Oxford University Press's Blog, page 352

If diplomacy did not exist, we would need to invent it

We now face a century of change like no other in history. Technology will transform how we meet our needs for peace, dignity and community. This will shatter the global political equilibrium, and shift power away from governments towards individuals. States, ideas and industries will go out of business. Inequality could grow.

Already, the internet has changed the world faster than any previous technology. The smartphone has given a superpower to much of the world’s population. For many, the web is no longer for our downtime, but for all our time. We have access not just to more information than we can process, but more than we can imagine. From self driving cars to artificial intelligence, as Nobel Prize winning geneticist Richard Smalley says – “when a scientist says something is possible, they’re probably underestimating how long it will take. If they say it is impossible, they’re probably wrong.”

And we’re only just getting going. The patterns show us – data, computer chip advancement, global temperatures, demography – that change is accelerating at a staggering rate. Sociologist Ian Morris predicts that in just a century we will go through the equivalent technological tsunami of the journey from cave paintings to nuclear weapons.

For the first time, technology gives the prospect of the world’s population having an instant, global and unfiltered means of communicating, of consuming information, of forming opinions, preferences and communities. Digital technology empowers new sources of power, increasingly enabling the individual to take control of their lives. This connectivity could unleash an unprecedented empathetic force for global development. But it could also leave us feeling overwhelmed, unable to keep up, unequal, exploited by corporate algorithms, reduced to variables to be mined as big data, and our every networked action recorded by big-brother government surveillance.

How humans manage this paradigm shift is the greatest challenge of our time. Yet we are in danger of being overwhelmed by that change. At a time when we have the tools to react globally, we are failing to use them.  We have not begun to truly adapt our institutions to the new realities. And we too often mistake demolition for disruption.

“Abstract Geometric World Map” by Insspirito. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay .

If we are in the foothills of a truly global, connected, civilization, which craft is better equipped than diplomacy to shape debates on how to protect our basic human needs in the Networked Age? But diplomacy is hard in periods of economic and political uncertainty. The system based on states, hierarchies, and the status quo is becoming weaker. The pace of technological change means that the internet has often been something that happens to diplomacy, not a force marshaled in support of diplomacy.

So diplomacy must innovate with urgency, or face a slow slide into under resourced decline and irrelevance. Using digital technology, diplomats should build networks in a time of institutional failure; consensus in a time of arguments; and bridges in a time of walls. We should strive for expertise, patience, perspective and judgement in a time of fake news, sound bites and echo chambers. We can aspire to be courageously calm and tolerant in a time of outrage and intolerance. We can be internationalist in a time of nationalism, and open minded in a time of closed minds. A retreat from the world is the path to irrelevance, drift and uncertainty.

The great dividing line of the 21st century is between two basic human instincts – to fight for resource, or to negotiate for it. We need diplomacy more than ever because the implications of diplomatic failure are more catastrophic than ever. We need to seize our smartphones.

There are three new frontiers for digital diplomacy. Firstly, using social media not just to gather information and connect, but to influence on a massive scale, building campaigns and coalitions. Diplomacy is no longer an elite pastime. It will become more open, democratic and inclusive.

Secondly, artificial intelligence. No government is remotely prepared to deal with the consequences of the huge transformation of AI in the coming decades. Diplomats need not just to be thinking about the implications for our craft, but what AI will do to the societies in which we operate. Automation will destroy many industries, and increase distrust in traditional politics. How do we create the right global institutions to realize the potential, and manage the threats?

Thirdly, service delivery. In an age of Netflix and Amazon, the public won’t accept the same old government services – months waiting for an appointment or a visa. Digital technology creates new expectations of how we serve the public. So we are working now on building the embassy of the future, a hub for ideas, connections and networks.

If diplomacy did not exist, we would need to invent it. Now, we need to reinvent it.

Featured Image Credit: “Apple Device Blur” by Pexels. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay .

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Reducing the harm done by substances: key strategies

The most recent data on life expectancy for the United States show stagnation over the past three years. This stagnation has happened at a time when the most important causes of death, such as cardiovascular diseases or cancers, have decreased.

So, what causes of death are responsible for the stagnation in life expectancy? This can best be seen in the sub-population of middle-aged white non-Hispanics who have experienced increasing mortality rates and decreasing life expectancy for some time now. In this sub-population, the major causes of death on the increase are overdose, suicide, and liver cirrhosis: three killers which are all clearly linked to substance use.

