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Ten facts about the Paralympic Games

The Rio Summer Paralympic Games began on 7 September, 2016. These games offer audiences a chance to be awed by the athletic elitism of international athletes with disabilities, and are renowned for their spirit of accessibility and inclusion. The Paralympics are younger than the Olympics, but in just sixty seven years they have grown to encompass more than 170 countries and 4,000 elite athletes. These athletes compete in wheelchairs, with prosthetic limbs, and without senses such as hearing or sight across more than 20 different sports.

Below are ten interesting facts about the Paralympics so that you can impress your friends and family with your knowledge.

1. Before the Paralympics began, athletes with physical disabilities competed in the Olympics. Ray Ewry won eight gold medals in the 1900, 1904, and 1908 Olympics while having polio.

2. The Paralympic Movement began in 1948, after Dr, Ludwig Guttmann began to introduce sport as a method of rehabilitation for WWII soldiers. He organized the first competitions in wheelchair sport and the first event in archery at Stoke Mandeville on the same day as the opening of the Summer Olympics in London.

3. In 1960, the first Paralympic Games were held in the same country and city as the Summer Olympic Games, in Rome, where 400 athletes with spinal cord injuries competed. Ever since, the Summer Paralympic Games have been organized on a four-year basis alongside the Summer Olympic Games.

4. The term Paralympics combines the Latin word para (“next to”) with the word Olympics, because the games happen alongside the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Image credit: ‘Australian goalballer Sarah Kennedy makes a save’ by John Sherwell. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

5. The Olympic flag has flown over the Paralympic Games since 1984, when the International Games for the Disabled occurred in New York.

6. During the London Summer Paralympic Games in 2012, more than 4,200 athletes from 164 countries competed across 20 sports.

7. Wheelchair marathons are often completed in under 90 minutes, with 3.5-minute miles. Record holder Josh Cassidy completed a 26.2-mile race at 1 hour 18 minutes and 24 seconds in London 2012.

8. Goalball is designed for those with visual impairments, and in order to play athletes must wear an eyeshade (to ensure even those who can partially see are playing in the dark), so they rely on their tactile and auditory senses to score goals.

9. Another lesser known Paralympic sport is boccia, which is a ball and target game for wheelchair-based players.

10. Paralympic athletes such as South African swimmer, Natalie du Toit, and Polish table tennis player, Natalia Partyka, have been known to qualify and compete in both the Paralympic and the Olympic Games.

Featured image credit: ‘Australian T53 wheelchair athlete Paul Wiggins’ by John Sherwell. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Strategies for reflective practices in dance training

Reflective practice has the capability to facilitate deeper experiential understanding to enhance performance. It can release the dancer from the traditional ‘watch and repeat’ mode of dance training. Reflective practice and experiential learning is the crux of the process utilized in the Functional Awareness®: Anatomy in Action approach to somatic movement training.

Reflective practice has origins in the educational philosophies of John Dewey and one primary contributor to this literature is also Donald Schon. Schon (1983) describes two forms of reflective learning: formative “reflection-in-action” and summative “reflection-on-action.” “Reflection-in action” is while doing an action. Dancers who practice “action-in-action” can sense, recognize, assess, and readjust while they move through a phrase. They are reflective and re-learning in action. Schon’s summative, “reflection-on-action,” is a process of reflection after doing an action. Both forms of reflective practice can elicit cognitive and somatic insight for the dance student and the dance educator.

Peter Scales (2008) suggest that these modes of reflection become more effective if they are purposeful, structured, link theory to practice, and address change and development.

Functional Awareness® movement explorations follow a systematic process, and invites questions and discussion. It includes mind/body reflection, mental record or written record of nonjudgmental observations, further action research to corroborate evidence from the initial practice using sources from both in daily life and in dance practice environments. The self-assessment of the reflective data is collected and discussion between two people or a small group enables participants to share information, respectfully question, deepen reflection skills, draw inference and conclusion, to deepen understanding, and integrate information into dance training practice and in quotidian movement of daily life. FA® employs action research and a reflective mind/body strategy referred to as the 4Rs: recognize, release, recruit, restore. The 4Rs is a sequence for implementing reflective practice to encourage awareness, release unnecessary tension, promote discovery and discussion, and improve balance and performance. The following elaborates on the 4Rs and includes an exploration in standing balance.

Recognize habit. This is appreciative inquiry for what “is.” There is no judgment in the practice of awareness, merely bringing attention to a body/mind practice. No one is symmetrical and everyone exhibits postural imbalances and preferences. Assessing without judgment is a useful practice.

Close your eyes while standing. Stand for a moment as if you were waiting in line at the grocery store. Just settle into the habit that feels comfortable in standing.

Open your eyes. Notice if you are standing on leg more than the other.

Are you leaning forward on the balls of your feet or back on your heels?

Record your observations mentally or write them down.

FA® reflective inquiry invites questions and does not presuppose a right answer.

Release unnecessary tension. Ask yourself the question, “Where might I do less, or where can I let go?” Do not expect a specific answer. Wait… and be open to the response. Letting go of expectations and assumptions in your thoughts as well.

Recruit for efficiency in action. This does not require strong muscle action. Rather, Recruiting is a mental practice whereby the mind envisions an anatomical or metaphorical image to elicit change.  For example, notice the image of the fleshy bottom of the foot.

