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Immigration and the demise of political trust

An average of 30 percent of the British public have identified immigration as one of their most important concerns since 2003; in recent months, 50 per cent or more have named this as one of the most important issues facing the UK. In many other countries, such public concern about immigration has prompted the rise of the far-right as a significant challenger to established political parties, though the far right does not appear to be a serious challenger in UK general elections, even in the face of increased levels of migration (and despite government promises to reduce it).

Public concern about immigration presents a potentially more serious challenge to the functioning of liberal democracy than simply prompting the rise of the far-right, however, because it undermines public confidence in democratic political institutions and elites. Two key factors are likely to be causing this.

The first of these goes back to the construction of modern liberal democracy, which from its inception has involved a sense of ‘we-feeling’; the modern social welfare state may particularly necessitate a clear notion of society and belonging since it requires significant financial sacrifice for the benefit of others. Post-war immigration may be seen by many as a challenge to widely held conceptualizations of who ‘we’ are and more specifically, where newcomers fit within these conceptualizations. Many have argued that immigration and multiculturalism may create problems for the ‘we-feeling’ that underpins national social democratic political systems (although it must be noted that the evidence on this is somewhat mixed). This demise of the sense of community is likely to include the institutions and elites that are expected to represent and adjudicate between members of the community (i.e., citizens).

The second reason that public concern about immigration undermines confidence in the political system is that citizens are likely to have come to blame the political system as a whole for failing to control immigration. For several decades, citizens in Britain and other European countries have expressed fairly strong reservations about continued migration to their countries. Politicians periodically respond to these concerns by producing policy changes designed to slow the levels of immigration and/or to improve the integration of migrants who are allowed to stay in the country long-term. Opposition parties often promise to ‘get immigration under control’ when governing parties appear to be failing in this policy area. There are, however, countless examples of opposition parties promising the latter in particular, only to fail to have much apparent impact on immigration numbers once in office. This is because the legal and economic requirements in the area of immigration policy mean that it is extremely difficult to reduce immigration to the sorts of levels often promised by politicians without committing human rights violations, violating European Union law, or damaging the domestic economy and public services.

Thus, the main factor that may be contributing to the rising connection between public concern about immigration and distrust in national political institutions and elites is the politicians themselves promising outcomes that are not realistically deliverable. By making and invariably breaking such promises, political elites not only reduce confidence in their own handling of immigration but contribute to the demise of confidence in the national political system as a whole.

Headline image: Refugees Welcome Demo London Saturday September 12 2015 162 by David Holt London. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

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Shakespeare and conscience

At the outset of an undergraduate Shakespeare course I often ask my students to make a list of ten things that may not, or do not, exist. I say “things” because I want to be as vague as possible. Most students submit lists featuring zombies and mermaids, love charms and time travel. Hogwarts is a popular place name, as are Westeros and Middle Earth. But few students venture into religious territory. Concepts such as providence and damnation are seldom volunteered, and over the past decade only a handful of undergraduates have ever mentioned God, the soul, or conscience.

Midway through the semester I repeat my request, this time insisting that students create lists in the form of quotations from Shakespeare. This yields phrases like “noble blood” (Richard II) and “the Weird Sisters” (Macbeth), along with propositions such as “men have marble, women waxen minds” (The Rape of Lucrece) and “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would” (Hamlet). In short, debatable ideas about class, gender, political authority, and supernatural reality begin to surface, and this aids me greatly in steering class discussions. I ask why certain characters favor certain ideological perspectives, and students do well in proffering answers. They quickly see that Edgar’s claim near the end of King Lear – “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to scourge us” – is absurdly inadequate in explanatory power. It may suffice to account for Gloucester’s fate, but were the gods “just” in their treatment of Cordelia? Or did she exist merely to die and thereby punish her father?

Hamlet’s play-within-a-play is a particularly rich site for exploration. The theory behind Hamlet’s scheme is that people who’ve committed heinous crimes will involuntarily reveal their guilt if confronted with a theatrical image of their transgression. “The Mousetrap” is thus a lie-detector test, and Hamlet seems strangely naive in his confidence that it will prove a valid instrument. “The play’s the thing,” he says, “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” But is it? And does he?

Productions give differing answers. In the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet, with David Tennant in the title role, this scene allows Claudius to confirm Hamlet’s hostility toward him more than it allows Hamlet to confirm Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet is still exultant – he tells Horatio that he’ll “take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound” – but whether his theory about conscience has been verified is anything but evident. I ask my students whether they’d want to live in a world where people held convictions of this sort. Some laugh; others say they already live in just such a world.

Otello and Desdemona by Alexandre-Marie Colin. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If conscience needs prompting in Hamlet, it works quite well without it in Macbeth. Undergraduates love this play for its brevity, its magnificent intensity, and its “secret, black, and midnight hags.” I tell them (as Samuel Johnson has often told me) that it was a criminal offense not to believe in witches during the reign of King James I – although I can’t easily imagine how such a law was enforced. Did Shakespeare believe in witches? We’ll never know. But does it make sense, in a fictional realm where witches do exist, for conscience to gnaw relentlessly at the inner peace of murderers, robbing them of sleep and inducing hallucinations? I think it does. The heightened malevolence of such a realm cries out for an equal and opposite force of irresistible self-confrontation.

Nowadays we tend to think of conscience as a psychic internalization of socially-sanctioned moral imperatives, but in Shakespeare’s day conscience was routinely viewed as an instrument of providence. The theologian William Perkins described it as “a little god sitting in the middle of men’s hearts, arraigning them in this life as they shall be arraigned at the tribunal of the everliving God in the day of judgment.” This sounds impressive – if not exactly pleasant – but the problem is that such a view falls short with respect to empirical confirmation. We know, of course, that absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily constitute proof of absence, but we’ve also seen that Claudius is a tough nut to crack despite Hamlet’s optimism. And the optimism of King Lear is still greater in this regard – though perhaps because it’s partly shaped by madness.

When Lear rushes into the storm, he implores divine authority to jump-start the workings of conscience in guilty men and women:

                                                 Let the great gods


That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads


Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,


That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes


Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,


Thou perjured and thou simular of virtue


That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,


That under covert and convenient seeming


Hast practiced on man’s life. Close pent-up guilts,


Rive your concealing continents and cry


These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man


More sinned against than sinning.