This example is a poignant reminder of the importance of substance use for our societies. Since all harm from substance use is theoretically avoidable, the reminder is also for better substance use policies. This blog comes out of the work of a multi-year project involving more than 200 scientists, the Addiction and Lifestyles in Contemporary Europe Reframing Addictions Project (ALICE RAP), co-financed by the European Commission, and summarized in a six-book series on the governance of addictive substances and behaviours.

It is suggested that from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, humans have a biological predisposition for seeking out and ingesting drugs. These biological predispositions argue against simple policies like prohibition. The history of the last decades show a clear failure of such polices for illegal drugs.

Back to the original example: what policies should be adopted to reduce substance-related mortality?

First, policies should be conceptualized and integrated across all psychoactive substances. The situation in the United States was largely caused by legal recreational substances such as alcohol and prescription drugs dispensed in the medical system. Both alcohol and prescription drugs causally impact on overdoses: prescription opioids and benzodiazepines as the most frequent categories of overdose deaths in the United States; alcohol via alcohol poisoning and being a common contributory factor in prescription overdoses. In addition, prescription opioids and alcohol have been shown to cause suicides, and alcohol is also the major underlying causal factor for liver cirrhosis. In addition, illegal recreational drugs, such as heroin, also contribute greatly to these causes of death.

Unfortunately, currently in most societal decisions, substance policies are reactive and based on singular substances. For example, policies about overdoses have not included prescription drugs for a long time, although such drugs now cause the largest percentage of overdose deaths in North America.

Why prohibition is not the best solution

A second lesson from ALICE RAP concerns the framing of such drug policies. They should be oriented towards maximizing individual and societal well-being, and this can rarely be achieved by criminalizing the use of psychoactive substances. As a consequence, the long-term legalization of the use of all drugs could be suggested.

Tobacco Marketing by Inspired Images. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

This does not mean that substances should be legalized without regulation. On the contrary, as well as strong limitations on the marketing of such substances, there should be availability restrictions, and such restrictions should be commensurate to the size of the potential harm done by substances. One major contribution of the ALICE RAP project summarized has been the conceptualization of a toxicology-based approach to conduct a comparative assessment on the risk of different substances as they are currently used in our societies. The standard application of such an approach would avoid some of the more ideology-based classification of drugs in our society which have led to policies driven by moral knee-jerking.

Preventive aspects of policies to reduce the harm done by substances are vital, particularly for young people and developmental processes.

Drug prevention

Any economic analyses to date have shown that only a very small fraction of the costs of substances in our societies is spent on prevention (less than 1%), much less than on law enforcement or treatment. Current prevention programs, however, are a mixed bag: they are often based on good intentions and hope, rather than on solid empirical evidence.

One concrete proposal, derived from the work of ALICE RAP aims to improve this situation, through the establishment of a European Prevention Agency, which, similarly to the European Medicines Agency, would evaluate and disseminate evidence-based prevention programs according to standardized, objective and rigorous scientific criteria.

A final point to highlight concerns the concepts of addiction and substance use disorders, often posited as distinct categories of behaviour (outside the normal) and characterized by changes in the brain. This concept has contributed hugely to a sharp division of those who use drugs into ‘addicts’ versus the rest, as illustrated by the extensive stigmatization that all of our societies place on substance use disorders, even among health care workers who treat these problems.

The fact is that substance use behaviours constitute a continuum, where there is no clear threshold between normal and addictive behaviours. And the changes of the brain are associated with long-term heavy use, without the necessity to introduce concepts which label ‘addict’s as different. As a consequence, ALICE RAP proposes reconceptualising substance disorders as heavy use over time, and conceptualizing interventions for heavy use similar to interventions for high blood pressure.

The truth is, it is the consequence of fragmented policies, often reacting to perceived crises of select substances and fixated on disease and criminality instead of optimizing well-being that exacerbate this attributable harm. Key strategies are needed to reduce the current level of harm attributable to substance use in our societies, and these strategies should be known by policy decision makers.

Featured image credit: Smoking by Unsplash. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Pride Month: 1800 to the present [timeline]

OUP Philosophy is celebrating Pride Month to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality, and to coincide with NYC Pride and London Pride in June and July. Throughout history those in the LGBTQ community have faced discrimination and injustice for their sexuality, and have struggled to fight for equal rights. In this timeline, we have created an overview of how attitudes and behaviors have changed over time, and highlighted important milestones in the UK and US along the way.

