Oxford University Press's Blog, page 552

Regretoric: the rise of the “nonapology” apology and the “apology tour”

OxfordDictionaries.com is adding the nouns apology tour and nonapology. These additions represent two related steps in the evolution of the noun apology, which first entered English in the sixteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Its earliest example is a book title: the 1533 Apologie of Syr Thomas More. That was More’s book defending the old Catholic order and his own actions and the word then referred to a verbal defense (as in Plato’s “The Apology of Socrates”).

By the early 1600s, the noun had yielded the verb apologize and over time, the meaning of apology and apologize shifted further to indicate a statement of regret rather than a defense of one’s actions.

An intermediate step along the way was the use of apology to mean an excuse, and that use lasted quite some time. President George Washington, for example, used apologize this way in a 1789 letter to the Sultan of Morocco. Referring to the lateness of his correspondence, Washington wrote, somewhat long-windedly, that

The time necessarily employed in the arduous task, and the disarrangements occasioned by so great though peaceable a revolution, will apologize, and account for your Majesty’s not having received those regularly advised marks of attention from the United States which the friendship and magnanimity of your conduct toward them afforded reason to expect.

Washington was making an excuse for not writing—he was busy with other things—but not offering an apology as we now think of it.

By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we find apology most often used in its modern sense of contrition. In 1842, for example, young Abe Lincoln had written some letters criticizing James Shields, the Illinois state auditor. Soon after, he received a letter from Shields stating that

I will take the liberty of requiring a full, positive and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions used by you in these communications, in relation to my private character and standing as a man, as an apology for the insults conveyed in them.

Shields wants an apology not an excuse. Lincoln resisted apologizing and Shields ended up challenging Lincoln to a duel (which was canceled at the very last minute).

Perhaps Lincoln was ahead of his time in resisting the call to apologize, because apologizing gradually become both a stigma and an expectation for those in public life. If an apology was made, it was a sign of weakness, exploited in politics by one’s adversaries. That was certainly the case for Woodrow Wilson, who was attacked by political enemies for considering a treaty that “expresse[d] sincere regret” about the worsening of relations with the nation of Colombia (over that Panama Canal thing).

The attitude of politicians today often seems to be informed by the 1949 film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in which John Wayne’s military character has the catchphrase “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.” In context, the phrase meant don’t make excuses, but it has drifted semantically to the point where apology is treated as political weakness rather than moral strength—as backing down rather than owning up.

So today, we have arrived at the commonly used pejorative expressions apology tour and non-apology. The former is “a series of speeches, interviews, or other public appearances by a politician or other well-known figure, characterized as an expedient opportunity to express regret for a mistake or wrongdoing.” The latter is “a statement that takes the form of an apology but does not constitute an acknowledgement of responsibility or regret for what has caused offense or upset.” Today the terms position apologies as unnecessary on the one hand and insincere on the other.

Nonapology examples

Given this simultaneous politicization and devaluing of apologies, it is little wonder that public figures apologize so reluctantly and so poorly, with vague conditional regrets, wordy passive language, and out-and-out excuses. Here are a few of my favorite fauxpologies:

“Clearly in a campaign, with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right. In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong.” (Mitt Romney in 2012, offering an excuse)

“At the end of the day, I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions, but there are answers to all these questions.” (Hillary Clinton in 2015, saying she’s sorry people are confused)

“I also need to apologize to them for my failure as the governor of this state to understand the true nature of this problem sooner than I did.” (Chris Christie in 2015, being sorry he was uninformed)

“It’s unfortunate that we’re living in a time where just about every joke can be misconstrued to cause offense to someone. To the good people of Nigeria—a beautiful nation where my wife lived briefly as the child of missionaries—no offense was intended.” (Ted Cruz in 2013, saying he didn’t mean anything by it)

Why is it so hard for public figures to apologize well? Some may feel that they are victims of a game of gotcha, in which every casual comment or verbal misstep is amplified and misinterpreted. Others may feel that they have to take responsibility for situations not in their control or entirely of their making. And some have simply said or done things that they do not want to own up to.

Like it or not, we are in a culture of non-apology tours.

Image Credit: “Apology” by Marina Caprara. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Seven reasons why your medications are not working properly

What happens when medication doesn’t bring your condition under control? Usually, it’s not just one single issue but various factors that contribute to the problem. Your doctor will work to figure out why–and from there, create a new plan of attack. Finding the right combination of medications may require some trial and error. Some reasons why your medications may not work at their best could include the following:

You may not be taking medications correctly or you could be taking other drugs that interfere with your medications. Some medications work best when taken at certain times of the day or with special regard to meals. With complicated dosing schedules, people can forget to take medications or not take the correct doses at the correct time. Pill planners or pill boxes can help you to organize your medications and remember if you have taken a dose. Always check with your doctor or pharmacist to see if your medication has special instructions about when you should take the medication. Other drugs may also interact with your medication, which could change how it works in your body. Your medication can interact with other items besides prescription drugs, such as vitamins, herbal products, or dietary supplements. Keeping your doctor or pharmacist informed about everything you are taking can help to avoid these problems.
You may be eating an improper diet. You may not know this but certain foods can interact with your medications. These foods can impact how your body takes in medication or how the medication works to control your condition. Parts of your diet may also interact with your condition to reduce the effect of your medication. A registered dietitian can teach you how to read nutrition labels so you can spot these parts of your diet, such as sodium and carbohydrates, to better manage your intake.
You may have lifestyle factors that impact your health. Being overweight, being physically inactive, or smoking can impact many medical conditions and the way your medications work. Working to lose weight, increasing your physical activity, and moderating your alcohol consumption as needed can help to improve your health in many ways. If you smoke and can quit, it will lower your overall health risk for heart, lung, and other diseases. Making changes to your lifestyle and lowering your risk for disease may help to control your medical condition and improve the effects of your medication.
Prescription Drugs by J. Troha, National Cancer Institute. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
You could have other medical conditions that are affecting the way your medications work. Hormonal issues, poor metabolism, poor sleep, high blood pressure, or stomach conditions could change the effect of your medications. It is important to inform all of your doctors about any other conditions you may have to help avoid these problems. Some of these conditions could change how effective a medication is, and knowing about your other conditions will help your doctor make a plan that is best for you.
You or your doctor’s office could be making mistakes in testing. Misreadings can also happen at your doctor’s office or even in a lab. Make sure your results make sense and discuss results with your doctor since this can affect how your medications work. Some medications may need regular testing to check that the medication is working safely and effectively, such as insulin for diabetes or blood thinners for some heart conditions. Completing this testing as instructed and on time will help your doctor use this information to adjust your medication plan to work best for you. Some tests can be sensitive to when you last ate or how your recent health has been, so be sure to discuss instructions for tests with your doctor.
You could benefit from adjustments to your pain management plan. If you are suffering from chronic pain, you may experience occasional pain despite taking a routine medication from your doctor. This type of pain is called breakthrough pain and can sometimes be managed with different medications or adjusting your current medication with your doctor’s help. These medications can be used on an as needed basis for short-term control.
You may benefit from using a non-medication treatment option in your plan. Some conditions, such as chronic pain, can improve with the help of other treatment options such as physical therapy, exercise, or localized injections. These other options can work together to restore the effectiveness of your medication and improve your control of your condition. Seeing a doctor who specializes in pain management may help you to find the right plan for you.

Featured image credit: Antibiotic by PublicDomainPictures. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Sex, love, and Shakespeare [slideshow]

Whether he fills his scenes with raunchy innuendos, or boldly writes erotic poetry, or frequently reverses the gender norms of the time period, Shakespeare addresses the multifaceted ways in which sex, love, marriage, relationships, gender, and sexuality play an integral part of human life. Sixteenth century England was preoccupied with marriage prohibitions (avoid members of your immediate family), marriage feasts (what to wear), maternity wear (emphasizing the baby bump and fertility), treating syphilis (a sweating tub?), misogynist pamphlets (and feminist responses), sexual fact (The Hundred Years War), and sexual fiction (Greek mythology). Take a look at the slideshow below to see some of Shakespeare’s literary, historical, and mythological influences, social norms of the Elizabethan era, and works related to sex and gender by other writers in his time period.

A table of prohibited marriages from William Clerke's The Triall of Bastardie, London, 1594

In 1594, the English writer William Clerke published a treatise prohibiting certain marriages. He goes into detail about the “abominable customs” that a man must avoid when seeking a marriage, namely those involving an immediate or extended family member.

Image: A table of prohibited marriages from William Clerke’s The Triall of Bastardie’, London, 1594.” by William Clerke. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

A Marriage Feast at Bermondsey

This painting by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder depicts a marriage feast in Bermondsey, a district in South London, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The foreground features brightly clad people socializing and celebrating, while the background is painted with more muted colors and includes the Tower of London.

Image: “A Marriage Feast at Bermondsey” attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

This portrait, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, is of an unknown pregnant woman dressed in traditional Elizabethan clothing. Her dress, jewelry, and the fact that her family could afford to commission a portrait of her all suggest that she was either a member of the English nobility or of a wealthy family. This painting also offers an interesting glimpse into the style of 16th century maternity wear.

Image: “Portrait of an Unknown Lady” attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Randolph's Cornelianum dolium

The Latin comedy Cornelianum dolium (1638) was attributed to the poet and playwright Thomas Randolph. It addresses the various treatments used to cure syphilis as experienced by the hero of the story. The image above is the frontispiece for the play which features the main character in a Sweating-tub, also called Cornelius’s tub.

Image: “Randolph’s Cornelianum dolium” by Wellcome Images. CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Svvetnam, the vvoman-hater, arraigned by women. A new comedie, acted at the Red Bull, by the late Queenes Seruants

In 1615, British pamphleteer Joseph Swetnam published a misogynistic, offensive, and poorly written pamphlet titled The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women. Three women in particular responded to his attack on women in their own publications: Rachel Speght, Esther Sowernam, and Constantia Munda. Soon after, a play titled Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women was performed at the Red Bull Theatre in London. The play was presented as a comedy and generally mocked Swetnam’s ignorance.