These are difficult lines, but their broad arc of meaning is clear enough. Lear understands the storm as Hamlet understands “The Mousetrap”: as a divinely-guided instrument, a tool of exposure. But whether the tool works is even more doubtful than in Hamlet. Lear himself seems the only character in the play who’s ready at this point to acknowledge moral failure.

That conscience leads inevitably to confession cannot be demonstrated in Shakespeare. But that conscience partakes of divine rectitude is unfalsifiable as a proposition. Indeed it bears a close family resemblance to Othello’s claim, when he turns to the lifeless Desdemona, that “When we shall meet at compt, / This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, / And fiends will snatch at it.” No one can show that this won’t or couldn’t happen. Othello’s speech is grounded in a vision of how the world ought and needs to be, as are the assumptions of Lear and Hamlet regarding self-exposure. Belief, in short, is mostly desire.

If my students ponder no idea but this, they will not have read Shakespeare in vain.

Featured image credit: Macbeth meets the three witches; scene from Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. Wood engraving, 19th century. Wellcome Trust. CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Test your knowledge of G.E.M. Anscombe

This January, the OUP Philosophy team has chosen Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (G.E.M.) Anscombe as their Philosopher of the Month. G.E.M. Anscombe (1919 – 2001) was a British analytical philosopher best known for her contributions in the fields of philosophy of the mind, action, language, logic, and ethics. She was a prominent figure in the Analytical Thomism movement. As a young woman, Anscombe converted to Roman Catholicism which, in turn, influenced her political and social attitudes.

See how well you know Elizabeth Anscombe by taking the quiz below.

Featured image credit: The School of Athens by Raphael. CC0 public domain from Pixabay.

Quiz image credit: Castle at University of Cambridge. CC0 public domain from Pixabay.

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Conversations in computing: Q&A with Editor-in-Chief, Professor Steve Furber

Oxford University Press is excited to be welcoming Professor Steve Furber as the new Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. In an interview between Justin Richards of BCS, The Chartered Institute of IT and Steve, we get to know more about the SpiNNaker project, ethical issues around Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the future of the IT industry.

Justin: Can you tell us a bit more about your current role?

Steve: At Manchester I am a regular research professor and I’ve served my term as head of department, that’s some time ago now. I lead a group of 40 or 50 staff and students and our general research area covers computer engineering to computer architecture. On the engineering side we’re interested in the design of silicon chips and how you can make the most of the enormous transistor resource that the manufacturing industries can now give us on a chip. On the architecture side we are interested in particular in how we exploit the many core resources that are increasingly available in all computer products today.

Justin: What was the topic of your recent Lovelace Lecture?

Steve: The title is ‘Computers and Brains’ and basically this is a lecture which talks about some of the history of artificial intelligence from some of the early writings of Ada Lovelace herself – 2015 was the 200th anniversary of her birth – through to Alan Turing’s thoughts on AI and then onto the research that I’m leading today, which is building a very large parallel computer for real-time brain modelling applications.

Professor Steve Furber. Image used with permission.

Justin: Can you tell us about your SpiNNaker project?

Steve: SpiNNaker is the massive parallel computer for real time brain modelling and the name is a rather crude compression of spiking your network architecture – it’s not quite an acronym. We’re using a million ARM processors – those are the processors that you find in your mobile phone designed by a British company in Cambridge – in a single machine and with a million ARM cores we can model about 1% of the scale of the network in the human brain. The brain is a very challenging, modelling target, you can think of it as 1% of the human brain, but I sometimes prefer to think of it as ten whole mouse brains. The network we’re using is quite simplified as there’s a lot about brain connectivity that’s still not known, so there’s a lot of guesswork in building any such model.

Justin: You’ve said in the past that accelerating our understanding of brain function would represent a major scientific breakthrough. Can you expand a little bit more on that thought?

Steve: It is clear to anybody who uses a computer that they are incredibly fast and capable at the set of things that they are good at, but they really struggle with things that we humans find simple. Very young babies learn to recognise their mother, whereas programming a computer to recognise an individual human face is possible but extremely hard. My view is that if we understood more about how humans learn to recognise faces and solve similar problems then we’d be much better placed to build computers that could do this easily.

Justin: Where do you see AI processing going in the next five to ten years?

Steve: The big issue with AI is understanding what intelligence is in the first place. I think one of the reasons why we have found true AI so difficult to reproduce in machines is that we’ve not quite worked out how natural intelligence works, hence my interest in going back to look at the brain as the substrate from which human intelligence emerges. If we can understand that better then we might be able to reproduce it more faithfully in our computing machines.

Justin: What about the ethics of AI?

Steve: Ultimately AI will lead to ethical issues. Clearly if machines become sentient then the issue as to whether you can or can’t switch them off becomes an ethical consideration. I think we are a very long way from that at the moment so that isn’t foremost among ethical issues we have to consider. I think there are much more pragmatic engineering issues, for example to do with driverless cars. If a driverless car is involved in a crash whose fault is it, who is responsible? If the crash turns out to be the result of the software bug, if it turns out to be the result of the human interfering with the car, there’s a whole set of issues that will have to be thought through there and they come a long time before the issue of the machine itself having any kind of rights.

Steve’s SpiNNaker project investigates methods of brain modelling. Image used with permission.

Justin: What do you think are the biggest challenges the IT industry faces?

Steve: I think high on the list is the issue of cybersecurity. We are seeing increasing numbers of attacks on IT systems and it’s very technical to work out how to build defences that don’t compromise the performance of the systems too much. So as consumers we install antivirus software on our PCs but sometimes the antivirus software makes the PC almost useless. So there’s a compromise in security, always. Most of us live in houses where the front door will succumb to a few decent kicks, but the bank chooses something more substantial for its vault. Security has to be proportionate to the risk. But I think security is going to loom increasingly large in the IT industry.

Justin: What do you see as the most exciting emerging technologies at the moment?

Steve: The most exciting technologies around the corner I think are the cognitive systems, machines becoming less passive, they don’t just sit waiting for human imports but they actually respond to the environment, interact with it, engage with it and that requires some degree of understanding. I don’t want understanding to be interpreted in too anthropomorphic a way – their understanding may be quite prosaic, it might be at the level of an insect. But an insect has an adequate understanding of its environment for its purposes. That’s how I would expect to see computers developing increasingly in the future.

