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What have the Romans ever done for us? LGBT identities and ancient Rome

What have the Romans ever done for us? Ancient Rome is well known for its contribution to the modern world in areas such as sanitation, aqueducts, and roads, but the extent to which it has shaped modern thinking about sexual identity is not nearly so widely recognized.

Although LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people owe a lot to the Romans, the importance of Rome in this respect has been largely overlooked by historians. Attention has focused instead on ancient Greece as a model of a society in which same-sex relationships were accepted and even celebrated. Oscar Wilde famously defended himself while on trial for his sexual behaviour by making reference to the Greek philosopher Plato, who had made the “affection of an elder for a younger man … the very basis of his philosophy.” Early gay activists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as John Addington Symonds, George Cecil Ives, and Edward Carpenter also downplayed the sexual element in homosexual relations by promoting a similarly noble ideal of Greece, where love between males played an important role in the education of young citizens.

These activists saw Rome as a corrupt copy of Greece. It was the playground of sexually incontinent emperors such as Nero and Heliogabalus (or Elagabalus), who took decadence to new heights and outraged public opinion by openly marrying men. Roman poets such as Catullus and Martial wrote graphically about sex, while the novelist Petronius had conjured up a riotous world of orgies, cross-dressing, and bathhouses where spectators applauded at the sight of an enormous penis. Apologists for homosexual relations wanted to distance themselves from excesses of this kind in order to gain acceptance for their own desires and therefore used Roman ‘vice’ as a contrast to Greek ‘virtue’.

Portrait of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This vision of Rome as a decadent society was appalling to some, but it is also easy to see why it was appealing to others. Wilde talked of Plato in public, but he also had his hair cut in the style of a decadent emperor, and privately referred to the days before his downfall as his ‘Neronian hours.’ The anonymously published 1893 pornographic novel Teleny (which has sometimes been attributed to Wilde) makes clear links between its own fascination with large penises and Rome’s priapic preoccupations. The ancient Greeks, in contrast, had depicted boys with small penises as a vision of perfect male beauty in their art. Teleny also features an all-male orgy at which the participants (some of whom are cross-dressed) are aroused by images that recreate sexually explicit Roman wall-paintings. The star-crossed yet devoted male lovers at the heart of this novel are cast as the emperor Hadrian and his doomed beloved, Antinoüs, the beautiful young man who was commemorated by Hadrian in statues and images all around the empire. To this day, the figures of the emperor and his slave, the Roman gladiator, and the legionary, remain staples of gay pornography, eroticizing differences in power between men and fitting well into a modern gay aesthetic that places a high value on hyper-masculinity.

Lesbian desire and the women who feel it are repeatedly referred to in hostile terms in Roman literature. The satirical poet Juvenal is particularly scathing about women who have sex with each other, but his disapproval didn’t prevent Anne Lister (1791-1840) of Shibden Hall, near Halifax from finding his poetry on the theme arousing. She also used his poetry and references to other Roman poets who had discussed lesbian desire to sound out other women’s tendencies.

Rome also offers models for transgendered identities, sexual fluidity, and a range of sexual configurations and possibilities. Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, for example, plays on the poet Ovid’s portrait of one of the many gender-bending characters from his Metamorphoses, in her 1999 poem “From Mrs Tiresias” (in the collection The World’s Wife). Ovid’s Tiresias was transformed from being a man into a woman, and then back again, and clearly made the most of this gender fluidity, since he reveals that sex is more pleasurable as a woman.

Rome, then, has offered LGBT people throughout history a model of a society in which same-sex desires were highly visible and openly discussed, as well as a number of authors who were very frank indeed about sex and sexuality, and who wrote about taboo topics in many other traditions, such as transvestism, transgendered individuals, and sex changes.

Today, Rome offers us a sex-positive and multi-faceted vision of sexual possibilities and permutations that challenges the more famous, but also more limited, version of Greek homosexuality that has played such an important role in LGBT history.

Featured image credit: The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Spectre and Bond do the damage

Ian Fleming and his scriptwriting clones have trailed clouds of British glory. By creating an image of undercover British omnipotence they covered up the impotence of a declining power. Spinning clandestine myths, they told porkies in plain daylight about an empire of influence that no longer existed.

The durable Bond is back once more in Spectre. Little has changed and there has even been reversion. M has come back, morphed into a man, Judi Dench giving way to Ralph Fiennes. 007 still works miracles, and not the least of these is financial – Pinewood Studios hope for another blockbuster movie. Hollywood: roll over and die.

