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Coetzee’s Dialogues: Who says who we are?

Throughout his career, J. M. Coetzee has been centrally preoccupied with how to tell the truth of an individual life, most of all, how to find the appropriate narrator and fictional genre. Many of his 15 novels disclose first person narrators in a confessional mode, and so it is not altogether surprising that his latest book is a dialogue with a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, in which they explore together notions of self-hood, repression, disclosure and the nature of communication. It is as if Coetzee has spent a lifetime attempting to answer Samuel Beckett’s question: “Who is this saying it’s me?”

As Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz’s Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy becomes an extended written conversation, The Good Story follows many boundary lines between self and other, truth and fiction, memory, confession, and self-construction. Kurtz is a sympathetic and perceptive reader of fiction; Coetzee has no professional knowledge of psychotherapy, but from inside their separate ways of thinking, they work to create a dialogue about these general concerns.

Close to the mid-point in his career, Coetzee wrote: “Truth is related to silence, to reflection, to the practice of writing. Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing.” “Speech” seems to mean conversation, interviews, journalistic writing and, presumably, letters. It was at this time that he made clear that he would no longer give interviews to journalists. The key words are “silence” and “truth,” and the figure of Beckett surely lies behind this statement.

John Maxwell Coetzee, photo by Mariusz Kubik. CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

In spite of this, he did enter into a series of conversations with David Attwell, and those conversations are a precursor to The Good Story. The dialogue with Attwell extended over a few years and was eventually published as Doubling the Point. Something of this dialogue genre entered later novels such as “Elizabeth Costello” and “Diary of a Bad Year.”

Atwell, author of the very fine recent study of Coetzee’s manuscripts, and Arabella Kurtz appear to be kindred spirits with whom he can release himself from the controlling voice of the fiction-writer and allow another to colour his thinking and his articulation. Another such kindred spirit is the American novelist Paul Auster with whom he had an extended epistolary conversation between 2008 and 2011, and their letters were published as Here and Now in 2013, although they do not speak of the novels they are writing or their literary careers.

The dialogue books reveal another dimension of Coetzee, his need to create a mutual space in which experience and varieties of truth may be examined in an atmosphere of respect and sympathy. The title Here and Now is the first hint of the intentions of Coetzee and Auster in publishing this record of a late-life friendship. The confessional genre of the personal letter appears to be the implicit, framing context of this writing, and if friendship is the biographical thread, then the letters may follow its meandering, spontaneous, circumstantial course. Emotionally engaged and warm, the often long letters create a quiet, un-dramatized space, and one has a sense that in a fundamental way they are a comment on the era of the selfie and the kinds of self-expression the camera cultivates.

There is no editorial presence in these “Letters.” It seems to mock posthumous editions of letters of great writers, with contexts provided by a knowledgeable editor, and published by a university press – there is no context here, no preface, introduction, or editorial paraphernalia, and the book appeared from the mainstream commercial publishers of Coetzee and Auster’s fiction. We are not told if this is a complete set of the letters sent during this period. We do not know if they are presented complete, or if they have been rewritten for publication. Nor, crucially, are we told if Auster and Coetzee intended from the beginning that the letters would be published, so that in some sense they may not have been writing to each other but to us readers, that they are a kind of epistolary novel grounded in daily experience.

Who can say who J.M. Coetzee is? Certainly Attwell tells us much in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time, more than anyone else has, about the solitary writer, but from the first novel, Dusklands, Coetzee has made clear in his subversion of narrators and narrative voices that the reader must enter into a dialogue with the “author,” and that it is in this dialogue that J. M. Coetzee invites the reader to recognize how difficult it is to tell anyone’s story.

Close to the end of The Good Story, he speaks of “living reading”: “It involves finding one’s way into the voice that speaks from the page, the voice of the Other, and inhabiting that voice, so that you speak to yourself (your self) from outside yourself.” He refers to this process as “a dialogue of sorts,” and, clearly, in his own roles as reader and writer, it is in this dialogue that an answer may be found to who Coetzee is.

Featured image credit: “Writing? Yeah.” by Caleb Roenigk. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Wounded religious sentiments and the law in India

We live in world suffused with offended religious sentiments: depictions of Muhammad in newspaper cartoons and hackneyed films spark violent global protests; courthouse officials in the US South refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses in defiance of the Supreme Court; and in India, authors threatened by thugs on the Hindu Right  “die” publicly in order to avoid a less metaphorical demise.

Although our natural tendency might be to see religious offence as welling up from some interior core of personal conviction, in each of these cases we could point to factors such as politics, socialization, or the media environment that contribute to, even manufacture, the religious emotions on display. That insight calls into question the idea that these feelings of outrage are natural reactions to a prior offence or insult. Because we truly feel our feelings, we believe strongly in their authenticity, and even when we disagree with someone else’s beliefs, we can understand when they are “offended” by an insult to the things they hold sacred.