The three dots are indicating a potential balance for the foot. Stand for a moment, release unnecessary tension and then visualize the tripod of the foot. Notice whether this invites a change from your habitual stance? Envisioning this anatomical or cortical map enables the muscles to realign and recruit with efficiency.

A common tool employed in Functional Awareness® is the practice of exaggeration to deepen discovery and body awareness.

Stand and move most of the weight way back onto your heels. What holding or tension does this invite in the body?

Now stand with most of the weigh on the front two points near the balls of the feet. What tension or holding does this invite in the body?

Reconsider the three points or tripod of balance in the foot and become aware of letting the body shift. Refer back to the idea of allowing the body to recruit this new muscle action and understanding of balance.

Restore towards balance. Proprioceptive and neuromuscular changes occur once you invite an anatomical image to be considered. These changes can aid the body to restore the body towards balance. For this movement exploration, it can shift the balance of your feet.

Share your findings with a colleague. Consider how moving out of habit and into awareness helped you move toward balance.

Further Reflection & Inquiry: Your Findings and Why They Matter

Make note of what was discovered in the explorations above. Bring some of these concepts forward into daily life. Perhaps notice stance and the tripod of balance while watching a teacher demonstrates a phrase or when waiting in line for coffee or food? Does a pattern reveal itself? Further evidence can be gleaned by noticing the pattern of how shoes wear out.

Does the one shoe show more wear than the other shoe? Does this support or contend your other observations?

While dancing, do you favor using one leg to turn over the other? Does this corroborate with evidence about waiting in line?
Do you have one leg that you prefer as your standing leg? For example, does one leg support you in adagio movement more reliably?
Do you prefer 5th position with the right leg in front? Or how about the left leg in front? Do these feel the same? Is there correlation between standing habit and this information?

Investigating standing habit is the gateway to honoring a personal discovery towards movement efficiency for standing leg stability and turns in any dance class. You can prevent imbalance with a simple consideration of the tripod of balance at the feet. Merely, recognize the pattern, release unnecessary tension, recruit the image of the tripod of the foot to allow muscular support to shift and restore towards balance.  Further reflection leads to change and further inquiry. These strategies for reflection, inquiry and collaboration are implemented in collegiate course work in somatic study as well as within dance technique curricula.

Featured image courtesy of the authors.

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Science, sincerity, and transformation of near-death experiences

One of the first great philosophical books, Plato’s Republic, concludes with the recounting of a near-death experience. Socrates relates the myth of Er, a soldier who died in battle but came back to tell what he saw in the other world. Like other myths in Plato’s works, this is meant to supplement Socrates’ philosophical arguments and to help instill noble beliefs. It’s a last ditch effort at making the case for living a just life.

The transformative power of near-death experiences is not lost on us in the 21st century. But Plato’s use of Er’s story stands apart from the way near-death experiences are presented nowadays. We have books with titles like Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, and Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences. The idea no longer seems to be that near-death experiences are stories that serve to prepare us for rational argumentation. Rather, the idea seems to be that near-death experiences are arguments. Or perhaps the idea is that there is no need for arguments—a sincere report is all it takes.

Plato’s Republic (pictured) uses the recounting of a near-death experience as a persuasive tactic. Image credit: “Papyrus d’Oxyrrhynque P. Oxy. LII 3679, IIIe siècle, contenant des fragments de La République de Platon.” edited by Theornamentalist. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This shift in emphasis raises the rather obvious question of whether we should be convinced of the content of a report simply in light of its sincerity. In some contexts the answer is clearly ‘No.’ Even sincere testimony may be faulty. False memories appear real to the subject reporting them, even though they do not correspond to actual events. This is one reason why the testimony of young children is not simply taken at face value in court. They are especially vulnerable to suggestion, and so their accounts of past events, no matter how sincere, may not be the best guides to what actually took place. Religious convictions provide a second example of why sincerity should not be taken as evidence of truth. Members of different faiths often sincerely believe in conflicting tenets. But the fact that they conflict means that not all of them can be true. Though particular religious convictions may be true, the sincerity of those who hold them is not evidence that they are. In general, it seems, sincerity is not a sure guide to truth. And yet this is what we are asked to accept when it comes to near-death experiences.

As someone who thinks that near-death experiences do not prove that there is a heaven, I commonly hear that am failing to let the scales drop from my eyes. I have been told that what I need to do is go out and hear the stories of those who have had these experiences. Then I will see the light.

In the film adaptation of Heaven Is for Real, Greg Kinnear [featured above at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival] plays Todd Burpo, a small-town father who shares his son’s spiritually-driven near-death experience with the world. Image credit: “Greg Kinnear” by Gordon Correll. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

I think this advice is misguided. But the motivations behind it may be noble. Near-death experiences often transform those who have them for the better. They become more compassionate, less afraid of death, and more understanding and loving of others. One might feel as if a naturalistic account of near-death experiences would undermine these transformations. Such an account might seek to explain why someone experienced seeing deceased relatives in heaven by appealing to the comforting psychological effects this would have in the context of a brush with death. By citing them as causes of the experience, however, this explanation may seem to risk eliminating these comforting effects. Even worse, it may do so not just for the subject of this experience, but also for all those who found hope and optimism in a sincere account of heaven. Books on near-death experiences are best sellers because people find great hope in them. One motivation for simply accepting people’s sincere reports of what they’ve experienced may be to save the power and meaning of these experiences from the deflating explanations of psychology and neuroscience.