Featured image: Rainbow Flag in the Twin Cities. Photo by Tony Webster. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Corruption: are you an expert? [quiz]

Headlines regularly focus on political scandals and corruption. From public officials embezzling government monies, selling public offices, and trading bribes for favors to private companies generate public indignation and calls for reform—corruption, it seems, is inevitable. But what really is corruption, and who is responsible for its continuation?

Inspired by The Death of Expertise, in which Tom Nichols explores the dangers of the public rejection of expertise, we’ve created a series of quizzes to test your knowledge. Take this quiz to see how much you know about corruption. Then watch the video below to see how OUP employees fared against economist Ray Fisman.

 

Featured image credit: “bank-note-euro-bills-paper-money” by Pixabay. CC0 public domain via Pexels.

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Divine powers

What do we think of when we think of ‘God’? Any answer to this question will include the idea that the divine is powerful. God creates, God is in charge of the world. If we think that the concept of God doesn’t make sense, that may be partly because the concept of God’s power doesn’t make sense: how can a good God be powerful whilst the world contains this much suffering?

The nature and extent of divine power is theologically fundamental. But underlying any theological claim about divine power are a set of philosophical ideas about power. Power is capacity – to act, to interact, to effect change. Thus power is central to the make-up of the world, to how its different bits relate causally. In late antiquity, towards the end of the Roman Empire, Neoplatonism, and Christianity between them reconfigured thinking on divine power, and with it the world, in ways that often seem alien to us, yet would prove enduringly significant in Western thought.

To understand Neoplatonic ideas about power, you need to forget everything you think you know about the world. For Plotinus (c. 204-270), the founder of Neoplatonism, and his successors, the physical world was just the tip of the iceberg, as it were. What was most real was intelligible – that is, accessible by thought rather than the senses. The intelligible realm is where the power is; the intelligible causes the physical. Our world teems with divine power, and all power begins in the power of the One – roughly, Neoplatonism’s highest god – and works its way vertically, downwards. Nonetheless, human actions seem to work horizontally: we are in the world and we act on things in the world. Plotinus thus seeks to incorporate a ‘horizontal’ element into his otherwise ‘vertical’ understanding of power relations.

Neoplatonic thinking on divine power occurred against the wider backdrop of Greco-Roman religion, in which the Olympian pantheon of gods persisted. Porphyry sees the traditional deities as expressions of divine power, the power of the One. Proclus considers that divine power manifests to different degrees in statues of gods. Their philosophy of power thus engaged with contemporary ritual and day-to-day religious practices.

Christian ideas about divine power built on Jewish ones, and both drew heavily on their scriptures. Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman world often drew extensively on ‘pagan’ philosophy – but they also brought distinctive theological commitments to the table. The famous Jewish Platonist, Philo of Alexandria (25 BCE-50 CE), blended Plato with the Torah in writing about divine power to paint a more personal picture of God than many Neoplatonists.

Philo argued that we humans needed to understand God’s power in order to be healed and achieve the state that the creator God intended for us. Similarly, for the Christian Platonists Origen of Alexandria (c. 184-253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395), God’s power is manifested primarily in creation and salvation. Gregory specifically picks up on the Neoplatonic issue of ‘vertical’ power. Vertical power, starting with God, operates between two spheres of reality – intelligible and corporeal. But how can God cause something physical so unlike God?

For Christians, God’s power is also complicated by the incarnation and crucifixion – God does not seem all-powerful when nailed to a cross. So, many early Christians suggest, paradoxically, that God’s power involves weakness. Has the notion of divine power, and with it the world, been reinvented?

Featured image credit: Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo. CC0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Abstract objects: two ways of introducing them, in the core and the periphery of language

One of the most striking features of natural language is that it comes with a wealth of terms for abstract objects, or so it seems, and to a great extent they can be formed quite systematically and productively. First, we can form nominalizations from expressions that normally serve as predicates, for example adjectives, and the nominalizations can be used, it seems to refer to abstract objects. Thus, from the adjective wise, we get wisdom or Socrates’ wisdom, and from the adjective patient, we get the noun patience. Wisdom and patience seem to be used as abstract terms below:

(1) a. Wisdom is admirable.

b. Patience is better than impatience.