That exhortation is cousin to a connected urge to compete with America’s spies for the prize of fame. Lancing with his pen, John Le Carré was dismissive of what he portrayed as America’s intelligence parvenus. Just at the time when it became plain that the Cambridge spy ring had wrought havoc, he shouted out the improbable message that we were the best. Graham Greene had already written The Quiet American explaining how terrible those CIA people were. The Bond fictions are a populist version of the same prejudice. Ian Fleming, their author, cultivated the American market, yet his CIA character Felix Leiter is no more than a 007 sidekick, rather like Holmes’s Dr Watson (acted by an American female, Lucy Liu, in the CBS adaptation Elementary).

Fleming was just being nationalistically British. He was not anti-American and meant no harm to America, a nation to which he had every cause to feel commercially grateful. Yet by accident, he and his imperial hubris visited three misfortunes on the United States.

Image: Ian Fleming and Sean Connery, via Scio School Central. CC-BY-ND-2.0 via Flickr.

He invented the CIA – or so he said. The too literally minded might be tempted to take him at his word. For he did, when a wartime aide to Admiral John Godfrey of Naval Intelligence, draft a memo recommending stronger central coordination of US intelligence – and ultimately the CIA materialized in 1947. Fleming was an obscure and junior officer at the time, and much more important people and causes were behind the creation of the CIA. But he contributed to a pernicious myth, that the British, trailing those old familiar clouds of glory, had come to rescue a nation that had almost criminally neglected to equip itself with an appropriate intelligence apparatus. Certain US intelligence expansionists have been feeding on that myth ever since, valuing quantity over quality and allowing themselves to be deluded into the Bondian belief that an intelligence agency should behave like a mob of gangsters.

Then there was the notorious aftermath of Fleming’s dinner with Senator John F. Kennedy on 13 March 1960. Cultivating his ‘cool’ image, Presidential candidate Kennedy had publicly professed himself to be a Bond fan. He now asked Fleming, what would Bond have done about the troublesome Fidel Castro? Fleming rattled off some exotic ways of liquidating the Cuban president, adding that the administration of a depilatory drug might strip the revolutionary of his machismo by making his beard fall out. Though he may have enjoyed dispensing imperial advice, our author was also trying to amuse. Unfortunately there was a humourless guest at the dinner party. The CIA’s John Gross hastened to brief his boss, director Allen Dulles, what Kennedy would require if elected. In the course of Kennedy’s presidency the hapless agency duly tried out the beard trick, the exploding clamshell, the poisoned cigar, all to no avail and to the long-term detriment of American-Cuban relations.

As if this were not enough, Fleming can be blamed for Watergate. Jealous of James Bond’s fame, future CIA director Richard Helms got hold of a CIA operative with a track record of operational incompetence, and asked him to invent an American 007. E. Howard Hunt had already written a pulp novella, Bimini Run, a kind of poor man’s preview of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Wishing to make himself useful he now entered the realm of pop spy fiction and, using the pen name David St. John, wrote the Peter Ward series of spy novels. Though the result was uniformly awful, the exercise kept Hunt on the horizon of potential employers. He became a leading “Plumber” in the criminal gang hired by President Nixon to burgle the Democratic Party’s office in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. That and the ensuing cover-up and presidential resignation were an endnote to the Bond glory-story.

Poor old MI6 and Ian Fleming. Cuddly bears to our Soviet rivals, accidental liabilities to our American friends. But that’s not our dreamland. Come movie-time at least, we remain in happy Bondage.

Featured image credit: MI6 Vauxhall Cross, by Ewan Munro. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Elective Neck Dissection in Early Oral Cancer: Debate Resolved

A debate over whether to remove lymph nodes from the neck during surgical treatment of early oral cancer has gone on for decades. Now findings from a randomized control trial reported last June at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting, in Chicago may finally put that controversy to rest.

After just over 3 years of follow-up, 80% of 245 patients who had the nodes removed during surgical treatment of the primary tumor were still alive, compared with 67.5% of 255 patients randomized to a watch-and-wait policy who had the nodes removed only when metastases were suspected. “The elective node dissection (e.g., removal) prevented one death in every eight patients and one recurrence in every four patients who received it,” said Anil D’Cruz, M.D., chief of the department of head and neck surgery at the Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, India, and the study’s principal investigator. “[From] those results, I believe elective neck dissection should be the standard of care for all patients with early-stage, node-negative oral cancer.”

