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Strategy challenged, part 2

An overlooked aspect of the conductor’s rehearsal procedure is the precise planning of any given rehearsal and of the rehearsal trajectory, from first reading to final dress, toward the end of “peaking” at the concert. As I am wont to say after a bad rehearsal, you don’t want to peak too soon. My experience in China has provided the opportunity to explore this aspect with fresh eyes, given that, as we found in part 1, Do your job, the assumed rules of engagement do not necessarily apply everywhere. As I said at that time, “The rules of orchestra playing don’t change–looking, listening to the person next to you, communicating with the principal stands, keeping in touch with the conductor. Unless the “rules” are broken from the outset; unless the “rules” never existed in the first place, which clearly they didn’t here.”

OK, what rules did apply? How were they agreed upon? How were they enforced? Specifically, once I understood that my assumptions about how an orchestra functions were inaccurate and that this orchestra would actively challenge my approach to rehearsal, I had to decide how many of their unwritten rules I was willing to adjust to, and how many of mine I was determined to enforce. In a word, I needed a new strategy.

Let’s make a list of areas under discussion/negotiation, where my expectations diverged from those of the orchestra:

Starting on time/Length of breaks/Attendance
Rehearsal procedure
Part preparation/practicing

1. Starting on time/Length of breaks/Attendance Our rehearsals were scheduled to begin at 9:30 am and after the lunch break, at 1:30 pm. Breaks were supposed to last 15 minutes. None of this happened, in spite of my request after the first day that we be ready to start on time, at the assigned hour, and that breaks not run long. Even that phrase – “ready to start” – had different meanings for different constituencies in the orchestra. For some, perhaps 30%, it meant being in one’s chair, music out, warmed up and ready. For 50% or so, it meant getting into the rehearsal venue at 9:30. For 15%, it meant sauntering in a minute or two late, and then for the remainder, it just meant not showing up, for whatever reason that was never explained to me coherently. In my experience, the rehearsal that does not begin promptly with everyone in attendance is compromised and rarely gets off to a good start. The first day, we didn’t start on time, and as a result, we had bad sessions. I urged the orchestra to show up on time Tuesday, which they did, resulting in two superb working rehearsals. By 3:30 on Tuesday, I no longer felt the need to remind the orchestra to arrive on time for Wednesday’s morning rehearsal. Mistake. We began late, people were unfocused and inattentive, and by 9:35, I stepped off the podium, quietly but obviously perturbed, announced to the orchestra that we would take five minutes to collect ourselves, and that I would return at 9:40 to start over again. Walked out of the hall into the stifling 95º heat and returned at 9:40. We tuned, and I asked the musicians if they were ready to work. Silence. I asked again, a few said yes. A third time I insisted on the question, and finally, there was some sense of accountability and accord that we were ready to begin proper rehearsal.

The rehearsal itself was nonetheless limited and frustrating for many, because we had not come to agreement on the 2nd and 3rd components of the areas under discussion above. Until and unless we reconciled our differences in rehearsal approach and practice/prep expectation, our collaboration would continue to be difficult.

So, when do you, as conductor, compromise? What is in your power to fix, to change, to affect? What do you have to give up when you are a guest?

Obviously, we are not talking about a sit-down discussion and negotiation. This little dance is playing out in real time, during a tense rehearsal. Each time I stopped to fix something – a wrong or misread note or rhythm, faulty ensemble, shaky intonation–certain factions of the orchestra expressed their dismay in tangible, obvious fashions. Rarely have I felt more acutely what I call the “adversarial relationship” between orchestra and Maestro. And that is where things stood by the end of the Wednesday rehearsals.

More in part 3, resolution, where we will also look at the remaining two aspects of the process, rehearsal procedure and part preparation/practicing.

Featured image credit: “Maestro, orchestra” by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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What do we call our children?

In the Indo-European languages, most words for “mother,” “father,” “son,” and “daughter” are very old—most (rather than all), because some have been replaced by their rivals. Thus, Latin filia “daughter” is the feminine of filius “son,” and filius has nothing to do with son, which is indeed ancient. The words for “father” and “mother” are especially stable, though even they may disappear under the attack of baby words. In English, dad ~daddy coexists with father, but Gothic, a fourth-century Germanic language, had only atta for “male parent,” seemingly a baby word, like Russian tyatya and Hittite tata, among others. Substitute d for t, and tyata will be almost indistinguishable from daddy.

The puzzling thing is that atta, in exactly this form, has been recorded in many languages, not only Indo-European. Sometimes this complex means “father,” sometimes “mother,” and sometimes “sister.” Many people will recognize the title Atatürk “father of the Turks” and Attila, the name of the fifth-century ruler of the Huns. Although Hunnish, he became known under the Gothic name that meant “Daddy.” Like other dictators with unlimited authority, he wanted to be known as the great parent of his tribe (or nation). The part –ila in his name is a diminutive suffix, related to –ula in Latin ursula “little she-bear,” here probably a sign of endearment (something like “our beloved father”). It is not related to but has the same meaning as the Modern English suffix –ling, which will reemerge in this story.