The Hindu Right in India has proven masterful at the production and subsequent exploitation of wounded religious sentiments. Political scientist Paul R. Brass has documented the mechanisms of “institutionalized riot systems” in India that systematically incite offended Hindu emotion, trigger large-scale violence against Muslims, and then manipulate the narrative of the riot in the aftermath to depict it as the spontaneous and natural reaction of offended Hindus. The persistent backdrop to these kinds of outbursts is the politics of the Hindu Right–including India’s current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–which portray India as a Hindu nation that must always be vigilant about the “anti-national” activities of its Muslim and Christian residents. Although together they make up 16.5% of the population, Muslims, Christians, and also Dalits (India’s lowest castes) are routinely accused of transgressing Hindu norms, and those accusations lead to real violence. “Love jihad” and eating beef are among the more recent fantasies strategically deployed to stir feelings of outrage among Hindu nationalists.

For writers, the legal force of wounded religious feelings in India came prominently into view in February 2014 when Penguin India announced that, in response to a suit by Dina Nath Batra, an activist on the Hindu Right, it was ceasing production of The Hindus: An Alternative History by University of Chicago historian of religion Wendy Doniger. Calling Doniger “a woman hungry of sex” and accusing her (despite the fact that she is a non-observant Jew) of a “Christian missionary zeal,” Batra charged that Doniger’s book “hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus” through its fixation on erotic elements in Hindu literature. (The Hindus has since been republished in India and it always remained widely available). Among the reasons Penguin cited for what many regarded as a capitulation to bullying by fanatics was the specter of violence against its employees.

Penguin had good reason for its concerns. In a series of highly publicized cases, beginning in the 1990s, “offended” Hindus protested the work of a stream of scholars. They initially focused on non-Indian and non-Hindu ones, although that would eventually change.

Image by Amy L. Allocco. Used with permission.

First it was Jeffrey J. Kripal for imputing homoerotic impulses to the 19th-century saint Ramakrishna, then Paul B. Courtright for a psychoanalytic interpretation of the elephant-headed god Ganesha, James W. Laine for a critical study of the mythologized medieval king, Shivaji, and A. K. Ramanujan for arguing merely that there was no single, authoritative version of the great Hindu epic, The Ramayana. Death threats were issued, professors were beaten up, libraries were ransacked, precious manuscripts destroyed, and Doniger herself dodged an egg during a protest that broke out at a public lecture. All because of so-called “wounded religious sentiments.”

As is the case with many of India’s 21st-century ills, a healthy measure of the blame for an environment that encourages the production of hurt religious sentiments lies squarely with British colonialism. On the one hand, the very categories that divide communities into “religions” are products of colonial governmentality by foreign rulers with hardly a clue about the degree to which Hindus, Muslims, Christians and others in India shared overlapping identities and religious practices. On the other, always anxious to avoid any domestic conflict that might disrupt their centuries-long transfer of India’s wealth to Europe, the British devised a peculiar statute to curb religious offence that remains on the books today, a favorite tool of the Hindu Right for attacking their opponents, whether they are Muslim butchers or college professors.

Statute 295-A of the Indian Penal Code criminalizes “deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” The law was enacted in 1927 to restrain the public insults to Islam that were stock tools in the preaching of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu organization dedicated to an India purified of what they deemed to be foreign influence and religious superstition. Rather than curbing violent confrontation between opposing religious groups, however, the law fueled it by creating an environment in which violent displays of wounded sentiments served as evidence of an opponent’s criminal speech. A statute to protect against hurt feelings actually produced them; wounded religious sentiment, we have discovered, emerges from the very legal framework that seeks to stamp it out.

Despite a worldwide outcry by scholars, activists, and journalists following Penguin’s withdrawal of The Hindus, the colonial law remains in place, now protecting the world’s oldest religion from the grave threat posed by television comedians. Its existence ensures the continued production of hurt sentiments and the violence they engender and guarantees that the exploration of India’s rich and complex religious fabric will continue to be, for the moment, a risky business.

Featured image credit: Rishikesh Temple India by Devanath. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Effective hallmarks for teaching the Kodály Concept in the 21st century: part 2

The Kodály Concept of music education is based on the philosophical writings of Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) and incorporates principles of teaching music developed by his colleagues and students. His writings on music education provided the impetus of developing a new pedagogy for teaching music. On 30 August, we discussed five essential lessons from the Kodály Concept. Below are five additional hallmarks of his work.

Developing audiation skills is at the heart of developing musicianship skills.

We are convinced that teaching students how to read and write music by using typical rhythmic and melodic “building blocks” abstracted from song repertoire is essential for developing audiation skills. Audiation is the ability to internally hear music in your head without an external sound stimulus. The process of learning to read and write music  using  an “ear” to “eye” process (sound to symbol) is fundamental to developing audiation skills.