Even nouns for concrete objects (diamond, ant) can be used without a determiner as abstract terms, referring to the kind whose instances are things described by the noun:

(2) a. Pink diamonds are rare.

b. Ants are widespread.

There are also complex construction that seem to stand for abstract objects, for example the number of planets or the amount of patience.Such terms are part of ordinary usage of language and do not require a technical or philosophical context.

There are also various nouns for abstract objects that lead us somewhat outside that usage: number, degree, triangle, square, property etc. Such nouns sometimes permit the construction of complex terms for particular abstract objects, of the sort the number eight, the direction north, the concept horse, or even the truth value true.

The various terms for abstract objects in natural language are distinguished by construction: some terms are simple, some are complex and they differ in construction. The terms also differ in what they stand for and what predicates they accept, and they differ in their role in language.

Some terms truly belong to everyday speech, not requiring philosophical reflection or the explicit acceptance of abstract objects. Certainly terms like “wisdom,” “patience,” “pink diamonds,” and “ants” belong to that. When we talk about wisdom, patience, diamonds, and ants, we generalize from ‘below’, about particular instances of wisdom, patience, diamonds, and ants. With other terms, by contrast, we acknowledge an abstract object as such, and talk about it as an abstract object. These are terms of the sort the property of being wise, the number eight, the direction north, the concept horse, and the truth value true.

This difference between the two sorts of terms is reflected particularly well in the way predicates are understood with wisdom and the property of being wise. Is the property of wisdom the same as wisdom? It used to be a common view among philosophers that they are. After all if Socrates has wisdom he has the property of being wise and conversely. However the two terms behave very differently semantically with a range of predicate:

(3) a. True wisdom is rare.

b. ??? The property of being truly wise is rare.

(4) a. John needs wisdom.

b. ??? John needs the property of wisdom.

(5) a. Mary rarely encounters true wisdom.

b. ??? Mary rarely encounters the property of being truly wise.

(6) a. Wisdom is admirable.

b. ??? The property of being wise is admirable.

(3a), (4a), (5a), and (6a) are about instances of wisdom.  By contrast, (3b), (4b), (5b), and (6b)  are about the abstract property object, and that does not make much sense with the predicates in question, under normal circumstances.. There are also predicates that can be predicated well only of the abstract property objects, for example logical predicates:

(7) a. The property of being wise and young is conjunctive.

b. ??? Wisdom and youth is/are conjunctive.

(8) a. The property of being pure is negative.

b. ??? Purity is negative.

Blossoming Apple Tree by Piet Mondriaan. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Thus, a closer look at the linguistic facts shows that there are two kinds of universals that natural language permits reference to, those that have properties strictly in virtue of properties of instances and those that have them in virtue of their status as abstract objects, independently of their instances.

This difference between two sorts of universals recalls the distinction between Aristotelian universals, universals that are inherent in objects, obtain properties from their instances and only exist if instantiated, and Platonic universals, universals that exist independently of their instances. It also recalls two forms of modern abstract art, art that that develops abstraction from concrete objects and art whose composition is based on already given abstract elements. The two paintings by Mondrian and Kandinsky illustrate this. The early Mondrian painting, ‘Flowering Tree’,  is almost abstract: it is the result of abstraction from the various features of the concrete tree, except for simple lines capturing the tree’s and the leaves’ shape and overall composition. The late Kandinsky painting, by contrast, is composed of various elements that come from an given inventory of geometrical shapes.

Composition 8 by Vassily Kandinsky. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

There are similar contrasts that can be found with other terms in natural language, for example with the number of planets, which does not refer to a pure number, but retains some of the properties of the plurality of the planets, and the number eight, which does refer to a pure number, an abstract object related to the number word eight.

In both cases, reference to the abstract object is ensured by the use of an abstract sortal noun (property, number). Such nouns, and the complex constructions in which they occur, like many technical terms and terms introduced within a special discipline, are not part of the core of language. They are dispensable for everyday speech and they generally require some reflective knowledge about or acknowledgment of the abstract objects in question. In that sense they belong to what one may call the (ontological) periphery of language. They are terms that stand for objects that are not part of the ontological core of language, but belong to its periphery, a part of the ontology of language that includes various objects that may have been introduced for particular purposes. This leads to the hypothesis that reference to truly abstract objects is possible only with terms from the periphery of language, not terms from the core of language. Language in its core is Aristotelian, but not so for its periphery.