Image: “Svvetnam, the vvoman-hater, arraigned by women. A new comedie, acted at the Red Bull, by the late Queenes Seruants” printed by William Stansby. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Digital Folger Shakespeare Library

Ganymede

In Greek mythology, Ganymede was a youth who tended sheep on Mount Ida. He was abducted by Zeus and carried to Mount Olympus on the back of an eagle. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Rosalind disguises herself as a boy named Ganymede and Celia disguises herself as the shepherdess Aliena. In both the play and the mythological depiction above, the ambiguity of gender and gender roles are heavily emphasized.

Image: “Ganymede” by Virgil Solis in 1563 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Laura Gibbs, Ph.D., University of Virginia, Ovid Illustrated. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via


Modern Languages MLLL-2003. World Literature: Frametales

Joan of Arc

During the Hundred Year’s War, a woman named Joan of Arc rose to prominence in the French military due to her divine visions of how to defeat the English. She was a significant figure in the war effort and was deemed a martyr 25 years after she was burned at the stake by the English. In Shakespeare’s history play Henry VI, Part 1, she is introduced as Joan la Pucelle to Charles, the Dauphin of France. Her role as a character loosely follows her actual role in history, mainly involving her visions, her military involvement, and her subsequent death. She is a unique female character, given the fact that she is not married against her will, entangled in a love triangle, or confined to a stereotypical 16th century female role. However, similar to the fate of several other female Shakespearean characters, she suffers a particularly gruesome death.

Image: “Joan of Arc” by unknown. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Tarquinius and Lucretia

The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, is one of Shakespeare’s most popular pieces. Written as a narrative poem, it gravely recounts the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius. In the painting above, Italian painter Titian depicts the terrible act with evocative detail and vivid colors.

Image: “Tarquinius and Lucretia” by Titian. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Venus and Adonis

The above painting, by Peter Paul Rubens, depicts the mythological encounter between the goddess Venus and the mortal Adonis. Shakespeare retells the story in his erotic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis.

Image: “Venus and Adonis” by Peter Paul Rubens. Public Domain via WikiArt Visual Art Encyclopedia

Featured Image: “Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene II” engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti after a painting by Angelica Kauffmann. Library of Congress. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Are you really free? Yes: a new argument for freedom

How is human freedom really possible in the natural world as correctly described by modern physics, chemistry, biology, and cognitive neuroscience? Or, given the truth of modern science, are you really free?

By ‘real freedom,’ I mean ‘real free will and real rational agency,’ which in turn means:

First, you really can choose and do what you want to, or refrain from so choosing or doing, thus without being in any way compelled or prevented by irresistible inner or outer forces (real free will).

Second, you really can self-consciously choose and do what you want to, for reasons, and with real moral responsibility (real rational agency).

By ‘real moral responsibility’ for X, I mean:

First, X is something you really chose or did, whose objective moral value flows from and directly attaches to your really free choice or action.

And second, real moral responsibility requires real freedom—if you weren’t free to choose or do X, you couldn’t be responsible for it.

Most contemporary philosophers and scientists, and many non-philosophers too, hold that you are not really free, because they also believe that the truth of modern science entails a thesis I will call ‘natural mechanism.’

‘Natural mechanism’ says that everything that happens is either deterministic, indeterministic, or some mixture of both, and that all its causal and quantitative characteristics are not only fixed by the general causal laws of nature, especially those laws governing the conservation of quantities of matter or energy, together with all the settled facts about the past, especially including the Big Bang, but also calculable from those laws and facts on an ideal digital computer.

If natural mechanism is true, then you are not really free, because, instead, no matter what you may believe about your freedom, you are really a deterministic or indeterministic natural automaton, ultimately caused by the Big Bang.

I will now provide a new philosophical argument for a theory of real freedom that is neither contrary to modern science nor committed to the thesis of natural mechanism, that I call ‘Kantian natural libertarianism.’

Kantian natural libertarianism flows from two simple but earth-shattering ideas proposed by Kant in the 18th century, and also from one slightly less simple but still earth-shattering idea proposed by Nobel laureate physicist Ilya Prigogine in the late 20th century:

First, action that is perfectly in conformity with a law, is not necessarily entailed or otherwise necessitated by that law.

Second, real freedom presupposes, in rational human animals, the natural processes specifically characteristic of living organisms; but living organisms are not natural automata, whether deterministic or indeterministic, because they are self-organizing and purposive; hence real freedom is grounded in biological anti-mechanism.

Immanuel Kant, by Veit Hans Schnorr. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Third, the correct physics is a non-deterministic interpretation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call this NDI-NET.

Let us suppose that NDI-NET is true, and that all the general causal laws of nature, as formulated by modern science, are also true, under the NDI-NET interpretation.

From these suppositions, it does not follow that natural mechanism is true, and that we are really natural automata.

To see this, suppose that everything we choose and do is at least consistent with those general causal natural laws, and that therefore we never violate any of them.

And in particular, suppose that we never bring any new matter or energy into the natural world, hence we never violate any of the general causal natural laws governing the conservation of quantities of matter or energy.