Singing, movement and active music making are the foundations for teaching Music literacy

Laying the foundations for developing music literacy skills begins with active music making. The “singing voice” coupled with movement is essential to music learning. Quality repertoire is indispensable. Therefore the role of the teacher becomes clear; it is to deconstruct a music repertoire so the children can reconstruct themselves. Begin with the sounds of music, guide children to label these sounds with rhythm and/or solfège syllables, show children how to notate these sounds with music symbols so that they read music fluently on the staff with confidence and greater musicianship. The goal is always to promote and develop musicianship through beautiful singing and music making. But the teacher also develops student’s musicianship by allowing them to incorporate their knowledge of music literacy in developing other skill areas such as listening, improvisation, form, musical memory, reading, writing, and inner hearing.

Singing and analyzing repertoire plays a significant role in the process of teaching Improvisation.

Improvisation, the art of composing extemporaneously, and composition, the art of formulating and writing music, are integral components of a music curriculum. Both improvisation and composition extend and develop students’ creativity and musicianship. Improvisation can take many forms. Improvisation is connected to movement, text, music literacy, as well as improvising using instruments. Improvisation may be experienced using a structured and unstructured approach to teaching.

We nourish children’s ability to improvise by focusing on the forms and rhythmic and melodic building blocks of known repertoire. Children, like great composers, who master the ability to “copy” the forms of known repertoire will become artful improvisers.

Teach children to play instruments using “a sound to symbol” orientation.

Learning how to play music instruments, non-pitched, pitched (Orff instruments and recorders) is an important skill to teach children. We believe that there are three steps to teaching students to play instruments musically.

Students need to be able to sing repertoire they are going to play on their instruments. It helps if they can read the rhythm of what they are performing with rhythm syllables and numbers. They should also be able to sing the repertoire with solfège syllables and perhaps letter names. Singing is a more direct means to developing and solving music problems in the music classroom. Singing allows students to internalize the sounds of music before they play them.
Students need be taught the technique for playing instruments.
Playing a musical instrument takes patience and it can be time-consuming in the general music education classroom. It is important that students apply their knowledge of solfège, inner hearing, and theoretical knowledge to ensure musicality when performing on their instrument.


Creating an Organic Music Curriculum

The construction of a music curriculum takes time and patience. If the teacher is to achieve both short and long terms outcomes for students, then we need to consider the construction of a curriculum in an “organic” manner: teachers need to think about the connections between their philosophy of teaching and the development of a learning goals and how to translate these goals into lesson plans with assessment activities. More and more, school administrations are requiring music teachers to become just as accountable for their classroom learning as general classroom teachers. Many successful teachers are developing organic music curricula that reflect current research from the fields of perception and cognition. Best practices and models indicate that music learning needs to begin with artfully singing age appropriate repertoire that can be used for developing singing, performing on instruments, developing creative movement, teaching music literacy, improvisation skills and developing informed audience members.

Featured image: “classroom” by Lindy Buckley. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

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Law, gender equality, and social justice in India

My research interests have for more than five decades been directly or obliquely related to the making and administration of laws, especially with regard to women, in colonial and independent India. Indeed, my first series of articles, which appeared in the early 1960s, was on social reform and legislation in 19th century India. A little later, while researching for my doctoral dissertation on early Indian nationalism, I got interested in the Maharaja Libel Case, which had been occasioned by the redoubtable social reformer Karsondas Mulji’s exposure of the sexual abuse of their female followers by certain Vaishnav maharajas. Revelations in this case had led Justice Arnould to observe in a landmark judgment: “What is morally wrong cannot be theologically right.”

Years later, I stumbled upon an 1885 editorial on a Bombay High Court judgment in a case involving a woman who, married as an eleven-year old, had refused to cohabit with a husband she disliked. This was the now famous but then little known Rukhmabai case, and I ended up writing a whole book on it.

Beginning with the prohibition of Sati down to the enactment of the various Hindu Codes in the immediate wake of independence, the large body of modern laws relating to women has emerged over a century and a half. This has been a momentous and fascinating development, involving mutually interacting diverse forces, agencies and processes. In each specific instance it followed one particular pattern, which now has become all too familiar. It would commence as a barely felt need for legal change, which would grow into a demand for legislation, but not without simultaneously provoking opposition and public controversy; then would ensue the actual – often prolonged and difficult – process of legislation.

Finally, no matter how clear its language, the enactment would set in motion the interminable process of actual, even mutually irreconcilable, judicial interpretations and decisions.

What is surprising, though, is the faith people still retain in the efficacy of law.

For long my long engagement with different aspects of this development was informed with great faith in the efficacy and goodwill of law. That faith then began, initially imperceptibly, to be eroded. The erosion, it appears in hindsight, was set in motion by a study in which I concentrated on literature in different Indian languages to understand the nature of modern Indian social consciousness, a theme that inevitably included the question of reform. What sealed the growing erosion was the post-history of the Rukhmabai case.

Embarrassed that its law relating to restitution of conjugal rights had nearly sent an innocent woman to jail for no crime but upholding the dignity of her person as a woman, the colonial Indian government first sought to modify the existing law, only to eventually give in to organised orthodoxy. A hundred years later, in independent India, the law was interpreted by the country’s Supreme Court just in the way it was in Rukhmabai’s case.

