Oxford University Press's Blog, page 478

The Devil’s best tunes

It’s been said that the Devil has all the best tunes. If this is true, he likes to keep a conspicuously low profile. While songs of praise for Jesus, God, Krishna, Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and a host of other deities, saints, and semi-deities abound, Satan is seldom properly hymned. If he is mentioned at all in the world’s songbook, it is mostly unfavourable. Here are ten exceptions the Devil might actually like to hear.

1. The Rolling Stones – “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

“Please allow me to introduce myself…” Okay, you probably expected this one. The nasally sung Stones classic is probably the most well-known pop song featuring Satan and it initiated a boom of dark-themed popular music. It was inspired by the Russian novel, The Master and Margarita (1931-1940/1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov, a rewriting of Faust that satirized the Russian communist society in the decade after the October Revolution. Bulgakov was of course inspired by the magnificent German magnum opus, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in turn based his text on traditional Faust folklore dating back to the sixteenth century.

2. Eartha Kitt – “I Want to Be Evil” (1953)

The Rolling Stones were far from being the first to speak softly of the prince of darkness. In this beautiful song by Eartha Kitt, she unambiguously expresses her wish to “go to the Devil.” “I wanna be evil/ I wanna see some dissipation in my face…” Kitt’s song rings with passion about the desperation that “being good” can bring.

3. Golden Earring – “When The Lady Smiles” (1984)

At first glance, this song from Dutch rock band Golden Earring is just about a dangerously seductive and capricious lady (modern music about diabolically seductive men is much more rare). However, lines like “she’s the beast inside your paradise/the fallen angel that keeps you hypnotized” suggest that this lady is none other than the Devil herself. As such, the song can be placed in a long list of popular music describing feminine danger in demonic terms. There’s Elvis Presley’s Devil in Disguise, Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman, The Beatles’ Devil in Her Heart, Bobby Vee’s Devil or Angel, Mitch Ryder’s Devil With The Blue Dress On, to mention only some of the most prominent examples. Unlike these other songs, The Golden Earring does not seem to mind being led to perdition. “Ooh/And I love it/Yeah, I love it/She’s done nothing to mislead me.”

4. DJ Lobsterdust – “Queen vs. Satan ft. Pastor Gary G. – It’s Fun to Smoke Dust“ (2008)

In the more extreme recesses of charismatic and evangelic Christianity, preachers have frequently condemned all pop music as demonically inspired, if not the product of a secret Satanist conspiracy dating back to the druids. Some of them have gone so far as to organise collective record burnings in which many a priceless collector’s item must have perished. This mix by DJ Lobsterdust features Queen, backward masking, and Devil’s Flower, alongside genuine clippings from pastor Gary Greenwald’s almost endearingly clumsy anti-pop preaching.

5. Robert Johnson – “Me And The Devil Blues” (1937)

The controversy between restrictive religion and sin-loving popular music has deep roots, as far back as blues music. While blues was often called “the Devil’s music” by the religious establishment, there were whispered rumours about a much more direct contact between some blues players and their “dark lord.” Delta Blues legend Robert Johnson, in particular, was said to have acquired his prowess at guitar picking by selling his soul to Satan at the crossroads (for some cultural background into these allegations, I refer to this interesting site). Meanwhile, Johnson did indeed record this obscure track, in which he proclaims that he and the Devil are “walking side by side” and requests to be buried by the highway side, “so my old evil spirit/can get a greyhound bus and ride.”

6. Anton Szandor LaVey – “Answer Me” (1993)

In itself, this is probably the least satanic track in this playlist, but its performer, Anton Szandor LaVey, was the most outspoken and most notorious apostle of Satan in the twentieth century. On his life before founding the Church of Satan in 1966, LaVey liked to spun wild tales, but he did actually work as a professional and semi-professional musician in the carnival circuit. Answer Me was originally composed in 1953 by the German songwriter Gerhard Winkler under the honey-sweet title, Mütterlein [“Mama Dear”]. In the same year, the song was translated by Carl Sigman and made it to the English hit charts in no less than two performances – one by Frankie Laine and one by David Whitfield. While one may debate the musical merits of LaVey’s cover, his raw singing strikes one as eerily sincere.

7. Devilman theme (1983)

Devilman was a Japanese manga anime series from the 1970s which told the tale of a teenage boy who masters a powerful demon who tries to posses him. He then becomes a hybrid between a human and a demon. The original manga ended with an apocalyptic victory of Satan reminding of Anatole France’s 1914 masterpiece Fin de Satan; Go Nagai, who drew the manga, later claimed he had intended Devilman to be an anti-war piece. This is the theme song from the Italian version of the Japanese anime broadcasted in the early 1980s – remarkable fare for the children’s hour, to say the least. Don’t forget to notice the cute boy soprano singing about world domination…

8. Black Widow – “Come to the Sabbat” (1970)

After the Rolling Stones paved the way, rock music came to feature an increasing number of frontmen shocking or titillating their audiences with increasingly extreme evocations of the macabre, the occult, or the monstrous, accompanied by increasingly loud electric guitars. Out of this grew the subgenre of Heavy Metal and its many sub-subgenres, such as Dead Metal, Black Metal, and Industrial. Satan was and still is frequently mentioned in this music. While he was first used as a prop for shock value onstage, some musicians and audiences took him more seriously, resulting in Scandinavian Satanist Black Metal extremists burning down priceless medieval churches and embarking on murder and similar mayhem. Its most enduring legacy, however, may be the thousands of people making the Sign of the Horns at pop concerts and festivals today as a gesture of defiance and general coolness. While it is hard to point down a particular song initiating or representing this entire musical sub-stream, Black Widow’s Come To The Sabbat may be as good as any, with its hauntingly inviting refrain, “Come…Come… come to the Sabbat/Satan is there.”

9. D-Devils – “Fight And Dance With The Devil” (2001)

Metal has no monopoly on the Devil in contemporary music: techno, house, and dance too have their own infernal undercurrents. This can hardly be better exemplified than with the techno classic Fight And Dance With The Devil. While metal subcultures like to revel in Gothic lettering and medieval weaponry, here, the demonic presence is suggested musically by a synthesizer pouring out medieval-style bagpipe music. Although the track does not expressively praise Satan, this music sure is perfect for devilish dancing. (Please note: This track should not be confused with the rap song released by Immortal Technique in the same year, and certainly not with the instrumental hit by Cozy Powell from 1973.)