Nevertheless, it does not follow that whatever we choose and do is entailed or otherwise necessitated by those laws. This is because, as Kant pointed out, mere conformity of action with laws is not the same as entailment or necessitation by laws.

Indeed, for any general causal law of nature whatsoever, no matter how specific it is, together with all the settled natural facts about the past, nevertheless, there is always some physical ‘open texture’ that is not entailed or necessitated by that law, although it remains perfectly in conformity with the laws.

More precisely, in the wake of the Big Bang, there is always and everywhere some physical open texture that, at various stages of far-from-equilibrium, temporally-unidirectional, complex, self-organizing thermodynamic activity, as studied in ND-NET, creates targets for ultra-specific, context-sensitive physical activity: e.g., the roiling surface-structures of boiling water; the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction, plus light excitation; the unfolding of weather systems; the development of viruses; organismic activity including the purposive lives of simple organisms, plants, and animals; the feelings, desires, perceptions, and thoughts of conscious animals; and really free choice and action by conscious animals, including rational human animals.

Let us call these thermodynamic targets ‘live options,’ and this physical open texture ‘natural open space.’

Given some live options in natural open space, then, even though you never violate any general causal laws of nature and never bring any new matter or energy into the natural world, it remains really possible for you, in context, to choose and do some things you want to, in purposive, creative, and morally-empowered ways, by spontaneously locally re-organizing and re-structuring the total quantity of matter or energy that is always already available then and there.

For example: now type or write down any word that spontaneously comes into your head.

(I typed ‘freedom’.)

Let’s call this sort of activity, ‘natural self-determination.’ This is just like a creative artist who makes an original work of art by spontaneously locally re-organizing and re-structuring whatever already-existing materials are given to her.

As naturally self-determining animals, we are all creative natural artists, ‘little bangs,’ who purposively bring new energy-structures into the world, and thereby actualize potential energy.

The Big Bang has done many things. But it didn’t type or write down that very word: you did it, with real freedom.

Therefore you’re not a natural automaton; instead you’re a naturally self-determining animal fully capable of real freedom.

So Kantian natural libertarianism is true.

Featured image credit: Padlock photo by Dustin Gaffke. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Contextual cartography: an email exchange with Henry Greenspan and Tim Cole, Part 2

Two weeks ago, we published the first part of an exchange between Henry Greenspan and Tim Cole. Below, they wrap up their conversation, turning to the intellectual difficulties of taking context into consideration. The issues they raise should be of interest to all oral historians, so we want to hear from you! Join the conversation in the comment section on Part 1, or by submitting a follow up piece for publication on the blog.

Unraveling

Henry Greenspan: As is clear, our discussion has complemented a number of current directions in oral history, even while such considerations are essentially absent from work concerning survivor testimony. Thus, while productive “reflexivity” and consideration of what is “off the record” have become central in oral history—as in the terrific work of Anna Sheftel, Stacey Zembrzycki, and others—such attentiveness to self and context remains very rare in work concerning Holocaust survivors. Indeed, I would say that the great bulk of survivor “testimony” projects are at least 20 years behind oral history more generally.

In that context, James Young’s piece on “double stranded” narratives that Tim cited was an important effort but has borne essentially no fruit—even within Young’s own work. Such, I think, is the power of habit and of paradigms.

That power will not simply be resolved in the “marketplace of ideas.” Contemporary ways of engaging survivors and their accounts—and especially the creation of video-testimony archives—are aggressively promoted, richly funded, and celebrity endorsed. When I began my work in the 1970s, there were essentially no models for what an interview with a Holocaust survivor was supposed to “look like.” That allowed survivors and I to make it up as we went along, a lucky accident for which I will always be grateful. Conversely, as a number of us have noted, it now takes considerable effort to convince a survivor-interviewee that there is any option aside from the conventional testimony approach. That is how ritualized things have become.

Taking place and space seriously may help us to better understand what others say, how they say it, and why they say it.

Nevertheless, I think the wider theme of Tim’s and my interchange is that the now usual way we engage survivors and their retelling—the “testimony” paradigm itself—is beginning to crumble. A new collection edited by Steven High, Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, presents alternatives. So do a series of other recent volumes and journal articles, many written by young scholars open to, and interested in, new approaches.

Of course, seriously engaging both context and retelling itself as inseparable parts of a complex, evolving, and multi-dimensional process—rather than an archived testimonial endpoint (the egg-from-chicken model) —is not simple. For example, when Young refers to “the social and political circumstances surrounding a story’s retelling,” he is not simply invoking one additional “strand,” but a relative zillion. Most readers will know the list. “Circumstances” include myriad aspects of the interview dialogue itself; the impact of varying protocols and practices associated with different projects and purposes (on all sides); contemporary perceptions, presumptions, and conveyed expectations of “witnesses”—who they are and what they have to say—and survivors’ varying responses to those expectations. In short, relevant “circumstances” potentially include every aspect of an interview’s where, when, why, how, and who—as defined both by the immediate participants and a wider, actual and imagined, many more.