The unsuspected discovery that, for all its vaunted material, affective, ideological and other advances, the country has deep down remained like it was, provides a different, and more realistic, understanding of the nature of laws. Speaking only of laws relating to women, this understanding suggests that, leaving aside the relative effectiveness of Bentinck’s abolition of Sati, laws have in real life been rarely more than marginally effective. Further, whatever effect they have had has depended significantly on extra-legal forces and developments.

Recall Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s great effort that led to the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1856. The celebrated reformer lived to witness the Act’s ineffectuality and died a sad disillusioned man. If things have since changed for the better, little credit can be assigned to the Act. Recall, for all the adavancement and awakening during the intervening hundred and forty-sx years, the more dismal fate of the Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870. Recall, also, the work done by Behramji Malabari, than whom the women of India have not known a more ardent friend. In getting the Age of Consent passed through tireless campaigning in India and Britain, Malabari had hoped to protect married girls from marital rape.

Pragmatic considerations had forced him to agree to what he admitted was a ridiculously low age of consent. He had, however, hoped that, once the principle of rape within marriage was accepted, the low age would in course of time be raised. Malabari’s hope with regard to age has materialised, but the substantive idea of rape within marriage remains a dream. Let alone the tricky idea of minimum age for marital intercourse, even the plainer prohibition of child marriage continues to be openly and regularly defied.

Examples, unsurprisingly, can be multiplied ad nauseum.

What is surprising, though, is the faith people still retain in the efficacy of law. Come any crisis, there is an immediate demand for stronger, harsher laws. Quotidian experience of law apart, even the wise dictum that ‘hard cases make bad laws’ is forgotten, as is the fact that, in a functioning democracy, harsher laws render conviction that much more difficult.

Featured image credit: Indian women in field, by Unsplash. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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John Locke on politics, civility, and parenting

In times of political change and upheaval, as we’ve seen around the world through the last five years, I take great comfort in reading the works of political writers of various ages. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is one of my favorites and a book I return to often, and no one has helped me understand Paine so well as Professor Harvey J. Kaye, who wrote Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. Professor Kaye is compelling in his own right and a formidable political writer as well; he reveals how some of history’s greatest writers, including Paine, are coopted for modern political gain.

Locke seems somewhat less “trotted out” than Paine often is, and I hadn’t read his work since college. This effort of rereading seemed timely as we enter a very contentious, sometimes fraught, and often socially unnerving presidential election in the United States. It is good to remember, in times like these, how greatly civility was respected in Locke’s time (even if it wasn’t always expected).

Locke (1632-1704) was writing in an England fraught with religious upheaval, the England that sent many to the Americas. Those early immigrants, my forefathers among them, built a nation based on the freedoms born of deep strife and intolerance. Locke’s writing must have been a balm and an inspiration to many during his time. He was certainly progressive, touting freedom and tolerance but also patience, understanding, and civility—what is generally known as Locke’s “Natural Rights of Man.” Locke was not a godless man (raised by Puritan parents, he became a physician after studying at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1652 to 1658), but he was insistent about the separation of Church and State. It is fascinating to read the justifications in his own words and also to recall their echoes in the later remarks of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

Locke took something else from his parents and his Puritan upbringing: a strong impulse that the parent is a guide and protector, not the ruler of their children. That it is the parental role to create a safe haven, instill morals, and provide guidance but in the end every person must choose their own path:

“That Adam had not either by natural Right of Fatherhood, or by positive Donation from God, any such Authority over his Children, or Dominion over the World as is pretended.”

I opened Locke a few days ago with a mind toward politics and instead I got a helping of parenting advice! If Locke were alive today, I think he would also be a part of the lively (and contentious) debate over feminism. Locke was fully in favor of the equal rights of all humans, and from my reading of Second Treatise and A Letter Concerning Toleration, no one could doubt that the humans to whom he refers include women and children.

Nonetheless, Locke’s mind was a political one and reading his work turns minds toward the better understanding of equality. How one takes his words and shapes them to their own thoughts and moral compass is entirely up to the reader, but I found his words both reassuring and enlightening in a time of great change. We were discussing Locke at the office a couple of weeks ago while I was formulating what I might write about the great man, and one of my outstanding colleagues sent me a link to this video about Locke. For me Locke inspires thoughtful contemplation; for others he inspires a parody of “What Does the Fox Say?” What does Locke inspire in you?

Featured image: Christ Church College, Oxford, England by Photochrom Print Collection, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Down to earth, or moving slowly, with the body close to the ground: “creep” and “crawl”

My travel through the English kr-words began with the verb creep, for I have for a long time tried to solve its mystery. On the face of it, there is no mystery. The verb has existed in Germanic from time immemorial, with cognates all over the place. Its Old English form was crēopan, with the past singular crēap, past plural crupon, and past participle cropen. Consequently, it was a so-called strong verb, which means that to form its principal parts, one had to change the root vowel, as we do in Modern Engl. rise—rose—risen and its likes. Later, creep joined the verbs sleep (slept, slept) and weep (wept, wept), each with its own long and complicated history, quite different from that of creep.