Justin: What do you think the IT industry as a whole should be doing to improve its image?

Steve: I think the image of the industry is particularly important in the way it comes over in schools and in the choices that pupils make about their future careers. We certainly had a problem recently with the kind of exposure to IT that’s happened in a lot of schools being de-motivating, it has discouraged pupils from computing. I think the changes that are needed to remedy that are now in place and it will take a little while for them to filter through, but of course BCS has played a very active role in seeing those changes through, so hopefully computing will have a better image where it matters most, which is in schools.

Justin: Why do you think that we aren’t seeing so many women going into IT?

Steve: If I knew why women did not find IT so attractive, then I’d do something about it. It’s a major problem that for some reason culturally we think IT and computers are a male preserve and of course if we talk numbers then they are predominately male. It’s a problem that we’ve been worrying about all the time I’ve been in the university and many things have been tried and nothing has really made much difference, so it concerns me hugely but I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think there is any shortage of female role models, there are plenty of very high-powered women in the computing business. I really don’t understand why the subject is not attractive to girls at school, which is where the problem starts. I welcome any suggestions as to what we can do to remedy this.

Justin: Talking of role models, did you have any of your own?

Steve: My role models were probably not in computing, as I said I came through the mathematics and aerodynamics route at university and was really drawn into computing by what I saw as the new wave of computing based on the microprocessor, which in the late 1970s was a very new approach to building machines. So who do I hold up as a role model? Well, one of the lecturers at the university was John Conway who was always a very inspiring mathematician and it was great fun to listen to his lectures.

Justin: Looking back at your career so far is there anything you would have done differently if you had your time again?

Steve: I don’t think so, there are no decisions in my career path that I particularly regret and I think the advice I give to people is roughly the advice I follow myself, which is to make decisions that keep the maximum number of doors open. So look for opportunities, but when there’s nothing obvious staring you in the face then think about what subject creates the most possibilities in the area you’re interested in. Maximise the number of doors.

The full interview between Justin and Steve was originally published in ITNOW, and may also be viewed on YouTube as a two part recording. Watch Part One and Part Two online.

Featured image credit: Mother board by Magnascan. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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What was Shakespeare’s religion?

What was Shakespeare’s religion? It’s possible to answer this seemingly simple question in lots of different ways. Like other English subjects who lived through the ongoing Reformation, Shakespeare was legally obliged to attend Church of England services. Officially, at least, he was a Protestant. But a number of scholars have argued that there is evidence that Shakespeare had connections through his family and school teachers with Roman Catholicism, a religion which, through the banning of its priests, had effectively become illegal in England. Even so, ancestral and even contemporary links with the faith that had been the country’s official religion as recently as 1558, would make Shakespeare typical of his time. And in any case, to search for a defining religious label is to miss some of what is most interesting about religion in early modern England, and more importantly, what is most interesting about Shakespeare.

Questions such as ‘was Shakespeare a Protestant or a Catholic?’ use terms that are too neat for the reality of post-Reformation England. The simple labels Catholic, Protestant, and Puritan paper over a complex lived experience. Even in less turbulent times, religion is a framework for belief; actual faith slips in and out of official doctrine. Religion establishes a set of principles about belief and practice, but individuals pick and choose which bits they listen to.

‘Catholicism’ was an especially tricky category in this era. Under pressure of crippling fines and even execution, early modern Catholics maintained their faith in a variety of ways. Not every so-called papist supported the pope. The Roman Catholic Church of this era encompassed ‘recusants’ (who openly displayed their Catholicism by refusing to attend mandatory Church of England services) and ‘church papists’ (who conformed to the monarch’s protestant customs, but secretly practiced Catholicism). Some Catholics supported Elizabeth politically, looking to the pope only in spiritual matters; others plotted her overthrow. Catholicism was in the eye of the beholder; hotter Protestants saw many elements of Elizabeth’s own Church as horrifyingly ‘Romish’, but to average Protestants those puritanical objections seemed hysterical. Some accepted the theology and politics of the reformation, but still harboured an emotional attachment to older traditions, like praying for the dead. Furthermore, people have a habit of changing their minds over time, shifting their beliefs at different moments of their lives. Asking about the confessional allegiance of any early modern individual is a much more difficult – and interesting – enterprise than figuring out an either/or choice. Whatever Shakespeare’s personal faith was, he wrote plays that worked for audiences who had to feel their way through these dilemmas, audiences for whom Protestantism was the official state religion, but who experienced a far messier reality.

Playhouses provided spaces to explore these anxieties. Even though the direct representation of specific theological controversy was banned, Renaissance plays frequently featured elements of the Roman Catholic religion that had been practically outlawed in real life. Purgatorial ghosts and well-meaning friars still appeared on stage; star-crossed lovers framed their first kiss in terms of saintly intercession and statue veneration (Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.206-19); and various characters swore ‘by the mass’, ‘by the rood’, and ‘by’r lady’. Shakespeare wrote over sixty years after Henry VIII set the Reformation in motion. By the 1590s, English friars, nuns and hermits belonged firmly to the past, and many writers used them like the formula ‘once upon a time’: to create a safely distant, fictional world. Even so, Catholic Europe and Jesuit missionaries were perceived by state authorities as a very present danger. Anti-Catholic propaganda demonised that faith as fundamentally deceitful; ‘papist’ piety was mere pretence, a cover for lechery, treachery, and sin. Accordingly, some writers used Catholic settings as a shorthand for corruption (think of the decadent world of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, with its murderous and lascivious Cardinal). So Catholicism could point in different fictional directions: it could benignly and nostalgically suggest an unreal past, in the manner of a fairytale; or, it could paint a threatening image of a more contemporary fraud. But it’s striking that Shakespeare uses Catholic content rather differently from his contemporary dramatists, often embracing the contradictory connotations of, say, a friar, exploiting the figure’s nostalgic and threatening associations at the same time. This exploration of ambiguity seems to have been one way in which he thought through not only religious controversies, but also the very act of making fiction itself. A figure who works both like a fairytale and like a fraud tests out what is good and what is dangerous about literary illusion.