A modern representation of Daddy Attila, the Huns’ beloved ruler.

The existence of such words throws a curious light on the problem of cognates, or congeners. Why did so many languages have nearly the same name for a close relative? Those words are hardly related across language borders. It is even more unlikely that we are dealing with so-called migratory words or borrowings. Even though all infants babble in the same way, it is amazing how many identical baby words for “father” exist all over the world. Surely, a proto-word meaning “father” did not exist half a million years ago.

In the past, forming a family in Europe was a strongly regularized procedure, and it is still such in many parts of the world. Hence a multitude of words for every member of a large family: “maternal uncle” versus “paternal uncle,” “married woman in relation to her mother-in law” versus “married woman in relation to her father-in law,” “two men married to sisters”—people needed a term for everybody. English has lost all the complex terms of the past. It is enough to add “in-law,” to produce the entire panoply of parents, brothers, and sisters. Only cousin, a borrowed word, is still with us. A study of kin terms is a flourishing branch of etymology and of anthropological linguistics.

Child is not a kin term, and one cannot expect uniformity in the coining of this word across the globe or even in related languages. Some such names are clever and simple. The German for “child” is Kind, recognizable to English speakers from Kindergarten. The word must have arisen with the sense “belonging to or born to one’s kin.” Engl. kind, as in one of a kind and the indispensable kind of is an obvious cognate of German Kind. In the past, the English noun kind meant “birth, descent” (compare kith and kin). Likewise, the related adjective kind meant “natural” or “native” (as in kindly Scot). A close semantic neighbor of German Kind is Scots bairn “one born,” derived from the verb bear “to give birth.” Child has an ascertainable etymology. Its root shows in Gothic and means “womb.” Thus, child is the fruit of the womb. This makes perfect sense.

Equally transparent, but not at first sight, is the Slavic word for “child.” I’ll cite the plural form deti “children.” Deti is related (akin!) to Gothic daddjan “to suckle.” The Slavic child is thus a suckling, but only from an etymological point of view, for the one recognizable Russian cognate of deti is doit’ “to milk”; no native speaker of Slavic will dream of connecting them. However, once we notice such words, we are no longer surprised that Latin filius “son,” mentioned above, and femina “woman” share the root with deti (that is, if we know that Latin f- corresponds to Germanic b-, both from the reconstructed Indo-European consonant  bh).

Leonardo’s Madonna Lita. After a look at this picture, will anyone doubt the etymology of Russian deti?

One’s child is a dear or a nuisance, as the case may be, and that is why various words have been invented to express people’s love or mild disapproval of a son and a daughter. Now we are, fortunately, unisex, but in the past, when little girls were made of sugar and spice, and all that’s nice, while little boys were constituted of frogs and snails, and puppy-dogs’ tails, a few amusing examples of “stigmatizing” male children turn up.  Perhaps the most surprising of them is urchin. The word came to English from French and meant “hedgehog.”  The development of senses must have been from “hedgehog” to “bristling creature,” to “contentious, mischievous youngster,” and occasionally “ragamuffin.” Those studying historical semantics distinguish between the amelioration and the deterioration of meaning. I am not sure whether the progress from “hedgehog” to “mischievous, ragged youngster” is improvement, regress, or neither. From the human point of view, it is certainly better to be a boy than a prickly beast, the more so as hedgehogs do not live in the New World (the closest approximation is the porcupine). The hedgehog’s point of view would be hard to assess.

The prototypical urchin.

The word imp moved almost in the opposite direction. The earliest recorded meaning of imp is “young shoot, sapling.” The corresponding verb (to imp) meant “to engraft”; the German verb impfen still means the same.  An offshoot, naturally, makes one think of a child, and indeed imp soon came to mean “scion.” It is the next step, the narrowing or specification of its meaning from “small creature” to “son of the Devil” or “petty devil,” that could not have been predicted. Nor did brats fare too well. The origin of brat is obscure. The most common hypothesis derives this contemptuous word for “child” from Irish brat “ragged garment.” Secure parallels of such a semantic leap are few, and in ragamuffin rag- has probably nothing to do with ragtag and bobtail. Still another young male of questionable integrity is a shaver. A barber who can shave close to the skin is a sharper or a shaver. Today a (young) shaver is not necessarily an artful dodger, but the word, though it means “young lad,” is informal and has unquestionable ironic connotations.

This is an imp, Tantrabolus’s kith and kin. (See the previous post!)”

Some stories have a happy end. Thus, one more Russian word for “child” is rebyonok (stress on the second syllable). The root reb– is the same as in orphan (with metathesis: in one word r precedes, in the other follows the vowel). Latin orbus means “bereft,” and Russian rab means “slave” (bereave is not related to them). Compare Engl. boy and busboy: “boy” and “servant” often form an alliance. It is reassuring that rebyonok is neither an orphan nor a slave. The topic is inexhaustible. Think of stripling (a small strip, as it were) and a slip of a girl (boy). Children vary, and so do the metaphors for their names.