A classic creeper.

Once I saw the form cropen, I wondered whether Modern Engl. crop has anything to do with it. Crop “the produce harvested at one time” interested me most, though crop “a bird’s craw” seemed also worthy of a look. My search was rewarded by two opinions: (1) the ancient root of creep, I read, meant “to bend” (also, I thought, perhaps “to cut with a sickle?”), so that crop “harvest” is related to this verb, and (2) the root underlying crop is different from that of creep; consequently, the two words have nothing in common. I could not have been enlightened more. But in the crepuscular world of etymology straight is the gate but narrow is the way that leads to it. In any case, crop “harvest” and crop “craw” can, as it seems to me, be traced to the sense “upper part.”

A classic crawler.

I had better luck with cripple. The word goes back to Old Engl. crēopel and its doublet crypel (with y by umlaut from u, as in crupon, above). Obviously, in the remote past, creep had a broader meaning than it has today. Eorþcrypel meant “paralyzed person” (eorþ “earth”), someone unable to rise from the “earth.” Crupon made me think of crumple and crumb. Crumb, like dumb and thumb, acquired its final b (in spelling!) late: its oldest attested form is cruma. The presence of m did not bother me, for m and n were often inserted in ancient roots. However, the etymology of crumb turned out to be “unclear,” and it was not crumb but German krumm “crooked” that led me to the sense “bend.” I have an uneasy feeling that crumb is also a member of that family, but I always remember James Murray’s injunction to the people whom he occasionally asked for help: “I need facts, not opinions.” Cowed by the great man, I must confess that I have no facts proving the affinity of crumb to German krumm.

Crumple turned out to be akin to cramp and crimp “wrinkle,” scrimp “scanty,” and shrimp. (The presence of initial s- is trivial: I have often written about the so-called s-mobile, or movable s, a consonant that was gratuitously added to many roots.) Meeting shrimp was like running into an old friend, for on 18 April 2012, I wrote a post on it. Things began to come together. “Bend ~ bent,” creep, cripple, “scanty,” “crooked,” cramp, German schrumfen “to shrivel” (from the older schrimfen), shrimp (a tiny creature), crumple, crimple, and, I hope, crumb (another minuscule thing) seem to imply the opposite of straight, upright, big, and self-sufficient. (Dare I add scrumptious “delicious” to that list? It is a late Americanism that once meant “particular, fastidious,” that is, “discriminating, able to see small things”; usually scrumptious is explained as sumptuous, with r added for emphasis.) Some dictionaries point to the underlying idea of “hook” (a thing bent) and add crutch ~ crook, cringe, crank, crinkle, and German krank “ill, sick” (from the earlier meaning “small, weak”) to the series. The most careful etymologists warn the enthusiasts not to jump to conclusions, for in casting the net so broadly one never knows where to stop.

Creepy-crawly

Those who warn us of the dangers of etymological greed are right. The feeling of unease increases when one realizes that, if the Germanic root was approximately ker– or kre-, with various vowels, its non-Germanic cognate must have begun with g-. Once we rush to add consonants (p, t, k) to ker- ~ kre-, the family expands to double its size. Hooks, for example, show up in the least unexpected places. Old French had graper “to harvest grapes,” from which we have grape (remember how crop “harvest” can possibly be obtained from crop “cut”?). Also, sadly, we can reconstruct problematic ancient roots and produce families like the one being discussed here, but we can never explain why a certain combination of sounds acquired the meaning known to us today, except when we have a clear case of sound imitation (with sound symbolism, though it certainly exists, we are on more slippery ground). So what was there in the group kr– to suggest closeness to earth, bending, and weakness? We will hardly ever know.

Perhaps the speakers of Indo-European did have a root beginning with gr-, or perhaps only some words that have caught our attention go back to this root, and the rest joined them later. In Germanic, gr– is associated with grimness, growling (sound imitation?), and for some reason being able to seize things (hence gripe, grip, grope, and grab). But grow and gray also begins with gr-. We are left with the suspicion that hundreds of old words were born from the accidental rubbish of everyday speech and that trying to find the reasons for discovering the union of sound and sense is in most cases a wild goose chase.

There could have been a sound symbolic element in the verb creep alone, because its final consonant varied with k, as evidenced by German kriechen (-ch goes back to –k). Most old scholars who dealt with the etymology of creep tried to account for the alternation, but nothing of great value has been said about the subject. Perhaps once upon a time creupan- presupposed a movement slightly different from that designated from kreuchan-. Creeping makes one think of a worm, a snake, a caterpillar, or ivy.

As though there was not enough trouble with the history of creep, in the fourteenth century English borrowed crawl from Scandinavian. The lending language had the form krafla. This verb has well-known cognates, for example, Dutch krabben and krabbelen. They meant “scratch,” so that creeping referred to the movement of a worm and a snake, while crawl designated moving on the ground the way crabs do. Incidentally, scratch, with movable s-, along with its German cognate kratzen, does not sound too different from creep: the same kr– and a vowel between it and the final consonant. The initial group kl– refers to things slippery and sticky, while kr– makes or made people think of bending and staying bent. This is interesting, but I am not going to embark on another journey like the one I left behind when I let my clown bow out.