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History of the United States’ Constitutional Law

Oxford University Press presents a timeline of the history of the United States’ Constitutional Law. This timeline begins with early documents that influenced the drafting of the Constitution of the United States, such as the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. It takes you on a tour of the formation of the United States of America and its original governing document, the Articles of Confederation, before detailing the formation and development of the Constitution of the United States from the drafting of the original seven articles of the constitution in 1787 to the 27 amendments that have been ratified. The timeline also covers other essential documents, such as the constitutions of each of the 50 states and selected landmark Supreme Court cases, without which any history of US constitutional law would be incomplete.

To provide additional information about these topics, the timeline incorporates links to freely available content from various OUP online resources.

Featured image credit: “Constitution We the People. CC0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Practising surgery in India

Being a surgeon in India is very different and probably more interesting than being one anywhere else in the world. Not only are there the usual third world problems to deal with like poor, undernourished patients with advanced diseases who throng the underfunded public hospitals but there is now, in stark contrast, a for-profit and thriving expensive private health sector to which, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, three quarters of the patients go first.

Consequently, the Indian surgeon, whether in a public or private hospital, has to constantly adjust patient management based not on what are internationally-recognized ‘best’ treatment modalities but on what is ‘appropriate’ for a particular individual and based on generally inadequate Indian data. Decisions regarding which investigations to do and which treatment to offer have to be made on how much the person can afford, how far away he is from competent medical care, and what local expertise and technical resources are available there. This is usually very different from what is regarded as “ideal” in Western countries. For instance, there is a disease known as extrahepatic portal venous obstruction which is very rare in the West but not uncommon in India. Patients with this condition have massive and sometimes fatal blood vomiting but their liver function is normal. For these patients, it may be ‘appropriate’ to make the diagnosis by simply feeling the abdomen for an enlarged spleen, confirm it by a low cost ultrasound examination, and follow this by a one-time complex operation called a lienorenal shunt, which will cure 95% of the patients. This contrasts with the patients with blood vomiting in Western countries who are subjected to extensive investigations like CT scans followed by treatment with drugs or repeated endoscopic ligation of their enlarged oesophageal veins. In these countries, blood vomiting is usually a consequence of alcohol abuse which damages the liver and these patients do not benefit from surgical procedures. This is an example of why we must work out solutions to our very different problems in India and not follow blindly what we read in Western textbooks and journals.

Darbhanga Medical College Platinum Jubilee Gate by Swapkun. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In many major public sector hospitals like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi to which patients come from all parts of the country, the number who need surgery is far greater than the resources available. If these patients were put on a waiting list on a first-come-first-served basis they may have to wait for a procedure, even for cancer, for longer than six months. Consequently the surgical resident who is responsible for allocating admissions has to decide on the order of admission by using a complicated and possibly more rational triage process depending on the complexity of the disease, the economic status of the patient, and the distance he or she has travelled to reach the hospital. Thus at one extreme, a middle class man who lives in Delhi and has a small groin hernia will be given a later date for operation (he will probably get it done in the private sector which he can probably afford – unless of course he has ‘influence’ and jumps the queue). At the other extreme may be a poor farmer from Bihar with extrahepatic portal venous obstruction, who has travelled all the way to Delhi in the hope that an operation will save his life. It is the latter who is more ‘deserving’ and has to be admitted and treated quickly because he has a life-threatening disease which can only be cured by a procedure not performed in the hospitals where he lives.

Unfortunately because of the shortcomings of the public sector, most Indians now opt for private hospitals – 80% of which are run ‘for profit’ by healthcare corporations. Although the management may be ‘world class’, the patient will always be wary of the diagnostic investigations or treatment advised and wonder whether these are being done mainly to make more money for the hospital.

With the current distrust of doctors by patients, even the ethical private practitioner is now in a dilemma to conduct simple and low cost tests to save the patient unnecessary expenditure or conduct more complicated and expensive ones to avoid being sued for failing to make a diagnosis.

The hapless Indian patient at present is left to choose between an underfunded and inefficient public hospital and a rapacious private medical facility.

What is to be done? The most obvious solution is to try and provide universal health care by increasing the present spending of 4.2% of the GDP (of which only 1.2% is contributed by the government) to the Western European levels of up to 9% which is less than the huge 17% spent in the United States.

