliberate human activity aimed at building and/or maintaining the world. For example, what you imagine when someone says, “Babylon” is the product of a collective human enterprise generations. We call humans who have successfully built and preserved world “civilizations.” The distinction between work and labor is that between plowing a field and doing archaeology. Both might be slow, labor intensive tasks performed while one wilts in the hot sun but one task sustains our bodies while the other one refines our imagination of the past. Finally, Arendt separates action from work and labor. Actions are deeds done in the moment for all to see, and, Arendt argues, show you who a person really is. Actions are not premeditated efforts like works or labors, they are done because a person must do something without the luxury of premeditation.

For Arendt, the distinction between these three kinds of activities, labor, work, and action, leads her to think of them as corresponding to different kinds of human values, the social, the private, and the political. The social zone of human values are where virtuous laboring traits are the highest values. Likewise, the private refers to where excellent work shines as the highest virtue and the public is the zone where acts shine as the highest virtues (heroism, courage, altruism). Arendt builds the competition between competing human moralities as a kind of three ring circus, where the stages do not change much, but which one dominates the spotlight tends to be highly dependent on history and chance.

German stamp, 2006. Deutsche Post AG, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

To demonstrate the volatility of this spotlight, Arendt noted the transition of the value of labor in Western culture. Arendt wrote that laboring, the activity most venerated in speech by modern industrial societies because industrialization has made consumption a co-dependent group activity. Ancient Athens, meanwhile, saw laboring exactly the opposite way. Because staying alive was the most basic concern, Athenians saw it as the least valuable activity because it was the least transcendent. Athenians found laboring so base the most privileged employed slaves to keep from doing it themselves. Arendt tells this story not to apologize for Athenian slavery or to celebrate America’s labor obsession, but to show by example the historical plasticity of the hierarchy of human values in Western thought as it has gone from one extreme to the other.

Arendt’s thinking on human values, if one follows her along, takes us on a path to self-understanding and humility, but also one of purpose. Arendt’s shows that our hierarchy of values is transitory and unstable, in part because our mental picture of the world is incomplete and the facts of our future existence on the earth is uncertain. While Arendt’s thinking challenges us not to think of our values, our works, or our actions as more transcendent than they really are, she does so to sound a note of hopeful defiance. In Arendt’s view, the slow, patient efforts of humankind – making art, teaching history, building houses, raising crops, protecting the rights of individuals in courts of law, moving people with the right words in the right moment – these activities mean all the more in allowing us self-made dignity and comfort in a world that grants us no such thing by entitlement.

Featured Image credit:  The temple of Hephaestus, as seen from the Ancient Agora, Athens, Greece. Jebulon, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons . 

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The current conflict between Spain and Catalonia explained

Spain is a state split into autonomous communities, three of which—Catalonia, Galicia, and Basque Country—are denominated historic communities, having their own languages that coexist co-officially with Castilian, the official language of Spain. All the autonomous communities in Spain have their Statutes of Autonomy, the basic institutional legislation for an autonomous community, recognized by the Spanish Constitution of 1978. At the very least, this legislation encompasses the community’s designation, its territorial boundaries, the organization and location of the seat of its autonomous institutions, its assumed powers, and, if applicable, the principles governing its language regime.

Catalonia is a pluralistic and multicultural society. Catalans, as a group, strive to achieve and to maintain an ethnolinguistic identity by preserving their economic, historic, cultural, and demolinguistic (speakers of Catalan) status, dimensions that allow them to compare favorably with the Spanish national group.

What is happening?

Today we are witnessing a very strong ethnopolitical polarization between Catalonia and Spain. In recent years, the strong anti-Catalan action of the Partido Popular Español (Spanish People’s Party henceforth PP), an essentialist right-wing party in charge since 2011, ruling with an absolute majority from 2011 to 2015 and with a relative majority in the legislature initiated in 2016, has provoked a significant surge in Catalan national feeling. That is, the Spanish State do not accept the idea of a multinational and multicultural state. Spain from its stance as a unique and essentialist nation, is facing a Catalonia that claims recognition as a nation and a strong self-government. These demands have led to a strong polarization between the parties, to such an extent that the conflictive escalation has led Catalonia to consider secession.