10. Léo Ferré – “Thank You Satan” (1961)

My personal favourite. I like to end this list with a song expressing genuine gratitude to Satan – and none could be more poetic and ironic than this Baudelairian French chanson. Ferré thanks Satan for erotic mischief, for love, for political anarchism, for children, for cheap wine, for inflammatory poetry, for the taking of the Bastille, “even though that did not help a bit,” and, finally, for never appearing on television. If you’d like  you can read the complete lyrics.

Featured image credit: “I was walking among the fires of Hell…” by gags9999. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr. 

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Sartor resartus, or some thoughts on the origin of the word “cloth” and the history of clothes

I keep clawing at the bars of the cage I built for myself. But first a digression. Walter W. Skeat wrote numerous notes on English etymology, some of which he eventually put together and published in book form. Much to my regret, not too many kl-words attracted his attention. But I was amused to discover that the verb clop means not only the sound made by shoes or hoofs but also “to cling, adhere to.” Clop is a variant of clap, a sound imitative word like click—clack—cluck, but its homonym (“to cling”) illustrates the point I have recently made in this series, namely that kl-words may exchange hostages. My example was the English verb cling “to adhere to” versus German klingen “to ring.”

Clop-clop-clop                                        Clap-clap-clap

Skeat also devoted some space to clove, the troublesome noun touched upon not long ago. He suggested the Italian origin of clove, the English form being “a compromise between the F. clou and the Ital. chiovo.” In my essay, I said that Skeat had refrained from explaining why he felt unimpressed by the etymology of clove in Murray’s OED. Perhaps he thought that his note would satisfy the curious. He was mistaken. Someone interested in word origins has no time for opening the countless books and articles in which something may be said about this or that item (nor is the desired bibliography available even to specialists).

Several Old English names for the articles of clothing are still extant, even if with modified meanings: (ge)wæd (long æ; now only in widow’s weeds, which few people recognize; by contrast, German Gewand is common); rēaf “the garment, etc. taken as booty,” but the plural often meant “clothes”; hrægl (rail continued into Early Modern English), and scrūd (now shroud; shred is related to it), to mention the most frequent ones. A common Old English word for “clothes” was hæteru (long æ, neuter plural; the singular form has not been recorded). Its continuation hater stayed in the language until the Middle period and is still current in some regions; one of its Indo-European cognates means “covering,” a circumstance not to be lost sight of.

These are not widow’s weeds!                              These are indeed widow’s weeds.

A look at the modern language reveals the same ingenuity in naming or borrowing words for the things we wear. Consider dress (“something put right”; French), apparel (“something prepared”; French), attire (“equipment”; French), garment (“something garnished”; French), raiment (“something arrayed”; French), not to mention duds, togs, and their likes. Old English clāð (ð = th in Modern English this) meant “cloth,” that is, the fabric from which clothes were made, rather than “attire,” but its plural, as was the case with rēaf, designated “clothes.” The etymology of cloth should probably take us to the material used for making clothes rather than to some object meant for wear.

Do only clothes make the man?

The general contours of the story of cloth will be familiar to those who have followed this series. Again a West Germanic kl-word with an uncertain Scandinavian cognate, and again a somewhat dubious sticky denouement. The Dutch and German for “cloth” are kleed and Kleid respectively. The phonetic match is perfect. In older German, kleit “Kleid” appeared late and made its way southward rather slowly. In some modern dialects it is still a foreign word; in Swabia, a congener of hæteru is current. Even in Old English, clāð is absent from many texts. Consequently, we cannot know how ancient this word is and how far we have to look for its cognates. Words for “clothes” travel easily across borders, and in the Middle Ages borders were especially porous. For instance, Gothic used a Greek loanword for at least one article of clothes, namely paida. Our main Gothic text is a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek. The noun occurs in Matthew V: 40, where English has “And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.” Cloke (the spelling of the King James Bible), that is, cloak is the gloss for Greek chiton “tunic,” an outer garment. A past participle having the same root also turned up in Ephesians VI: 14 (English: “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness…”: girt about, that is, “clad”). The Greek word was baítē, and it meant “goatskin; (leather) coat,” but, characteristically, the noun and the participle the translator into Gothic saw in the Greek text had nothing to do with baítē. Paida was probably an everyday word, for it spread from the Goths to Old English (pād “coat”) and German, and from Germanic to Finnish (paita). Cloth is native, but this does not exclude the possibility that we are dealing with a coinage of Indo-European antiquity. The same point has been made with respect to some other kl-words.

Attempts to discover the origin of cloth began, as usual in such cases, with several random shots. Medieval Latin c(h)lēda “hurdle,” Slavic klet– “barn” (because clothes cover a body and are like home), Celtic klet “warm,” and Latin claudere “to close” have been mentioned. Those are idle fantasies. Other, even wilder, fantasies will, as always, be disregarded. The famous Germanic scholar Sophus Bugge believed that clothes were first and foremost things thrown over the body (and he cited a relevant example from Old Icelandic), but his derivation of cloth from the same root as Greek bállō “I throw” (not quite impossible from the phonetic point of view) made no stir. As is known, many words of Indo-European that begin with sk-, st-, sp-, sl-, sm-, sn-, and sw– can have doublets without initial s, the sound that was therefore called s mobile. It is not improbable that some cognates of cloth (assuming that such cognates exist) begin with sk-. If we assume that cloth is related to Greek chlōthō “I spin” and add s– to it, the semantic match will be tolerably good. But, since a Greek word with initial s- has not been attested, this reconstruction joined the graveyard at which all the previous ones are buried.