All’s Well that Ends Well is a case in point. This comedy tests fantasy ideals against real-life problems. Helen, the clever wench who miraculously cures a king and wins a husband of her own choosing, finds herself in love with a prince who isn’t so charming. But critics have never been too sure about whether Helen herself is a virtuous victim of her snobbish husband, or if she’s simply conniving and self-centred. By putting all of these possibilities in play Shakespeare invites us to interrogate the ideals that underpin romantic comedy: are the conventions we think of as happy endings really all that happy?

‘St Martin’s, Stamford’ by DncnH. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

One way that Helen secures her own happy ending is by putting on a pilgrim’s habit which allows her to follow (and eventually catch) her runaway husband. But this costume, with its mixed Catholic associations, further complicates the character and the morality of the plot. While the Catholic Church regarded pilgrimage to holy places as “meritorious” (a way of piously working to the salvation that only Christ could enable), Reformers scoffed at the notion that one earthly place could be holier than another, dismissed as idolatrous the intercession of saints usually invoked at shrines, and abhorred the idea that Christ’s gift of salvation needed supplementing. Shakespeare hints both that Helen might be the hypocrite of anti-Catholic polemic, who uses a pious habit to conceal selfish intentions, and that she might be a prayerful woman, who would be justly rewarded with a happy ending. Furthermore, the comedy also draws on more secular associations of ‘pilgrimage’, which run through the love poetry of the period figuring amorous devotion. We first learn of Helen’s pilgrimage in a letter that takes the form of the sonnet; at this point Helen is painted as something of a Petrarchan stalker, trekking her errant husband in the clothing of well-worn poetic metaphor. But Shakespeare unpicks other threads of meaning in the pilgrim costume too. In anti-Catholic fabliaux pilgrims used their religious journeys for decidedly smutty adventures. It’s probably no mistake that Helen uses her pilgrimage so that she can finally have sex. And again, there’s a question mark hanging over this behaviour. On the one hand her active desire for physical intimacy with her husband is legitimate and liberating, but on the other, she repeatedly removes her husband’s power of consent, most disturbingly in a bed-trick (a ‘wicked meaning in a lawful deed’). The comedy questions her sexual scruples.

Shakespeare exploits the various associations of the pilgrim in post-Reformation England. In Helen, papist and Catholic connotations are compounded: she is meritorious and devious, miraculous and cunning. The ‘happy ending’ of this play sees husband and wife reunited and apparently reconciled. But the ‘real’ wonder of this moment is provisional: ‘All yet seems well’ (my emphasis). The audience is very aware of the pragmatic tricks that Helen had to perform in order win this resolution. By drawing on the contradictory meanings of the pilgrim, Shakespeare creates a paradoxical character that engages his audience with the ethical dilemmas of fiction: when might the means justify the ends?

In this play, as in others, Shakespeare calls on the ambiguous associations of Catholic figures, images and ideas, as a means of engaging his audience with the problems he frames. He seems to revel in the pleasures of slippery meaning. By flirting with stereotypes and sectarian expectations he makes his audience think more deeply about the difficulties of the plays and their own culture. Whatever Shakespeare’s personal religion was, the religion he put on stage was both playful and probing.

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Movement and memory: an email exchange with Hank Greenspan and Tim Cole, Part 1

Regular readers of this blog will be more than familiar with the work of both Tim Cole and Hank Greenspan. Their work offers new and powerful ways of understanding the role of space and time in oral history process and production. Below is the first part of their exchange, in which they discuss the importance of spatial and temporal positioning, as well as their own methodological approaches. Come back to the blog in two weeks for the exciting conclusion to the dialogue, and add your voice in the comments below.

Setting the Stage

Hank Greenspan: It is a pleasure to blog with Tim Cole whose work I much appreciate.

I would like to raise a form of “spatial positioning” with Holocaust survivors (really with anyone) that is different than the kind of positioning and re-positioning within survivor narratives that Tim has emphasized, as well as the spatial context (often defined by distance from/proximity to memory sites) in which survivors recount. This is the space that survivors choose, and partly create, for their recounting.

From the beginning, it was very important in my own work to allow survivors—as much as possible—to “set the stage” for our interviews. This could mean everything from where, in general, we met, to what room in their home, to what was on the walls or coffee table, to who else was around, to whether the door was open, and more. Reflecting my training as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I assumed that such “staging” was itself an intrinsic part of survivors’ recounting; that is, part of their performing their account—similar to shifting textures of voice, body positioning, and other physical movements. While it typically takes time to understand the significance of these dimensions, I assumed they were potentially as informing as verbal content. My own multiple interview approach (versus single “testimonies”) made it at least more likely there would be the time required.

It is worth noting that the vast majority of “testimony” projects—which make up most of the survivor accounts that we have—exclude these dimensions. In virtually all projects, the almost always one-time interviews take place in survivors’ homes or in a recording studio—there are rarely other options. The demands of video recording inherently restrict movement; few survivors feel free to move around while they are being “filmed.” Similarly, the frame of a video recording—typically, a head shot, sometimes a bit wider—limits what is later viewable and, in most cases, limits survivors’ actual movement within the interview.

As a single example, Victor, the Treblinka survivor about whom I wrote for the OHR blog last May, was insistent on meeting neither in his home nor any kind of studio. Rather, he chose a room in a local community center that was, in essence, a kind of secret space. Over the 18 months we met—more than a dozen interviews—he never told his family or anyone else about our work—a secret confirmed years later when I contacted his son who did not know of the interviews. While Victor agreed to be audio recorded, a video camera would have been anathema (not that one was available in the late 1970s when our interviews began).

It became clear early on that the staging Victor chose complemented the content of his recounting. Both his Holocaust memories and his retelling of his life more generally were structured by themes of secrets kept and unmasked, confidences maintained and violated, reverence sustained or desecrated. At different moments in his retelling, he was both the perpetrator and victim of unmasking. So was I. He tested my trustworthiness throughout our first year of meetings.

As confidence grew, he physically enacted how he concealed himself in darkness—during the Holocaust and after—so he could catch intruders before they caught him. He showed me (a la Godfather) where he sits in rooms so that he sees who is entering before they see him. He described these strategies of concealment as what he had learned as a self-styled “military man” before, during, and since the Holocaust. Sharing these secrets and tactics with me, he also shared much more about his life in general. His memories of himself as an “ardent lover” that I wrote about here last spring depended on the sustained acquaintance and working relationship that we established.