Now that we have parted with shrimp, it is only fair to welcome crab: a crab is a crawler, a scratcher, not a creeper. With regard to the adjective crabbed, I can’t do any better than to quote The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: “Crabbed, with original reference to the gait and habits of the crab, which suggest cross-grained or fractious disposition; cf. for meaning Low German krabbe cantankerous man, krabbig contentious, cross-grained, and for formation dogged.” Isn’t the English adjective a borrowing from Low German? Be that as it may, it does not seem that English speakers always make a clear distinction between creep and crawl, for otherwise they would not have coined the adjective creepy-crawly. And a final flourish. Whatever the ultimate origin of the family name Crawley, it is different from that of the verb crawl.

Thackeray’s Sir Pitt Crawley at the most crucial moment of his life.

Images: (1) Grass Snake by Hans, Public Domain via Pixabay (2) Crab by Hans Dietmann, Public Domain via Pixabay (3) Spin arthropods by Paul Sprengers, Public Domain via Pixabay (4) Francis, 1st Marquess of Hastings (Earl of Moira) by Ashuvashu, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Featured image: Baby Boy Crawling by lisa runnels, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The poverty paradox

Amartya Sen’s famous study of famines found that people died not because of a lack of food availability in a country, but because some people lacked entitlements to food. Can the same now be applied to the causes of global poverty?

Certainly there have been big changes in the distribution of global poverty since the end of the Cold War. Back in the late 1980s over 90% of the world’s poor were to be found in countries classified as low income countries. Today three-quarters of the world’s poor – about a billion people – live in countries classified as middle income countries. Of course there are all sorts of questions about the classification of countries by average income per capita, and the location or ‘geography’ of contemporary poverty in middle income countries points towards that. It also points towards the potential divorce of much of foreign aid from global poverty as most donors seek to focus aid on the poorest countries, even though much of world poverty is no longer in the low or least developed countries. What the large increases in average income do point towards is that there has been substantial increases in domestic resources available to end poverty. In fact about 70% of global poverty could be ended via redistributive social policy potentially funded, for example, by the public funds currently spent on regressive fossil-fuel subsidies that largely benefit elites and the upper middle classes. Those classes are more likely to drive cars and thus use more fuel and use larger amounts of household electricity than lower income classes. If such regressive subsidies were redirected, it would cover the cost of the poverty gap via cash transfer programmes in many middle income countries.

In short, a ‘poverty paradox’ has emerged: Most developing countries have or will have in the foreseeable future the domestic resources to address absolute poverty at a national level, and yet poverty is likely to persist despite those available resources because of prevailing patterns of and trends in inequality which may weaken the poverty reducing power of economic growth.

What does it mean for theorizing or thinking about the causes of global poverty? Orthodox theoretical explanations of poverty have tended to imply that the poor are poor because they do not have what they need to be defined as not poor, for example; the ownership of, or access to, assets or the holding of certain values over others, rather than theorizing about the structural causes of poverty at a societal level. Put another way, studying poverty has become to some considerable extent about studying the poor at an individual or household level, but that is not the same as studying poverty and structural causes at a societal level. And the study of poverty is often in a vacuum rather than systematically connected to broader processes of economic development.

Poverty by openDemocracy. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

In short, studying the ‘poor’ is not the same as studying poverty. This distinction is important as the difference between individual (or household) analysis and social structure of society is a central contention in theories of poverty in addressing the question of why are some people poor? An individual might be able to get better educated and get a job, and possibly move out of poverty as some theories emphasise, but individuals cannot change the unemployment rate or education opportunities across a society nor the welfare regime for social policy or the ‘growth regime’, for economic policy, which are a product of, amongst other things, the forms of economic development pursued.

One could say that theories of absolute poverty fall into three types: (i) material, deprivational, and deficit theories (within which those outlined above fall); (ii) subjective, cultural, and behavioural theories (the poor are the poor are lazy or have the ‘wrong’ values in terms of consumption and procreation); and (iii) structural and distributional or relational theories of poverty (which are those theories where poverty is a structural aspect of society or the modes of late economic development). Each theory of poverty implies a different type state response or ‘public responsibility’ in terms of the social policy or the welfare regime, or more generally the governing of who benefits from economic development. For illustration, if poverty is caused by individual failure such as laziness as subjective, cultural and behavioural theories suggest then there is little role for the state in terms of an interventionist welfare regime. However, if poverty is structurally related to distribution of existing wealth, income, and opportunities, and the nature of contemporary labour markets then there is a substantial role for a state to redistribute with an interventionist welfare regime.