Appearing most often on the tongue, or on skin membranes in the cheek, oral cancer results mainly from tobacco and alcohol abuse. It’s especially common among men in South Asian countries such as India, where betel nut chewing adds to the risk. Infection with the human papillomavirus 16 (HPV-16) virus is also a risk factor, especially among younger, nonsmoking women. The National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program predicts that 47,000 people will be diagnosed with oral cancer in the United States in 2015. Since it rarely produces pain or other detectable symptoms before it metastasizes to the lymph nodes, and then typically to the lungs, oral cancer is usually diagnosed at late stages when 5-year survival rates rarely exceed 50%. By contrast, 5-year survival rates in early-stage oral cancers treated successfully with surgery can exceed 90%, but early detection of the primary tumor depends on access to health care. In India, where health care access is poor, only 10%–15% of oral cancer patients are diagnosed with early-stage disease, compared with about 25% in the United States.

Identifying occult nodal metastases in the neck can be challenging. According to Robert Ferris, M.D, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, these small malignancies are difficult to feel manually during a physical exam, and they don’t readily show up on positron emission tomography scans or on magnetic resonance imaging. Clinicians must therefore choose between two options: elective dissection, meaning that the nodes are removed during surgery for assessment by a pathologist, or watch and wait, whereby the nodes are checked at various intervals for evidence of cancer and then removed later if needed.

Choice Between Two Options

The argument in favor of watch and wait—especially for those with primary tumors smaller than 4 mm—is that nodal dissection carries a risk of long-term shoulder pain. (That’s because the surgical field sometimes crosses a nerve that interfaces with the shoulder muscles.) Only one in five patients with early oral cancer have occult metastases in the nodes, and according to Ferris, elective dissection would expose those who don’t to potential shoulder pain without any clinical benefit. But if the nodes turn out to be cancerous, he added, patients can be treated with a potentially life-saving regimen of radiation and possibly chemotherapy.

“The impact of finding these cancerous nodes is critically important,” Ferris said. “Only through the elective procedure can we segregate those who have metastases from those who don’t, and so the dissection can very strongly confer prognostic information.”

Earlier studies dating back to the mid-1960s lacked the statistical power needed to resolve this debate over the two alternatives. The studies generated divergent results, and so practice standards varied around the world, with proponents of watch and wait insisting that neck nodes could be removed later without compromising survival.

Answers From a Definitive Trial

To produce a definitive answer, D’Cruz launched his study in 2004. A total of 596 patients with T1 or T2 squamous cell oral carcinoma were randomized to either elective dissection or watch and wait. All patients had surgery to remove the primary tumor and adjuvant radiotherapy when indicated. After a median follow-up of 39 months, recurrences in the watch-and-wait arm numbered 146, compared with 81 in the elective dissection arm. Elective dissection also improved survival by a statistically significant 12.5% and reduced risk of death by 36%.

“I think it’s a very good study,” said Hisham Mehanna, Ph.D., chair of head and neck surgery at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and a discussant at D’Cruz’s ASCO presentation. “It’s well powered, well conducted, and the findings are conclusive.”

Ferris agreed. “The real benefit is that it provides level 1 evidence for what was already standard of care in the United States,” he said. “We’re now required to have level 1 evidence, so this is important. It validates the clinical benefits of elective dissection, and suggests that the procedure is also cost effective.”

The study didn’t address how many neck nodes to remove. However, a different presentation at ASCO showed that the best survival outcomes are obtained by removing 18 nodes or more. Vasu Divi, M.D., an assistant professor at Stanford School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif., and colleagues, reviewed data from 572 patients treated in two clinical trials—RTOG 9501 and 0234—with a median follow-up of 8 years. They concluded that dissecting fewer then 18 nodes results in statistically worse overall survival rates in both HPV-16–positive and HPV-16–negative patients. That finding was consistent with evidence from an April 2014 study in the Annals of Surgical Oncology. Led by Ardalan Ebrahimi, M.D., from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Australia, that study also confirmed that no fewer than 18 nodes should be removed during elective dissection in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma.

Insights From Ultrasound?

According to Mehanna, ultrasound imaging might detect occult nodal metastases in the neck and preclude the need for an elective dissection. To investigate that possibility, D’Cruz’s study also randomized patients after surgery to ultrasound-guided surveillance or to standard surveillance based on clinical exam. Those data have yet to be reported, “and until they are, we should continue with the elective procedure,” Mehanna said.

D’Cruz concurred. “Our [unreported] analyses so far show that whether you follow patients with ultrasound, or with clinical exam and ultrasound combined, you still have a survival detriment with watchful waiting.” He added, “We will have better figures to address this issue, but as of now the elective procedure should be the standard of care. We may find a small subset of patients that can be adequately followed on ultrasound, but we can’t jump to any conclusions yet.”