None of this would have been possible within the procedures and structuring formats of the large survivor video-testimony collections, in which Victor would not have participated in any case. We learn, I think, that “survivor testimony” as generally gathered and constructed is a particular door to a particular place—far more inherently selective of who retells, as well as how and what is retold (which are inseparable), than we generally suppose.

Individuals choose where to place themselves in both the pasts that they retell, as well as where they choose to place themselves in the present moment of retelling.

Getting into Position

Tim Cole: It is great to have a chance to dialogue with Hank through the medium of the OHR blog. Hank is someone who has made us think hard about oral history in general and oral histories co-produced with survivors in particular, and his reflections come from decades of careful and critical listening.

Hank’s comments are striking in bringing the spatiality of the process—and not simply the narrative or “product”—to the fore. By focusing in on the space and place of the setting, Hank does something important in extending my thoughts in the article about the ways that we might approach oral history after the so-called “spatial turn.” I have tended to focus in on the product—the videoed interviews and textual transcripts that have been produced by the large survivor video-testimony projects that were particularly active in the United States in the 1990s. Thinking about a number of those products, I was struck by how survivors placed themselves and others in past time/past place as they retold difficult stories. What Hank rightly suggests we need to do is add another geography to the mix, and pay attention to the sites of retelling, not simply at the macro scale (as Hannah Pollin-Galay’s work does), but at the micro scale of where—in public or private space—a survivor chooses to talk.

Rather than seeing these as different forms of “spatial positioning,” I wonder if they are both part of something that we could do more thinking about in the field of oral history—the centrality of place and space both in the process of retelling and the product of that retelling. As they tell of past time/past place, individuals choose where to place themselves in both the pasts that they retell, as well as where they choose to place themselves in the present moment of retelling . Both are significant and consideration of both may help us access the kinds of meanings that make oral history so important.

As Hank makes clear, the form of much contemporary large-scale oral history collection practice limits the kinds of places where survivors retell. As he notes, fairly tight parameters around the process mean that the living room at home tends to be the micro space chosen for the survivor and a close head shot further restricts the space for retelling to an armchair in that living room. He is right, I think, to ask what we might be missing from those spatial choices that are made with a concern about the product.

But there is more to the potential problems of foregrounding the final product over process that again touches on space and place. Within many of the large-scale oral history collection programs, the practice is generally to limit interviews not only to a single interview—compared with Hank’s practice of multiple interviews—but also to a single interview that covers a whole life story in two to three hours. There are exceptions here. One of the stories I look at in the article draws on the interviews undertaken by Joan Ringelheim, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the three Laks sisters. These interviews are unusually rich, and long—stretching to eight or nine hours, recorded over a few days—and reveal I think, the extraordinary skill of Joan as an insightful and probing questioner and a keen listener. But these kinds of interviews tend to be the exception rather than the rule in large-scale oral history collections.

The results of the constraints of time and space focused around an emphasis on the final product means that survivors rarely get to choose where they are interviewed and are also asked a linear set of questions that move through time and space in unidirectional ways. One thing that interests me about these interviews—and this is where, alongside undertaking oral history interviews myself, I am also very much interested in studying interviews undertaken by others—are the places where interviewers try to take their interviewees through their questioning and the places that interviewees are willing or want to go. One thing that I’ve seen time and time again, is almost a tussle between an interviewer keen to move on to this place or that—generally the next location on their list that runs ghetto then camp with an eye on the time—and an interviewee who keeps going back to this place or that, or dismisses the significance of the place they are being asked about with a perfunctory answer before heading somewhere they think of as more significant. There is an important internal geography to oral history interviews that has the potential to tell us much about the dynamic of the interview and also I think, the kinds of places and spaces that people go in their retelling of past time/past place.

Performing Space

Hank Greenspan: Tim’s good comments reminded me of one of the most provocative (and brilliant) moments in Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning Maus. Trying to get a chronological account of his father’s (Vladek’s) Holocaust experiences, and increasingly frustrated by Vladek’s tangents to other times and places, Art finally explodes: “ENOUGH! TELL ME ABOUT AUSCHWITZ!”

Crafted as it is, there could hardly be a better representation of the “tussles” that Tim describes between devotion to testimonial “product” and the vicissitudes of actual “process.” It is part of the genius of Maus that so much of the messiness is included. Indeed, as students always say (cats and mice notwithstanding) that is what makes the “Holocaust part” of Maus “so real.” Vladek’s recounting is not disembodied “testimony” waiting only to be “elicited”—as one might “elicit” an egg from a chicken—but always immersed within the thick contexts of his past and present life circumstances, relationships, choices, and contesting choices.

In my work, I especially emphasize survivors’ choices in retelling because I believe they are so often overlooked. As I argued in a recent OHR article there is nothing (no matter how “traumatic”) that is inherently “unbearable,” “incommunicable,” or otherwise “untellable.” Rather, it depends on what particular survivors, with particular listeners, choose to attempt to convey, for whatever purposes and at whatever personal costs. Survivors are typically very self-conscious about such choices, although they are rarely asked about them. I have suggested that not knowing survivors’ own reflections about their retelling compromises the reliability of our interpretations, a topic to which we may return.

Here, I want to suggest that the very distinction between process and product in survivors’ retelling is itself very much a product of conventional “testimony” practices, and that the process/product distinction is not always obvious.

For example, one could “dissect out” a transcript of Vladek Spiegelman’s semi-chronological Holocaust retelling from all the rest that Maus presents. We would then have a testimonial product cleansed of tussles and tangents, multiple story lines and levels of reflection, and complex movement in time and space. We could archive and index that testimony extract in the ways that most survivor accounts are archived and indexed. But what would we actually have relative to what Maus conveys about Holocaust retelling and memory and—through that–about the Holocaust itself?

In my discussion of Victor, the “ardent lover,” for this blog, I emphasized that he did not simply “position himself” in an atypical space (relative to most contemporary testimony projects). He actively sought out that space and choreographed his recounting within it—including his performing the themes of secrets and unmasking by physically demonstrating ways he learned to outfox potential intruders—then and since. Taken alone, the “text” of his retelling—including what most video-testimonies frame and sanction–would be less than lyrics without music; that is, less than most of Victor’s ballet.