Since the arrival of the Bourbons in the early eighteenth century, the Spanish elites have been building an organizational identity around a mystification based on “unity” and “common” language. This undertaking has had a powerful effect on the legitimation of Castilian Spanish’s supremacy over other languages, and the representation of cultural and linguistic diversity as an issue.

One of the repressive strategies carried out by the current state government on Catalonia has consisted of putting legislative obstacles to the development of the Catalan language. We must bear in mind that the challenge for the Catalan society is to maintain its own language with a high ethnolinguistic vitality for community life and, therefore, as one of the basic identifying signs of its society. Those who speak Catalan as their first language also express themselves with an absolute fluency and without any difficulties in Spanish, according to the 2015 report on the Catalan language. Despite its resurgence, the Catalan language survives in a strongly adverse sociodemographic context, regarding its recognition and the right to its use, suffering continuous impositions of other languages and regulatory pressures from the Spanish government which strongly oppose to its use. The Spanish State refuses to fully recognize the Catalan language as an official language of the State and of the European Union. This situation is unique in the European Union and among developed countries with a democratic tradition.

Why is it happening?

Spanish nationalism is used by the PP to obtain anti-Catalan votes in the rest of the country, while keeping the main opposition party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español-PSOE) split into two groups that support, respectively, the plurinationality and the national unity of Spain. Thus, the PP, because of its conviction, convenience, or political profitability, keeps an immovable position, with a strict application of the law and a rigid interpretation of the Spanish Constitution.

Cataluna in Spain by TUBS. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Spanish financial oligarchy operates in complete symbiosis with the State’s political power. The degree of cronyism and corruption is very high (estimated at 80,000 million euros per year), and it serves their own interests and the irregular financing of the PP. For these and other reasons, the Spanish deficit has been growing unchecked in recent years and has a direct impact on the Autonomous Communities, which have had their incomes cut.

The territorial debate in Spain against the Catalan demands certainly is a very profitable asset for the Spanish government of the PP. Their policies aimed at confronting the Spaniards with the Catalans and arousing negative emotions against the Catalan people help the PP to remain in power.

At what moment does the polarization between Spain and Catalonia break out?

The current ethnopolitical conflict has a clear origin: the 2010 ruling against the statute of autonomy. The statute that the Catalans had accepted in a referendum was appealed by the PP who took it to the Spanish Constitutional Court–and this Court cut it mercilessly. This cut meant great frustration and humiliation for the Catalans and has had enormous consequences.

For seven consecutive years until today Catalonia has officially requested to hold a referendum on self-determination, to be carried out with the agreement and support of Spain, and has never obtained any answer other than “No.” After many difficulties and obstacles, this consultative referendum was held in Catalonia without the agreement of the Spanish Government on 1 October 2017. The forceful actions taken by the Spanish government during the whole day was brutal: the state police that the Spanish government moved from Madrid and other points of Spain to Catalonia raided polling places and confronted crowds of voters. Despite the outrageous aggression on this day, the vote for independence won by a landslide.

How can the current conflict be moderated?

Intractable ethnopolitical conflicts such as the one can be moderated through communication between the parties, but this requires respect, recognition, and attention to the demands of the minority group. That is, it depends to a greater extent on the dominant group. And, due to the reasons explained, this attitude of dialogue is impossible with the current government who have pushed the minority group to extreme positions to defend their interests. Having pushed the political situation to extremes, the big economic powers realize that this situation can harm them (as the International Monetary Fund [IMF] has expressed itself in this regard) and have begun to step in.

Even so, at the moment, the Catalan people, after the overwhelming result of the referendum of 1 October, are still waiting for the Catalan government to carry out the secession and declare Catalonia independent from Spain, or to decide to delay its decision.