Even if this motivation displays a heart in the right place, it rests on a mistaken assumption. Naturalistic explanations of the causes of phenomena associated with near-death experiences need not undermine their transformative effects. Consider the life review, a characteristic element in many near-death experiences. Watching one’s life unfold as if it were a movie provides one with a detached perspective from which to witness one’s choices and actions. It involves adopting another standpoint on what one has done. Taking up different standpoints is often cited as a means to improved moral thinking. The familiar thought is that one might begin to make better choices, to be more compassionate and loving towards others, if only one could get outside one’s narrow point of view and see things as others do. The life review affords just this possibility, no matter how it’s caused.

At the end of the day, there is no inherent conflict between naturalistic explanations of near-death experiences and the preservation of their power to transform people for the better. The tools of science can allow us to make sense of these experiences in a manner that preserves their deep significance and positive effects. We are not forced to choose between a better understanding and a better world.

Featured image credit: “Stars and Lights” by Ed Dunens. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Small donor democracy? Don’t count on it

Hillary Clinton says she wants to get big money out of elections. One of the ways she wants to do that is to curb the influence of big donors by using federal matching funds to mobilize lots of small donors. This reform idea has become very popular recently, thanks to the concern about super PACs and billionaires that has been growing since Citizens United.

But the idea is an old one. The first serious small-donor programs began more than 100 years ago, and they have been working more or less continually ever since, without getting much public attention. It is because of them that we now have more small donors than at any other time in our history. The history of those programs, however, does not suggest that a small-donor democracy has ever been, or ever will be, within reach.

The idea first took hold as a serious reform in the 1908 presidential election. The Republican party had been burned by scandals about the 1904 election, which turned out to have been financed mostly by a few big Wall Street donors. In 1908 both parties reacted by very publicly launching serious attempts to recruit small donors.

This was not a one-time event, either, something the parties abandoned once the scandals had faded from popular memory: by 1928 the RNC had thirty-six times as many donors as in 1904. (DNC records are too spotty to make a similar calculation.) The numbers for both parties went up again after the Depression and World War II, and when President Obama ran for reelection in 2012 he had more than 1,000 times as many donors as the Republicans had in 1904.

That is an impressive number, but not impressive enough to justify the persistent belief that small donors can counter big ones. Obama’s 3.6 million small donors made up 82% of those who gave to his campaign committee, but they accounted for only 28% of the committee fund. Which means that 72% was provided by only 12% of donors. Add super PAC and other outside money raised and spent for Obama, and those small contributions made up only about 19% of the total.

The same pattern appeared in New York City’s small-donor program, which is seen as a model for the rest of the country. Using public funds to provide a six-to-one match for contributions of $175 or less, the program has recruited tens of thousands of new, small donors. And they are more diverse — by income, education, race, and ethnicity — than traditional donors. Another measure of the program’s success is that more than two-thirds of the people who made contributions in the city’s 2013 election were small donors. But those small donors provided only a little more than 10% of the total amount contributed; 90% came from less than one-third of the donors.

Girl Holding Roll of Bills in her Hand Money Bankroll by Steven Depolo. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

This pattern is not an artifact of Citizens United. It has appeared in every major-party presidential campaign fund for which we have records, which suggests that it is an inherent feature of privately funded elections. If small-donor programs are going to free candidates from being beholden to big donors, then they will have to reverse the pattern: mobilize enough small donors to provide 70 to 90% of campaign funds rather than 10 to 30%.

If there were any chance of bringing about change on such an earth-shaking scale, we would have seen some sign of it over the last 100 years. What we have seen instead is that it is very hard to get previously uninvolved citizens to make campaign contributions. Creating a small-donor democracy would mean continually mobilizing tens of millions of people, election after election. That has never been done before and there are no mechanisms for doing it now.

Public funding vouchers may be the incentive needed to create such mechanisms. Rather than giving subsidies directly to candidates, a voucher program would distribute a fixed sum of money to registered voters. The vouchers could be used only to make campaign contributions, so they would give every voter something that every candidate would want very much to get.

Under small-donor programs, candidates devote time and money trying to persuade otherwise uninvolved citizens to part with money they would rather spend on something else. Under a voucher program, candidates would devote time and money advising citizens on how to allocate money they can only spend on election campaigns. Voucher programs have not yet been tried at any level of government — the program that Seattle passed in 2015 will take effect in 2017 — but they should spur the creation of thousands of local political organizations.

Politics requires organization. The problem with small-donor programs is that they are organized to increase the number of small donors, but not to organize the donors themselves. Millions of unorganized donors are a statistic, not a political force. They look good on disclosure reports, but without organization they cannot have the kind of policy-making influence that would justify the term “democratization.” People have been chasing the dream of a small-donor democracy off and on for more than 100 years. The chase is on again, but the goal remains as illusory as ever.

Featured image credit: Elections in Kodiak by NicoleKlauss. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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A democratic defence of the European Court of Human Rights

“Vote leave, take control” was the slogan of almost fiendish simplicity that helped win the Brexit referendum, masking the mendacity and absence of vision that underlay it. The impulses it captures—wresting sovereignty back from remote elites to Westminster, with its proud democratic tradition—echo those that have for years underpinned the opprobrium directed at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in British public debate.