It is not hard to compile a list of “contingencies” and “moving parts.” It is enormously more challenging to envision them actually in motion together. One must determine, for example, which contexts are relevant, and for whom? And if one seriously intends to talk about what is “received,” one must include both sides of a transmission. How does what is said relate, or not relate, to what is heard? Every interviewer (like every parent or teacher) knows the chasm that may pertain.

So how does one go beyond a laundry list of “factors” while avoiding conceptual chaos? The optimistic (and ambitious) title of a current paper of mine is “Putting Context in Context.” Beginning with a series of interviews that I did with one particular survivor in the late 1970s and early 80s—and comparing my interviews with the same survivor’s retelling in six other and very different contexts and projects that took place between the 1960s and the mid-2000s—I hope to make some tracks. Unsurprisingly, there are striking continuities and there are striking differences. And, most important, this is a survivor who himself has deeply reflected about his responses to different projects—both those he has chosen to avoid and his choices within those he has engaged. I have been arguing for a long time that without such reflections from survivors themselves (which are not the “last word” but an essential “some words”) we are mostly blowing smoke. Within the institutionalized and scholarly habits that now encase survivor “testimony,” it will take lot of work for that smoke to begin to clear. It will also take a methodological revolution—mostly too late for Holocaust survivors, but not too late for the ways we engage survivors of other hells.

Mapping

Tim Cole: I’m pleased that Henry returned to something that he referenced in passing in his previous blog: the need to explore survivors’ reflections on choosing whether and what to say, because this is a critical part of understanding just what is (and is not) said. As Henry noted in an earlier post, we need to be aware that what happens when survivors talk can be “oral psychology,” “oral philosophy,” “oral theology,” or “oral narratology” and not only “oral history.” His alerting us to the variety of reasons that individuals choose to retell is important. Considering the reasons for creating the source is one of the first things any of us learnt in history methods classes. And yet, as Henry suggests, getting at those reasons tends to be difficult to access from most large-scale oral history projects given that such meta-data is largely absent. Henry’s practice of multiple interviews with the same survivor is one way of developing that kind of broader contextual understanding. Another is to listen hard to the interviews themselves and those times when these reflections do crop up within the act of retelling, or to draw upon as broad a range as possible of interviews and writings from one survivor. I have tried to do both in my forthcoming book, Holocaust Landscapes. For example, in a couple of chapters I draw on two interviews with David Bergman—who is one of the survivors I wrote about in the OHR article. What struck me about these interviews, was the value of watching and listening to an earlier audio-visual presentation that David had developed to better understand how and why he had decided to frame his wartime story as a series of train journeys.

Although, as Henry suggests, there are scholars doing important new work around oral history and the Holocaust, I think he is right to suggest that Holocaust studies—both historiography and collections—tends to lag behind the developments within oral history. I’d go further. My sense is that Holocaust studies period remains a profoundly conservative sub-field for a variety of reasons, and is the poorer for a tendency towards conceptual and methodological conservatism.

Much of my own work on the Holocaust over close to two decades now has been a call to consider the spatiality of the events. As I have begun to work more with oral history methods, I have been interested in extending that call to oral historians. As our conversation over the blog has suggested, there are multiple ways in which space and place play out in oral history. There is plenty of work to be done on thinking about oral history after the “spatial turn.” I would like to add another category to Henry’s list of what is happening when individuals retell their stories. To “oral psychology,” “oral philosophy,” “oral theology,” “oral narratology,” and “oral history,” I would add “oral geography.” I don’t feel that I have anything like a fully-fledged understanding of what “oral geography” entails, but simply a hunch that there may be value in thinking spatially about all aspects of the interview process and product. Doing so is not simply about trying to catch up with yet another wave of academic fads and fashions. Rather it is driven by a sense that taking place and space seriously may help us to better understand what others say, how they say it, and why they say it.

CODA: “To be and not to be”

Henry Greenspan: This week my class discussed interviews I did with Reuben, a survivor with whom I first spoke in 1976. Of all the survivors whom I’ve known, Reuben was the most obviously devastated. My decade of work as a clinical psychologist had not prepared me for a depression as profound as his. He described himself as a “gilgul”—Yiddish for “lost soul.” A gilgul, said Reuben, is “not in the old world or the new. He just wanders around. He’s lost, you know. He’s lost.” European Jewish culture, as Reuben knew it, was an “extinct species,” “pulled out by the roots,” “gone completely.” Reuben lived on as a remnant, situated nowhere. And, indeed, while his home was in a lower middle class suburb, he owned a small electric parts store in a part of Detroit burned over during the 1967 “riots.” The remains reminded him of the ghetto in Lodz where he was before Auschwitz. He noted: “Everything was boarded-up. And ruined. It was a lot like in the ghetto. A lot like in the ghetto.” Reuben thus found the Lodz Ghetto in the ghetto of Detroit.

Here, then, another example of the sort Tim describes of the way survivors locate memories in space—in this case, an active, lived overlay of one set of ruins on another. But, listening years later, what is most striking in my recordings with Reuben is how often they are interrupted by other lived experience. One constantly hears animated telephone calls from friends, in which Reuben and his comrades shifted unpredictably between Yiddish, Russian, German, English, Hebrew, and Polish (what I came to call “survivalese”) One also hears the arrival and departure of his teenage children—tires screeching, radios blaring, shouts and banter in the background. Periodically, a large maternal sheep dog followed by four pups padded through the kitchen in which Reuben spoke of how he was a ghost, without substance or locale.