Let us hope in today’s highly interconnected and globalized world Catalonia can only maintain greater sovereignty integrated in a Europe that shares and defends common values and diversity.

Featured image credit: 2012 Catalan independence protest on September 11th by Kippelboy. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Workplace bullying and the law

Is the law able to offer any assistance to victims of workplace bullying? Let me recite an example, which is all too commonplace.

Daniel* worked in an office in local government in the UK. When he was bullied by his manager he didn’t even realise it at first. The conduct was subtle. He would be given more than his fair share of the unpopular tasks. Everything he did was criticised, not aggressively, but constantly. When the office was reorganised he found his workstation relocated next to a noisy photocopier. The process by which his self-confidence was eroded was gradual. Some may think that Daniel should have just stopped being so sensitive and got on with things. He felt that himself for a while. He couldn’t complain about his treatment because when he said out loud what was happening to him it did sound a bit petty. And yet, over time, Daniel began to dread coming into work, became increasingly isolated from his colleagues, and, eventually, ended up on sick leave for three months. No one came out of this well.

And why was Daniel targeted in this way? Who knows? He never did. He was a fairly ordinary, innocuous kind of guy. So far as he could tell he wasn’t bullied because of anything in particular. For whatever reason his manger didn’t like him and had the power (and the inclination) to do something about that.

Many of us will have experienced bullying. We may have witnessed it happening to others. We may have been on the receiving end. And, although we probably won’t admit it (perhaps even to ourselves) some of us may have been perpetrators. For people to be bullied there must be bullies. Bullies are among us.

Bullying exists wherever there are human relationships, which means it exists everywhere. But there are some circumstances where it is particularly problematic because the victim cannot easily escape. Bullying in schools comes into that category. So does bullying in the workplace.  Why didn’t Daniel just go and get another job? Well, of course, that isn’t all that easy. And he had a mortgage to pay and a family to support. Walking away from the problem was not an option.

Bullying exists wherever there are human relationships, which means it exists everywhere.

So, what might we choose to do about workplace bullying? As a lawyer the temptation is to think in terms of legal solutions. But having a law against workplace bullying is unlikely to stop workplace bullying, any more than having laws against theft and murder have ever stopped theft and murder. If there is a solution (and there is unlikely to be a complete one) it is a management solution. But the law may be able to contribute by encouraging employers to take bullying seriously and to make genuine efforts to manage the issue effectively.

If the law gave victims of bullying enforceable rights against their employers then those employers will be motivated to seek solutions as a means of avoiding claims against them. And this is why it is so disappointing that UK law has such ineffective remedies for bullying at work. It has no general legal prohibition on bullying to which victims can turn for redress. It has some targeted protection if the bullying is discrimination based (on the grounds of race, sex etc) but that would offer no help to Daniel. His manager did not pick on him for a discrimination related reason. And other than that, all UK law offers are some causes of action designed for other purposes which some victims may be able to shoehorn themselves into, but many will not. For the bullied worker the UK legal landscape offers little practical assistance.

To say that UK law should do better by the victims of bullying is not to place the law on an unrealistic pedestal. It is not to assume that law can be a mechanism for making all things better. It would, however, be a recognition that law can have a part to play in seeking to tackle a wider social problem, a problem which causes real harm to people on a daily basis. Offering targeted legal redress to the victims of workplace bullying would be a contribution to a wider struggle to improve the workplace experience, something which would benefit employee and employer alike.

*Name has been changed to protect victim’s identity.

Featured image credit: Entrepreneur, Startup, Start up by StartupStockPhotos. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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The Protestant Reformation and the upside of historical amnesia

On 31 October, the Western world will mark a momentous date: 500 years since an obscure German monk, Martin Luther, putatively nailed his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door of Wittenberg, Saxony, thereby launching Protestant Christianity and, if you believe some historians, the modern world.