Much theorising on the causes of poverty have tended not to emphasize questions of national inequality, and tended not to present poverty as a structural outcome of specific patterns of economic development and distribution. This is, at least in part, due to a prevailing assumption that distribution is not a relevant factor in explanations of poverty. If it is no longer the case in many developing countries that everyone is poor, then structural theories have a new found relevance. This points towards poverty as a question of national political economy rather than resource scarcity and related in particular to welfare and growth regimes and to fiscal policy which is – of course – a political choice or contract that governments or political elites make with the rest of the population; and that if you care about ending global poverty, there is now a case for looking more closely at national redistribution for purely instrumental reasons: to end global poverty quicker than waiting for economic growth to do the job.

In the same way that Amartya Sen’s famous study of famines found that people died not because of a lack of food availability in a country but because some people lacked entitlements to that food, the shifts in global poverty since the Cold War now point towards the availability of national resources to end much of global poverty, but the poor lack entitlement to those public funds.

Featured image credit: POVERTY by Paul Downey. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Building Central Park

In the following excerpt from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, David Schulyer describes the construction of Manhattan’s Central Park and how – despite the difficulties and cost attached – it was ultimately worth the undertaking. It continues to captivate residents and visitors alike, and serve as a symbol of the City of New York.

The site chosen for Central Park was distant from the built area of the city: the cost of Manhattan real estate precluded buying land for a large park in the densely built lower part of the island, and this would be true in other cities as they acquired land for parks throughout the remainder of the century. Still, the process of assembling land for park purposes was a visionary accomplishment, removing 9,792 standard 25 × 100 foot Manhattan building lots and reserving them for public use. Anticipating continued urban growth, Olmsted and Vaux recognized that within a generation “the town will have enclosed the Central Park.” The land was acquired at the cost of $5,029,000.

However, the park site—a largely treeless, scarred landscape—was anything but park-like. Olmsted described the site as “filthy, squalid and disgusting,” and during his initial tour of the property, he was often knee-deep in mud. Major structures on the site included the Arsenal, near Fifth Avenue; the old, rectangular receiving reservoir of the Croton system; and the convent of the Sisters of Charity, at Mount St. Vincent. The new Croton receiving reservoir was under construction. A small community of African Americans and Irish immigrants, Seneca Village, stood on the park’s west side, near 86th Street. As many as 1,600 people resided within the boundaries of the park. During the fall of 1857, workers demolished or removed 300 dwellings as well as a number of factories to make way for improvements to the park.

Central Park remains one of the best investments New York City has ever made.

Central Park was a massive public works project. As many as 3,800 men were employed at the height of construction. Olmsted calculated that workers used 260 tons of gunpowder to blast rock on the site and handled 4,825,000 cubic yards of stone and earth, “or nearly 10 million ordinary city one-horse cart-loads, which, in single file, would make a procession thirty thousand … miles in length”—that is, extending from New York to San Francisco and back again, five times. During construction, workers used more than 46,000 cubic yards of manure and compost to prepare the ground for planting approximately 270,000 trees and shrubs. The elm trees along the Mall, or Pedestrian Promenade, were dug up in the Bronx and carted to the park for replanting. Workers built miles of drives, walks, and bridle paths, and more than twenty bridges and underpasses, to create a complete separation of ways as well as a number of buildings to serve the visiting public. The cost of construction was enormous. The state legislation establishing the park had authorized spending a maximum of $1.5 million in building the park. By 1859, costs totaled $1,765,000, at which time only part of the lower park had been completed and opened to the public. In 1861, the legislature authorized an additional $2 million for construction, bringing the total amount appropriated for building the park to $4 million. By 1870, Olmsted estimated that constructing Central Park had cost New York City approximately $8.9 million.

Building the park was so expensive because of the rockiness of the site and the transformations Olmsted and Vaux made in reshaping the landscape. Swampy lowlands were excavated to become lakes, and so much rock was carted off the site and soil, brought in, that Olmsted estimated a change in the grade of the park’s 843 acres 4 feet. The result of all that work—blasting, construction, soil preparation, and planting—proved to be a marvel to New Yorkers, who first encountered the finished parts of the lower park in 1859. Horace Greeley, for one, was pleased that the designers had preserved the existing landscape more than he anticipated. As is true of many visitors in the early 21st century, Greeley did not realize the degree to which Central Park is a humanly created landscape, one that, in its meadows, its picturesque areas, and its water, provides a welcome relief from the cityscape beyond its borders.

Perhaps inevitably, the park was drawn into the maelstrom of city politics from its very inception. The Charter of 1857, which created the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, was a patently undemocratic document that attempted to remove control of park construction from the city’s Democratic leaders. Construction was halted by strikes, as a fractious workforce, beset by the deskilling that accompanied industrialization and by competition for jobs from immigrants, resisted Olmsted’s efforts to establish a strong work discipline among employees. Park commissioners of every political affiliation sought patronage appointments on the park’s workforce, which led Olmsted, in the 1870s, to maintain a journal recording his travails at the hands of city politicians. Moreover, opponents of the park’s administration and cost launched several administrative reviews of operations, each of which concluded that the management of Central Park was efficient, even exemplary.