A version of this blog post first appeared in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Featured image credit: RGB-ray by Lasse Rintakumpu. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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The literary fortunes of the Gunpowder Plot

On the evening of 5 November English people commonly mark Guy Fawkes Day by burning him in effigy. There is, however, at least one place where this does not happen. I discovered when living in York many years ago that no effigy was burnt in the bonfire at St Peter’s School, because it seemed an inappropriate way to treat an Old Boy of the School.

The conspirators in what we now know as the Gunpowder Plot failed in their aspiration to blow up the House of Lords on the occasion of the state opening of parliament, in the hope of killing the King and a multitude of peers. Why do we continue to remember the plot? The bonfires no longer articulate anti-Roman Catholicism, though this attitude formally survived until 2013 in the prohibition against the monarch or the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic.

One way of tracking how the plot is remembered is through literature. I discovered, for example, a sermon preached on 5 November 1606 by Lancelot Andrewes, who appears to have been the first literary figure to embed the idea of a tunnel dug under parliament by the conspirators into his account. Such a tunnel is improbable, and is unsupported by any archaeological evidence, but good conspiracies benefit from villains digging a tunnel! And this one allowed writers to indulge in the metaphor of undermining the government.

In a note to the first of John Milton’s gunpowder poems, the editor observes that Thomas Cooper prefixed gunpowder epigrams to his ‘Nonæ Novembris Æternitati Consecratæ’ (Oxford, 1607).

The discovery of the Popish Plot in 1678 gave a fresh intensity to Guy Fawkes Day, so in Thomas Otway’s The Atheist, the epilogue by ‘Mr Duke of Cambridge’ refers to the rockets “on Queen Besse’s Night.” As Queen Elizabeth’s accession fell on 17 November, I needed a little scholarly assistance to understand this allusion. The scholarly note helped me out, explaining that “with the object of keeping aflame the anti-papist feelings of the London mob, the Whigs brought out their first Pope-burning pageant in 1679, having altered the date to the 17th of November, the day of Queen Elizabeth’s accession.”

My final example of the Gunpowder Plot in literature is a Latin poem by Thomas Gray. A helpful note in this edition informs me that it “was not uncommon for students at the universities to contribute Latin verses as part of the ceremonies of thanksgiving for the delivery of the nation.”

Image credit: ‘Gordon Riots’ by John Seymour Lucas. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The genre of Gunpowder poems lived on, occasionally stimulated by anti-Catholic episodes such as the Gordon Riots of 1780, but in the wake of Catholic emancipation, the celebration came to centre on bonfires and fireworks, with no religious overtones — except, perhaps, in the bonfires at Lewes, in Sussex.

Now, great poets no longer write about the Gunpowder Plot, but at many bonfires around the country half-remembered lines from a traditional rhyme can still be heard:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,


The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,


I know of no reason


Why the Gunpowder Treason


Should ever be forgot.


Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent


To blow up the King and Parliament.

I shall try to remember the lines as I stand with my grandchildren in the drizzle, watching a Guy being thrown onto a bonfire.

Featured image credit: The cellar underneath the House of Lords, as drawn by William Capon. Public domain Wikimedia Commons.

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Ten fun facts about the bagpipes

Depending on your tastes, bagpipes are primal and evocative, or crude and abrasive. Adore or despise them, they are ubiquitous across the city centers of Scotland (for tourists or locals?). In anticipation of St Andrews Day, and your Robert Burns poetry readings with a certain woodwind accompaniment, here are 10 facts you may not have known about the history of the bagpipes.

Traditionally, bagpipes were made from the skin of a whole animal, turned inside out, with the pipes attached where the legs and neck would be.
The chanter is never silent so there can be no rest between notes, and its volume cannot be changed. This is why variation is created with grace notes more than through dynamics.
Far from being a Scottish invention, bagpipes have a lengthy history. References to them exist in Suetonius, Martial, and Dio Chrysostom. Even Aristophanes suggests that players from Thebes sound like dogs in distress.
The tyrant Nero was a ruthless ruler, strategist, and persecutor of the pious. He was also said to be a skilled piper.
Across Europe bagpipes have been in continuous use for centuries, especially in Great Britain, Ireland, and north-western Spain. In Bulgaria, where the skins are prepared in milk, the instrument is called a Gaida.
Scottish Highlanders played it as a battle-field instrument meant to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies and to stir their allies to acts of bravery.
In 1745 the Scottish Loyalists government banned the instrument. The bagpipes were driven underground, where many wish they had stayed.
When a reckless piper broke this law, a court ruled that “no highland regiment ever marched without a piper” and that therefore in the eyes of the law, his bagpipe was an instrument of war. He was executed on 6 November 1746.
The song “A Flame of Wrath for Patrick MacCrimmon” is a piping standard. It gets its name from the story of a piper from Glenelg, near The Isle of Skye. The musician set a whole village alight in order to avenge the murder of his brother, the eponymous Patrick. It is said the piper overlooked the blaze from a hill, playing this relentless chant.
In April 2015 the bagpipes came unstuck again when busking regulation introduced by Boris Johnson sought to limit performances which involved instruments with “loud repetitive sounds.” Apparently the bagpipe fell afoul of this regulation.