It was years before I understood that all this life—friends, children, sheepdogs—as well as Reuben’s death—was the point. The two worlds do not add up, there is no higher synthesis; current theories of “trauma” and “resilience” do not help. One simply has to hold on to both realities at once, without attempting synthesis. Elie Wiesel once wrote that survivors faced a different problem than Hamlet’s: “To be and not to be.”

In the conventional video-testimony format—95% of the field, regardless of which specific project—the phone calls, children, and sheep dogs would literally be locked away—out of sight and out of sound. We would be left with a version of Reuben that excluded what might be most essential about being a genocide survivor—the simultaneity, again without synthesis, of both ongoing death and ongoing life.

And so another example of the ways the video-testimony format selects and excludes—often the most important things. Nor does it matter how many different “testimonies” from the same survivor in that format one watches, and however carefully. What isn’t there isn’t there—even for the most attentive interpreter. There is no way to see around the corner. We do not know, and really cannot know, what we are missing. But, worst of all, we rarely think about the problem and how it might be meliorated. Recent work concerning oral history “on the edge” and the need for “ethnographies of practice” are directly relevant. But in the world of Holocaust survivor testimony, such work is almost universally unknown.

Assertions like these will not be welcome by those who promote and fund video-testimony projects. If they respond at all, we hear about the worthy projects video-testimonies have facilitated (and I agree they have), but we will not hear more. And beyond such projects, there is the much larger world of studies in “testimony, trauma, and memory”—many inspired by work with Holocaust survivors—which will also not easily give ground. As Walter Benjamin wrote years ago, and I reiterated in the 80s and Alex Freund more recently, the romance of “storytelling” and “survival” is not easily abandoned. Too much—in material, ideological, and political capital—has been invested.

Like Reuben, then, much of Holocaust survivor video-testimony inhabits its own world–largely detached from oral history more generally and, strangely enough, even detached from the enormously complex lives and deaths of survivors themselves.

Image Credit: “Deceleration” by Kevin Dooley. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Nils Alwall: The quiet, unassuming Swede

During the night, between 3rd and 4th September 1946, things were stirring in the basement of the internal medicine department, at the university hospital of Lund, Southern Sweden. A 47-year-old man had been admitted for treatment. His main problem was uraemia (urea in the blood), but he was also suffering from silicosis (a lung disorder), complicated by pneumonia. His kidneys had now failed and waste products were rapidly accumulating in his body. His eyelids were so swollen he could not see.

Under local anaesthesia, the surgeon on-call opened two vessels in the patient’s wrist and inserted glass cannulae into a vein and an artery. A strange machine could be seen standing on the floor. It comprised of a large glass container with a cylinder of stainless wire netting inside. A flattened cellophane tube was wrapped around it. The tube was actually an eleven-meter long sausage casing. When the machine was connected, the blood from the patient’s artery ran through the tube and back into his vein. As the blood travelled through the casing, a large quantity of waste product was removed from the blood entering the liquid outside; the cleansed blood was then safely returned to the patient.

This exchange of substances through the sausage casing is now called “dialysis”.

‘Dialysis machine with bed side setup’ by Irvin Calicut at Malayalam Wikipedia. CC BY SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

To bring us back to 2016, such operations are now routine, and more than two million people world-wide undergo this treatment on a regular basis. 70 years ago however, this was revolutionary (and I don’t just mean the rotating drum). This advance was completely independent of Willem Kolff’s remarkable dialysis achievement. In fact, in the period 1943-1946, there were three simultaneous but entirely independent technological and clinical advances: One in war-torn Holland by Willem Kolff, one in Southern Sweden, and one in the United States. All achieved “human dialysis” successfully.

Back in September 1946 – during the course of the night, the patient regained consciousness until finally he was able to open his eyes and talk. Sadly, his life was then claimed by pneumonia just 24 hours later. Nevertheless, everyone present was aware that they had witnessed something of a miracle – one of the world’s first kidney dialysis treatments.

The device was designed by a 42-year-old associate professor, Nils Alwall. He had been deeply moved by the tragic situation of patients with renal failure, for which there was then no cure, unless they spontaneously recovered, say after an accident. Strict bedrest and diet constituted the only available treatment. Patients were not even allowed to leave the bed to use the toilet, and their food did not contain salt, protein, or spices – all in an effort to reduce the formation of nitrogenous waste products. After a few weeks, the boredom became almost intolerable. Many did not survive.

During the war years, Dr. Alwall experimented with dialysis on rabbits, applying the knowledge of physiology he had gained as a research assistant. As a result, his device was able to mimic normal kidney function better than the dialysis machine developed by the Dutchman, Willem Kolff. Kolff and Alwall worked completely independently of each other – this was during World War II of course – though Kolff was a few years ahead. Alwall’s device could also remove fluid by ultrafiltration in a more controllable fashion than could Kolff’s.