Theresa May has retreated from her position of withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, acknowledging that such a step—unprecedented in a democracy—lacks parliamentary support. She must also be wary of needlessly inflaming the devolved administrations, whose relationships with Brussels and Strasbourg have escaped the vituperative rhetoric that has sometimes shamed Westminster.

The reprieve may be temporary. The UK’s fractious relationship with Strasbourg is now inextricably bound up with the politics of Brexit, although in legal terms the two are unrelated (the Convention being a treaty of the Council of Europe, not the European Union). If the ‘hard’ Brexiteers prevail, they may be emboldened to complete the Eurosceptic project by ‘taking control’ back from Strasbourg, too. If they falter, attacking the Court may prove an expedient way of assuaging their frustrated constituency. After the seismic shock of the referendum, no outcome is unthinkable.

What does a democratic defence of the Court (and the wider Convention system) look like?

Hostility towards Strasbourg is not confined to the UK. Challenges have emanated not only from Putin’s Russia, but also several mature democracies. Yet only in the UK have proposals to weaken the Court or denounce the Convention become entrenched within mainstream discourse, with reckless disregard for their contagious effect in states with egregious human rights records (and in curious paradox to the UK’s generally exemplary record of responding to adverse human rights judgments, the prisoner voting saga aside).

The ‘democratic’ critique of the Court views supranational human rights oversight as an illegitimate constraint on politicians whose principal accountability is to the electorate.

What does a democratic defence of the Court (and the wider Convention system) look like?

In its institutions and procedures, the Convention system is far more accommodating of the democratic concerns of states than critical accounts allow. Contrary to popular myth, Strasbourg judges are elected by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a body made up of MPs from the forty-seven states. Under the principle of subsidiarity, the primary duty for upholding Convention rights rests with domestic institutions, while the ‘margin of appreciation’ which flows from that principle allows the Court to respect national differences.

While judgments of the Court are binding on states, they do not invalidate domestic laws. Rather, considerable discretion is conferred on states to determine the specific steps by which they remedy a violation of human rights. This gives parliamentarians the opportunity to interpret the meaning of human rights and devise remedies in their own national context.

Judgments of the Court are thus a catalyst for, rather than a determinant of, domestic reform. The modus operandi of the Committee of Ministers, in which government representatives meet privately on a peer-to-peer basis, may also be viewed as highly responsive to states’ sovereignty concerns (indeed, there are strong arguments for greater scrutiny of executive action by victims, litigants and civil society).

The democratic defence of the Court rests further upon a view of external human rights supervision as constitutive, rather than undermining, of democracy. States’ decisions to create, and ratify, human rights treaties generally follow a democratic process; accordingly, such regimes enjoy a form of delegated democratic authority based on states’ consent. More compelling still are the domestic effects of human rights, which act as an external corrective to the mistakes and injustices that even well-functioning majoritarian democracies may perpetrate. Human rights exist in part to protect those who are in a permanent minority or relatively powerless and who cannot therefore rely on the usual mechanisms that ensure responsiveness of politicians to the electorate.

The case law of the Court lays repeated emphasis on pluralism, state accountability, and the substantive and procedural dimensions of democratic self-governance. Judgments on the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, and free elections may all be seen as enhancing the capacities of states to better protect and uphold democratic standards. In this sense, external human rights supervision should be viewed as bolstering, rather than eroding, confidence in the democratic credentials of national decision-makers.

Crucially, all branches of the state—the executive, parliament, and the courts—are partners in the shared endeavour of protecting human rights.  From this perspective, the perceived ‘democratic deficit’ afflicting human rights stems less from a surfeit of judicial interference than from the inadequacy of political mechanisms to ‘domesticate’ human rights. The Joint Committee on Human Rights in the UK Parliament is viewed as a model of democratic engagement with human rights in Europe. The Committee’s reports have influenced the Court in its adjudications, demonstrating that the relationship between Strasbourg and national parliaments is a two-way street. Strasbourg listens—and increasingly defers—to the democratic deliberations of parliamentarians.

Public debate in the UK about the democratic legitimacy of the Court has for too long been dominated by loud voices, whose parochial and partisan considerations neglect the value of a human rights regime that offers a collective guarantee of human rights protection in forty-seven states at various uneven and precarious stages of democratic development.

This, finally, is the strongest democratic defence of the Convention system: that it belongs not to the governments of Europe, but to the peoples of Europe, for millions of whom it is the first and last hope of justice.

Featured image credit: Courtroom European Court of Human Rights 05, by Adrian Grycuk. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Poland via Wikimedia Commons.

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Ryan Lochte’s “over-exaggerating”

If there were an Olympics for making an apology, swimmer Ryan Lochte wouldn’t qualify. After being outed for his fake claim that he was robbed by men identifying themselves as Brazilian police officers, he took to social media for damage control. His Instragram apology on August 19 went this way:

I want to apologize for my behavior last weekend — for not being more careful and candid in how I described the events of that early morning and for my role in taking the focus away from the many athletes fulfilling their dreams of participating in the Olympics. I waited to share these thoughts until it was confirmed that the legal situation was addressed and it was clear that my teammates would be arriving home safely.

It’s traumatic to be out late with your friends in a foreign country — with a language barrier — and have a stranger point a gun at you and demand money to let you leave, but regardless of the behavior of anyone else that night, I should have been much more responsible in how I handled myself and for that am sorry to my teammates, my fans, my fellow competitors, my sponsors, and the hosts of this great event. I am very proud to represent my country in Olympic competition and this was a situation that could and should have been avoided. I accept responsibility for my role in this happening and have learned some valuable lessons.

