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The emergence of lawfare [infographic]

The security of individual nations and the wider world is protected through many means, force or diplomacy, culture or environment. Law is increasingly deployed as an alternative to military force, although its use dates back as far as international law itself. Even private sector and other non-governmental attorneys play a leading role in lawfare. So how did it develop? How are different countries taking advantage of it? And which groups are using it to achieve their goals? We explore these questions and more in an infographic based on Orde F. Kittrie’s Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War.

Download the infographic in PDF or JPEG.

Image Credit: Photo by AJEL. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Hilary Putnam and the mind of Aristotle

Few people have influenced contemporary philosophy of mind as profoundly as the late Hilary Putnam. One of his best known contributions was the formulation of functionalism. As he understood it, functionalism claims that mental states are functional states—postulates of abstract descriptions, like those employed in computer science, which ignore a system’s physical details and focus instead on the ways it correlates inputs with outputs. Psychological descriptions in particular focus on the ways a system correlates sensory inputs with behavioral outputs, and mental states are the internal states that correlate the two.

By the mid-1970s functionalism had become the dominant outlook in philosophy of mind. But Putnam, showing his characteristic independence of mind, became dissatisfied with the view. He did not retreat to substance dualism or idealism. He was convinced that we are physical beings whose capacities are essentially embodied in the physical mechanisms that compose us, yet he was also a committed antireductionist. He denied that physics, chemistry, and neuroscience could yield an exhaustive account of what we are and what we can do. In articulating a pro-physical yet anti-reductive view along these lines, Putnam found inspiration in a new source: Aristotle.

Hilary Putnam. CC-BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

Aristotle’s ideas had been dismissed in many quarters of the philosophical world as expressions of a bygone pre-scientific age. But Putnam saw through the dismissive haze to the empirically and philosophically-respectable core of Aristotle’s philosophy, ‘hylomorphism’.

Hylomorphism claims that form or structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. Some individuals, paradigmatically living things, consist of materials that are structured or organized in various ways. You and I are not mere quantities of physical materials; we are quantities of physical materials with a certain organization or structure. That structure is responsible for us being and persisting as humans, and it is responsible for us having the particular developmental, metabolic, reproductive, perceptive, and cognitive capacities we have. The hylomorphic notion of structure is very close to the notion of natural organization that many biologists appeal to – something amply illustrated by biology textbooks which claim that biological organization is responsible for the unity and persistence of organisms through the influx and efflux of matter and energy that characterize their interactions with the wider world.

In the mid-80s Putnam and Martha Nussbaum co-authored a paper that fueled interest in hylomorphism among philosophers of mind. The idea that a hylomorphic notion of organization or structure might provide resources for solving mind-body problems was not new. Decades earlier, John Dewey (another of Putnam’s inspirations) suggested that the key to solving mind-body problems was to reject the basic assumptions that motivated them – assumptions that had been enshrined by Descartes and others during the Scientific Revolution. He proposed replacing those assumptions with new ones based on an empirically-warranted notion of structure like the hylomorphic one. If thought, feeling, perception, and other mental phenomena were species of structural phenomena, Dewey reasoned, and structure was uncontroversially part of the natural world, then there could be no real problems finding a place for mind in the natural world – there could be no real mind-body problems.

Aristotle, copy of Lysippus. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

From a hylomorphic perspective, mind-body problems arise only for a worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure. Structure carves out distinctive individuals from the otherwise undifferentiated sea of matter and energy described by our best physics, and it confers on those individuals distinctive powers. If hylomorphic structure exists, the physical universe is punctuated with pockets of organized change and stability—composite physical objects (paradigmatically living things) whose structures confer on them powers that distinguish what they can do from what unstructured materials can do. Those powers include the powers to think, feel, and perceive. A worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure, by contrast, lacks a basic principle to distinguish the parts of the physical universe that can think, feel, and perceive from those that can’t, and without a basic principle that carves out zones with distinctive powers, the existence of those powers in the natural world can start to look inexplicable and mysterious. If there is nothing built into the basic fabric of the universe that explains why Zone A has powers that Zone B lacks—if nothing explains why you, say, have the power to think, feel, and perceive, while the materials surrounding you do not, then the options for understanding the existence of those powers in the natural world become constrained: either they must be identified with the powers of physical materials taken by themselves or in combination (as panpsychists and many physicalists claim), or their existence must be taken as an inexplicable matter of fact (as many emergentists and epiphenomenalists claim), or their existence in the natural world must be denied altogether (as substance dualists and eliminative physicalists claim).  If there is hylomorphic structure, however, the options are no longer constrained in this way. Distinctive powers like yours and mine exist in the natural world because structure exists in the natural world.