Any other fun facts to add?

Headline image credit: Bagpipes at the Strawberry Festival by Virginia State Parks staff. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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The right to a fair trial: part one

Our legal history stretches back well over eight centuries, to long before Magna Carta (1215). But however long this history may be, it is not one of which we can be universally proud, and the freedoms which we enjoy today have had to be hard won over the centuries. These are now encapsulated in the Human Rights Act 1998, which came into force in 2000, and which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights. They include, amongst others: the right to life, freedom from torture or being subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, freedom from slavery, and the rights to a fair trial, free speech (freedom of expression) and respect for private and family life. But these freedoms have not suddenly emerged from a twentieth century statute. Our history is peopled by many remarkable characters, and includes the stories of very many fascinating cases, some of which have created and developed freedoms over the ages.

For hundreds of years jury trials bore little resemblance to those we hold today, for when it came to matters of monarch and state against the citizen, juries did little more than rubber stamp the guilty verdicts which were demanded of them. Nevertheless, as the years went by, juries trying criminal cases did become increasingly courageous and independent. They may not have realised it at the time, but by bravely standing up against unfair prosecutions and oppressive judges they had a vitally important effect on the development of our liberties. One of the most important of these cases was Bushell’s Case:

In 1670, William Penn and William Mead were tried for preaching to an unlawful assembly. They were two devout Christians and peace-loving men who belonged to the Quaker sect. After attending a service in a Friends Meeting House they were accused of breaking a law which made it a crime to attend ‘conspiratorial gatherings’.

The trial was a disgrace and it began with a farce. The two men had lost their hats when they were arrested. The Lord Mayor, who was present in court, ordered hats to be put on their heads. Then the judge, who was the Recorder of London, fined each of them for disrespect to the court by wearing them! When William Penn demanded to know what he had done wrong, he was ordered to be locked away in an area at the back of the court.

The evidence against Penn and Mead was worthless, and the judge’s summing-up extremely unfair. When the jury refused to find the two men guilty they too were threatened and insulted. They were ordered to be locked up without food and drink; and when on the third day they found the men not guilty, they were all fined.

Eight of the jurors paid their fines, but four, led by Edward Bushell, refused to pay, and spent months in prison. At last their case came before Chief Justice Vaughan, who ruled that juries had the right to ‘give their verdict according to their convictions’, and no jury could ever be punished for its verdict.

Only eighteen years later—a tiny fraction of time in our legal history—another jury, put its newfound power to such use that it helped to bring down an unpopular king, and led to a landmark reform in UK constitutional law. This was in the trial of The Seven Bishops.

Image credit: The Trial of the Seven Bishops by John Rogers Herbert. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

James II was a tyrannical monarch, bent on overthrowing the constitution. In 1688, he had seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, prosecuted for ‘seditious libel’—the offence of publishing words exciting disaffection against the Crown.  The ‘crime’ which the bishops committed was to petition him against the forced reading in church of a declaration. James said the petition itself was seditious libel. He had the bishops imprisoned in the Tower. By this time he was so deeply unpopular with Parliament, the Church, and the people that when at last they came to trial, amidst great public rejoicing, the jury found the bishops not guilty.

A plot to oust James was already under way, but the jury’s verdict was taken as the signal the plotters needed. On the very day of the verdict (30 June) a written ‘invitation’ was sent to his son-in-law, William of Orange (then part of the Netherlands), to ‘come to England to redress grievances’—a polite way of inviting rebellion. William accepted, and on 5 November he landed with an English and Dutch army of 15,000 men. They quickly gained a huge following. James fled the country. Parliament declared the throne vacant, and William and Mary (James’s daughter) were proclaimed King and Queen. Soon afterwards, major constitutional freedoms were guaranteed in the Bill of Rights 1689. This Bill became another foundation of our liberties because amongst its provisions limiting the power of the Monarch, its ‘human rights’ enactments included: that the election of members of Parliament should be free, laws should not be dispensed with or suspended without the consent of Parliament, the right to petition the Monarch should be without fear of retribution, and excessive bail should not be required, nor excessive fines imposed.