I am grateful for my USA Swimming teammates and the USOC, and appreciate all of the efforts of the IOC, the Rio ’16 Host Committee, and the people of Brazil who welcomed us to Rio and worked so hard to make sure that these Olympic Games provided a lifetime of great new memories. There has already been too much said and too many valuable resources dedicated to what happened last weekend, so I hope we spend our time celebrating the great stories and performances of these Games and look ahead to celebrating future successes.

I’ve bolded some key phrases that call out the weakness of the attempt. Lochte avoids naming what he did wrong: he’s just apologizing for his “behavior” and for “not being more careful and candid” in how he described events. In essence, he says, it was a mistake—my bad. He tries some blame shifting, mentioning the trauma of foreign travel and the language barrier and suggests that others were at fault too. He tries to transcend with some flag-waving about how proud he is to represent his country and how gratefully he really is to the people of Brazil. Then he says, in essence, too much time has been spent discussing this, so let’s move on and celebrate athletics. It’s an apology by someone not used to having to be responsible for his behavior.

Image credit: “Ryan Lochte” by nrcphotos. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

For an apology to be successful, someone needs to name the offense, not re-describe it as merely careless and lacking candor. And for an apology to be successful, there need to be no excuses, blame-shifting.

As is often the case with bad apologies, Lochte had to try again. The next day, interviewer Matt Lauer asked if Lochte should have come forward earlier. He continues to reframe his behavior—vandalism and lying about the confrontation with the security guard—by saying he was taking “full responsibility” for his actions, but still not naming them. He went on to euphemistically characterize his behavior as not just exaggerating the story but over-exaggerating it, “Because if I didn’t over-exaggerate the story…none of this would have happened. We wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be sitting here discussing this.” Suddenly, it’s all about him being on the spot. It’s about his description of events rather than his behavior. Asked why, he suggests that he “was still intoxicated.” Lochte goes on in the interview to try the tell the story he would like to be true: that he is not making excuses (he is). And he suggests that it the truth is unknowable: “It’s how you want to – it’s how you want to make look like. Whether you call it a robbery, whether you call it extortion, or us paying just for the damages, like we don’t know. All we know is that there was a gun pointed in our direction, and we were demanded to give money.” Lauer pressed Lochte on the consistency of the details of his story and Lochte fell back on the idea that “people can see it in many different directions.”

When Lauer gets around to asking him how he’d respond to the people of Rio he says he would tell them:

How sorry I am. And my deepest apologies. They put on a great Games. They did everything. The people – of Rio or Brazil, the authorities, everyone there, they put on a great Games. And my immature, intoxicated behavior, tarnished that a little. And I don’t want that, because they did a great job. The fans were amazing. I know going out into my races they were all cheering for me. So, I mean, they were great. They hosted a great Games. And I’m just really sorry. And I hope they can accept my apology.

Lochte still can’t get around to saying what he did other than that his behavior “tarnished” the great games. Lochte may yet apologize further and if he does he might consider returning to Rio to offer restitution and some good works and saying something like this:

“I am here to apologize for my indefensible vandalism and lying during the Rio games. My friends and I vandalized your service station and I lied about the confrontation with the security guard. I disrespected my hosts, embarrassed my country and myself. I am profoundly sorry and hope that in the future I can live in a way that demonstrates my regret.”

No excuses, blame-shifting, or flag-waving. In life, as in the Olympics, a comeback is always possible. But it’s going to take more effort.

Featured image credit: Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 by nuno_lopes. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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Quantum mechanics – a new lease of life

“It’s not quantum mechanics” may often be heard, a remark informing the listener that whatever they are concerned about is nowhere near as difficult, as abstruse, as complicated as quantum mechanics. (Alternatively, of course, it is often said to be not rocket science or not brain surgery). Indeed to non-physicists or non-mathematicians quantum mechanics must seem virtually impossible to appreciate – pages of incomprehensible algebra buttressed by obscure or frankly paradoxical “explanations”. They may ask “What does the theory actually mean?”

What is more surprising is that even those celebrated for solving quantum mechanical problems may also say that they don’t know what the theory means, at least in terms of providing some understanding or picture in space and time. Taken at face value, quantum theory provides only a statistical account of the results of measurements, and no description at all of the physical system, before or after or in the absence of measurement.

The person most responsible for convincing physicists of this doctrine was Niels Bohr, one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. Set against him in a famous debate of the 1920-30s was Albert Einstein. Einstein’s best-known complaint about this view of quantum mechanics is “God does not play dice” and rejected the statistical nature of the measurement results, but he was more concerned about the lack of any picture or even description of the system between measurements, lack of realism as it is often put.

With two younger colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, in 1935 Einstein produced the famous EPR argument, based on entanglement – the demonstration that the wave-function of two particles may be so correlated that the behaviour of each is totally dependent on that of the other. Their argument showed that unless realism is restored, the Universe must be non-local, so that a “cause” may have an immediate “effect” at a different point in space, apparently violating Einstein’s own special theory of relativity. Not surprisingly, Einstein opted for realism and locality – local realism – in opposition to Bohr.