So also for a survivor who figures centrally in the work of my colleague, historian Ken Waltzer. This survivor refused to participate in any face-to-face interview. However, through a series of brief email exchanges (now well over 100), he and Ken—without fully realizing it—created an original space and medium for retelling that would not have otherwise existed. If one is genuinely interested in Holocaust memory, where does “process” stop and “product” begin in such an instance?

Of course, this man’s account, like Victor’s or Vladek Spiegelman’s, could be distilled for use as one historical source among many—essentially the way oral history was practiced years ago. But here new tussles emerge. That is because the majority of Holocaust survivors do not aspire to be generic “Holocaust sources” (although they may become deeply involved in a knowledgeable historian’s specific project for which they are directly recruited). Beyond that, survivors’ recounting—when not pushed to testimonial product—is often not primarily oral history (in the documentary sense) at all. Rather, Holocaust memory serves wider reflection: on the personal impact of such destruction, on faith in humanity or divinity, on the various challenges of retelling itself. When allowed, survivors’ accounts are thus as much “oral psychology,” “oral philosophy,” “oral theology,” or “oral narratology” as they are “oral history.” Leon, the survivor who articulated the reflection about recounting most often cited from my work—that he strove to “make a story” for what is “not a story”—called “mere factual recital” the least important aspect of his Holocaust retelling. Gathering “testimony” and actually listening to survivors are often very different things.

Refocusing the Narrative Spotlight

Tim Cole: Hank’s introduction of Maus into our conversation got me thinking about an important article that James E. Young wrote close to two decades ago calling historians to write what he dubbed “received histories” of the Holocaust, inspired in part by the multiple narratives told through word and image in Spiegelman’s “comix.” For Young, “received histories” are “double-stranded” narratives that mix “both what happened and how it is passed down to us.” “By restoring to the record the times and places, the social and political circumstances surrounding a story’s telling,” Young argues, “we might enlarge the text of history with its own coming into being.”

Re-reading Young, I was struck by his reference to the places of the story’s telling, given that this is something that Hank flagged early on in our conversation. As Hank suggested, those places tend to be chosen for, rather than by, interviewees and are almost entirely absent given the tight framing around head and shoulders of the interviewee. Also missing from this framing is the interviewer, and their reactions as they listen.

In his article, James Young was primarily interested in the process of historical writing and the importance of writing not only about the Holocaust, but also ourselves as historians and the ways in which we have encountered the events we write about. However, in Hank and my exchange we are—I think—pushing the idea of what received histories of the Holocaust might look like back to the interview room and not only the office where we sit and write.

When Young aired an early version of his article, he was heavily criticized by a Holocaust historian who saw his call for “received histories” to be a rather self-indulgent focus on the scholar rather than those being studied. However, one thing that has struck me about Hank’s work, and this conversation, has been how paying attention to listening and to process puts particular emphasis on those being listened to and their speech acts. It focuses on those choosing to tell their story in—as Hank notes—multiple ways and for many reasons (and at different times in different places).

Hank’s reflections on oral histories being more than history is worth thinking more about. It gets to the very heart of what it is that we all want when we sit down in the room together, and in particular whether we want the same things. Different interviewers and interviewees want different things at different times. Oral history is a co-produced source, but the idea of tussles suggests that co-production is not straightforward. I think that those tussles are particularly interesting, although you might then level the accusation that I’m getting self-indulgent on the sites of retelling and failing to grapple with the sites being retold. My hope in my own work is to try to move between the two. I don’t know if that is “received history” or not. I hope that it does justice to something of the complexity of what goes on when we ask questions and listen.

Image Credit: “Dance” by Hernán Piñera. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Landmarks in the study of rheumatology

From experiments with steroids, to placebos, and genome-wide studies, we take a look back at over two centuries of rheumatology studies. Rheumatology involves the study of any disorders of the joints, muscles, and ligaments – including such debilitating conditions as rheumatism and arthritis. These disorders are some of the major causes of morbidity and disability, affecting more than 350 million people world-wide. The term ‘rheumatism’ is relatively new however – first coming into use in the seventeenth century.

“The rheumatism is a common name for many aches and pains, which have yet got no peculiar appellation, though owing to very many different causes.”

 – William Heberden (1710-1801); Commentaries on the History and Cure of Disease (1802)

William Heberden, in many respects, summarized the state of rheumatic disease classification in 1802 with the statement above. At that time, only gout was clearly distinguished from the many types of aches and pains. Today, we have moved on significantly in our understanding, and rheumatology is seen an incredibly important medical discipline. Despite this, it is still one that is often overlooked.

With this in mind, and to mark the publication of Landmark Papers in Rheumatology, the editors have chosen fourteen of the most important papers from the book. These seminal works, highlighted in the interactive timeline below, demonstrate how our understanding of the causes and treatment of rheumatic disease have developed over time. Read ‘Chapter One’ here, freely accessible until 31st July 2016.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Image from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary’, published in Russia, 1890-1907, uploaded by Double-M. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Roe v. Wade and the remaking of the pro-life movement

On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Daniel K. Williams shares an excerpt from Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade on how pro-life groups reacted to the Supreme Court ruling.

On 11 January 1973, members of the North Dakota Right to Life Association braved the frigid temperatures in Bismarck to convene their first annual convention. Having won a sweeping victory at the ballot box only two months earlier, they were optimistic about the future and were ready to move on to the second phase of pro-life activism—campaigning for social welfare legislation that would give women facing crisis pregnancies the help they needed to carry their pregnancies to term. The conference program included sessions on “Health Insurance for Unwed Mothers,” “Subsidized Adoption,” and “Day Care Centers.” It was not enough to keep abortion illegal, they thought; they needed to create a compassionate society in which abortion would seem unnecessary and unthinkable.

But that new phase never came. Less than two weeks after the North Dakota Right to Life Convention met, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade. A right-to-life movement that had just begun to think about expanding its goals and moving on to new campaigns suddenly had to focus all of its energy on one central task—overturning Roe. It was a task that would transform the movement and ultimately lead pro-lifers to make alliances with politicians who had very different goals from the ones that the right-to-lifers in Bismarck had promoted.