Despite the enormous difficulties and extravagant cost, Olmsted, Vaux, and their associates created, with Central Park, an urban landscape that delighted residents. Shortly after the park opened to the public, skating on the park’s lake and ponds became a favorite pastime, as was carriage driving and strolling on the park’s paths, though Olmsted fought to keep competitive sports, such as baseball, out of the park. Visitors wrote about their enjoyment of the park, publishers issued guides to its landscape, and photographers recorded its scenery and the public’s appreciation of its many features. Central Park remains one of the best investments New York City has ever made. Indeed, it is hard to imagine life in Manhattan without it.

Featured image credit: “Southwest corner of Central Park, looking east, NYC” by Ed Yourdon. CC BY-SA 2.0  via Wikimedia Commons.

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A cautionary tale from the history of NGOs

The contemporary world features more than twenty thousand international NGOs in almost every field of human activity, including humanitarian assistance, environmental protection, human rights promotion, and technical standardization, amongst numerous other issues. These organizations include household names such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Doctors Without Borders, as well as less well known but sizeable institutions such as the International Cooperative Alliance which claims to represent more than a billion people. Many of these organizations comprise of networks spanning every continent, and their resources in some cases exceed the development assistance budgets of several OECD countries. Given their considerable role in contemporary global affairs, the activities of international NGOs have become subject to growing scrutiny, especially in the wake of a wave of scandals in recent years.

While the scale and reach of international NGOs today may appear to be unprecedented, these organizations have a history spanning many centuries. Up until the late eighteenth century they predominantly consisted of religious orders, but by the mid-nineteenth century international NGOs had been established in a wide array of areas including humanitarianism, anti-slavery activism, feminism, and the promotion of peace. Among the most influential and most globally networked of the international NGOs of the early nineteenth century was the International Shipwreck Society – an intriguing but now largely forgotten organization that sheds light on the potential and limitations of transnational organizations two centuries ago.

Founded in Paris in 1835 ‘with a view to uniting the benevolent of all countries’, the International Shipwreck Society focused primarily on humanitarian assistance to the victims of shipwreck and the rescue of drowning persons. This was a cause that aroused considerable public sympathy given the common occurrence of shipwreck in increasingly crowded seas as global commerce expanded in the early nineteenth century. Thanks to the interconnected nature of Paris and the energetic correspondence of its principal founder the ‘Count of Liancourt’ Auguste Godde, the Society expanded rapidly into a global organization, and by 1837 it had branches in Brazil, China, Mexico, Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States, as well as throughout Europe. Its journal, entitled The International, aimed to be ‘a powerful force for stimulating the spirit of charity among all peoples’ and to reach ‘all parts of the globe.’ Journalist Louis Reybaud remarked that ‘no organization made more noise in the columns of publicity or carried out more ingenious experiments’ than the International Shipwreck Society. Such was the organization’s popularity that secretary-general Godde found himself richly furnished with gifts including a diamond ring from Tsar Nicholas I.

The Society’s short life was also the product of the absence of oversight of its work.

Originally located at Place Vendôme 16, opposite what is now the Paris Ritz, the International Shipwreck Society displayed a remarkable capacity to generate large subscriptions from wealthy individuals, who could opt for a range of membership tiers, the highest of which, a Protector, offered for the princely sum of 1000 francs the same status in the organization as numerous European royals and ministers of state. Despite its extraordinary size and wealth, the organization was to meet with a precipitous end in the early 1840s. In Godde’s account, this was due to the machinations of the editor of its journal, Sebastian Palet, who wished to seize control of the organization. The pages of The International, on the other hand, reveal a somewhat different story: not only had Godde been falsely claiming to be a Count and a Knight of the Legion of Honour, he had also been abusing his position as both secretary-general and treasurer for purpose of his enrichment. With the organization splitting between supporters of Palet and Godde, the Society was to disappear by 1843. Godde fled to England where he taught French language lessons and died in 1890 a Poor Brother of Charterhouse.

The extraordinary tale of the International Shipwreck Society reveals not only the remarkably global scale of transnational organizations that had become possible by the 1830s, but also its vulnerability and dependence on the work of a small number of highly interconnected individuals. The work of the International Shipwreck Society was in part made possible by the limited regulatory context of France in the era of the July Monarchy, but the Society’s short life was also the product of the absence of oversight of its work. These issues remain pertinent to today’s international NGOs operating in an increasingly globalized context in which national regulatory mechanisms may be insufficient.

Featured image credit: Shipwreck in the North Sea by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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How well do you know your Broadway trivia? [quiz]

September marks the new Broadway musical season and the opening of fledgling shows like Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and familiar revivals like Cats. With every new Broadway season, comes the excitement that something will be a major cultural landmark (hello, Hamilton, anyone?). Broadway has a long history of being a significant and fascinating part of the zeitgeist. Ken Bloom, author of Show and Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes, put together a quiz so you can test your knowledge of Broadway stars, composers, shows and bizarre happenings throughout the years.

Featured image: part of the cover of Show and Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes.

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