It would take several decades for Putnam’s retrieval of Aristotelian ideas to become more than a mere suggestion. One reason was sociological: philosophers of mind and philosophers who took the merits of hylomorphism seriously (mostly scholars of ancient and medieval philosophy) had different professional concerns and operated in different scholarly spheres – something that inhibited fruitful collaboration between them. Another reason was philosophical: the assumptions motivating mind-body problems turned out to be deeper and more pervasive than philosophers like Dewey had imagined. It took a revival of Aristotelian ideas in metaphysics in the late 90s and early 2000s to unearth them. That revival, which was evident especially in neo-Aristotelian accounts of powers and composition, provided the conceptual resources needed to formulate hylomorphism in a way that could contribute to live debates in the philosophy of mind.

The number of philosophers working on hylomorphism and its implications for philosophy of mind continues to grow. Time will tell if Putnam’s instincts were right, and a hylomorphic framework really does provide resources for solving mind-body problems. It may not be his best-advertised contribution to the philosophy of mind, but it may end up being his most important.

Featured image credit: Vitreous metaphysics II, by Alkan Chipperfield. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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Death in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays [quiz]

Mortality is not a theme that Shakespeare shies away from in his works, and in many cases death serves an integral part of a play’s plot. Occasionally his deaths are tragic, others are gruesome and violent, and others are just creative (we’re looking at you, Antigonus), but they play move the play along or resolve its final conflict. Shakespeare’s frequent incorporation of death in his plays is better understood given the context of his time period, where death was a constant, imminent reality. In his sonnets, his thoughts on death are more clearly revealed and are usually expressed in relation to remembrance and legacy. Brutal deaths and morbid thoughts aside, how much do you know about death and Shakespeare?

Image: “Young Man with a Skull” by Frans Hals. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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5 reasons why a library is the best place to hide during a Zombie Apocalypse

Imagine you wake up tomorrow on what seems like a regular springtime morning. You snooze your alarm for a solid hour, resentfully stumble out of bed, open the curtains, and glance outside, only to be confronted by a somewhat unnerving scene – an army of terrifying human-like creatures feasting savagely on what appears to be human flesh. Blood, brains, bedlam: the zombie apocalypse has descended.

That’s right, May is also known as International Zombie Awareness Month. After witnessing many poor comrades lose their lives in Hollywood zombie uprisings, we’ve decided that we need to prepare for any eventuality. Suppose the living dead do come calling, where is the best place to hide, and, as Simon Pegg hopes, “wait for the whole thing to blow over”?

There is but one option, a library. Here’s five reasons why:

Knowledge is power

For those of you who haven’t read the OUP Companion to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse, you may be at a loss as for how to fight your flesh-eating foes. It’s only inevitable that technology will fail humankind at crisis point, and the go-to avenues for intelligence will be cut off.

As a library inhabitant, you’ll have a sea of books at your fingertips and will be well placed to source vital information. Whether swotting up on effective zombie-killing tactics in an apocalyptic novel, rummaging for the latest Bear Grylls survival guide, or treating an injured friend with the help of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, the local library is your best possible companion.

Build a protective fort

Take advantage of your local library’s plenitude of raw materials by building a protective fort, mighty enough to rival the great castles of England.

Raid the Reference section, and start with the large, sturdy books for the foundations: a dozen of the Oxford English Dictionary, a few copies of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and perhaps a couple of editions of Who’s Who for good measure. Use the bookshelves for extra support and, once constructed, cement any gaps with a Very Short Introduction or two.

Library couple, and panda, in a library. By violey. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

Even the apocalypse’s strongest zombie ring-leader wouldn’t be able to topple such a structure. Just sit back and relax in its protective embrace as the undead try and fail to breach your literary workmanship.

Silence is golden

Libraries provide a quiet and tranquil environment. There can be no better place to get some peace and quiet from the potentially upsetting collapse of civilisation taking place on the other side of the door. In such serene conditions, you could even curl up on a cosy library chair with your favourite Oxford World’s Classic.

What’s more, most librarians are wonderfully dedicated to preserving the order and upkeep of their libraries. With their groan-like noises, intimidating manners, and disruptive attitudes, the walking dead certainly wouldn’t be tolerated for long!

Entertainment

So you’ve settled into your new library home, constructed the world’s most impressive protective fort, and swotted up on your survival knowledge. Now what? In successfully evading the zombie army, you could be faced with equally frightening foe – boredom.