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What are the moral implications of intelligent AGI? [excerpt]

The possibility of human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains controversial. While its timeline remain uncertain, the question remains: if engineers are able to develop truly intelligent AGI, how would human-computer interactions change? In the following excerpt from AI: Its Nature and Future, artificial intelligence expert Margaret A. Boden discusses the philosophical consequences behind truly intelligent AGI.

Would we—should we?—accept a human-level AGI as a member of our moral community? If we did, this would have significant practical consequences. For it would affect human–computer interaction in three ways.

First, the AGI would receive our moral concern—as animals do. We would respect its interests, up to a point. If it asked someone to interrupt their rest or crossword puzzle to help it achieve a “high-priority” goal, they’d do so. (Have you never got up out of your armchair to walk the dog, or to let a ladybird out into the garden?) The more we judged that its interests mattered to it, the more we’d feel obliged to respect them. However, that judgement would depend largely on whether we attributed phenomenal consciousness (including felt emotions) to the AGI.

Second, we would regard its actions as morally evaluable. Today’s killer drones aren’t morally responsible. But perhaps a truly intelligent AGI would be? Presumably, its decisions could be affected by our reactions to them: by our praise or blame. If not, there’s no community. It could learn to be “moral” much as an infant (or a dog) can learn to be well behaved, or an older child to be considerate. Even punishment might be justified, on instrumental grounds.

“Some philosophers deny the reality of the self, but AI-influenced thinkers don’t. They see it as a specific type of virtual machine.”

And third, we’d make it the target of argument and persuasion about moral decisions. It might even offer moral advice to people. For us to engage seriously in such conversations, we’d need to be confident that (besides having human-level intelligence) it was amenable to specifically moral considerations. But just what does that mean? Ethicists disagree profoundly not only about the content of morality but also about its philosophical basis.

The more one considers the implications of “moral community,” the more problematic the notion of admitting AGIs seems to be. Indeed, most people have a strong intuition that the very suggestion is absurd.

That intuition arises largely because the concept of moral responsibility is intimately linked to others—conscious agency, freedom, and self—that contribute to our notion of humanity as such.

Conscious deliberation makes our choices more morally accountable (although unconsidered actions can be criticized, too). Moral praise or blame is attributed to the agent, or self, concerned. And actions done under strong constraints are less open to blame than those made freely.

These concepts are hugely controversial even when applied to people. Applying them to machines seems inappropriate—not least due to the implications for human–computer interactions cited in the previous section. Nevertheless, taking the “mind-as-virtual-machine” approach to human minds can help us to understand these phenomena in our own case.

AI-influenced philosophers analyze freedom in terms of certain sorts of cognitive-motivational complexity. They point out that people are clearly “free” in ways that crickets, for instance, aren’t. Female crickets find their mates by a hardwired reflex response. But a woman seeking a mate has many strategies available. She also has many other motives besides mating—not all of which can be satisfied simultaneously. She manages, nevertheless—thanks to computational resources (a.k.a. intelligence) that crickets lack.

These resources, organized by functional consciousness, include perceptual learning; anticipatory planning; default assignment; preference ranking; counterfactual reasoning; and emotionally guided action scheduling. Indeed, Dennett uses such concepts— and a host of telling examples—to explain human freedom. So AI helps us to understand how our own free choice is possible.

Determinism/indeterminism is largely a red herring. There is some element of indeterminism in human action, but this can’t occur at the point of decision because that would undermine moral responsibility. It could, however, affect the considerations that arise during deliberation. The agent may or may not think of x, or be reminded of y—where x and y include both facts and moral values. For instance, someone’s choice of a birthday present may be influenced by their accidentally noticing something that reminds them that the potential recipient likes purple, or supports animals’ rights.

All the computational resources just listed would be available to a human-level AGI. So, unless free choice must also involve phenomenal consciousness (and if one rejects computational analyses of that), it seems that our imaginary AGI would have freedom. If we could make sense of the AGI’s having various motives that mattered to it, then distinctions could even be made between its choosing “freely” or “under constraint.” However, that “if” is a very big one.

As for the self, AI researchers stress the role of recursive computation, in which a process can operate upon itself. Many traditional philosophical puzzles concerning self-knowledge (and self-deception) can be dissolved by this AI-familiar idea.

But what is “self-knowledge” knowledge of? Some philosophers deny the reality of the self, but AI-influenced thinkers don’t. They see it as a specific type of virtual machine.

For them, the self is an enduring computational structure that organizes and rationalizes the agent’s actions—especially their carefully considered voluntary actions. (LIDA’s author, for instance, describes it as “the enduring context of experience that organizes and stabilizes experiences across many different local contexts.”) It isn’t present in the newborn baby, but is a lifelong construction— to some extent amenable to deliberate self-molding. And its multi-dimensionality allows for considerable variation, generating recognizably individual agency, and personal idiosyncrasy.