That many people can’t remember what the Protestant Reformation was all about might not please scholars. But at least it appears to be serving the cause of Christian unity, a major causality of the Reformation, and a leading goal of modern Christian theology.

This is according to two recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center. One asked Americans what they knew about the Reformation and how much its defining ideas—belief in the Bible’s theological sufficiency (sola scriptura) and salvation by faith alone (sola fide)—still shaped their faith. Another survey sought similar information in Western Europe—including Germany, the cradle of the Reformation and once the site of bloody Catholic-Protestant conflicts.

Only one quarter of American Protestants correctly identified salvation by faith alone as a core Protestant belief, and one in five guessed that the split between Protestants and Catholics was caused by “the Great Crusade.” Around 3 in 10 could not identify Martin Luther as the catalyst of the Reformation.

Across European countries, a median of 29% of Protestants agreed with the Protestant reformers’ position that faith alone permits salvation, while 49% said that both faith and good works were necessary—a position traditionally associated with Roman Catholicism.

But historical forgetfulness appears to be a boon to Christian unity. The European survey shows that “the vast majority of Protestants [and] Catholics [are] willing to accept each other as family members.” And this is especially true in Germany, where 97% of Protestants and 98% of Catholics are willing to accept members of the other faith into their families.

 Perhaps at this historical milestone, Protestants should try to see why Catholics have felt the Reformation a tragedy, and Catholics consider why Protestants have felt it necessary.

In the United States, 6 in 10 US adults, including 57% of Protestants and 65% of Catholics, believe that Protestants and Catholics are more similar than different in their beliefs. The days of nativist anti-Catholicism, which once bristled at the prospects of JFK’s Catholic presidency, appear long over.

What has led to the surveys’ results? Many factors to be sure, but I would hazard that growing secularization—more extensive in Europe than America—has led many to downplay or disregard traditional intra-Christian divisions. Worried awareness of Islam after 9/11 is perhaps another factor dissipating older differences and stereotypes.

To be sure, historical amnesia is probably not the surest basis for peacemaking. In an ideal world, Christians of various stripes would be able to work through their differences knowledgeably.

And what of those, often denominational and church leaders, doubling down on past divisions—sometimes in the service of self-interest? How should they commemorate the Reformation this October?

One provocative possibility comes from the late dean of American church historians, Jaroslav Pelikan. For the interests of truth and conciliation to be served, Pelikan once argued, Protestants and Catholics should think of the Reformation as a “tragic necessity.” Partisans on both sides, he elaborated, will have difficulty acknowledging this: “Roman Catholics agree that it was tragic, because it separated many millions from the true church; but they cannot see that it was really necessary. Protestants agree that it was necessary, because the Roman church was so corrupt; but they cannot see that it was such a tragedy after all.” Perhaps at this historical milestone, Protestants should try to see why Catholics have felt the Reformation a tragedy, and Catholics consider why Protestants have felt it necessary.

Pelikan’s reflections might not be the final word on the Reformation’s quincentennial. But as we look ahead to 31 October, they might not be a bad place to start. Taking them seriously might even help church leaders, albeit with greater knowledge and influence, arrive at where people in the pew already seem to be.

Featured image credit: Luther posting his 95 theses in 1517 by Ferdinand Pauwels. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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New finds from the Antikythera shipwreck

The Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities recently announced that the latest season of diving at the famous Antikythera Shipwreck — notable among other things as the findspot of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical gearwork device now recognized to be the most complex and sophisticated scientific instrument surviving from antiquity — had located a concentration of large metal objects buried under the seabed, one of which was recovered: the right arm, lacking just two fingers, from a bronze statue. This news, while holding out exciting prospects for the 2018 campaign, is nevertheless like an eerie echo of the past.