In a library, you’d have enough to read, listen to, and look at, to keep you entertained for a lifetime. What better opportunity to finally start reading War and Peace, brush up on your knowledge of ancient Rome, or start learning that second language?

Perspective

Hidden amongst the books, you may take solace in your current situation. All you would need to do is flick open the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to discover that humankind has been faced with stressful situations for as long as we can remember. After all, if Samuel Pepys can live through both the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of London, maybe there’s hope for you too!

There you have it, five reasons for heading straight to your local library in a zombie apocalypse. We assure you, with the abundance of entertainment and the tranquil setting, it’ll feel just like a long holiday.

The only potential caveat is this: given their dietary preferences, we need to hope that the zombies don’t realise that libraries are where the biggest and best brains are found!

Featured image credit: Zombie girl, by David Williss. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Charles Darwin’s observations on migratory birds

Charles Darwin’s five year voyage aboard H. M. S. Beagle and subsequent life work are as widely known as any events in the history of the biological sciences. His wide ranging bird work has been overshadowed by drab small birds he discovered in the Galapagos Islands–the Galapagos, or Darwin’s, finches. Legend has persisted that these birds provided his first insight into the origin of species by natural selection during his voyage. They didn’t, but birds called mockingbirds living among the Galapagos Islands did, nine months after leaving the archipelago, as he sorted his specimens and notes. Only now has Darwin’s ornithological writing been comprehensively complied, reviewed, and assessed, making it possible to review what he wrote about, then little understood, bird migration.

In his diary for 25 April 1826, 17-year-old Edinburg University student Darwin wrote “no swallows, or rather the genus Hirundo, have appeared in or near Edinburgh,” presumably because he knew swallows (Barn Swallow) would by then be preparing to nest at his family home in Shrewsbury, to the slightly warmer south of Britain (Browne 1995, Charles Darwin: Voyaging: 65-6). In 1838 he also, but most briefly, alluded to the then known Purple Martin migration in North America (Darwin 1838, Zoology of the Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle: 38-9).

In his 1839 book Journal of Researches about the Beagle voyage, Darwin recorded that Green-backed Firecrown hummingbirds migrate to central Chile in autumn and in spring begin to depart as arriving Giant Hummingbirds replace them. During his time at Valparaiso this large hummingbird “had arrived in numbers, a little before the vernal equinox. It comes from the parched deserts of the north, probably for the purpose of breeding in Chile.” He came to believe that the firecrown did not breed in Chile, as “during the summer, their nests were common to the south of that country.” He observed that the literature indicated that North American hummingbird migration “exactly corresponds to what takes place in this southern continent. In both cases they move toward the tropic during the colder parts of the year, and retreat north before the returning heat. Some, however, remain during the whole year in Tierra del Fuego; and in Northern California—which in the northern hemisphere has the same relative position which Tierra del Fuego has in the southern—some, according to Beechey [presumably Frederick William Beechey], likewise remain.” (Darwin 1839, Journal of Researches: 331-2). This is broadly consistent with subsequent knowledge (Schuchmann 1999, Handbook of the Birds of the World, vol. 5: 632, 635).

Discussing bird vocalizations, Darwin noted “During the nocturnal migration of geese and other water-fowl, sonorous clangs from the van may be heard in the darkness overhead, answered by clangs in the rear.” He was describing “contact calls”, used by flocking birds to keep in touch, particularly when out of sight of one another (Darwin 1901, Decent of Man: 563).

Of migrating snipe, and of Eurasian Blackcaps, Nightingales and Western Yellow Wagtails, it was observed that males arrive on the breeding grounds before females (Darwin 1901, Decent of Man: 594, 327 respectively).

In The Origin of Species, Darwin explained how plants and animals could have dispersed to far-flung locations, including remote islands, by air, sea, and via animal agents: some birds mentioned were migratory ones. Several of his insights resulted from hypotheses conceived during his voyage, some subsequently tested by experimentation. He floated dead pigeons with seeds in their crops in tanks of artificial seawater, removing the seeds after 30 days to plant and found most germinated. As a floating bird can travel far on surface ocean currents during a month it is easy to imagine such corpses reaching islands to result in plants growing there. Migrating birds caught in a gale may travel at “35 miles [56 km] an hour” or more and could thus be displaced 500 miles [805 km] during the period that viable seeds remain in them (Darwin, The Origin of Species 1902: 509-10). Such birds might die after being displaced such distances to then float on the sea for weeks before swept ashore with their cargo of viable seeds. Wind-swept living birds also reach remote islands.