That’s possible because the agent’s Theory of Mind (which initially interprets the behavior of others) is applied, reflexively, to one’s own thoughts and actions. It makes sense of them in terms of prioritized motives, intentions, and goals. These, in turn, are organized by enduring individual preferences, personal relationships, and moral/political values. This computational architecture allows for the construction of both self-image (representing the sort of person one believes one is) and ideal self-image (the sort of person one would like to be), and for actions and emotions grounded in the differences between the two.

In sum: deciding to credit AGIs with real human-level intelligence— involving morality, freedom, and self—would be a big step, with significant practical implications. Those whose intuition rejects the whole idea as fundamentally mistaken may well be correct. Unfortunately, their intuition can’t be buttressed by non-controversial philosophical arguments. There’s no consensus on these matters, so there are no easy answers.

Featured image credit: “abstract-lines-numbering-system” by geralt. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Will the real Robinson Crusoe please stand up?

It is difficult to think of a literary narrative, other than Robinson Crusoe, that economists have so enthusiastically appropriated as part of their cultural heritage. The image of Robinson, shipwrecked, alone, and forced to decide how to use his finite resources, has become almost emblematic in the teaching of the problem of choice in economics. But does Robinson Crusoe still have anything to offer economics students in a post-crash world?

It would seem not. When economics teaching came under a barrage of criticism after the financial crash in 2008, the problem was that the basic theories being used in the classroom were as far removed from the messiness of CDOs (collateralized debt obligation), asset bubbles, and bank leverage as Robinson is to any human interaction. The purity of Robinson’s choice problem, abstracted from the complications of other people, governments, or wider cultural contexts, was matched by the stripped-down workhorse models of economics that had been taught to students across the globe for many decades. Both Crusoe and first year university economics seem equally outdated for a 21st century economist.

But then it became clear that Robinson was far more resourceful than we had allowed and what we were looking for in a new literary text was already there in abundance in Defoe’s narrative. The problem was simply to recast and reclaim Robinson into a role that was far closer to his real circumstances than the bit-part lonesome character he has usually assumed in the works of Jevons, Torrens, and many economics textbooks.

Alexander Frank Lydon illustration of 1865 Groombridge and Sons edition of Robinson Crusoe by Alexander Frank Lydon (1865). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

For it turns out that Robinson was never really that alone. After his shipwreck he is petrified at the sight of a footprint in the mud. He now restricts his movements to a very small part of the island and his actions are severely and materially impacted by the mere possibility of other people, who do in fact eventually arrive. Robinson is no longer in Jevons’ pristine world of pure choice but inhabits a more complex environment, perhaps that of Adam Smith whose impartial spectator delimits one’s behaviour even when no-one else is around, or maybe that of John Nash whose actors cannot avoid second-guessing how others might respond.

Moreover, Robinson arrives on the island because he fancies himself as a slave trader but he encounters a severe storm before he is able to procure any slaves. Seen in this context, his abortive journey might be deemed a success because he does eventually acquire a slave, Friday, who he puts to work. Robinson’s welfare is therefore the result of a choice he makes not in isolation, but in the historical context of an extreme power relationship in which he is the ultimate claimant to the product of Friday’s labour, a result related to  the guns he rescued from the shipwreck. This distribution of welfare is destined to change, however, as others arrive on the island and the simple power relationship with one other inhabitant cannot be easily replicated with many.

Previously, Robinson had been a successful gold merchant and owner of a sugar plantation in Brazil, activities through which he honed his skills in managing and incentivising his workers’ efforts. He will use these considerable management skills to motivate and organise a small productive community among the new arrivals on his island, and we will see how the economy’s performance, and the welfare of its citizens, respond to his organisation of labour and the rules of conduct he is able to implement in this new peopled world.

Can one really understand Robinson Crusoe without seeing him in the context of his history, institutions like slavery, his considerable human capitals, his skill at implementing rules, organising, motivating and monitoring his workers both before and on the island? And is it fair to say that when economists settled on Robinson Crusoe as the emblematic text for the teaching of economics, they had landed on just the right part of the literary heritage, but for the wrong reasons?

Featured image credit: Books in black by Pixabay. Public domain via Pexels.

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Back to physics: a reading list

Back to university means picking out the best textbooks to use for your studies. If you’re just starting out in your first year of studies or are pursuing further degree in a more specialized field, we have some great resources to explore. From the basics of fundamental physics to the intricacies of understanding light-matter interaction, this list provides the best starting point for under-graduates and post-graduates alike. What else would you recommend for physics scholars?

Under-graduate:

From Classical to Quantum Fields by Laurent Baulieu, John Iliopoulos, and Roland Sénéor

By beginning with the basic axioms that a ‘reasonable’ relativistic theory seems to obey (which most theoretical physicists admit to be true) you can arrive at results that shape your understanding of our physical reality. It’s possible to assert that quantum relativistic theories exist in a real global mathematical sense, which means that you can manipulate (with the usual precautions) some interesting quantities including vacuum expectation values of products of fields.