When residents of Athens opened their morning newspapers on November 6, 1900, they found among the usual mix of foreign news and domestic politics a front-page story with the headline, “Ancient Statues Under the Sea.” It told how the Minister of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Spyridon Stais, had met Antonios Ekonomou, Professor of Archaeology at Athens University, who was representing a group of Greek sponge divers who claimed to have discovered a hoard of bronze statues at a depth of more than 60 meters near Cape Maleas in the southern Peloponnese. As proof, they had brought back a bronze right arm, missing only its thumb and part of the middle finger.

The divers quickly came to an agreement with the government. Using their brass-helmet-and-hose apparatus, they would scour the sea floor for artifacts at what the archaeologists realized must be the site of an ancient shipwreck, carrying up smaller objects and tying up larger ones so they could be raised to the surface, and the government would send a navy vessel to do the hauling and transporting and archaeologists to supervise. In compensation for their dangerous labor and for skipping a season of commercial sponge-fishing, the divers would be paid generously once the operations were over.

Within days, the troopship Mykali accompanied the sponge divers with their small boats to the shipwreck site, at last revealed to be off the small island of Antikythera in the straits between Crete and the Greek mainland. Work at the Antikythera Shipwreck lasted ten months, ending only when the divers reported that they had searched every accessible area and could do no more.

Image credit: The Antikythera Mechanism. Photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The yield of the 1900-1901 campaign was spectacular but also frustrating. The ship’s cargo turned out to comprise many luxury objects including bronze and marble statuary and fine glassware, to say nothing of the fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism. But the bronzes, the most valued of the salvaged artworks because ancient bronze statuary rarely escaped the melting pot, were shattered in fragments and only one, the so-called Youth of Antikythera, was recovered even nearly complete. Moreover, this was before anything resembling scientific archaeology was possible for an underwater site, so that little could be certain concerning the nature of the ship and its last voyage, though there was general agreement that it dated from roughly the last two centuries BCE (we can now narrow this to within a decade or so of 60 BCE) and that the cargo was being transported from the Aegean Sea to the west, likely Italy.

Since 2014 the Return to Antikythera project has revisited the shipwreck site for one or two diving campaigns each year, applying a dazzling range of new technologies to gather archaeological data, all of which should cast light on an ancient voyage of remarkable significance for our understanding of ancient economies, art, and science. As was the case in 1900-1901, the new investigations have had to work in the face of capricious weather conditions, and parts of the site were clearly worked over pretty thoroughly by the sponge divers. The latest finds, however, are in the location of the ship’s hold, and were protected from earlier excavation by boulders, under which there is excellent prospect of finding some of the missing bronzes and other parts of the cargo in untampered archaeological context — this would truly be a breakthrough!

Can we also hold out hope that missing pieces of the Antikythera Mechanism will turn up? All we know is that the fragments now in the Archaeological Museum in Athens were retrieved toward the end of the original operations in the summer of 1901, when the sponge divers were systematically searching whatever parts of the wreck site that they could reach, and perhaps the ship’s hold is not the most likely candidate for where such a delicate instrument would have been stored in transit. Perhaps, again, some of the brittle, corroded components had disintegrated beyond recognition or were accidentally crushed under a diver’s lead-soled boots. We have a good idea of what to look for, however: a system of gears that simulated the movements through the zodiac of the five planets known in ancient times (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), and substantial pieces of metal plates inscribed with texts describing the Mechanism’s features, the astronomical theories built into its inner workings, and predictions of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. If any of this turned up, we would stand to learn a great deal more about ancient science and technology.

Featured image credit: Photo of the beach at the east of Kytheria, by Comzeradd. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Marketing-driven government (Part 1)

Marketing is an approach to social programme design and delivery that should underpin how governments and not-for-profit agencies develop and select policy, shape how services are delivered, and build sustained partnerships with citizens and other stakeholder organisations.