A Yellow-crowned Night Heron, of the Americas, with mud on its legs and beak in Guayaquil, SW Ecuador. Photo by Clifford B. Frith and used with permission.

Hawks and owls (some migratory) regurgitate pellets of indigestible food a day or more after eating it, which may include viable seeds (from birds swallowed). Migrating hawks can cover a significant distance in a day. Darwin also noted that hawks look out for tired migrant birds and in eating them may disperse seeds within them. Herons eat fish that may have seeds within them, which can then be dispersed by the birds days later. Similarly, birds with seeds embedded in mud sticking to their legs, feet, beak, or feathers will transport viable seeds great distances (see photo). Darwin cites a correspondent on the English south coast who shot migrant wagtails, wheatears and whinchats as they arrived and “several times noticed little cakes of earth attached to their feet,” which could have contained viable seeds to be dispersed onto English soil (Darwin 1902, The Origin of Species: 510, 512).

Birds also disperse tiny animals. Darwin suspended duck’s feet in an aquarium where “many ova of fresh-water shells [snails] were hatching; and I found that numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells crawled on the feet, and clung to them so firmly that when taken out of the water they could not be jarred off.” These molluscs survived on the duck’s feet for 12 to 20 hours, during which, Darwin observed, a duck or heron might fly 600 or 700 miles (966 to 1,127 km), and if blown to a more distant point or island, would surely alight on any available water and thus disperse the molluscs (Darwin 1902, The Origin of Species: 538).

This summarizes what Darwin published about bird migration: Not a lot given that he wrote so much about birds, including mention of some 600 species, but mostly original, novel, and ground-breaking for its time.

Feature Image: Two Hood (Island) Mockingbirds, one of the group of mockingbird species found on various Galapagos Islands that first gave Darwin his insights into the origin of species by natural selection. Photo by Clifford B. Frith and used with permission.

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Listening to the Queer Archive — a conversation with Marion Wasserbauer

The current issue of the OHR invites diverse authors to share their experiences listening to and learning from LGBTQ lives. This week, we bring you a short interview with one of the contributors, Marion Wasserbauer, whose article “‘That’s What Music Is About—It Strikes a Chord’: Proposing a Queer Method of Listening to the Lives and Music of LGBTQs” suggests that music is an integral tool for listening deeply to a narrator’s voice.

On her project website, www.queervoices.be, Wasserbauer explains “One way to acknowledge the participants’ agency and really giving them a voice, is to let them construct their own story with the help of music and musical memorabilia they prepared beforehand and bring along to the interview. I am interested in whether musical key moments or key musicians/ musical styles correspond with key moments in the identity formation.” Each oral history includes a musical playlist, all of which are accessible here.

Load up a playlist and enjoy the music as your read her responses below. Make sure to check out the rest of the special issue, which is freely available online until June.

Many oral histories use a “life history” approach, which aims to capture a broad scope of a person’s life in the recorded interview and transcript. It seems like you’re going beyond that, by creating a sort of mini-exhibit for each of your interviewees. How has the final product shaped the way you conduct interviews?

Music, LGBTQ identities, and the connection between both are the subject of my research. As music and musical memorabilia are central topics to the oral history interviews, it was a very natural choice for me to use music and musical memorabilia as access points to the narrators’ life histories. How we tell about our life reflects how we perceive now what we experienced in the past. Music is able to evoke memories and feelings in the narrator, and it helps to convey these experiences to me as a researcher and other readers/listeners as we learn about music and identity in the narrators’ lives. While transcribing and analyzing the interviews, I make a personal playlist and a small queer archive accompanying each life story. These archives contain the playlist, photographs of memorabilia, excerpts of my field notes and fragments of the interview. According to each narrator’s wishes, some archives contain more details, and others simple feature a playlist.

 How we tell about our life reflects how we perceive now what we experienced in the past.

The online archive on www.queervoices.be is therefore an ongoing project, forming an audiovisual companion to my academic work. Where my academic papers are fragmented, focusing on various topics within all of the life stories, the queer archives provide a way to get to know more about the narrators and to get a more complete insight their life (stories).

What difficulties have you found with your archival methodology?

The interdisciplinary character of my research, situated between media studies, LGBTQ studies, sociology of music and history, informed by feminist scholarship and pop music is a wonderful opportunity to explore all of these fields, but at the same time makes it very complex. Inspired by theories of the queer archive, my archival approach adds yet another layer to my already very open and broad research.

Admittedly, it is rather time consuming to make the individual playlists and archives. However, I really enjoy getting to know my research narrators through the music and memorabilia they share with me. These are often vital elements to their narratives, so it only seems fair to spend time on making them accessible. I believe that these mini-archives are a way to not only add vital visual and audio information about the narrator, but to acknowledge their whole life story.