However, Einstein’s ideas were fairly comprehensively rejected (except by Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum theory, and his famous “cat” argument which backed up Einstein’s views). Application of quantum mechanics proceeded with enormous success before and also well after World War II, both scientifically in predicting the behaviour of a wide range of important systems, and commercially – in particular the transistor, its descendants, and the laser. Thinking about the basics of the theory, though, was frowned on – the mantra was “shut up and calculate”. The most important physics journal, The Physical Review, banned papers debating views opposed to those of Bohr.

As early as 1952, David Bohm, a refugee from McCarthyism living in Brazil, produced a good argument for realism, and in the 1960s John Bell finally showed that the standard argument against realism, a mathematical “proof” of John von Neumann from 1932, was wrong. However in another important paper based on EPR, Bell showed that Einstein’s and his own dream of local realism was impossible – at least if quantum mechanics was still correct under entanglement.

John Stewart Bell, 1964. SLAC Staff Directory photograph. Courtesy SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Archives and History Office, Muffley Collection. Used with permission.

This could have been the end for such speculation, but actually it was anything but. While the Bohr-Einstein debate was theoretical, Bell’s work was a direct stimulus to experiment – was quantum mechanics or local realism correct? Such experiments have been carried out with gradually improving technology. While it has been clear for some time that quantum mechanics would win, it is only recently that all loopholes have been removed. It has been confidently predicted that once loophole-free tests had been performed, Nobel Prizes would follow, so we shall wait and see!

Even apart from that, the liberation felt from the negativity of von Neumann’s “theorem” was striking. Very slowly, building up in the 1990s and into the new century, a freedom developed to question the ideas of Bohr and to come up with new ideas and interpretations of quantum theory without being denounced as unprofessional and a “crank”. Many of these ideas would probably be disliked by Einstein and Bell as much as by Bohr, but as in any healthy field of science, discussion is open, many suggestions may be made, and the most satisfactory should survive.

One of the interesting novel interpretations of quantum mechanics has been that of “many worlds” or “many universes”. In this interpretation, rather than measurement producing a single result in “our” Universe, every possible result is found, each in a different universe. The first suggestion came from Hugh Everett III in the 1950s, but the main proponent today is David Deutsch. Since, unlike Bohr’s ideas it does not need an external observer, it is unsurprising that this interpretation is popular with astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking.

While all this may sound esoteric, it is often found that attention to realism rather than verbal manoeuvring may lead to practical consequences, and in the 1990s quantum information technology has developed to be a major focus of scientific and technical endeavour. The ideas of EPR, Bell, and Deutsch have been central.

Deutsch was the initiator of quantum computation, which has been shown to be able to solve, in minutes, some problems considered, in practice, impossible on pre-quantum or classical computers because of the length of time required. Deutsch argues that this speed-up is because different computations are carried out in each of the Many Worlds, though others disagree.

The other main techniques in quantum information theory are quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. The first is a way of passing a stream of information from one observer to the other without any eavesdropper gaining any knowledge. The second is much like science fiction “teleportation”, except that it is only applied to single particles, and is not instantaneous – as Einstein demands the process takes place at a speed less than that of light.

Quantum information theory is developing and will continue to develop in many other directions. Like the new ideas on quantum mechanics itself, the comparatively new freedom of thought must be a great boon to those interested in genuine progress in the understanding and application of physics.

Featured image credit: Light by geralt. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

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Saying “Black lives matter”

As the political season in the United States heats up, it has become controversial in certain circles to say “Black Lives Matter.” A few (perhaps even many) object because they don’t believe that black lives matter equally. Most, however, it seems to me, are responding out of fundamental misunderstandings of what “Black Lives Matter” means in the USA in 2016. (I will set aside crude partisanship as an explanation that, to the extent that it is true, does not require further comment.)

No serious person seriously believes that what is being claimed is that only black lives matter. The complaint instead is that “Black Lives Matter” implies that black lives matter in a special or privileged way – or even more than other lives. “Black Lives Matter” is taken as a demand for or assertion of “special rights;” a denigration of the lives and rights of members of other groups; or both.

A few (perhaps even many) may be making such racist claims. Most, however, are instead advancing claims of equal value and rights. Black lives matter too – in exactly the same ways that all other human lives matter.

How do claims to equal rights come to be understood as claims for special rights? The answer, I want to suggest, again setting aside self-interested partisan misconstrual, is a failure to appreciate the character of rights. In particular, this (mis)understanding fails to appreciate when rights are claimed (actively asserted) – and when they aren’t.

When a right is secure, a right-holder simply enjoys her right, without any need to claim it (and usually without even a thought as to making such a claim). We claim rights – we say “I have a right to that” – only when those rights are challenged, threatened, or violated. And we do so to demand, as we are entitled to demand, that our rights be respected and protected. As philosophers of language put it, claims of rights are “performative” (rather than descriptive). They aim to make things happen (rather than describe the world).

Do rich lives matter? Of course they do. But no one would say that unless the lives of rich people were being systematically threatened – which certainly is not the case in contemporary America. Although the description is accurate, the performance – saying “Rich Lives Matter” – would be, at best, oddly out of place.

Do white lives matter? Or course they do. But there is no reason or occasion to say that – unless one believes, against all the evidence, that “the white race” is under attack.

Consider, however, the sorry string of well-publicized killings of black men, women, and children at the hands of uniformed public officials; the fact that the names that we do know are only the tip of the iceberg; the obscene murder rates in many urban black communities; and the poverty, unemployment, and infant mortality rates of black Americans. These and similar appalling facts provide a powerful reason to say “Black Lives Matter.” And that reason is to try to better protect the equal rights of black Americans.