The one and only breakthrough happened in 1891, when A. Erdmann brought out a booklet on cloth and felt. In his opinion, cloth has the root one sees in Greek gloiós “sticky,” the very root discussed last week in the post on clean. In Erdmann’s reconstruction, cloth emerged as “something pressed together” (with reference to fulling)—a fabric of course, not a garment. I am not aware of any criticism of this etymology, except that Bugge offered his own derivation and pointed out that Old Icelandic klæði was thrown over the body. But of course, clothes are made of cloth, so that Bugge’s objection does not go too far. The modern dictionaries that are not entirely noncommittal and don’t send us away with the foolproof formula “origin unknown” offer the etymologies of cloth resembling Erdmann’s.

As to the Icelandic look-alike, it too has been the object of involved speculation. The discussion centered on the question: native or borrowed from West Germanic? Sifting the arguments for and against each of the two solutions, with a long digression on Saami, would distract us from our topic. Suffice it to say that at present most philologists look upon klæði as a borrowing from Old Frisian. Oh yes, one more thing: clothed and clad owe their difference to phonetics.

If Erdmann was right, cloth will find a place in the perennial papers of the great and famous sticky club and join cleave, clover, clean, and other honorable and honorary members.

Image credits: (1) “Grey horse” by Yellowhorse. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. (2) “Applause” by niekverlaan. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. (3) “Joyce and her ‘shears’…wild woman!” by Larry Jacobsen. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. (4) “Woman in mourning” by Bertha Wegmann (1846-1926). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. (5) “Skeletons” by Clker-Free-Vector-Images. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

Featured image credit: “Cloth” by lukibrasil123. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

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Let’s tank tanking

“Tanking,” or deliberately trying to lose an athletic contest to gain a future competitive advantage, such as earning higher draft pick of prospective players, became the talk of the town or at least of many fans, in many US cities saddled with losing teams in such sports as hockey, basketball, and baseball. If actually practiced, however, tanking would exploit spectator, players, and coaches alike.

While teams that tank do so secretly, examples of the practice have all too frequently come to light. For example, two girls’ high school basketball teams from Tennessee were disqualified last year from the post-season playoffs for each trying to lose a game against each other in order to draw a weaker opponent in post-season play. Instances can be found in professional sports as well. Badminton players from China, Indonesia, and South Korea were disqualified from the 2012 London Olympics for trying to lose matches so as to obtain a better future seed. Similarly, the 2005-06 Timberwolves of the NBA were plausibly accused of tanking their last game so as not to lose a high draft pick to a team with an even worse record.

The notion of tanking isn’t limited just to athletes and coaches, however, as all too many fans of losing professional teams are constantly urging their teams to purposely lose games in order to gain an advantage in the draft of new players. In fact, chatter about tanking – the unintended consequence of the draft system in many professional sports leagues, including the NBA, NFL, and WNBA – was prevalent on-line last season among fans of some losing NBA and NHL teams.

While these “fans” might not question whether it’s unethical for professional teams to tank, they should. They are guilty of using the present team members as mere tools for the advantage of next year’s team. Everyone involved – fans as well as players and coaches – are exploited in these schemes.

Losing on purpose cheats fans who attend sporting events believing they will see an actual game. Think of two teams playing each other, each trying to lose on purpose, presumably without being detected. Would anyone pay to see such an anti-game if they actually knew what was going on? How does presenting an event as a contest when it is no such thing differ from false advertising or knowingly presenting consumers with a defective product?

2012 Olympics Korea by Tom Page. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps more important, if tanking became a regular practice, how could anyone tell that what was being played was a true contest rather than a counterfeit? The very integrity of the sport would be called into question.

Some might argue that professional sports teams are businesses. If intentionally losing a few games now leads to much greater success in the future, why not do it? Isn’t the goal of running a business to make a profit?

While it is true that professional sports are big businesses, businesses have moral obligations other than simply making a profit. They have moral obligations to provide safe working conditions for their employees, to refrain from knowingly selling defective products, and to not engage in false advertising. The idea of intentionally losing calls all of these moral obligations into question. Thus, trading players in order to make room to pay better players more in the future is a legitimate way of building for the future. But would it be legitimate if a team were to deliberately limit playing time of its best players simply in order to insure losses?

Teams at elite levels of play may well ignore this incentive and try to win. Players and coaches have strong incentives not to appear inept which would lower their market value, and as a consequence never actually tank. Fans, however, may suspect otherwise, and all too often root for their teams to lose. The integrity of the game is then called into question.

Tanking, and those who call for it, threatens the very idea of a true competition in sport. Those who call for their teams to tank need to understand that even the appearance of tanking can threaten the integrity of competition. It undermines what is perhaps the central value underlying athletic competition, the tacit agreement among competitors to actually test one another to see who best meets the challenge of their sport.

Featured image credit: João Havelange Olympic Stadium – Rio de Janeiro – Brazil. Photo by Dodoedo. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Is globalization the problem?

Populist angst and anger is running through the United States presidential campaign, but also through the Brexit debates, directed at the political establishment, and also at globalization (with the European Union standing in for the latter in the UK context). This anger has taken policy elites by surprise, throwing wrenches into the works of carefully planned political campaigns by mainstream Republican, Democratic, Conservative, and Labour parties on either side of the Atlantic. Post-Brexit, European elites fear that this grassroots oppositional and anti-establishment politics also is diffusing across Europe (as resistance to free trade did in the 1860s).

Mainstream political and economic elites are quick to condemn these inconvenient voters for their inappropriate ‘implicit bias’—racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and untrammeled nationalism, and certain mass media for effectively stirring up these bad attitudes. Missing from these characterizations, however, is the impact of ‘bad latitudes’: Geography.

There is generic dissatisfaction, stemming from wage and employment stagnation, exploding income inequality, and post-democratic frustration with average voters’ political helplessness (relative to well-funded lobbyists, supranational institutions, and organizations). But there also is a particularity to those seeking to reassert their national identity against globalization. Socio-culturally, they are older, whiter, and more working class. Geographically, they reside in cities and counties characterized by deindustrialization and economic stagnation since the 1980s. These are the very places that experienced prosperity during the Fordist heydays of the 1950s-70s, a prosperity that Donald Trump and the Brexiteers disingenuously pledge a return to.