How did you get started?

When I was accepted as PhD student to work on the role of music in the lives of LGBTQ people, I soon decided that I wanted to work with life stories in a creative way. First, there are the theoretical and methodological starting points: A winter school by oral historian Selma Leydesdorff introduced me to oral history, and I got acquainted with Halberstam’s and Cvetkovich’s work on the queer archive through my interest in queer studies. The idea of the queer archive, stressing the importance of ephemera and seemingly irrelevant material in making and telling queer history, really resonated with me.

Also the collaborative character of the queer archive as described by Halberstam struck a chord: “[t]he archive is not a simple repository”, but “it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity” (Halberstam 2005: 169-70) and the researcher becomes a co-archivist rather than a mere observer. This is how I, as a queer researcher and member of the LGBTQ community, need to approach this project on music and LGBTQs. I believe in listening to people’s stories, and in the co-construction of meaning by talking with each other. The idea of the queer archive ties in with the ethics of oral history, although it could be argued that the queer archive has greater attention for affective and subversive dimensions of the narrators’ lives.

 I believe in listening to people’s stories, and in the co-construction of meaning by talking with each other.

I think it is vital that in research like mine, focusing on music and identity, audio and visual elements should not be minimalized and only mentioned in the form of written text, but be acknowledged within academic work.

Second, and most importantly, I started talking to LGBTQ people about music and their lives. In most interviews, music and memorabilia naturally provide a guide for the life stories. Most narrators appreciate receiving their playlists and see their archive online – in that way, the queer archives are a token of gratitude for sharing their stories with me.

You mention that the article is part of your dissertation project. Can you give a sense of how the dissertation project will take up or move beyond the ideas you talk about in the article?

In my article, I provide a general discussion of my methodology, focusing on the theoretical and ethical backgrounds and providing first insights into what putting the theory into practice looks like with several narrators. At the moment, I have collected 22 LGBTQ individuals’ stories, and am looking into a diverse range of topics related to music and identity. In my dissertation, each of these narrators gets introduced thoroughly, before I analyze these topics in different chapters, for example exploring sexual fluidity in women, what being a fan means for my narrators, and how music works in trans* individuals’ lives.

This thematic focus arose from the life histories, as there are clearly musicians, styles, experiences and feelings that are shared by several of the narrators. The thematic focus also enables me to structure what we learn from the life histories. For each topic, I focus on parts of the stories, and here the queer archives come in to provide an insight into their whole story.

The special issue of the OHR, “Listening to and Learning from LGBTQ Lives” is available for free online through June. Make sure to check out Wasserbauer’s article “‘That’s What Music Is About—It Strikes a Chord’: Proposing a Queer Method of Listening to the Lives and Music of LGBTQs” as well as the rest while you still can!

Image credit: “SCOTUS APRIL 2015 LGBTQ 54663” by Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Understanding dementia

Dementia, from the Latin demens, is a persistent disorder of the mental processes marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning. It affects 47.5 million people worldwide, and there are 7.7 million new cases annually. This year’s Dementia Awareness Week (15-21 May 2016) aims to bring recognition and awareness to this neurological illness. To mark this significant event, led by Alzheimer’s Society UK, we have created a reading list of journal articles, books, and other online resources that explore the causes, treatments, and contributing factors of this debilitating disease.

Journal articles featured in this article will be free to access until 30 June 2016.

Oxford Textbook of Cognitive Neurology and Dementia, edited by Masud Husain and Jonathan M. Schott

Addressing the staggering developments in neurological practice and dementia care over recent years, this latest addition to the Oxford Textbooks in Clinical Neurology series provides an integrated overview of the latest research, with a focus on the clinical approach to the patient.

“The risk of overweight/obesity in mid-life and late life for the development of dementia: a systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies”, by Emilio Pedditizi et al.

This systematic review of studies explores whether there is a link between obesity and dementia in mid-life and later life. Intriguingly, there appears to be a positive association between obesity younger in life and later dementia – but the opposite is true in late life.

Image Credit: ‘Dementia, Woman, Talk.’ CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

“Parkinson’s disease dementia: a neural networks perspective”, by James Gratwicke et al.

The number of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease dementia is on the rise, but the mechanisms underlying this form of dementia are unclear. This article suggests implications for therapeutic approaches based on the discovery that the condition reflects dysfunction in seven distinct brain networks.