With this extra amount it is imperative to build more and equip better public health facilities manned by surgeons who have undergone training relevant to our problems. Certain surgeons could thus be taught to do basic procedures like stitching wounds and setting simple fractures, others to perform appendicectomies and hernia operations, and the more complicated problems could be sent to tertiary care hospitals. New medical schools are needed but they should not be run as profit making businesses, as they are at present. If government financing is not available, they could be not-for-profit institutions run by trusts.

Finally there must be better central control of the medical practice by having a revamped Medical Council of India that is more transparent and honest and maintain rigorous standards in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education and ethical practice.

So why, if there are all these problems, is working as a surgeon in India so satisfying? The first and foremost reason is the patients are inordinately grateful and treat doctors as ‘next to God’. Secondly the problems are very interesting with easily-available solutions; each patient has to be treated, not necessarily according to what is written in Western textbooks, but by using innovative strategies appropriate to his or her needs. Finally there is little more satisfaction than curing someone with a complicated medical problem by applying locally the expertise one has gained from training in the world’s best institutions. It gives being a doctor a real meaning.

Featured image credit: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar Sijua, Patrapada, Bhubaneswar, Odisha 751019 by Krupasindhu Muduli. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Listening for change

In OHR 44.1 Susan McLeod reviewed Hear, Here a project of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse that utilizes innovative techniques to connect the public with oral history. We were excited to read about it and invited the project’s founder, Ariel Beaujot, to join us on the blog to discuss making oral history accessible, and the possibility for using the past to intervene in the present.

How might we, as oral historians, make the voices of those who have lived and live in our communities available to all? For the past 10 years oral history programs all over the country have been digitizing their collections and putting them online. This has allowed researchers easier access to their subjects, and family members and friends to hear the voices and stories of their loved ones. But what about making the work that we do as oral historians more accessible to the average person who lives in a town with strong oral history collections but may not have any immediate or obvious connection to the narrators?

This is the work that Hear, Here seeks to do. Hear, Here is a location-based project that allows anyone to access short oral histories on the street through a toll-free number. Throughout downtown La Crosse we put orange street signs with phone numbers so that people can call to hear a story about the exact location in which they stand! If visitors or townspeople want to leave their own stories they can stay on the line and leave a message. If their story fits our objectives, it is re-recorded and added to the larger project and to the Oral History Program. In this way the Hear, Here becomes user-generated.

We planned this project in conjunction with the longstanding Oral History Program at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Two researchers, Terry Holford-Talpe and Sue Hessel, went through the collection and choose those that tell a concise story about a specific location in the downtown area of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Some of our original stories are up to 6 minutes long, but we have found that people standing on the street listen to stories for an average of 2 minutes and 10 seconds, so as we add to the project we edit the stories to fit into the timeframe that people prefer. As well as stories from the Oral History Program, my team and I recorded stories specifically for this project. The combination of the two–original oral histories and new ones–has allowed for a long-term understanding of the downtown area in a new way. There are stories that help us understand issues such as homelessness, racial prejudice, built environment, gentrification, red-light districts, and experiences of foreign nationals and LGBTQ*. Hear, Here maps the city in a new way, allowing us to see the experiences of everyone, not just the privileged few. Beyond knowing and hearing these stories we have found that the project can help to create a more ideal city by generating social and policy changes.

In our modern times, oral history/public history projects like this one can not only generate knowledge but create real and lasting changes. Some of the stories in the project indicate that our city, like all cities in our complicated and nuanced world, has its racial prejudices and injustices. The pushback that the project had from some local politicians and business people led our team to research the longer history of racial prejudice in the town. Through this research we found that La Crosse qualifies as a sundown town, or a town that has purposely kept itself White. We can see this from the 1980 census that indicates that La Crosse was 99% White – the fifth Whitest city in the entire country. With this knowledge we worked with the Office of Multicultural Student Services at UW-La Crosse and the city’s Human Rights Commission to bring in James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, who spoke at an open meeting at city hall confirming La Crosse as a sundown town. This resulted in the Mayor writing a public apology for historical and current injustices, and has given the Human Rights Commission more power within city government.

The idea of helping to create a more ideal city through our work is a compelling one. I think it’s time for us in the oral history world to not only think about documenting the voices of the underprivileged but to think about how these stories can generate understanding in more privileged community members leading to real change. In these neoliberalist times we need to remember that the systems of oppression cannot be fixed by telling peoples’ stories, having speakers come in, or apologizing. We must recognize the long-term historical factors that create inequity and work to develop policy with teeth that actively works against racist tendencies that have made La Crosse, and many other cities in the Midwest, into sundown towns. One step towards this goal is sharing all stories, but it is only a step in what will be a marathon.