Featured image credit: The Seven Bishops Committed to the Tower in 1688, by Pieter Schenck. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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California’s S.B. 185, thermal coal, and the fallacies of social investing

Recently signed into law by California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., S.B. 185 requires public employee pension plans to divest their investments in publicly-traded companies that derive half or more of their revenue from “the mining of thermal coal.” California’s law is the most recent manifestation of the campaign for social investing by states’ employee pensions. The advocates of social investing seek to use pension funds to pursue policy objectives extraneous to the financing of employees’ pensions.

As one who shares the environmental concerns evidently animating S.B. 185, I would commend California if it adopted a revenue-neutral carbon tax. However, the social investing mandated by S.B. 185 is a misguided way to pursue environmental or other worthwhile goals. Social investing by pensions is both wrong as a matter of law and ineffective as a matter of policy.

An individual can invest her own money to pursue any environmental or other social goals she favors. However, as a legal and practical matter, pension funds are different. Such funds are, as the old saying goes, other people’s money. California’s pension funds represent deferred wages owed to government employees, financed by taxpayers to underwrite the retirement benefits promised to these employees. As a matter of law, such pension funds are to be invested in accordance with the highest fiduciary standards, exclusively to finance retirement benefits. Pension trustees’ only concern should be providing such benefits, not pursuing extraneous goals, however noble such goals may be.

California’s constitution explicitly adopts the traditional articulation of this high fiduciary standard for the public employee pension funds of the Golden State:

The assets of a public pension or retirement system are trust funds and shall be held for the exclusive purposes of providing benefits to participants in the pension or retirement system and their beneficiaries and defraying reasonable expenses of administering the system.

This traditional standard, often labeled as “the exclusive benefit rule,” reflects the hard-won lesson that monies held by trustees in general and by pension trustees in particular can be diverted from their mission—namely, the provision of the benefits promised to beneficiaries. Once the door is opened to extraneous considerations in the investment of trust funds, that door is not easily shut. More likely, the door will stay open for pension resources to be used for more collateral causes rather than the provision of retirement benefits. Sometimes these causes will be admirable; sometimes they will not.

Hence, as a matter of case law, statutory law and, often, state constitutional law, pension trustees are held to the highest fiduciary standard; their investment of pension assets should serve “the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants.” When public pension funds are instead used to punish coal mining companies or to pursue any other social objective, such funds are not being used exclusively to provide retirement benefits.

Who is to decide what is an appropriate social objective to pursue with public pension monies? Suppose that legislator X favors divestment of the stock of any medical equipment manufacturer whose products can be used to perform abortions. In contrast, legislator Y wants to sell the stock of any company whose management is insufficiently pro-choice.

Social investing by pensions is both wrong as a matter of law and ineffective as a matter of policy.

The traditional fiduciary standard embedded in California’s constitution is intended to prevent pension funds from becoming political battlegrounds of this sort. Under this high standard, pension trustees are to ignore political and social policy objectives and instead concentrate exclusively on the financial objective of providing retirement benefits.

In practice, social investing is ineffectual. If California’s pensions sell the stock of a corporation which derives half or more of its revenue from mining “thermal coal,” someone else will buy this stock. The resulting game of musical chairs merely shuffles the identity of the corporation’s shareholders.

The details of S.B. 185 further confirm that that law is a legal and practical muddle. S.B. 185 permits California’s public employee pension plans to retain without limit the stock of companies which derive revenue from mining nonthermal coal, for example, corporations which sell coal used in manufacturing. Why is coal burning acceptable for some purposes but not others?

Equally troubling is the 50% rule of S.B. 185. If a relatively small company derives all of its revenue from mining thermal coal, S.B. 185 requires that the stock of the company be sold. However, a huge conglomerate may sell vastly more coal than this small company but not trigger divestment under S.B. 185 because its coal sales constitute less than half of this conglomerate’s revenues.

Particularly anomalous is S.B. 185’s qualification that pension trustees should not divest the stock of coal companies unless such divestment satisfies the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to exclusively fund pension benefits. If selling the stock of a coal (or any other) company furthers the financing of pension benefits, that sale need not be legislated since the trustees should make that sale anyway. If it is necessary to prod California’s pension trustees on social investing grounds to make that sale, this is prima facia evidence that the sale should not be undertaken. By definition, the sale of the stock of a thermal coal company to advance environmental considerations is not made “for the exclusive purposes of providing benefits to participants in the pension or retirement system” as California’s constitution requires.

The environmental concern underlying S.B. 185 is compelling. However, the social investing required by S.B. 185 is misguided. Such social investing dilutes the high fiduciary standard under which public pension funds are to be invested exclusively to finance retirement benefits.

Image Credit: “Coal Excavator” by Dren Pozhegu. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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“Challenging change” – extract from A Foot in the River

We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live – our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values – seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this?