Alzheimer’s Disease, edited by Gunhild Waldemar and Alistair Burns

Covering the core aspects of Alzheimer’s Disease in a concise, easy to read format, the latest edition of this book has seen all fourteen chapters updated, from understanding the causes of the disease, as well as pharmacological treatments and end-of-life treatments.

“Mutual gaze in Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal and semantic dementia couples”, by Virginia E. Sturm et al.

Mutual gaze (i.e. when two individuals make eye contact) is a building block of social behavior that may be differentially affected by these diseases. This paper studied 13 Alzheimer’s disease patients, 11 frontotemporal dementia patients, nine semantic dementia patients, and 22 normal controls as they engaged in conversations with partners about relationship conflicts.

Introduction to Clinical Neurology, by Douglas J. Gelb

This highly informative and accessible text covers a broad range of neurologic conditions, enhancing the understanding of why patients are managed in particular ways dependent on their condition, with details on the approach, examination, and interpretation of the findings in the clinical setting.

“Improving response inhibition systems in frontotemporal dementia with citalopram”, by Laura E. Hughes et al.

This study shows that boosting serotonergic transmission may help to manage disinhibition, which is a feature of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia.

Practical Dementia Care, edited by Peter V Rabins, Constantine G Lyketsos, and Cynthia D Steele

Now in its third edition, this book continues to be an essential title for all caregivers, from nurses to psychologists, responsible for the care of individuals with dementia. Updated with the latest research, Practical Dementia Care provides a patient-centric approach to dementia care providing a wide overview of treatments, with a focus on enhancing quality of life.

“Observational cohort study: deprivation and access to anti-dementia drugs in the UK”, by Claudia Cooper et al.

In this study, Cooper, et al. investigate whether four years after the English National Dementia Strategy was created if access to anti-dementia drugs in the UK has improved. Has the strategies’ key objective of reducing treatment inequalities been achieved?

Mental Health in Older Age – Infographic

Population growth and change pose new challenges for ensuring that people have healthy and happy lives in older age. Mental health involves different issues at different life-stages, but contrary to popular opinion, research has shown that older people are generally as satisfied with their lives as younger people.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Photo, Photographer, Old’ by jarmoluk. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Mental health in older age [infographic]

All over the world, populations are changing. People are living longer, and older people are forming a larger part of the global population. Baby boomers are retiring and improved health care has extended life expectancy. Meanwhile, as young people move to cities or abroad, more older adults live alone or without social support. Without a doubt, this ageing population will have far-reaching impacts on the world.

Every generation faces new obstacles to health and well-being as they age. Friends and family members die, physical fitness declines, and neurocognitive disorders like dementia increase. But ageing is not necessarily a time of decline. Studies show that older adults enjoy greater life satisfaction and happiness than younger adults. Perhaps retirees have more time for hobbies and socialising without the burden of childcare. At the same time, factors like social support, culture, and personal values have a important influence on well-being in older age.

So what challenges in mental health do older people face? And how can we make sure that older people continue to have healthy and happy lives?

Featured image credit: sympaty by Mario Mancuso. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Labour and the legacy of antisemitism

We are currently living through a period when “antisemitism” seems to be on the rise in Europe, and is now a hot topic of debate in Britain, because of a few clumsy statements by some prominent Labour politicians (along with a very few statements that do appear to have an actual antisemitic animus). Both in Britain and in the United States the leaders of the BDS movement (Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions) are frequently assailed as being antisemitic because of their being against Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Yet, a word like “antisemitism” should not be bandied about carelessly. It is far too emotive, and even explosive a term to be as irresponsibly handled as it has been of late in politics and the press. Antisemitism was not just some psychological state of mind but a modern ideology and political movement, that had major consequences in the Holocaust. As such, modern antisemitism differs in crucial aspects from what is often called antisemitism but is more accurately called Jew-hatred, or, more neutrally, hostility to Jews.

The very word “antisemitism” is deeply problematic. Why use this fancy, scientific word for what in many ways is such a traditional and common phenomenon? The term was invented by Jew-haters, and the reason for using the term was to make Jew-hatred respectable: modern and “scientific”, an ideology and political movement that would oppose “Semitism”, which was supposedly the adverse influence of the “Semitic” race(s) on Western society and culture. “Semitic” originated as a linguistic category, to describe the family of various Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, but came to be a racial category, over against the “Aryan” race. It was from the start almost exclusively aimed at Jews, as the primary “Semites”, but not only, and there have been many instances when Arabs have also been “Semites” and discriminated against as such by “anti-Semites”. But let us assume that antisemitism was aimed against Jews; it is key to understand that it was a modern ideology that used, at least rhetorically, the language of race to make its argument.  Antisemitism as a movement also put Jews at the very centre of world developments, as the negative pole against which “Aryan” (Western) culture needed to battle. This is why, historically, most of what we view as antisemitism was not really antisemitism, as such.