Labeling the problem as globalization misdirects populist anger, however. Globalization—creating a more interconnected and seemingly smaller world—has taken multiple forms since humans first trekked beyond the continent we now call Africa. When Marx and Engels called upon workers of the world to unite, they had a very different modality of globalization in mind than the currently hegemonic form. Geopolitically, the Cold War was a clash of contrasting global imaginaries, communism and capitalism, each seeking to influence those imagining a third way—the third world as articulated at the 1955 Bandung conference of newly independent nations. The currently hegemonic form is capitalist globalization, which is where the problem lies. Notwithstanding taken-for-granted claims that globalizing capitalism is capable of eliminating poverty while achieving socio-ecological sustainability, its internal logic countermands such claims. The logic of globalizing capitalism in the real world (unlike the artificial worlds of mainstream economic theory) is such that it continually reinvents its own geographies—spatial divisions of economic activity and asymmetric connectivities between places. These geographies reproduce socio-spatial inequality and undermine sustainability: Wealth and sustainable environments accrue in certain places and peoples at the expense of impoverishment and unsustainability elsewhere.

Dollar by MoneyBlogNewz. CC-BY- 2.0 via Flickr.

Globalizing capitalism dates back to the 15th century when, critically enabled by slavery and colonialism, northwestern Europe began to elevate itself from its backwater status (relative to prosperous and sophisticated south and east Asian societies), emerging as the workshop of the world. Contrary to those who credited Europe’s success to being a special kind of place, this success was based on bucking what are now seen as the rules of capitalist globalization (free trade, limited government intervention, free labor) in order to engineer asymmetric connectivities with the rest of the world. Colonialism and slavery brought prosperity to Europe, but depopulation, resource depletion, and deindustrialization to much of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

It was believed that this would change with the end of European colonialism. Newly sovereign countries, taking responsibility for their success within global capitalist markets, should now be able to participate equally on the world’s stage. But this was not to be. The inequalities created under colonialism proved resilient; less a failure of political will than of economic logic. Asymmetric connectivities favoring the first over the third world persisted, with the latter countries continuing their colonial role as providers of raw materials for the first world. Anger at these inequalizing processes stemmed from the third world and was directed at the first, through such initiatives as the Group of 77 seeking to renegotiate global terms of trade, but to little avail. Persistent impoverishment and economic stagnation in the third world underwrote Fordist prosperity in first world industrial regions, whose residents could regard globalization with equanimity.

This particular uneven geography began to unravel in the mid-1970s, as first world Fordism entered its terminal crisis. Manufacturing began to relocate elsewhere, bringing limited prosperity to selected peripheral regions and former third world countries, at the expense of economic crisis and unemployment for unionized workers in first world industrial regions. The dominant logic of globalizing capitalism also shifted, from state-led to neoliberal (most recently, finance-dominated) globalization, undermining organized labour, middle class purchasing power, and welfare-state safety nets in the first world.

Combined with China’s rise, this is visiting seemingly permanent economic stagnation and job shortages on first world people and places who believed that their past prosperity was attributable to working hard, rather than to unequal connectivities enabling them to benefit from impoverishment elsewhere. Little wonder, then, that they feel alienated by new geographies of globalizing capitalism that now disadvantage them. Yet those frustrated by the current geographical turn of capitalist globalization would be better advised to direct their anger against globalizing capitalism—a system inherently incapable of delivering on its promise of prosperity for all people and places conforming to its logic—not globalization.

Featured image credit: Globe by Luke Price. CC-BY- 2.0 via Flickr.

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Revisiting the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial

If you were accused of a crime that you did not commit, how confident are you that you would be found innocent? And what injuries and injustices could you endure before your innocence was finally proven?

I think about these questions often, after having devoted nearly a decade to studying the People v. Zammora, more popularly known as the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. How was it possible that 17 young men were found guilty of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, or assault with a deadly weapon, when the forensic evidence could not connect the accused to the crime, and the state could never produce a confession, an eye witness, a murder weapon, or even a motive. The accused young men did not even know who the murder victim was. And yet, after three months of trial, a jury of men and women – all white – found the defendants guilty of some role in José Diaz’s death.

How could this happen?

The progressive activists who worked to reverse the convictions of the Sleepy Lagoon boys blamed an “anti-Mexican” tone taken by the Hearst-owned newspapers that poisoned the social climate. A host of scholars since then have run with that thesis, although, I think, uncritically so. The Hearst newspapers were not the major news outlet in Los Angeles, nor were they the only newspapers in circulation. And the period was, after all, already profoundly shaped by segregationist laws underwritten by deeply embedded ideas about race and rights. So I’m not sure what “anti-Mexican” would have looked like within this particular context. Either way, the claim that both a grand jury and a trial jury reached a guilty verdict solely because of the Hearst newspapers should require some kind of evidence beyond the charge. This is something that the activists never produced, nor can such evidence be found in sifting through the historical record now.

Something else had to be at work.

Unfortunately, the jurors were never interviewed, so it is difficult to know what they found compelling in the state’s case. However, there are indications that a number of factors played against the accused.

As I dug deeper into the historical record, it became clear to me that one of the greatest injustices in the trail began even before the proceedings got underway. Some of the boys had a public defender assigned to them, but others hired whom they could afford. The seven attorneys who gathered around the defense table varied greatly in courtroom experience, and they never managed to see themselves as a team, or that they were involved in a collective cause. Each worked individually for their respective clients, and in doing so, openly clashed with each other in court over their different objectives.

George Shibley was perhaps the sole exception among the defense attorneys. He was an instinctive fighter, and he could be relentless in pursuit of his cause. As a result, he laid down a pattern of objections to the procedure that an appeals lawyer was able to later successfully build upon, but Shibley’s doing so also came at great a price. In reading the trial transcript decades later, the judge’s animosity towards Shibley is still palpable. The judge grew increasingly irritated at Shibley’s constant objections, to the point where he began to openly belittle Shibley during the trial and even threatened to have him thrown out of the courtroom. The jury took all of this in.