The Physical World: An Inspirational Tour of Fundamental Physics by Nicholas Manton and Nicholas Mee

Many natural processes, and our own everyday activities, aim to put in the least amount of effort to get the most back as quickly as possible. For example, you may take a longer route in the car in terms of distance, in order to get to your destination faster (by detouring to a highway or motorway). Physicists say that these satisfy a variational principle, a fundamental idea explored in the introduction of Manton and Mee’s textbook.

Materials for the 21st Century by David Segal

We all know glucose – that simple sugar that makes so many of our favourite foods taste wonderful, including candy floss (or cotton candy). It plays a central role in the structure of other natural products, including cellulose – a natural polymer of glucose molecules (where glucose is the monomer) and the most abundant biorenewable material on earth. Teach yourself about the latest advances in materials science research and learn about over 500 materials.

Post-graduate:

Light-Matter Interaction: Physics and Engineering at the Nanoscale, Second edition , by John Weiner and Frederico Nunes

Light-matter interaction is a rapidly developing field but one that graduate students from many disciplines need to thoroughly understand. Key notions such as phasor representation, expressions for energy density and energy flux are constantly used within the field and are paramount to understanding the physical optics of plane waves.

Generating Random Networks and Graphs by Ton Coolen, Alessia Annibale, and Ekaterina Roberts

Testing a hypothesis against a control case is one of the most important aspects of the scientific method. Random graphs have proven pivotal in establishing network science, with a wide scope of application in the field. In order to utilize random graphs most effectively, students and researchers must determine a mathematical connection between the stochastic graph creation process and the stationary probability distribution.

Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer of Planetary Atmospheres by Kelly Chance and Randall V. Martin

The interactions between matter and electromagnetic radiation as well as the energy transfer in electromagnetic radiation are research areas in physics that are increasing in importance as ever more attention is being paid to weather, climate, and air quality on Earth within the fields of atmospheric and planetary science. Einstein coefficients nuclear spin and rotational spectroscopy are among the fundamental principles required to perform quantitative spectroscopy.

Featured image credit: Dr. Richard Feynman during the Special Lecture: the Motion of Planets Around the Sun by Energy.gov. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons . 

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Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew politics

How tolerant and diverse should a society be? Are there limits to the views that a society should accept? Can individuals from diverse backgrounds join together to contribute to the common good, and what happens when tensions arise between different groups? To what extent should individuals be asked to adapt to a putatively shared national culture, and should they be encouraged to preserve their own distinctive cultural inheritances?

Given the events of 2016-2017, such questions stand at the forefront of American civic life. Yet similar questions also animated a figure whose birthday we celebrate this month: the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). Born in rural Prussia, Mendelssohn moved to Berlin at the age of fourteen and soon acquired languages such as French and Latin. By the 1750s he was writing in German and Hebrew on philosophy and Judaism, and by the 1760s he had become not only his era’s leading Jewish thinker, but also a central figure in the late Enlightenment. He is remembered today as the founder of modern Jewish thought, and his contemporaries eulogized him as someone who sacrificed his life for reason: he fell ill and died, it was said, because he was in such a rush to deliver a book defending reason to his publisher that, on a cold December evening, he left home without a coat and proceeded to his destination on foot.

Questions relating to diversity and tolerance loomed large in Mendelssohn’s life. German intellectuals in the 1780s wrestled with the question of whether Jews should receive the civic rights available to non-Jews, and Mendelssohn played a central role in these debates, addressing widespread suspicions that Jews were simply too different to be integrated into Prussian society. He was also the target of recurring challenges to convert to Christianity. To many of his contemporaries, Judaism was an oppressive religion that curtailed liberty by demanding irrational practices such as onerous dietary restrictions and strict Sabbath observance: how, these individuals wondered, could a philosopher accept such a tradition?

Mendelssohn’s best-known response was his German treatise Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism. Far from being irrational and oppressive, he argued, Judaism actually encourages free, rational thought. According to Mendelssohn, rather than requiring a fixed creed, Judaism demands only a set of practices that direct adherents to reflect upon matters such as God, empowering each individual to formulate her own religious beliefs. By following practices such as traditional dietary laws and celebrating liturgical events such as the Sabbath, Jews would find themselves frequently reflecting on the deity who commanded such behavior, and this reflection would provide occasions for individuals to form — and, when necessary, reimagine — their own conceptions of God.

Portrait of Moses Mendelssohn by Anton Graff, Jewish Museum Berlin. James Steakley, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

What is less well known is that Mendelssohn went further in his Hebrew writings, arguing that Judaism could also produce engaged citizens committed to the common good. His Hebrew commentary on the Pentateuch, known as the Bi’ur or Elucidation, outlined a general theory of societal development, arguing that societies constantly change in ways that yield both benefits and dangers. Imagine a society that has long emphasized agriculture and some forms of commercial enterprise, but now begins to devote more resources to the latter type of activity and encourage the production of luxury goods. While such changes might yield material benefits and allow individuals to cultivate new sorts of skills, these developments might also generate perils such as corruption and civic strife, as individuals become so committed to the acquisition of wealth and luxury that they neglect intellectual pursuits and find themselves in bitter competition with their neighbors.