Hostility against Jews in Antiquity was not antisemitism. Ancient Jewish history was full of enemies of the Jews, and from a Judaeocentric point of view this all looks like Jews being at the centre of history, but for an imperial power like Rome, they were not: they were just rebellious subjects, particularly rebellious subjects, who claimed, idiosyncratically, that there was only one god, theirs, but just that. This led to the (second and final, so far) destruction of the Temple, and to much animosity against Jews by many Roman figures. Yet that is only part of the story; another part is that the Roman authorities also accommodated Jewish idiosyncrasies for long stretches of their rule over them.

Once Christianity appeared, from within Judaism, then there was a serious, potentially lethal, rivalry between two monotheistic faiths. No question. Yet even here this religious anti-Judaism was just that, a religiously based animosity, against Jews maintaining their religious beliefs against their Christian rivals. It was not against Jews as a “race”, and the Church wanted to convince Jews of the truth of Christ, so accepted converts, at least in principle. When Jews refused, this was a problem for the Church, but the Western Church’s answer was not to demand the elimination of Jews. The awful slaughters of Jews in the First Crusade were against Church teachings, and indeed against the specific orders of members of the Church hierarchy in medieval Germany, for instance. Jews were the one group tolerated within Western Christendom, ironically, as long as they accepted subjugation, so they could act, eventually, as witnesses to Christianity’s Truth. Yet, formal subjugation did not necessarily mean Jews were constantly the victims of oppression. As Salo Baron put it, famously, the “lachrymose history” of the Jews as eternal victims is at variance to much of Jewish experience in European medieval and early modern history, where many Jews prospered at various times and places, and were often of a higher social status than, for instance, vileins or serfs. But the point here is that anti-Judaism was not, generally speaking, racial in its definition of who was the Jewish enemy. The Spanish Inquisition did lead to this conclusion, in Iberia, but that was not the rule.

Children sheltering among the rubble of the Gaza strip, 2016. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

It took a modern, biologically based understanding of human nature to make Jewish identity a racial as opposed to spiritual/religious concept. So it was really only in the latter part of the nineteenth century that hatred against Jews became “antisemitism”, as a reaction to the success of Jews in overcoming the subjugation that had been allotted to them by the Church. The antisemitic ideology and political movement that developed then, most successfully in Central Europe, was an unstable combination of racial, religious, cultural and social animosities towards Jews, and a very large component of it was a hypertrophic version of xenophobic ethnonationalism that sought to bolster (some would say invent) national identity by identifying what the national group was not. In this strategy of negative integration, anyone with another identity could be excluded as not fully belonging. Hence Germans could know they were Germans because they knew Jews were not Germans, and should therefore be excluded from German society—at least discriminated against, certainly not treated as equal, as they were in a liberal political system.

Antisemitism as a political movement was generally rather unsuccessful in the early nineteenth century, the big exception being the Christian Social dominance of Vienna. However, the catastrophe of the First World War, the ensuing breakup of Central Europe into “national” states, and then the economic calamity of the Slump, led to the success of fascist, authoritarian and nationalist political parties in much of the region, culminating in the conquest of power of the Nazis in Germany in 1933. It was in this context that the implicit logic of antisemitism, that Jews were a foreign body in the nation that needed to be excluded and expunged, reached its appalling, extreme conclusion in the Holocaust.

Little if any of this has to do with a separate form of animosity toward the “Jewish state” of Israel and its supporters, Jewish and non-Jewish, that is now causing such concern in Britain as it applies to the Labour Party. No one in the Labour Party has suggested excluding British Jews from British society because they are Jewish, or even of depriving them of their equal rights as citizens. If they did that would be clearly antisemitism, but it would be entirely against the egalitarian and secular traditions of the Labour Party as well. Instead there is an animosity among many members of the Labour Party, especially those with a Muslim or Middle Eastern background, against Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism. The reason is fairly obvious: Israel’s founding was enabled partly by Western guilt about the Holocaust, but took place at the expense of the sovereign interests of the rest of the population of Palestine. Israel’s existence as a Jewish nation-state within the pre-1967 borders has in effect been (grudgingly) accepted by most of the Arab and Muslim world, but the occupation of the territories conquered by Israel in 1967, now getting on for half a century ago, has not been.