Even something as simple as how to seat seven defense attorneys and 22 defendants came into play. While the attorneys crowded around the defense table, the trial judge thought it practical to seat the defendants together on benches opposite the jury. Some of the defense attorneys objected that their clients were being denied access to representation with this arrangement, but the judge ruled against them by pointing out that the defendants could confer with their attorneys during recess and before and after the trial was in session.

It probably didn’t help, either, that the accused young men were openly flippant, if not irreverent, during the three-month proceeding. They either did not fully grasp the seriousness of the charge, or they were tremendously confident of their innocence. Either way, they giggled, poked each other, rolled their eyes, and some even took to imitating some of their own attorneys behind their back, all within full view of the jury. None of this constitutes culpability, but again, the jury took it all in. By the time the trial approached its conclusion, the contempt that jury members had for the accused was clearly manifest in their faces.

Zoot suits were a type of clothing popular among African Americans and Mexican Americans during the 1940s. They were used as a status symbol in the case when the defendants were not allowed to change their clothing during the trial. Five men in modernized zoot suits by Aaron F. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

What was most egregious to me as I poured through the trial transcript, however, was that not one of the attorneys appears to have critically examined the evidence of the case. The Appellate Court later ruled that much of the evidence introduced by the state was inadmissible, such as statements made after arrest without an attorney present that were used to incriminate co-defendants. But not one of the defense attorneys ever raised an objection about this evidence. In fact, at no point did anyone of the defense ever produce a simple timeline of events that would have clearly shown that the accused were not present at the time that José Diaz received his mortal wounds, and although they arrived on scene later, only one of them seems to have seen him as he lay dying. Not one attorney ever raised the issue that the state, in lacking a confession, eye witnesses, or incriminating forensic evidence, failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

After two years dedicated work, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, comprised of a mix of celebrities and progressive activists, succeeded in getting the case heard on appeal. In noting that the state put its full weight in protecting the rights and liberties of José Diaz, as well as the Mexican American families who had been attacked by the defendants, the Appellate Court rejected the charge that racism played a role in the prosecution of the case. However, the court agreed that the judge undermined the integrity of the defense in belittling Shibley in front of the jury. In reviewing the evidence, the court also sympathized that the jury, “lacking legal training and experience, found it extremely difficult to keep before them the admissible, as distinguished from the inadmissible evidence in a trial which lasted for 13 weeks, involved 22 defendants and 66 separate charges”. Perhaps most importantly, the court found that the judge’s decision to seat the defendants away from their attorneys effectively denied them adequate representation, and ultimately, due process. The court reversed the conviction and ordered the boys released from prison.

The success of the case on appeal was hailed as a victory for justice, and the People v Zammora is now a landmark case in California law protecting the rights of the accused. I would not disagree with any of this. But I have to wonder, still, at what cost was justice served in this case? Would I be comfortable with a legal process that took up to two years to conclude, all the while waiting behind bars? The precarious balance of justice in this case still frightens me. Were it not for the dedication of a handful of committed volunteers, I don’t know that the decision would have ever been reversed, and some of the boys could easily have spent the rest of their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit.

Featured image credit: Judge Gavel by George Hodan. CC0 1.0 via Public Domain Pictures.

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Child labour in India: an uncertain future?

India is known to have the largest number of child labourers in the world. Consequently, it has come under intense media and political scrutiny both within India and from afar. Traditional understandings of the causes of child labour have focused on the economic, social-cultural, and historical milieus specific to India, such as caste, class, corruption, gender, illiteracy, lack of law enforcement, political apathy, poverty, religion, etc. Whilst these are undoubtedly useful but also problematic considerations, so are child labour and children’s rights within the broader context of neoliberal globalisation and the interplay between international, national, and local discourses.

The argument I present is seemingly straightforward: that it is short-sighted just to look at India in isolation when examining the issue of child labour. Rather, broader global processes at play within and outwith India complicate the issue, some of which are India’s own making and others that are not. It was the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1991 that liberalised India’s economy and opened it up to global forces associated with neoliberal globalisation. The ‘liberalisation’ of India continues to have profound implications for its people; whilst it created new winners and losers in India’s political economy, rather ironically, it simultaneously crystallised traditional (illiberal) relations and structures of power, notably caste, class, gender, and religion.  So what does the future hold for child labour in India? What possible scenarios may impact on how child labour is seen and understood?

India remains wedded to neoliberal globalisation. This has had profound implications for all sections of Indian society

First, India remains wedded to neoliberal globalisation. This has had profound implications for all sections of Indian society, regardless of whether they are willing participants or not. The fruits of globalisation have been resoundingly unequal.  Despite the occasional news headlines of ‘Dalit billionaires’, for the majority of the poor there has been little or no qualitative improvement in their lives, rather many have found themselves pushed further to the margins of society and precariousness, whilst the much lauded and written about middle-classes and elites delight in their relatively recent newfound global status and material wealth, particularly as consumers.

Second, notwithstanding the rhetoric of building an inclusive India with promises of development and employment for adults, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP continue to push ahead with a vision of India that reproduces caste hierarchies and sustains the hegemony of those located higher in the Hindu social order that legitimises exploitative practices, such as child labour. Importantly, Dalits have become further marginalised and violence towards them continues with impunity. Child labour, as a form of structural violence, is part of the broader matrices of discrimination and violence encountered by Dalits that are instantiated by the caste complex.

Third, the answer to overcoming many of these culturally sanctioned systemic inequalities is the implementation of meaningful education that is truly transformative. For the reasons given, in the short term this proposition is pretty unlikely. However, in the long term, there may come a time when India’s quest to become a global economic and political superpower may depend on a far larger educated population. Therefore, it may be in the long-term interest of those classes and castes that currently dominate Indian society to loosen their grip over the control of education, which remains a key site of power and exclusion.

Child searching street in India, by PDPics. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

Fourth, social movements and NGOs working for human rights increasingly encounter greater threats to human rights and the structures that protect them. Since the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks (2001), the subsequent ‘war on terror’, the recent rise of so-called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), and various insurgences taking place in various countries (including India), governments have increasingly diverted already scare resources from social and welfare services to securitised programmes with the aim of tackling extremism (although the two are intimately linked). Indeed, governments around the globe have used the real or perceived threat of terrorism to implement draconian security measures that trump civil liberties and human rights. Such measures have been used to silence social movements, NGOs, and political opponents that seek to hold the state to account or call into question the legitimacy of its power. Consequently, issues such as child labour, the right to education, the right to welfare, poverty, discrimination etc., simply fall to the wayside. Put simply, they are deemed unimportant and irrelevant to those in power. This makes the work of civil society even more urgent despite coming under greater scrutiny and facing decreasing funding.