Felipe Fernández-Armesto offers a radical answer to this fundamental question of human history – and speculates on what it might mean for our future. The following extract describes the importance of change in developing human culture.

If we want to understand what is special about our planet and about our own species, we have to begin by confronting an even deeper problem: the problem of change. Why do we not live in a stable—or at least a more stable—world? Why do we have change—or at least so much more of it than other worlds?

These are questions so big and daunting that, in spite of their importance, philosophy has given up trying to deal with them. We hardly ever even crack them open nowadays for close examination. Some questions are hard to answer: all interesting questions, I think, are of that kind. And others—like those that fill the pages that follow—are almost too hard to ask. Change is a difficult subject to address, because everything we say about it is observed from the inside, trapped by a form of uncertainty principle. Change grips us as we try to grasp it. It is almost unimaginably hard to conceive of life without it.

Yet people have tried.

The earliest evidence of their efforts is visible in Ice Age art. The painters of the cave art of northern Spain and southern France, between about twenty- and thirty-thousand years ago, felt drawn to deep, dark places in barely accessible caverns, in the most unchanging environment they could penetrate—made of unyielding rocks. They decorated some of the innermost spaces of the caves with images so enduring that many of them are intact to this day, despite the corruptions of the atmosphere caused in the meantime by natural disasters and the corrosive exhalations of human bodies and breath. No one knows why Ice Age artists made their paintings in such adverse conditions, with painful labour, coarse tools, and limited pigments, in the gloom of flickering torchlight—but only an enterprise of supreme importance can have been worth so much commitment.

The best explanation we have connects their efforts with a need to escape evanescence by reaching for the undying world of gods or spirits or ancestors, locked inside the stone, where shamans could travel imaginatively, on spiritual journeys, propelled by rites and drugs. You can almost see, almost touch those efforts in the hand-prints that smother some of their stones. The attempt to reach the world inside the rock was part of a widespread quest to escape change, perhaps because change is inseparable from mortality. Worshippers have always been drawn, for the same reasons, to mountains, which seem to resist change by outlasting life, or trees, which evade mortality by impressive longevity and incalculable self-renewals.

Change was and is something to fear or flee. We still have a love–hate relationship with it, sometimes embracing it in the hope of improvement, sometimes eschewing it in a spirit of scepticism or despair. Perhaps, if we understood change better, we would cease to fear it. Yet for thousands of years we have been short of new thoughts, almost bereft of new theories about it—so much so that we have pretty much given up on the job.

For an account of systematic enquiry about change in general—rather than about particular changes—we have to go back about two-and-a half millennia.

There was a time, towards the middle of the millennium before Christ, when the question ‘why does change happen?’ was the subject of intense debate among schools and sages in the eastern Mediterranean. Thinkers we usually call the pre-Socratics, whose work informed Socrates’s thinking (and, therefore, the whole Western tradition ever since) came up with two, mutually contradictory, answers.

Change puzzled the philosophers because it is an apparently universal law—the most obvious feature of how we humans experience the world; but change only makes sense in distinction from a previous, unchanged state against which to recognize it. In that case, what can set it going? Moreover, if something changes, it is different from what it previously was, so how can we continue to speak of it? ‘You cannot step twice into the same river’ is the aphorism Heraclitus coined around the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries BCE to express this troubling insight. By the time one foot follows another, the stream will have borne its own self away.

Featured image credit: “Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of the Hands) in the Santa Cruz province in Argentina” by Mariano. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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How much do you know about Mormon feminists?

No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith’s distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights. But even as the church has maintained a conservative position in public debates over sex and gender, Mormon women have developed their own brand of feminism by recovering the lost histories of female leadership and exploring the empowering potential of Mormon theology.

How much do you know about Mormon feminists? Test your knowledge by clicking on the quiz below!

 

 

Featured image: “DC Mormon Temple 3″ by Jason Vines. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

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Fragile systems and development

It seems there are as many lists of fragile states as there are countries. All of these lists usually agree that Somalia should be near one end of the spectrum and Denmark near the other, but have different methodologies, approaches, and objectives. They are used for everything, from description to advocacy, prescription, and early warning. I’ve worked on these lists for the World Bank, commented on a number of launches for these lists, and have tried to think seriously about what they mean — how they can be useful and harmful. I’m glad to see our global understanding of fragility maturing. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, “States of Fragility“, reflects how the world is thinking with ‘fuzzier’ classifications. It is time to move past a list of fragile states and into thinking about fragile systems.