‘Nils Alwall’ uploaded by Kenji3111. CC BY SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Alwall was also responsible for early vascular access successes, which allowed for a safe connection to the dialysis machine. In addition to all of this, he pioneered the first successful percutaneous kidney biopsies, again in World War II, but only finally written up as a series report in 1950. One has only to wonder how one individual could have made so many important contributions to mainstream kidney treatments that we are still using today (though, to be candid, the fact that we still biopsy the kidney in 2016 as we did in 1946 is a matter of concern – where is the diagnostic progress from biomarkers and other new techniques?).

These early pioneers could never have contemplated the dialysis industry we see today. At the start, compensating for permanent kidney damage would require two things: the opportunity to reliably connect the artificial kidney to the patient’s vascular system, and, the use of a convenient disposable filter. The first condition was met when doctors learned to enlarge the vein by surgically connecting it to an artery (the Brescia-Cimino arteriovenous shunt). The second condition was met by the company Gambro in Sweden, which was founded after Alwall convinced the director of the clinical and commercial significance of a disposable filter for dialysis.

Gambro went through many lean years before breaking even, but eventually its stock skyrocketed. The company was also the origin of the “Crafoord Foundation” in Lund: one of the most important research financiers in Sweden.

Swedes generally are reserved, quiet folk, imbued with a strong sense of “lagom” (no precise English translation, but the closest would be “just enough” and “not too much”). So Alwall did not brag or boast about his extraordinary medical contributions. Despite this, he should be known as a pioneer of the global development of dialysis; astute, assured – and ultimately unassuming.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Swede (The Vegetable)’ by pin add. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.

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Mind this space: couple therapy

What happens in our relationships? This is the question that draws people into the profession of couple therapy. Therapists stand outside the couple in order to understand how their relationship systems and unconscious dynamics work. What is it that the couple have created between them? How can you restore the balance within that relationship? We spoke with David Hewison and Kate Thompson of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships on couple therapy: what it offers, why it’s unique among other kinds of therapy, and why it “can’t turn frogs into princes”.

Listen to more from David and Kate, as well as a raft of other eminent psychologists, on Mind This Space, a new podcast series from the psychology team at Oxford University Press. The podcasts explore the fascinating world of psychology for students, researchers, and practitioners.

Featured image by Charlie Foster. CC0 via Pexels.

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Epicureanism: eat, drink, and be merry?

Most people have a good idea what it is to have a Stoical attitude to life, but what it means to have an Epicurean attitude is not so obvious. When attempting to decipher the true nature of Epicureanism it is first necessary to dispel the impression that fine dining is its central theme. From its introduction in the third century BCE, Epicureanism has revolved around a set of interrelated and compelling ideas about nature, morality, and politics. It contributed to scientific enquiry, social progress, and human self-understanding. Epicureanism was treated as a serious, though wrong-headed philosophy by its Stoic rivals and has gone on to be caricatured and maligned down throughout the ages.

The letters and sayings of Greek philosopher Epicurus, along with his many manuscripts on nature and society (long lost but recently partially recovered), were reworked by his first century BCE Roman follower, Titus Carus Lucretius, into the six-part poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things).

In this beautiful text, you will find an exposition of ancient materialism based on the claim that nothing really exists except atoms, in motion and at rest, and the void. According to the system there are multiple worlds, or cosmoi. Each of these has emerged from chaos, producing its own stars and planets, people, animals, and plants, and each will eventually return to chaos.

The mind is material, and all living beings are mortal. The ancient Epicureans denied any involvement of a God or Gods in the creation of worlds or their maintenance, and Lucretius in particular saw religion as superstitious and cruel. Death, they maintained, is not to be feared but is a condition of nothingness from which all experience, hence all suffering is excluded. This claim was central to a philosophy whose aim was to banish fear and its often dreadful consequences, including the persecution of others, from human experience.

In moral philosophy, the Epicureans argued that the avoidance of pain, inflicting it and experiencing it, and the enjoyment of harmless pleasures ought to guide human ‘choice and avoidance.’ Unlike the Stoics, they did not suppose that the human mind has unlimited power over the body; insofar as we are fully material beings, we act and suffer as one psycho-physical unity. They cautioned against excess, pointing out that that while eating, drinking, and sex are pleasurable and so to be enjoyed, moderation is called for. Overindulgence or imprudent choice brings on all manner of vexation, pain, social punishment, and remorse.

Epicurean political philosophy is based on the idea that humans created their institutions by trial and error over many years, taught by no one, and that unstable forms of government and social practice will inevitably give way to other forms. All social distinctions that for are imaginary or conventional; there are no natural authorities or natural hierarchies. The school of Epicurus was exceptional in Athens in allowing women as members.

The Epicurean legacy is impressive. It has left an imprint in the writings of Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke, Newton, Hume, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Darwin and Marx, as well as in more recent philosophical writing. There have been numerous detractors as well, from the Fathers of the Early Church, who regarded the Epicurean teachings with consternation, all the way to Kant who wanted to draw a sharp line between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of moral goodness. This led him to produce his own opposing theory of the noumenal substratum of reality to the Epicurean atoms.