Fifth, there is growing apathy in the North towards the South. There is a growing perception that all the government aid packages and charity from the North simply haven’t placated the ‘savages’ of the South. Indeed, there is also a perception that the elites in the North are not dealing with the needs of the marginalised in their own countries. The conflation of issues such as poverty, disease, exploitation, refugees, asylum seekers, radicalization, terrorism, conflict, and human rights abuses in the South has meant that both interest and people’s moral compass in the North is waning in terms of the South. In the media, the South is the ‘Other’ which is represented as ‘out of control’, more ‘dangerous’, and more ‘uncivilized’ than ever before. Child labour in India is seen to be indicative of deficiencies within Indian society and ‘not the West’s problem’. As a result, campaigns and calls for public support in the fight for children’s rights in the South are ebbing in the face of public consternation.

Related, sixth, in some respects, India’s economic success has also been its undoing in terms of how it is seen from afar. As the world looks on at India’s economic success and the emergence of wealthy social groups whose lives are replete with all the status symbols associated with wealth in the North, there is growing apathy in the North about whether governments should send aid packages to India to address such issues as child labour, discrimination education, poverty, etc. The example of the Indian government’s investment in a space programme is often held up as evidence that aid to India is not necessary. This is especially the case when many of the countries in the North have also encountered an economic recession and stagnating economic growth. This comes at a time when there is growing nationalist sentiments in countries such as the UK, which recently elected to leave the European Union.

Finally, the issue of child labour in India faces new challenges and an uncertain future – India and the world around it have changed so much in a relatively short period of time. The struggle remains to keep the plight of child labourers in the news headlines at a time when terrorism, economic uncertainty, and conflict seem to dominate. Here, civil society social movements and NGOs are absolutely pivotal in keeping in check both the growing power of the state and ever-expanding global capital.

Featured image credit: Crowded market street in India, by PDPics. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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How can history inform public policy today?

As a historian of philanthropy, I have wrestled with how to bring historical perspectives to my own gifts of time and money. I study philanthropists in North America, the British Isles, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The distant past, you might think, and of little concern to our philanthropic practices today. Yet for a while, immersed in the topic, I could not make so much as a modest donation without also considering hundreds of years of charitable developments. An encounter with a homeless person might leave me reflecting on how people in previous centuries defined the “worthy poor,” or those people eligible for aid. Volunteering to help a charity in my neighborhood prompted contemplation of the unintended and harmful consequences of programs in the past. Unsure about how to allow my knowledge of the past to inform my decisions today, I wondered if studying long-ago humanitarians meant I had to eschew charitable activity in my own life.

I approach questions about humanitarianism both with my historian’s mindset and with contemporary concerns. For a time, the two ways of thinking led to intellectual – and moral – paralysis. I eventually realized that the question I had been asking is how can historical perspectives help with decision-making? In my role at the National History Center of the American Historical Association, I think about this question in relation to policy conversations. I believe that understanding the history behind today’s policy challenges can meaningfully inform public decision-making. It was when I sought to apply this belief to my own life that I had to think more carefully about what I meant.

I believe that understanding the history behind today’s policy challenges can meaningfully inform public decision-making.

A reason for my dilemma, I realized, was that I initially considered questions about contemporary philanthropy by making analogies to the past. In the late eighteenth century, doctors played leading roles in the spread of innovative charitable institutions around the Atlantic world thanks to their strong networks. Recognizing doctors’ role and the professional imperatives that shaped it is important for understanding eighteenth-century humanitarianism. Analogizing from it to ask how a novel charitable movement today had spread across the United States, however, proved unhelpful. The contexts are too different for the parallels to be meaningful.

Once I quit trying to draw analogies, I was able to reflect more holistically and found that my exploration of leading American and British philanthropists of the eighteenth century helped me think about where I wanted to make a contribution. The men I study acted both locally and globally. They founded and ran charities in their cities and collaborated with far-flung friends to advance medical charity, anti-poverty efforts, antislavery, prison reform, and other causes around the Atlantic and beyond. They were motivated by sincere concern for the well-being of humanity. In the years after the American Revolution, Americans and Britons also used their correspondence about beneficent projects to feel out their new relationship to one another. Transatlantic philanthropy helped them contribute to transnational conversations. Thinking about that dimension to my subjects’ activities helped me realize that I feel most equipped to participate in local conversations about poverty, gentrification, and inequality. As a result, I have chosen to focus my energies on local organizations.

A historical perspective also helped me become more comfortable with uncertainty about the impact of my time or money. Concerns among today’s philanthropists about effectiveness are nothing new. Managers and supporters of charities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries likewise sought to use their money wisely. Yet potential clients rarely had much say in devising programs meant to serve them. As a result, my subjects sometimes struggled to attract clients or found that their proffered aid did not meet clients’ needs. They also contended with clients who violated charities’ rules (not infrequently abetted by charities’ managers who humanely ignored those rules). Recognizing that charities often were less effective than they claimed publicly could have made me reluctant to support charities today. Instead, the work of historians of poverty helped me understand that in the past charities’ clients have tapped philanthropic resources as one part of their survival strategies. My guess is the same holds true today. People in need may use charitable programs to ease their hardships and gain control over their lives in ways donors may not understand. Knowledge of the history of poverty tells me something that metrics designed to gauge impact do not.

Historical perspectives helped me resolve my own quandary, but so what? Our institutions, our policies, our political choices, and our civic life have roots in the past. Understanding their origins and development over time is essential to candid engagement with contemporary public and policy questions. The ability to bring that knowledge to bear on today’s challenges, I have come to think, depends on asking our leaders and ourselves to reflect not on whether, but how historical perspectives can inform our decisions. The answers will differ by context. The process may clarify problems and priorities.