Moving from Fragile States Lists …

The term fragile state originated as an alternative to ‘failed state’ – a worldview predominated by assertions about ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ states, with very weak states referred to as ‘failures’, ‘failed states’, etc. Many critics rightly pointed out the naivete of a single dimension in conceptualizing the myriad ways in which states and societies can go wrong. Certainly they can be weak at the center, unable to maintain the Weberian monopoly of violence, but societies can also fail to reconcile grievances between ethnic groups; have disenfranchised minorities at the periphery seeking autonomy; have neighbors at war; are havens for organized crime or trafficking; are instruments of massive corruption or oppression; have economic and political systems that simply have low capacity to deliver essentials of governance; or all of these things and more. Since 2001, the international community has become more nuanced in its understanding of fragility, including World Bank and OECD language on “situations of fragility,” such as “achieving turnaround,” “improving development aid effectiveness,” “creating resilience,” and “making a durable exit from poverty and insecurity.”

It is time to move past a list of fragile states and into thinking about fragile systems.

Unfortunately, fragility has often been defined at the state level out of convenience. We have state level data and state actors are the main counterparts for development actors, for better or worse. As a result, the term ‘fragile states’ should be read as a sort of vernacular shorthand term for countries that cannot manage economic, environmental, or political shocks.

There are a number of problems with defining fragility at the state level. These lists are generally slow to respond to changing conditions, and they create arbitrary and discrete thresholds that don’t reflect a continuum of fragility. The broad use of the term ‘fragile state’ can be pejorative and lead to conceptual fuzziness and oversimplification, which leads to misdiagnosis of complex political dynamics. There are many so-called ‘fragile states’ that have extremely resilient communities and societies within the political boundaries of the state. Likewise, there are fragile societies in otherwise resilient states.

Still, country level analysis is useful for descriptive purposes. Annual analysis by the OECD and the World Bank, among others, usefully reflects global trends within this group of countries, as disparate as they may be. There are good reasons to continue to categorize and monitor a group of countries with similar challenges.

Today, most practitioners define a situation of fragility as that with one or more of the following features: poor or lagging development, weak capacity and/or institutions at the national or local level, low or contested legitimacy, violence or conflict-affected, and/or less resilient (i.e. less likely to rebound from or adapt to shocks).

… to Fragile Systems Thinking

Systems thinking involves understanding how all of the strategic actors engage with each other in processes to produce specific outputs. Collectively, these interconnected parts comprise a system and the performance of the system is measured by its outputs. Systems are interconnected, have amplifying and stabilizing feedback loops, are occasionally cyclical, chaotic, or otherwise non-linear, and are often complex. A popular example is an ecosystem: how air, water, soil, weather and climate, plants and animals, have interconnected effects on the performance of each other and the system as a whole.

Systems thinking goes past linear thinking and ‘engineering’ solutions that suggest an equilibrium is attained only when a problem is solved. I found at the World Bank that this is hard for development economists to do as our instinct is to look and solve for equilibrium solutions. Economists solve for long run solutions, but in fragile situations the road to the long run can involve decades of instability, or even civil wars, pogroms, and mass killings. Keynes famously said “In the long run, we’re all dead.” In fragile situations there may be many dead in the short run and this violence may make some long run equilibria unattainable. A systems approach solution for resilience – or anti-fragility – may be ephemeral, as systems may be dynamic, such that problems are always evolving and good solutions are adapted even as they are implemented.

Economists solve for long run solutions, but in fragile situations, the road to the long run can involve decades of instability, or even civil wars, pogroms, and mass killings.

Because all states and societies are highly interconnected through borders, trade, tourism, financial markets, migration, the Internet, the environment, and other porous membranes, it can be difficult to define the edges of a complex system. Systems can overlap with each other, reside inside other systems, and interact with other systems and the rest of the world. A systems approach is useful for identifying not only complex problems and challenges, but also the very real possibility that there is no ‘best’ solution to these challenges. When challenges are seemingly intractable or are too large to be fully understood, they are often called wicked problems. In most cases, violence has the effect both of magnifying the underlying pressures and eroding the institutions needed to manage them, creating a fragility trap from which it is very difficult to escape. Interactive mapping of such a system can reveal unintended consequences, feedback loops, and other cyclical effects, as well as differences between stakeholders in what the problems are (and what solutions might work).

As the world continues to move away from fragile states and toward thinking about fragile systems, I think it will be useful to link fragile systems in current development theory to the concept of resilience to environmental pressures. The new agenda for sustainable development will require a systems approach to identify systems solutions to complex phenomenon like war, climate change, humanitarian emergencies, poverty, instability, and insecurity.

 Featured image credit: ‘Black Marble – Africa, Europe, and the Middle East’ by NASA. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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