It is because of such dangers, Mendelssohn insisted, that Judaism is politically relevant. If Judaism requires actions that lead individuals to reflect upon matters such as God, then Judaism can dispose adherents to attend to the well-being of their non-Jewish neighbors. After all, Mendelssohn reasoned, a benevolent God would be concerned with the welfare of all human beings, and individuals reflecting on the deity might recognize this point and seek to pursue this divinely sanctioned end — to promote human well-being by assessing the practices of their society and combating the emergence of potential dangers. In the scenario outlined above, Jews might recognize the benefits of commercial growth but seek to combat the resulting obsession with wealth and luxury, accepting societal change as inevitable while working with their non-Jewish neighbors to curtail the worst excesses. As Mendelssohn stated in his Hebrew commentary:

The Holy One, Blessed be He, desired that [a society’s] condition would not remain at a determinate proportion and one restricted stage. Rather, it would change as times changed and vary as events varied….In matters such as these, which properly change in accordance with time and events, one should neither impose a determinate limit upon nor set a boundary for man, saying “until here shall you go”….Rather, the more correct approach is to be on guard against the trap.

Far from threatening civic harmony, Judaism could promote civic well-being; however ‘irrational’ and ‘problematic’ Jews’ practices might appear, the presence of a Jewish minority could be a source not of weakness, but of strength.

Mendelssohn’s vision is not without problems. Even if religious traditions can generate a commitment to the common good, this is hardly the only possible outcome. We know all too well that religion can beget hatred and violence, and Mendelssohn himself famously expressed doubts about the civic potential of atheists. Yet despite these limits, Mendelssohn’s perspective remains valuable. Confronting worries that Jews were too different to be accepted into society, he turned this position on its head, casting social inclusiveness as a civic good. However foreign our neighbors’ practices might initially seem, he argued, we should view these individuals as potential fellow citizens — as individuals with whom we might join together to pursue projects of shared concern. Insisting that the promise of diversity and tolerance outweighs the perils, Mendelssohn’s voice still resonates today.

Featured image credit: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Kaspar Lavater as guests in the home of Moses Mendelssohn by Moritz Daniel Oppenhiem (1800-1882) Judah L. Magnes Museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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Racist medicine: a history of race and health

In 1999, the human genome project declared race a biological fiction with no basis in the genetic code. Despite this position, many physicians and medical scientists continue to use race in genetic studies, drug tests, and general practice. Since racial medicine persists, the question emerges: what’s the historical relationship between the medical profession and race? When did the medical profession begin to define racial difference, and can understanding this history lead to a more “race” conscious and sensitive medical profession?

Throughout the eighteenth century, physicians and scientists in Europe and the United States discussed and attempted to define racial difference. In the 1790s, however, Benjamin Rush, a founding father and early medical professor at the University of Pennsylvania, introduced racial difference into the curriculum of US medical schools. Rush taught his students that blackness was a form of leprosy that physicians would learn to cure eventually. By constructing a national future free of black Americans, Rush defined the country’s destiny as all white. Thus, within a few decades after the founding of the United States’ first medical school, physicians began to carve out their position as experts on racial difference.

Despite a belief that physicians would eliminate black skin color, Rush and many other doctors considered white and black people as essentially the same animal. This wasn’t true of physicians in the decades immediately preceding the American Civil War. By this point, many doctors and scientists subscribed to the theory of polygenesis—that God created each human race as a separate species and healthier in their “native” climates and geographies. These physicians argued that African Americans thrived on the plantation and among the diseases of tropical climates.

In an 1857 essay, physician and racial scientist Josiah Nott argued that to properly treat plantation ailments, medical practitioners must understand the natural relationship between African Americans’ bodies and southern, malarial climates. First, Nott claimed that African Americans had an immense tolerance to heat compared to whites. He stated that in Africa, the natives “can lie down and sleep on the ground in a temperature of at least 150 of Fahrenheit, where the white man would die in a few hours.” Second, Nott believed that African Americans were immune to the worst diseases of tropical climates such as malaria and yellow fever, a position medical students in the US North and the South shared with Nott. While contemporary scientists have shown that the Duffy antigen and sickle-cell trait provide protection against certain strains of malaria, there is no scientific evidence to support the notion of inherited immunity to yellow fever. In their depiction of non-whites as suited for hard labor and toil on southern plantations, physicians such as Nott supplied a vital argument for the moral rectitude of slavery.

Medical theories such as those espoused by Nott lead physicians to treat African Americans differently than white patients. Antebellum medical students studying in the North and the South agreed that African Americans required less blood-letting than whites, an unintentional benefit of antebellum medical racism. While Josiah Nott studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1820s, Professor Nathaniel Chapman taught him that black patients could not bear blood-letting. In short, as much as Nott was a product of the slave South, he also learned racial-bias from his medical training.