Do blue lives matter? Of course they do. And recently there have, sadly, been multiple occasions to say so.

Protest Black Lives Matter Sign Protestor by BruceEmmerling. Public domain via Pixabay.

“Blue Live Matter” and “Black Lives Matter,” however, are not competing claims, as some partisan demagogues have suggested. Quite the contrary, they are closely comparable appeals, in the face of unquestionable tragedies, to protect people who have been targeted simply because they are members of a particular group. If we define hate crimes as crimes motivated by the victim’s membership in a group, both “Blue Live Matter” and “Black Lives Matter” are appropriate, even necessary, protests against (and appeals for protection from) hate crimes.

Such claims by members of hated groups are not demands for special rights. They are assertions of rights that we all have, equally. The only thing “special” is the invidious discrimination that forces these victims to claim their rights. And the ultimate objective of such claims is to change policies and practices so that members of these groups no longer have a special need to make such claims; that is, to realize a world in which members of all groups are equally able to enjoy all of their rights.

“Blue Lives Matter” is a claim for restorative justice: to restore a situation in which the lives of men and women in blue are not threatened simply because of the honorable career that they have chosen. It is not a demand for special rights but an assertion of equal rights. And all defenders of the equal rights of all should both endorse this claim and lament the fact that it needs to be made in the United States of America in 2016.

Similarly, though, “Black Lives Matter” is, at the very least, a claim for restorative justice. (Many see it as a rights-based call for – finally! – establishing the real, full, and practical equality of black men, women, and children.) Rather than demanding special rights, it demands (nothing more, but nothing less, than) the equal protection of equal rights. And all defenders of the equal rights of all – all those who truly believe that all lives matter, equally – should both endorse this claim and lament the fact that today, as in generations past, it still needs to be made in the United States of America.

Precisely because all lives matter, equally, it is important that we say, here and now, “Black Lives Matter.”

Although I have stressed similarities, the differences between these groups are also striking. Race is not an occupational choice. Black skin cannot be taken off at the end of one’s work day. Blacks have been targeted for centuries, systematically, in the economy, in society, and by the state. Furthermore, although progress continues to be made in reducing discrimination, unconscious racial bias remains a serious problem – as even police training programs are increasingly recognizing. In other words, the case for saying “Black Lives Matter” is especially pressing and compelling.

Featured image credit: Protest Black Lives Matter Penn Station by BruceEmmerling. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Just because all philosophers are on Twitter…

Just because everyone is on Twitter doesn’t mean they’ve all got interesting things to say. I vaguely recall reading that late 19th-century curmudgeons expressed similar scepticism about the then much-hyped technology of the telephone. Their thought was that even if there came a time when everyone had a telephone on their desk, the amount of insight and knowledge to be shared would not be able to keep pace. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, so it is perhaps not surprising that with insight unable to keep up with the expanding space for communication, other, less serious, topics filled the gaps. Thus www.lolcats.com.

It is not all bad news of course. The expansion and ready availability of communication technologies has meant that it is far easier for serious ideas to be tested and refined, far easier to develop diverse communities of scholarship, and far easier for new discoveries, theories and data to permeate beyond ivory towers. A modern counterpoint is that it is also far easier to spread misleading and self-serving theories, far easier to spread messages of hate and violence, and far easier for discourse to polarise as, with so many options available, people gravitate towards those sources which reinforce and intensify existing prejudices.

This explosion of available information and opinions also presents a challenge to traditional notions of education and citizenry. There may have been a time when the purpose of education was primarily to create an informed citizenry – to give them the relevant information – but that time is certainly not now. Now, information is more freely available and a far more important skill is the ability to independently discern reliable from unreliable sources, fact from fiction, genuine authority from charlatanism, feline ecology from lolcats. Where once scholarship meant perseverance and a dedication to tracking down otherwise inaccessible information, an increasingly vital skill in modern scholarship is a well-tuned bullshit detector.

A useful distinction to bear in mind here is between message and medium. (Philosophers love distinctions!) Each has its own hype cycle, and they are not always in sync. At the top of each cycle is the peak of inflated expectations. It is at this point in the cycle of new media technologies that we hear grand transformational claims, such as the view that virtual reality will end inequality, that the internet will kill traditional publishers and bookshops, that social networking will scupper academic peer-review, or that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will turn University campuses into ghost towns. After a tough period of disillusionment when initial enthusiasts and investors come to terms with the failure of their over-inflated expectations, the cycle reaches a plateau of productivity where the new medium is embraced by an increasingly significant portion of the population who see genuine usefulness beyond the hype.

Though the cycle repeats with each new medium – from telephones to Twitter – it is not futile. For what is gained through each iteration is a deeper understanding of the phenomenon which the technology was due to replace. So, for example, we learn something about the true (and changing) value of publishers, bookshops, peer-review and universities by understanding that they cannot be wholly replaced by new technologies. A strong theme running through these particular values is the notion of a discerning eye. With so many pieces of information, opinions and lolcats out there, we would simply be lost if we did not have some way of filtering reliable from unreliable research, scientific from wishful thinking, well-reasoned interpretations from self-serving propaganda.