Roe v. Wade fell like a bombshell on the pro-life community. During the previous two years, pro-lifers had won victories in dozens of state legislatures, but in one moment, the Supreme Court had eviscerated all of them. Even worse, the ruling explicitly deprived the fetus of personhood and constitutional protection. For years, pro-lifers had compared the repeal of abortion laws to the policies of Nazi Germany, and they had warned of a coming holocaust for the unborn. It seemed to them that the moment had now arrived, and they feared for their nation. “The horrible truth is, the Court’s decision put our nation officially in favor of killing by law,” National Review writer J. P. McFadden declared. It was “morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s genocide.”

“Pro-life rallies continue in the present day, as seen here by a photograph of the 2010 March for Life, which occurs on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade each year” by Forstle. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Court’s denial of personhood to the fetus reminded pro-lifers of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Court deprived African American slaves of the same right. “As it did in 1857, our country shall surely suffer and suffer terribly for this decision,” Lena Hohenadel, co-chair of the Lancaster County chapter of Pennsylvanians for Human Life, predicted. In order to symbolize the connection, 30,000 pro-lifers gathered in November 1973 at the St. Louis courthouse where Dred Scott had been tried, and listened to Mildred Jefferson, the most prominent African American in the movement, give a fiery denunciation of Roe. “We are determined that the Supreme Court decision on abortion shall not stand,” she said. Politicians “pandering for abortion shall find our judgments harsh,” she declared. “We will consider they are bargaining in blood and will not vote for them.”

Other pro-lifers invoked the Vietnam War. “It is ironic, and profoundly tragic, that a nation which has just concluded a prolonged and unbelievably destructive war in Southeast Asia should now turn to the large scale destruction of its unborn children,” Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life declared. It called Roe “a declaration of war against the unborn—a declaration which, unless reversed or overturned, will mean 500,000 to 1,000,000 fetal deaths per year in the United States. . . . With the possible exception of atomic weapons, no instrument of modern warfare can rival the destructiveness of the abortionist’s arsenal.”

American Catholic bishops told the faithful that they must refuse to comply with the decision. “We have no choice but to urge that the Court’s judgment be opposed and rejected,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared on 24 January 1973. “Doctors, nurses and health care personnel” must “stand fast in refusing to provide abortion on request, and in refusing to accept easily available abortion as justifiable medical care.”

Pro-life Catholics’ willingness to defy the Supreme Court en masse was unprecedented, but so was the Supreme Court ruling. In Catholics’ view, the nation’s highest judicial institution had directly defied the Declaration of Independence and the law of God, and they were shocked. Catholics who had come of age in the mid-twentieth century had grown up in an era when the American Catholic Church had identified its goals with those of the nation. Baby Boomer Catholics grew up hating communism, loving baseball, and cheering when John F. Kennedy, one of their own, was elected president. They had seen close ties among church teachings, New Deal liberalism, and the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court’s decision called all of this into question. It appeared that the law of the state was now diametrically opposed to the law of God, and that the Supreme Court, the institution many liberals of the 1960s and 1970s looked to as a guarantor of civil rights, might be an enemy of the most fundamental human right of all—the right to life. Fr. James McNulty told the national convention of the Knights of Columbus that “the comfortable meld of Catholic and American has been disastrously upset.”

But it was not only Catholics whose faith in the nation was shaken. Some pro-life evangelicals also felt the same way. Christianity Today declared in an editorial on Roe that “Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God, and prepare themselves spiritually for the prospect that it may one day formally repudiate them and turn against those who seek to live by them.” . . .

Outraged by the Supreme Court’s disregard for unborn human life, thousands of new recruits—most of whom were women—joined pro-life organizations. By May 1973, Michigan Citizens for Life (formerly Voice of the Unborn) had increased its membership to more than 50,000, up from 10,000 only six months earlier. Three years later, the organization had 200,000 members, 75 percent of whom were women. In contrast, the National Organization for Women (NOW) had only 30,000 members nationwide in 1973.

Image Credit: “ The Supreme Court photographed by Ken Hammond for the United States Department of Agriculture.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Can a robot be conscious?

In this blog series, Olle Häggström, author of Here Be Dragons, explores the risks and benefits of advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and machine intelligence. In this second post, Olle explores the computational theory of mind concept.

Can a robot be conscious? I will try to discuss this without getting bogged down in the rather thorny issue of what consciousness –– really is. Instead, let me first address whether robot consciousness is an important topic to think about.

At first sight, it may seem unimportant. Robots will affect us only through their outward behavior, which may be more or less along the lines of what we tend to think of as coming along with consciousness, but given this behavior, its consequences to us are not affected by whether or not it really is accompanied by consciousness.

On the other hand, even if robot consciousness does not affect us, it does, arguably, affect the robots. If sufficiently advanced robots are conscious, then it might give us reason to consider it morally wrong to, e.g., keep them as slaves. Robot consciousness might also affect the valuation of certain kinds of ‘robot apocalypse.’ Suppose that at some point robots overtake our position as the most intelligent creatures on the planet, and that they eliminate us and go on to colonize the universe. If robots lack consciousness, the scenario seems dismal – a wasted universe. But if they have consciousness, coupled with a capacity for pleasurable experiences, then one might plausibly look more favorably on such a scenario.

Also, consider the futuristic prospect of uploading our minds to machines, as a means to liberate us from our weakly and fragile bodies, to make travel as easy as digital file transmission, to allow us to inhabit wonderful virtual realities, and to make us practically immortal by means of storing safely located backup copies of ourselves. If machines lack consciousness, the whole uploading idea seems rather pointless.

Image credit: Asimo at a Honda factory by Vanillase. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

To someone with a naturalistic worldview, machine consciousness is, in one sense, obviously possible. Namely, we know, that there exists configurations of matter that give rise to consciousness, and there is no reason to believe that it would be impossible, even in principle, to artificially construct configurations of matter that have the properties needed. Once we’ve done that, we’ve built a conscious machine.

So let us narrow the question down to whether electronic computers, made of silicon and transistors, can be conscious. For this, we need some understanding of what sort of configurations of matter give rise to consciousness – what is the relevant property? There is much disagreement among philosophers of mind here. The most common idea in favor of the possibility of conscious computers is the so-called ‘computational theory of mind’ (CTOM), which holds that consciousness arises as soon as the right kinds of algorithms or computations are implemented, regardless of the material substrate, be it a biological nervous system or an electronic computer, or something else. What ‘the right kinds’ are remains an open question.