As opposed to the well-known histories of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and Nazi eugenics that emphasize exceptional episodes in the history of medicine, an examination of early racial medicine and its infestation of medical schools draws attention to many unexceptional and largely unquestioned aspects of race in medical practice. While most physicians decry the tortuous experiments conducted by the Nazis, far less awareness exists of how medicine has seen race as biological for centuries.

In some respects, the debates over race and health in early America aren’t so different from those being had by medical professionals in the present. Are health discrepancies being caused by the social determinants of health such as poverty and even the mental stress of experiencing racism or are these discrepancies inherited? While inheritance and genetics undoubtedly contribute to human health outcomes, it’s important to recognize that inheritance doesn’t follow along the human-imagined racial barriers tied to skin color. Peoples of different skin colors from around the Mediterranean and West Africa possess the sickle-cell trait. Likewise, increased rates of hypertension among African Americans don’t derive from race-based inheritance, as increased rates aren’t experienced among Afro-Caribbeans or West Africans. In short, examining the origins and the present of racial medicine works to highlight the fatal flaws of this brand of medical thinking. Lines of inheritance and genetics don’t obey the color lines created socially, and the history of racial medicine draws attention to a long pattern of misunderstanding how racist medicine often creates the negative health outcomes that it claims to explain.

Featured Image Credit: Types of Mankind by Internet Archive Book Images. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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Which reptile are you? [quiz]

Reptiles are often seen as cold, creepy creatures, whose characteristics are applied negatively in popular culture. Despite this low opinion of this class of animals, their extinct ancestors are some of the best known animals in the world and continue to fascinate kids and adults alike. Reptiles have inspired some of the most recognizable characters in popular fiction including the gold-hoarding Smaug, the iconic dragon trio from Game of Thrones, and the mascot of Hogwarts’ most infamous house, Slytherin.

The earliest reptile originated between 310 and 320 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. Over time, early reptiles evolved to become more dominant in their environments, leading to what is commonly known as the “Age of Reptiles” during the Mesozoic era. Most of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and ichthyosaurs became extinct before the end of the era.

In the periods following, these lifeforms have become smaller, to better adapt to their changing environments, and took on the features we associate with this class today. Reptiles are distinguished from other vertebrates by having a dry scaly skin and by typically laying soft-shelled eggs on land. Their physiognomies have let reptiles navigate the Earth for millions of years. Are there any traits that homo sapiens have adopted to improve our survival rate? Can these be traced back in our personalities today?

How do your personality traits match up to those of our reptilian comrades? Find out which reptile you most closely resemble!

 

Featured image credit: Dinosaur by roseteamhomes. Public domain via Pixabay .  

Quiz background image credit: Skin by sipa. Public domain via Pixabay .  

Quiz outcome image credits: ‘Grass snake’ by Huskyherz. Public domain via Pixabay . ‘Turtle’ by Skitterphoto. Public domain via Pixabay . ‘Crocodile’ by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay . ‘Reptile’ by Pixel-mixer. Public domain via Pixabay . ‘Chameleon’ by Pixel-mixer. Public domain via Pixabay .  

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Infrequently asked questions: The Monologic Imagination

In the online age, a tried and true method of conveying a lot of information succinctly is the “Frequently Asked Questions” portion of a webpage. In the spirit of honesty and forthrightness, we’re naming our contribution to this blog “Infrequently Asked Questions.”. The topic we are focusing on is monologism, the practice of presenting one’s voice as pure and singular, unquestionably true, and, in the case of groups, unified. Monologism is a common feature of religious and political projects.

Q: Dialogism is “in” at the moment–indeed, has been in for a few decades. It’s synonymous with cherished notions like democracy, consultation, transparency, and pluralism. Why are you doing something so retro?   

A: We (Tomlinson and Millie) worked together at Monash University in Australia and shared an interest about monological projects. By this, we mean speech and other representational practices in which people not only assert their singular rightness but also try to eliminate other claims. This might sound especially familiar in the current political climate of the USA, but it’s commonly found in many political and religious arenas.

 Q: Your book ranges all over the map, from Papua New Guinea to Algeria, from Iran to Cuba. Surely not all of the things authors are looking at are the same thing? There’s no singular Monologism, is there? 

A: Right, there is no singular monologism, but there are common tendencies. When Millie was conducting research on Islamic oratory in West Java, Indonesia, between 2007 and 2014, he noticed that Muslims in that part of the world responded positively to preachers with a wide range of skills. They preferred preachers who are singers, comedians and so on. But when this activity was represented as a common good, those skills were completely ignored–and sometimes deliberately distanced. This kind of dynamic is familiar to any reader who sees a gap between what people really love to do and what they say they really love to do. The latter always moves in a monological direction, where “we” all happen to agree on an idealized standard.

Q: Why the cagey phrasing, “move in a monological direction”? Does monologue exist, or doesn’t it? 