Featured image credit: Scene illustrating the poverty of the Foy Family, London by J.S. Lettsom, 1801. CC BY 4.0 via Wellcome Library, London.

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Why cooperate?

Birds do it. Bees do it. Microbes do it, and people do it. Throughout nature, organisms cooperate. Humans are undeniably attracted by the idea of cooperation. For thousands of years, we have been seeking explanations for its occurrence in other organisms, often imposing our own motivations and ethics in an effort to explain what we see.

Mutualisms are those cooperative interactions that take place between different species, such as plants and pollinators. Their significance lies much deeper than simply providing material for philosophical ruminations and endless natural history documentaries. Mutualisms occur in every habitat worldwide; indeed, ecologists now believe that every species on Earth is involved in one or more of these interactions. Their influence extends from individual cells to the biosphere as a whole. Mutualisms are key to the reproduction and survival of many plants and animals, and to nutrient cycles in ecosystems. Moreover, the ecosystem services mutualists provide are leading mutualisms to be increasingly considered conservation priorities, just when acute risks to their persistence are appearing.

It is surprising, then, how little we actually know about mutualism. The young field of ecology has historically focused upon “nature red in tooth and claw” rather than on more peaceable interactions. The past decade has seen an outpouring of new research on mutualisms, but many of the biggest questions remain to be answered. Are there properties that mutualists as diverse as pollinating bees, cleaner fish, and the bacteria within our own microbiome share? How do mutualisms arise, persist, and dissolve?

Bumblebees feed on nectar two different ways on flowers of Fumitory (Corydalis caseana) in Colorado, USA. Above, a bee is “cooperating” by feeding through the floral tube using a behavior that results in pollination. Below, a bee is “cheating” by feeding through a hole she has made in the side of the flower. Photo credit: Eran Levin, used with permission.

There is one central mystery about cooperation in nature – indeed, the simplest question of all. Cooperation takes time, energy, and often some investment of resources. So why cooperate? In very general terms, we cooperate in order to be cooperated with – that is, to get something in return that’s hard to obtain in other ways. Consider some human examples. Two students exchange notes from lectures each missed in a course they both attend. Both benefit. Or, one student provides notes for a lecture the other missed, and the other provides a fine home-cooked meal in thanks. Once again, both benefit. It’s just as easy to find examples where these exchanges take place between different species. Flowers produce sugar-rich nectar; bees feed from them, and in the process move pollen, leading the plants to produce seeds. Cleaner fish graze on the parasites clinging to other fish, gaining a meal and in the process improving their partners’ health. While it is nice to think that all cooperation we see in nature is some form of generosity towards others, both evolutionary theory and practical wisdom tells us otherwise. Cooperation is a reciprocal exchange; it is not a unilateral, altruistic act.

The problem here is obvious. Why not cheat? Why shouldn’t a student take a friend’s notes and conveniently fail to provide her own notes (or that nice meal) in return? Someone who cheats this way would, after all, potentially improve her class standing, or save the money and time involved in cooking. When it comes to human cooperation and this so-called “temptation to cheat”, most of us have an instinctive answer. Cheating is great if you can get away with it (and many do). But often, you can’t get away with it. Cheaters are remembered and not cooperated with again, so they lose out. For these reasons, potential cheaters have strong incentives to do the right thing. I am oversimplifying here; a large body of research in biology, psychology, and economics is directed towards understanding this phenomenon. But the general idea is robust: a temptation to cheat (at least with unrelated individuals) always exists, but the threat of retaliation can keep it under check. Of course, it’s easy to find cheating everywhere we look anyway. Despite the threat of retaliation, the temptation to cheat apparently makes it worth the risk.

Does this logic work once we move beyond humans? Humans have long memories. We remember who has cheated, and who has cooperated with us. We can also plan ahead and, for instance, establish a class of individuals who police and punish cheaters. But what about bees? Cleaner fish? The microbes in our gut? Are they tempted to cheat, and if they do so, are they punished?

Photo credit: Eran Levin, used with permission.

This is a hot topic in the study of mutualism. We now have no doubt that cheating is everywhere in nature. I study bees that collect nectar in a way that leads them to pick up and deposit pollen (acting as pollinating mutualists), but that, for some reason, sometimes switch to feeding through a hole they chew through side of the flower, bypassing the pollen entirely (i.e., acting as cheaters). When cleaner fish eat parasites from their hosts, they are mutualists; when, as occurs quite often, they dig a little deeper and start feeding on the host’s own tissues, they definitely are not. Parallel examples are under active study across mutualisms involving plants, animals, and microbial systems.

The unanswered question is whether mutualists are able to keep cheaters under control. Host fish have the cognitive apparatus that allows them to remember individual cleaners who nipped them, and to keep them away if they return for another snack. Retaliation appears to work rather nicely to keep cheating under control in this interaction. Conversely, my plants can’t “remember” a bee that robs its nectar, and withhold that reward if it comes back. In this case, policing seems impossible. One might therefore expect bees to rob all the time – yet they don’t. Why? This is an open question. More generally, we are at a very early stage in trying to explain how mutualisms can persist in the many cases when cheating can’t realistically be punished.

Why study mutualisms, beyond the fact that they make our world more beautiful and more interesting? One mutualism (pollination) is single-handedly responsible for generating much of the world’s food supply. Our own microbiome, made up in part by a complex web of mutualisms, is increasingly believed to be key to human health. Beyond these aesthetic and practical reasons, however, is one consideration that is fundamentally related to the question of cheating. If we can understand when and why other organisms cooperate even in the absence of effective policing, we may gain a better sense of the conditions that promote cooperation in our own species. Surely that would be helpful knowledge at a time when learning how to live peaceably with others seems essential to our survival as a species.