This is not to say, of course, that the best way to navigate modern media seas is by blind deference to authority. All authorities are fallible (with the notable exception of OUP, of course). Far more important is the ability to critically evaluate pedigree for oneself. This is where universities can come in. My own engagement with MOOCs (through the Open University’s FutureLearn platform) has taught me that while large online courses are fantastic at bringing together a diverse range of students, they work best when those students are encouraged to engage critically with the ideas and experience they and others bring to the community. Inculcating and refining these skills is something that smaller scale teaching and face-to-face education are, im my experience, uniquely placed to do. So while everyone being on Twitter might not mean that everyone has interesting things to say, the resulting flood of information and opinion does mean that educators still have interesting things to do.

Featured image: Mobile Phone by geralt. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Remembering H.D. on her 130th birth anniversary

American-born, British citizen by an ill-fated marriage, the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) was wary of nationalism, which she viewed as leading inevitably to either war or imperialism. Admittedly, she felt—as she wrote of one of her characters—“torn between anglo-philia and anglo-phobia,” and like all prominent modernists of her day, her views were probably not as enlightened as ours. But, except in times of war, she was decidedly unpatriotic and disdainful of provincialism, and her work on a 1930 avant-garde film, Borderline, decrying racial violence and prejudice in America is evidence of an unusual open-mindedness. While loyal to the “beleaguered rock” of England under siege during World War II, she referred variously in her lifetime to at least half a dozen nations as home. She felt deep connections to particular regions of the world: the United States of her youth; the Moravia of her ancestors; Greece, so often the setting and subject of her poetry; Switzerland, where she spent her final decades; and her adopted English homeland. I can’t imagine that she would have been terribly pleased about Brexit. For H.D., boundaries between countries should be fluid, the citizens of the world happily nomadic. In a letter to the poet May Sarton, she once suggested—only half-jokingly—that a more peaceful world might be accomplished by redrawing national borders to accommodate personality types, rather than geographical, ethnic, or linguistic commonalities.

It was in part this expansive vision that first drew me to H.D.’s work, in Randy Malamud’s modern poetry seminar in my second term of an M.A. program. Here was an extraordinarily well-traveled woman—she even viewed King Tutankhamun’s tomb when it opened to visitors in 1923—who was a self-taught scholar of the histories, mythologies, cultures, and languages of the world, ancient and contemporary. Having reinvented English verse—with fellow Imagists Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington—H.D. went on to write the “crystalline” lyric poetry for which she is best known, ambitious epic poems, autobiographical fiction and memoirs, and experimental historical novels; she translated drama and poetry from ancient Greek, and briefly worked as an actor and filmmaker. She knew such modernist luminaries as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence; hung out with Natalie Barney’s Parisian salon and in Berlin cafés with avant-garde artists G. W. Pabst and Hans Sachs; maintained significant friendships with Havelock Ellis, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Pound; and was twice an analysand of Sigmund Freud’s. She was bisexual, enjoying relationships with men and women throughout her life, married for two decades to Aldington and committed to a lifelong companionship with Winifred “Bryher” Ellerman, a writer and a wealthy patron of the arts. Her extensive library and correspondence reveal an intense intellectual curiosity about anything and everything, from Byzantine trade routes to astrological charts to Shakespeare’s comedies, from military strategy to fairy tales to Northern Buddhism. She especially loved reading travelogues and life-writing, and she painstakingly learned ancient Greek, French, Italian, and German in order to read her favorite writers—among them, Euripides, Sappho, Dante, Herman Hesse—in their native languages.

She imagined worlds in which women, not men, were the questers, the seekers of knowledge. She plumbed ancient worlds for salves and antidotes to contemporary global issues.

You might be surprised to learn, then, that H.D. was born 130 years ago today in the small, tight-knit, devout Moravian community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where her grandfather directed the Moravian Seminary, her uncle played the organ for Central Church, and her mother taught music and painting to seminary students. H.D. spent her childhood attending Lovefeasts and Christmas Eve candlelight services. Nineteenth-century Moravianism, however, sowed the seeds of H.D.’s nascent cosmopolitanism. She was fascinated with the history of the persecuted pre-Reformation sect that had isolated her, in a sense, from other Americans. She traced her family’s roots to Eastern Europe and learned a mystical tradition that defied the orthodoxies of most mainstream Protestantism in its conception of sex as sacrament and its acceptance of the validity of ecstatic encounters with deity. Though she spent her lifetime studying numerous ancient and modern religions, as well as a fair number of occult and spiritualist traditions, she returned again and again to Moravian traditions and rituals as a model for spiritual belief and practice. In her later years, she characterized it as a path to “world-unity without war.”

So today we celebrate the birthday of a modernist writer and thinker who spent her life and career challenging the status quo. Her early poems of Sea Garden privileged the flowers “[m]arred and with stint of petals… thin, sparse of leaf” over the meticulously manicured roses of a “sheltered garden.” She composed verse in the voices of female deities maligned and forgotten. She penned memoirs about her bisexual desires, and her struggle to be read as a woman writer. She imagined worlds in which women, not men, were the questers, the seekers of knowledge. She plumbed ancient worlds for salves and antidotes to contemporary global issues. Her epitaph aptly remembers her as “one who died / following intricate song’s / lost measure.”

Quotations above are from H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea, The Mystery, and Collected Poems, and appear by permission of Declan Spring, for the H.D. Estate.

Featured image credit: Hydrangea flowers dead in winter by Charro Badger. CC-BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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