Image credit: Marble bust of Epicurus. Roman copy of Greek original, 3rd century BC/2nd century BC. British Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image credit: Greek Antiquity. Public domain via Pixabay.

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The resource curse – Episode 31 – The Oxford Comment

Global inequality, particularly as it exists today, has proven to be more “process” than state of being. An era of unprecedented interconnection means that individual practices, just as much as large-scale social, political, and economic actions, shape, sustain, and reinforce power dynamics. Consumerism is one such practice, transferring economic power from the hands of those who buy goods to those that supply them. Seldom, though, do we stop to consider whose pockets we are lining in our consumption, whether buying a new television or refueling at our local gas station.

In this month’s episode of The Oxford Comment, Leif Wenar, author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World, and Dale Jamieson, author of Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed, explore the unseen costs of consumer demand, corporate conduct, and more, including the increasing destabilization of our global political (and environmental) system. Together, they contemplate the “revolutionary” consequences of changing the means by which we live, moving our world toward a new era of ethics, sustainability and security.

Image Credit: “War and Poverty” by Kelly Short. Public Domain via Flickr.

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Watts Riots: Black Families Matter

On 11 August 1965, the Watts Riots exploded in Los Angeles, taking the nation by surprise. Sparked by an arrest that escalated into a skirmish between local residents and police, the riots lasted six days. They laid bare the seething discontent that lay just beneath the surface in many black communities. The Voting Rights Act, which curtailed state and local communities from enacting practices locking African Americans out of the political process, had been signed into law just days earlier. Seen as a massive step forward for African Americans, media and political leaders wondered, why did Watts explode?

We now know Lyndon B. Johnson’s private conversations afterwards indicated a certain understanding:

“These groups they got really nothing to live for. Forty percent of them are unemployed…These youngsters…they’ve got no place to sleep…broken homes and illegitimate families and all the narcotics are circulating around them…and we’ve isolated them.”

Johnson’s understanding of the Watts Riots was framed by The Moynihan Report placing single mother families at the center of “a tangle of pathology” driving persistent poverty of urban ghettos. Black families, not persistent racism, was framed as the driving force behind urban conditions. The report inspired many of the programs launched in the aftermath of the riots. These programs, rather then constituting a fully invested attack on poverty, were mainly Band-Aid solutions addressing perceived internal problems of the black community. The massive structural problems of which riots and troubled families are a symptom continued to build. Then, as now, “The Black Family” is portrayed as the root of everything, from intergenerational poverty to clashes with police. The Moynihan Report, written 55 years ago, has framed public policy for decades. In our 20 years of research of African American families, we have yet to see work in this area that does not reference this report in some fashion.

The report has a complex legacy. On the one hand, it cogently assessed the connection between the constraining impact of discrimination on every area of life, including intimate relationships available to African Americans. Still, the report also stigmatized families led by unmarried women by insisting they were responsible for transmission of cultural responses keeping African Americans locked in poverty. Since the report, single black motherhood has been placed at the top of the list of presumed “self-inflicted” harms.

This response to the Watts Riots has set the stage for social policy responses, including the 1966 Welfare Reform Act, and punitive aspects of the “War on Drugs,” both of which were key in the emergence of what law professor and author Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” These responses did not arrest family change or improve the conditions of urban communities.

Black families, whatever their structure, really do matter.

In fact, the 50 years since the Moynihan Report and the Watts Riots have brought accelerating marriage declines and disruptions among American families of every race, especially pronounced among African Americans. In 1965, nearly a quarter of African American children were born to unmarried mothers, while only 5% of white children were. Today, those figures are 70% and 25%. In fact, the experience of marriage, once pervasive, has become much less so. Currently, only about 55% of whites and 31% of black adults are married.

In 2015, as was the case in 1965, declines in marriage continue to be associated with race, poverty, and inequality, as well as with cultural arguments about pathology and black communities. Massive structural differences that continue to mark racial groups despite color-blind policies have made many Americans less patient with such simple connections. To be sure, race continues to influence how many people think about the links between marriage, childbearing, and problems confronting African American communities. Even the first black president, Barack Obama, started initiatives promoting “responsible fatherhood” as a primary strategy for building “strong communities.” Then, as now, Americans of every race decry “deterioration” of urban communities as being tied to family behavior, and loss of “traditional family.”

It is notable that families in recent headlines regarding the murders of African American men and women represent a range of configurations and have been pivotal in galvanizing a new wave of social activism. Trayvon Martin’s parents are divorced but publicly united in their grief as parents; Mike Brown’s parents were never married; Eric Garner was married. The families of Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, and Sandra Bland are all a part of this legacy of families insisting that systems be interrogated and held accountable.

As the activism of a new generation of non-traditional mothers, fathers, and families remind us that “Black Lives Matter,” it would be wise to shift the focus away from understanding declines in traditional family as causing the crisis conditions faced by African Americans. Instead, we need to ask how to better respond to the crisis of the new “Jim Crow” poisoning the criminal justice system at every level, because black families, whatever their structure, really do matter.

Image Credit: “Black Lives Matter Black Friday” by The All-Nite Images. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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