Featured image credit: Sweetlips fish being cleaned by a cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus. Photo by Nhobgood. CC-BY SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Brexit, business, and the role of migration for an ageing UK

John Shropshire used to farm celery just in Poland. Why? Because celery production is labour intensive and Poland had abundant available labour. However, he now also farms in the Fens, Cambridgeshire. Why? Because the EU Single Market gives him access to the labour he needs. Not cheap labour – John pays the living wage to his workers – but available seasonal migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe – 2500 of them. The strawberries enjoyed at Wimbledon are picked by similar labour, so are the hops in our British brewed beer. Indeed, two thirds of the UK’s agricultural workforce (excluding seasonal workers) is EU born. Many people know this. They also know that a large proportion of our nurses and doctors are from overseas; figures from the Nuffield Trust show that over half the doctors registering to practice with the GMC qualified outside the UK. 38% of food manufacturing workers are foreign born, as are 22% of workers in scientific research and development, according to The Migration Observatory.

However, what is often misunderstood is the reason why so many migrants work here. It is not just that the UK is a great magnet for labour – it is that we need them and business welcomes them. For it is not just globalization which has encouraged the advanced economies to attract and facilitate the immigration of skilled overseas workers. Population ageing is also leading governments to consider migration as a solution to the demographic deficit and population decline.

At the turn of the 20th century one quarter of the world’s population lived in Europe, and provided the labour power house of the world economy. By the middle of this century Europe’s population will have fallen to below 10%, and will account for only some 6% of the world’s workers. In addition, Europe will steadily age, so that the ratio of workers to older dependents will double by the second half of the century. While migration will not prevent the ageing and population decline of Europe, including the UK, it will alleviate it.

Indeed, the major challenge facing the ageing high income countries is one of growing skills shortages. In almost half OECD countries, the retiring generations will be larger than the incoming ones from 2015, according to the 2010 World Migration Report. Rather than fixating on reducing migration, OECD countries should be concerned about the stiff competition they face from emerging economies in the battle for global skills.

People crowded steps by Unsplash. Public domain via Pixabay.

And most severely hit will be Europe, including the UK, whose ability to attract skilled migrants will decline as it competes with North America, Oceania and Asia. While EU countries – and especially the UK – are the world’s leading destination for international students, we have not successfully capitalised on this through retaining the much needed skilled graduates within our economies. Indeed some projections indicate that without mass immigration into the EU of around 100 million there will be a need for a rise in retirement ages of 10 years by 2050 to compensate for the impact of demographic ageing on the work force. That is we shall all have to work much longer.

So what are the facts on the EU migrants in the UK which seem to have formed so great a part of the Brexit vote to leave? Firstly they are more likely to be of working age – nearly 70% compared with only half of the UK-born population – more likely to be employed, and more likely to have a degree or professional qualification. In other words contributing to the skilled workforce the UK dearly needs to attract and maintain.

A significant number of the businesses interviewed in a recent BIS survey stated that having access to migrant workers had led to improvements in business performance and productivity, and migrants were seen as essential to maintain and grow the business.

Migration also has an impact on the sustainability gap of public finances, increasing the number of potential tax payers, and in general immigrants in OECD countries pay as much in taxes as they take in benefits, according to the OECD 2013’s International Immigration Outlook. In particular, according to a report for the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, EU workers in the UK take less from the benefits system than UK born do, as they bring in education paid for by their native countries, and typically return before they require pension support.

Immigration also improves competitiveness and productivity. The growing social or ethnic diversity due to immigration encourages innovation and entrepreneurship, increases the size of the local economy, and increases trade and international linkages through diasporas. In 2013 the Office for Budget Responsibility calculated that increasing UK immigration to 300,000 annually would reduce UK government debt by almost a third – while stopping immigration would increase the debt by almost 50%.

Migration data is complex, however, and the national benefit to the economy and society are often clouded by local concerns, including those based on perception rather than experience. For example, while new EU migrants displace earlier EU migrants in the UK labour market, they do not displace UK born workers. Yet the perception of those voting for Brexit in the June referendum was different. Ironically the unemployment rate at the time was 4.9%, the lowest since 2005. (See figure 11 in The Office of National Statistics’ 2016 Labour Market Survey.)

Prior to Brexit some 29% of agricultural growers experienced problems recruiting enough labour and nearly half anticipated labour shortages by the end of the decade. As John Shropshire declared ‘… if there were controls on labour that made it difficult… one option would be to take these machines, the celery rigs all around us, to Poland and grow the product there.’ If you can move a whole celery farm out of the UK to find labour – I suppose you can move anything!

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10 facts about the trombone

Tuba, trumpet, trombone…which one should you pick up this fall?  Read below to learn what makes the trombone the right choice, and to find out a little more about this bass instrument’s long history.

1.  The date of the first trombone’s creation, or its original creator, is somewhat of a mystery. The earliest record of a trombone dates to the 15th century.

2.  How does a trombone differ from the other options?  The trombone uses a slide to alter pitches, rather than a valve. It is the only instrument in the brass family to do so!

3.  The word trombone is derived from Italian and German words meaning “trumpet.”

Photo credit: “Trombones” by bpcraddock, Public Domain via Pixabay.

4.  The trombone has been called multiple names, including dracht  (draught, draucht) trumpet and tuba ductilis.

5.  Trumpets were featured in various paintings, images, and diagrams since the 15th century.  The first visual of a trombone was in Filippino Lippi’s fresco The Assumption of the Virgin in S Maria sopra Minerva, Rome in 1488-93.

6.  The first diagrammatic depiction of a trombone is Aurelio Virgiliano’s Il dolcimelo (1600).

7.  Like antiques?  The oldest surviving trombone was made in 1551. Very few early trombone mouthpieces survived to today. One of the most notable early mouthpieces is embellished with the mark of the Schnitzer family, who made trombones in Nuremberg in the 16th century.

8.  It was not until the late 18th century that the trombone became an official part of the orchestra.

9. German trombones from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries often carried a traditional mark of a pair of snakes dancing across the bell bow. 0 These snakes are called, “Schlangenverzierungen.”

10.  The trombone is rarely heard as a solo instrument, apart from in some jazz music. There are just a few notable trombone soloists, however, predominantly form the 19th century.  The group including C.T. Queisser and F.A. Belcke in Germany, and in France, A.G. Dieppo.

 

Featured image: “Zoetermeer Jazz 2008.” Photo by FaceMePLS. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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