Moreover, the policies of Israel towards those territories, especially in the West Bank, have, understandably, caused much hostility toward Israel and its supporters, among whom, again quite understandably, are most of British Jewry. Some of this hostility has its causes in an undue dislike of Jews, and it might well be that some individuals in Britain indulge antisemitic prejudices in supporting pro-Palestinian groups, but attempts to thus call this hostility to Israel “the new antisemitism” are, to my mind, misplaced and illegitimate. Antisemitism is about excluding people simply because of who they are, and on an unfair, unreasonable basis. Instead, in the current antagonism toward Israel and its supporters, most of it is fairly clearly a result of hostilities caused by a real national conflict over the territory of Israel/Palestine. Call that anti-Zionism, call it anti-Israelism, but it is not antisemitism.

Featured image credit: Israeli Flag, CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Desire & sexuality in the work of Emile Zola

The second series of the BBC Radio 4 dramatization of the novels of Emile Zola (Blood, Sex and Money) is just coming to a close. The central theme of the present series is Sex. Sex is all-pervasive in Zola. It encapsulates the themes of desire, pleasure, and perversion; and it is inseparable from Zola’s social themes.

Zola’s Naturalism (as he called his brand of realist fiction) entailed a new explicitness in the depiction of sexuality and the body.  Nana, for example, represented a drastic advance towards erotic verisimilitude. In the opening scene, Nana, the actress-prostitute, appears with progressively less clothing on the stage of a variety theatre that its director insists on calling a brothel. The power of her sexuality is such that she reduces her audience to a single mass of lusting, panting flesh. Nana’s first appearance as Venus prefigures her future as a “man-eater,” for after this performance she becomes the object of desire of every man in the audience. Nana devastates the lives of aristocrats, bankers, and government officials. She symbolizes Second Empire Paris itself—a society and a city crackling with desire, built on its urges and appetites. Counterparts of Nana in other novels, embodying different kinds of female desire, are Renée Saccard in The Kill, Clorinde Balbi in His Excellency Eugène Rougon, and even the demure Hélène Grandjean in A Love Episode. The power of sex in Nana reverses class hierarchies, converting the male oppressor into the oppressed. The possibility of class collaboration is explored in The Ladies’ Paradise, where Octave Mouret, the creator of the great modern department store, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers—until he falls in love with Denise Baudu, the only one of his salesgirls who refuses to be commodified.

Nana assumes a mythic dimension, as her death is transformed into an almost hallucinatory picture of cultural collapse. Zola is playing on nineteenth-century male fears of the ‘natural’ woman, and in particular the possibility that prostitutes might transgress established social boundaries and infiltrate the bourgeoisie and upper class.  A similar vision of the breakdown of class hierarchies, though not expressed in the same apocalyptic vein, is to be found in Pot Luck, a kind of satirical Upstairs, Downstairs set in a new apartment building in Paris.  The bourgeois tenants wish to be seen as respectable citizens, with culture and education on their side: a superior class. They go to extreme lengths to maintain the segregation between themselves and the lower classes, whom they portray as dirty, immoral, promiscuous, stupid—at best a lesser type of human, at worst some kind of wild beast.  But the bourgeois are not what they seem. Class difference is merely a matter of money and power, and has a tenuous hold over the raging forces of sexuality and corruption beneath the surface.  The more searchingly Zola investigated the theme of middle-class adultery, the more he risked uncovering the arbitrariness and fragility of the whole social order.

In Pot Luck Zola ironically subverts the notion that bourgeois supremacy over the workers is a natural rather than a cultural phenomenon.  The conflict between nature and religious dogma is explored in The Sin of Father Mouret, where the graceful Albine echoes the innocent Miette in The Fortune of the Rougons and looks forward to the young Angélique in The Dream.

Blood, Sex and Money succeeds admirably in translating Zola’s fictional world into vivid radio drama, with Glenda Jackson superb as the 104-year-old narrator, Aunt Dide. By combining and juxtaposing different texts, the series brings out very clearly the thematic coherence of Zola’s work. Nearly all of Zola’s novels are now available, in actual translation, in the Oxford World’s Classics series. I would make two points about the challenges facing the translators. First, it is supremely important to capture the pungency and dynamism of Zola’s language: to produce English versions that are as vibrant as the originals, and which reproduce the rhythm and colour of his amazing descriptions, with their proliferating detail and brilliant use of poetic metaphor. These descriptions express the very meaning of Zola’s work. Second, there is the particular challenge, with regard to the language of sex, of rendering appropriately—without distortions of register, directly, idiomatically—his ground-breaking candour of expression.

Featured image: “Portrait of Émile Zola” by Édouard Manet, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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