For more information about Hear, Here you can like us on Facebook or visit our website.

Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Hear, Here street sign in downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin.” Photo courtesy of Ariel Beaujot.

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The global challenges Brexit won’t fix

23 June marks the first anniversary of the UK’s Brexit referendum. One year ago, the European Union was reeling. There were fears that the EU would start to unravel, with other countries being pushed by populism and euroscepticism into following Britain towards the exit door.

A year on, that fearful mood has evaporated. Elections in the Netherlands, France, and now the UK itself have shown an unmistakable popular rejection of eurosceptic forces. But that doesn’t mean Europe can look forward to what Winston Churchill once termed the ‘sunlit uplands’ of political and economic progress. The EU is far from resolving its accumulating problems, and we the people of Europe need to get real about the realities of tomorrow’s world.

To begin with the good news, it’s very encouraging that Dutch and then French voters rejected populists like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, respectively, who call for the EU’s demise. Until both elections this Spring, the tide of public opinion was feared to be running strongly in their favour.

With a fervent pro-European like Emmanuel Macron as France’s president, and with Angela Merkel set to win a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor in September, the way is open for the Franco-German ‘locomotive’ to be back on the rails and pulling the European project forward again.

Just as significant has been the UK’s June 2017 election result. Called by Tory Prime Minister Theresa May in the hopes of securing an electoral mandate for a ‘hard Brexit’, her humiliating loss of a House of Commons majority instead signals a much softer approach. If carefully handled by both Westminster and Brussels, Brexit’s damage on both sides of the English Channel could be greatly reduced. More than that, if the Brexit divorce is amicable enough it isn’t inconceivable that in the longer-term there might even be a reconciliation and a reaffirmation of the marriage vows.

Looking to the future, it makes sense to study the global picture. The stresses and strains of intra-European politics are naturally of immediate concern to EU policymakers and voters, but they obscure the wider picture. Europe as a whole is on a slippery slope; if it fails to address its deep-seated structural disadvantages it will be overtaken by its international competitors.

Vote Leave and Vote Remain posters in Pimlico, June 2016. by Philip Stevens. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

A shortlist of Europe’s collective challenges looks like this:

Europe is rapidly ageing, and shrinking. Within 25 years the ratio of retired pensioners to taxpaying workers will have gone from today’s 1:4 to 1:2. Its worryingly smaller workforce may conceivably be buttressed by artificial intelligence (AI), but the robots that might fill jobs don’t pay taxes or consume goods.
The solution is more immigration. Some experts say 100 million newcomers are needed by mid-century to keep the active labour force stable. But that risks huge disruption and dangerous racial and religious tensions.
The high-tech lead that Europeans, along with Americans, have long enjoyed is being eroded. Asian competition is strong, and China alone is set to overtake Europe on innovation and patented breakthroughs by 2023.
Europe’s integration has guaranteed peace since World War II, but its security is increasingly threatened, not by Russia but by Arab volatility and Africa’s population explosion. NATO’s Cold War strategies won’t help.
Today’s 1.2 billion Africans will number 2.5 billion by 2050. That threatens more armed conflicts on Europe’s doorstep because of food shortages and resource competition, and will lead to an unquenchable flow of economic migrants as well as refugees.

All these problems are just the tip of the bad news iceberg. Beneath the surface there’s the reality that EU governments have been refusing to acknowledge in plain terms that these problems exist. They have therefore shown little willingness to confront them collectively.

The UK’s response is contradictory. The EU’s failure to act more decisively on the world stage has arguably contributed to British voters’ dissatisfaction with ‘the European Union’. Yet at the same time Britain’s refusal to allow the EU to move forward on key issues like security, immigration, and more social justice has robbed the Union of much of its momentum.

Whatever the results of the increasingly uncertain Brexit process, it would be hard to argue that the UK will on its own be better equipped to confront these challenges. Equally, without the international perspective that Britain has often brought to EU policymaking, Brussels’ thinking on how to confront these threats risks being narrower and less global.

Rationally, the case for the Brexit negotiators on both sides to cool it and adopt less confrontational stances is overwhelming. Politically, and therefore emotionally, the outlook for that isn’t reassuring.

Featured image credit: europe mediterranean eu by KreativeHexenkueche. Public domain via Pixabay.

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