Since a sufficiently detailed computer simulation of my brain instantiates the same algorithms and computations, CTOM seems to promise the possibility of computer consciousness. Personally I find CTOM to be quite attractive. Suppose I am having coffee and a chat with a friend. I judge her to be conscious, and I base this judgment on her outward behavior, not on any specifics of her internal anatomy. If (to my great surprise) she lifts her skull and reveals that her head does not contain an ordinary human brain, but one made of computer chips, then I would not change my mind as to whether she is conscious. If this intuitive way in which we ascribe consciousness to others is correct, then consciousness is substrate-independent, so that CTOM or something like it is true. However, this argument for CTOM is far from conclusive, because our intuition might be wrong.

In the recent anthology Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds, philosopher David Chalmers discusses uploading in the context of CTOM. In the same anthology, his colleague Massimo Pigliucci complains that Chalmers proceeds “as if we had a decent theory of consciousness, and by that I mean a decent neurobiological theory.” But is it really fair to hold it against CTOM that it is not a neurobiological theory? Pigliucci has exactly one observation of a consciousness, namely his own. What property of his brain is it that produces consciousness? What is the appropriate generality here? Because his brain is a neurobiological entity, Pigliucci takes for granted that neurobiology provides the correct generalization. But ‘neurobiological entity’ is not the only category in which his brain fits; there are others such as ‘computational device’ (as preferred by adherents of CTOM), or simply ‘material object’ (as preferred by panpsychists). Or perhaps the phenomenon of consciousness does not generalize at all beyond his own brain (a solipsist position). At present, we simply do not know what the right generality is, and any discussion of the fundamental origin of consciousness needs to begin with admitting this.

A more famous argument against CTOM is philosopher John Searle’s Chinese room from 1980. Suppose CTOM is true. Then, if we write a computer program that in sufficient detail simulates the brain of someone who knows Chinese, the computer attains both consciousness and true understanding of Chinese. Alternatively, we can accomplish the same thing by setting up a room with two windows – one for input of Chinese symbols, and one for output of other Chinese symbols, serving as replies – and inside the room sits Searle himself together with giant stacks of paper, some of which contains detailed instructions (corresponding to the computer program) for simple manipulation of Chinese symbols. But Searle still does not understand Chinese – he merely follows the instructions mindlessly. So CTOM obviously has it wrong.

There are various replies to the Chinese argument. The so-called ‘systems reply’, admits that Searle himself does not understand Chinese, but points out that he is just a component of the system and holds that the system (the room, including its contents) does understand Chinese.

In response to this, Searle changes the thought experiment by getting rid of the room, and instead internalizing all the instructions by rote learning. He will still not understand Chinese, and this time there is nothing to the system beyond Searle, leaving no room for the systems reply.

But is it really true that Searle will not understand Chinese? To me the scenario looks very much like a case of multiple personality disorder. We have two persons – English-speaking Searle, and Chinese-speaking Searle – inhabiting the same body. English-speaking Searle claims not to understand a word of Chinese, while Chinese-speaking Searle claims to have such understanding. Why in the world should we believe the former but not the latter?

The Chinese room is a beautiful thought experiment, but fails as a refutation of CTOM. Then again, CTOM could be wrong nevertheless. We have yet to figure out the nature of consciousness and its place in the physical universe.

Featured image credit: Banksy 28 October installment from “Better Out Than In” New York City residency by Scott Lynch. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Mentalization and borderline personality disorder (part two)

Sigmund Karterud is a pioneer of group therapy for borderline personality disorders. He focuses on mentalization: our ability to understand ourselves and other people in terms of mental phenomena – beliefs, feelings, wishes, and hopes. In the second part of our interview, Sigmund explains the evolutionary relevance of Mentalization-Based Group Therapy. (Read Part one of Sigmund’s interview here.)

In a previous article you wrote for the OUPblog, you said some interesting things about the evolutionary reasons behind mentalization; about the way in which the ability emerged. Could you say a little about how, as a phenomenon, it came into existence?

Sigmund Karterud: The word ‘mentalizing’ refers to the ability to think, in mental terms, of the reasons for behavior; for your behavior and mine, and for the interaction between us. For example, that I am able to see that you behave [in a certain way] because you are hungry, you are angry, you are driven by sexual lust.

There are mental intentions behind your behavior, but the issue here is that those intentions are more or less opaque; they are not written on your forehead. So I have to interpret why you behave in a certain way, and my interpretations can be wrong. This ability to infer why people behave as they do is mostly taken for granted, it’s so obvious, but of course this ability evolved at some point and for some reason.

There’s a lot of interest around this subject at the moment, and what exactly the differences are between chimpanzees’ mental functioning and humans’, especially a child’s mental functioning. Do chimpanzees interpret other chimpanzees? Do they even think?

You can interpret another person in an intuitive way, and when you do, you don’t think about it too much. That’s called ‘implicit mentalizing’. ‘Explicit mentalizing’ (the opposite of implicit) is when I’m saying to myself, ‘the reason for your behavior is so and so’. It is a linguistically based capacity. I need language to speak to myself in such a way, so explicit mentalizing must be linked to the evolution of language.

When did we start to communicate in linguistic terms, or with sounds and gestures, such as those used by the Great apes? Of course they have a rather sophisticated communication, but it’s when you move to a linguistic form that the possibilities are far greater. In evolutionary terms, that’s linked to the question of when the brain developed areas responsible for linguistic concepts. The question for us is, how did the brain change in order for us to articulate; and what were the reasons for these developments?

The kind of explanatory direction I support is that developments in group complexity demanded more social cognition. That sets all of this up to happen. The more complex, social and organizational interaction is, the more rewarding it is for you and me. If I’m able to interpret my neighbour and the other members of the group, then I can become smarter.

So, the evolutionary driving force for mental capabilities is not to avoid danger from wild animals. It is for social cooperation, perhaps for hunting, which is necessary for the development of the group from a scattered family to complex group dynamic, a dynamic that remains today.

Featured image: Cave of the Hands by Mariano (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

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