However, marketing is a very often misunderstood and misapplied within Government (which includes all local, regional, national, and international public-sector departments and agencies; as well as not-for-profit organisations such as schools, universities, public transportation, and police and fire services). This misunderstanding and misapplication results in government programmes designed to help citizens and tackle social issues functioning at a suboptimum level in terms of both their effectiveness and efficacy. With the context of global budgetary constraints, and new and rapidly developing relationships between states and citizens around the world, now is a good time to reappraise why marketing has not been comprehensively incorporated into the heart of government strategy and what the impact of such a shift might be for both government programmes and the concept of ‘marketing’ itself.

There is a pressing need for governments and not-for-profit agencies to move away from a limited, individually-focused managerialist culture characterised by expert problem definition and solution generation, and dominated by a limited intervention tool box consisting of information giving, and the application of disincentives and occasionally incentives focused mainly on individualist responsibility. Rather, the approach needed is one built on citizen insight about what people value and what will help them, and the application of a full intervention mix of both rational and non-rational choice approaches.

Adopting a strategic approach to the application of marketing within government is an indicator that governments respect and value citizen input into the selection of policy priorities and the development, implementation, and evaluation of social programmes. Marketing, if applied strategically, is also a reflection of an approach that values mutuality and coalition delivery. A strategic approach to marketing can help muster coalitions and social assets from the business sector and communities, and to help understand the root causes of social problems whilst also developing comprehensive strategies to address them.

A good example about how marketing principles can be systemically applied to tackle social problems can be found in the corporate adoption, by Public Heath England, of a long term social marketing strategy to inform and guide all of its programmes. These multi-component programmes are planned on the basis of clear measurable behavioural objectives: they are informed by deep target audience understanding and delivered via segmented interventions in partnership with the public sector, the NGO, and the private sector. The results of this systematic application of marketing to guide and drive strategy have been impressive over the ten years of its operation. For example, the ‘Change4Life’ social marketing programme has resulted in 30% of mums reporting that the programme made them reduce their child’s sugar intake. There has been a 4% decrease in sales of sugary cereals, a 3% decrease in sales of sugary drinks, and a 4% increase in the sales of diet drinks. The ‘Be clear on cancer’ programme has resulted in 30% more referrals for suspected lung cancer. The ‘Act Fast’ stroke identification and early treatment programme has resulted since its launch, in 5,365 fewer people becoming disabled as a result of a stroke, giving a return on investment of £28 for every £1 spent.

Image by Clem Onojeghuo. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.

Resistance to marketing and its contribution to social policy

Politicians and policy officials who sit to both the left and right of the ideological spectrum have an antithesis towards social intervention strategies that can be viewed as in anyway bypassing considered, rational decision making. This disquiet is driven by a view that citizens need to make informed, conscious decisions about why and how to behave for their own and society’s social good. This preference leads to an intervention strategy bias in that favours social advertising and digital communication channels, and the use of incentives and disincentives systems such as fines, penalties, or rewards to influence decision making and behaviour. A further consequence of this view is that marketing, in this context, is relegated to the role of developer and executor of social promotions.

A further consequence of this bias is the paradox that many government programmes that seek to influence population behaviour have a focus directed at individual responsibility and action, rather than a collective holistic societal response. Marketing’s role is conceived as being about influencing individual voluntary choice to do the right thing, be it not smoking, recycling, or obeying littering laws. This approach throws up a further, often sighted criticism of ‘Social Marketing’: that it represents a neoliberal conception of social policy which ignores the causal conditions and factors that sit at the root of most social problems. Marketing is also viewed as a reductionist managerial mind-set that seeks to reduce all social issues down to discrete individual behaviours that produce a targeted, rather than holistic, conceptualisation of problems and their solutions.

‘Social Marketing’ also meets resistance among some government ministers and policy officials who sit on the left of the political spectrum due to their deep mistrust of the market as a solution to any social challenge, and their belief that marketing is about covert persuasion thorough the application of ethically questionable interventions that bypass rational voluntary choice.

In part two of this blog I will explore why the application of marketing as a core part of social policy selection, development, and delivery is often resisted by civil servants and those in power.

Featured image credit: Image by StockSnap. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay .

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