A: Bakhtin said it couldn’t really exist except for Adam, the first human, who didn’t have a human to respond to until Eve showed up. But he also observed how nationalists attempt to unify meanings in “one consciousness” with “a unified accent.” The point is that all discourse is inherently dialogical, and any attempt to purify or singularize it is bound to fail. But we tend to side more with Mukarovsky, who argued that monologue and dialogue necessarily coexist.

Q: So monologue must fail?

A: Well, it might achieve some victories along the way, in Constitutions, coups, and religious movements where preachers are thought to represent God’s truth.

Q: Is monologue exclusively “religious” or “political”? And what do you mean by those terms anyway? 

A: We’re not going to define those terms in a blog, sorry, but we’re also not claiming that monologue is strictly a religious or political thing. We’re saying that when people represent polities and divinities, monologue seems to get used a lot, strategically. At the same time, many people attach such positive meanings to dialogue that they can work themselves into ideological pretzels over single-voicedness. One of our book’s chapters is by Philip Fountain, who observed how Mennonites who attempted to establish a creed wound up convinced that this was the wrong thing to do.

Q: So, can we talk about the current state of US politics? How does Donald Trump and his style of expression fit into this discussion?

A: It seems to be, doesn’t it? But the book project began several years ago, when the idea of Trump as president was still just a joke on The Simpsons. We do discuss American politics, though. The first chapter in the book is by Greg Urban, who discusses (among other things) the making of the American constitution in 1787. The founding fathers were creating something that would ideally bind in an inclusive way, but in order to do this, they had to exclude any possibility of dialogism from the consultation process. They really shut down that possibility. Some committee members had no faith in the public’s capacity to contribute to the process, as they were certain that false news was being distributed by conniving Americans, and that this would impede the committee in crafting a Constitution that would reflect the common good!

Featured image credit: “Microphone” by RoAll. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay .

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Taxing or exempting the church

Religious entities pay more taxes than many people believe. Moreover, churches and other religious organizations are treated quite diversely by different taxes and by different states. Sometimes churches and other religious entities are taxed in the same fashion as secular organizations and persons are. Yet other taxes narrowly exempt churches while taxing secular philanthropic organizations.

The states’ sales taxes, for example, vary in their respective approaches to religious institutions. In some states, churches and other religious organizations both pay sales tax on their retail purchases and collect tax on their retail sales. In other states, churches and other sectarian entities pay sales tax as retail buyers but do not collect tax as retail sellers. And yet with other states, the pattern is reversed, with churches and religious organizations collecting taxes on their retail sales while they are exempted from the taxation of their retail purchases. In other states, churches are wholly immune from sales tax obligations as either buyers or sellers.

To take a second example, within the broad consensus exempting churches from property taxation, states disagree about the property tax status of parsonages in which clergy live. Some states exempt parsonages from property taxation; others do not. In some states, housing occupied by supervising clergy qualifies as tax-exempt parsonages. In other states, it does not.

Central to understanding the tax status of religious organizations is the concern which has come to be called “entanglement”:either taxing or exempting churches and other sectarian entities entangles church and state. In the tax context, there are no disentangling alternatives. Some taxes entail more church-state entanglement than do other taxes. Different tax provisions entail different types and different quantities of entanglement risk.

Enforcing ad valorem property taxation, for example, can enmesh taxpayers and tax collectors in difficult disputes about the value of real property. Such taxation can also lead to enforcement entanglement when property owners lack the liquidity to pay tax. In cases where a property owner has no cash to discharge his property tax obligations, the tax collector must take action – typically foreclosure – to collect property taxes owed but unpaid. The taxes generating the greatest enforcement entanglement are those, like ad valorem real property taxation, where the amount of the taxpayer’s liability may be difficult to determine and where the taxpayer may lack the cash to pay the tax.

In contrast, sales taxation is a form of taxation less expectant with possibilities for church-state enforcement entanglement. Most retail sales involve no valuation controversy as the purchaser usually pays an easily-ascertainable cash price. Most taxable sales present no liquidity issues since the purchaser typically pays cash including the sales tax owed on his purchase. It is thus unsurprising that in many states churches and other religious organizations pay or collect the less entangling sales tax.

Similarly, real estate conveyance taxes apply to the sales and purchases of sectarian entities since these are typically easily-taxed cash transactions.

Taxing the church or exempting the church involves imperfect trade-offs among competing and legitimate values. On balance, our federal system of decentralized legislation makes these trade-offs reasonably, though not perfectly. For example, the sales tax obligations of churches and religious entities could in many states be broadened without risk of significant additional church-state entanglement. Moreover, cash parsonage allowances should be taxed. Even if parsonage allowances are included in clerical incomes, modestly compensated clergy, like other low-income individuals, would pay little or no federal income tax anyway due to the standard deduction, personal allowances and the earned income credit.

On the other hand, the so-called “Johnson Amendment,” which precludes churches and other tax-exempt institutions from political campaigning, is overly-broad and, as currently interpreted, unacceptably burdens the internal communications within churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious congregations.

Featured image credit: white painted wall church by Pixabay. Public domain via Pexels.

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