Oxford University Press's Blog, page 598

Thinking of Kepler on the beach

This summer I discovered the pleasures of cycling to beaches in Mallorca with crystal clear water and those perfect shades of blue. We would climb down to the most remote of them to snorkel and swim among the rocks, chanting songs about life being good. Once I abruptly stopped: nearby was a woman holding a selfie stick. I had got used to them on land – but not in this big bath-tub we call the Mediterranean. Might they soon be banned in the sea?

Whatever our view on the selfie culture, 21st century people are not the first to invest a lot in sharing how they look like. In the past, men and elites usually took the lead.

Learned Renaissance men created a strong culture of friendship. They wrote extensively to each other in intimate terms even though they sometimes never met. Chatting globally has its predecessor.

Friendships in these letters often resolved in the request for a portrait – be it a medal, engraving or panel portrait. They are ubiquitous in European collections, but we have often lost a sense of the exact story they tell – when they were made, and what emotions they wanted to share.

Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, presents an exceptional case we can reconstruct. Kepler got his assistant to paint an image of himself for a friend. This was just before Kepler stored up all his belongings to move his family back from Austria to Germany. His aged mother had been accused of witchcraft. Now Kepler took over her defence. Kepler had no idea how long the trial would take or what its outcome might be. But he wanted to share his likeness – the portrait, Kepler explained in a hastily written note to his friend, was to stand in for an autobiography until he found time to write it. Today, it presents us with our only clue as to what Kepler looked like as he entered his fifties, lived through the final phase of his mother´s exceptional trial and travelled across lands ridden by war, disease and destitution. It is the only representation of a mature Kepler he was ever involved in making, apart from a small, crude engraving on the frontispiece of the 1627 Rudolphine Tables. The latter hints at a worn out, badly paid astronomer working long hours in candle-light wearing his sloppy night-gown and cap.

Johannes Kepler, 1610. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Linz painting, by contrast, displayed Kepler as black-haired and elegantly bearded, dark-eyed man with a youthful air of cheerful confidence. He was carefully dressed, as if ready to receive high-ranking men. Indeed, the English poet and chaplain John Donne had passed by in 1619 to meet him. Sir Henry Wotton, who served king James I as diplomat, had met Kepler even more recently in Linz. Wotton enthusiastically wrote to the aged Francis Bacon about Kepler’s ingenious perspective machine, a ‘curiosity’ designed to survey the land more precisely. Kepler had related ‘with a smile’ that he invented it and explained every detail of how it would enable rulers to better measure and tax their land.

The Linz portrait depicted him exactly as this kind of man, at ease to converse about his latest experiments designed to benefit civil concerns. A tightly cut black velvet gown and breeches perfectly set off a plain white ruff and cuffs with intricately laced ends. His belt displayed a precious ruby set in the middle of golden wings. With his right elbow assertively placed on one hip, the Imperial Mathematician in midlife exuded distinction, intellectual alertness and an engaging personality. Kepler in fact somewhat obsessively thought of his mother as defaced by age. This painting showed Kepler as impressive man at the height of his powers. Posing for a relative amateur, Kepler would have had to stand still for hours.

It was worth the effort. For this was a time in which every detail of appearances – physiognomy, youthfulness or age, gestures, postures, dress, hair, accessories – was carefully observed and related to others. As in geometry, proportions meant attractiveness. High-ranking men endlessly judged appearances to gage who was angling for better positions and whether they were driven by rivalry or self-interest or by piety and commitment to further the common good.

Given such scrutiny, Kepler was annoyed to learn that his friend next commissioned an inferior engraving after the Linz portrait, which his friends ridiculed. It made Kepler look vacant, sad, even unworldly, and possibly preoccupied with obscure thoughts. His former professor of theology had reprimanded Kepler in 1619 that he suffered from a ‘confused spirit’. Could the devil attack him?

Kepler’s seemingly relaxed portrait for a friend thus was carefully considered as his mother stood accused and the scientist’s unorthodox religious views under attack. Kepler also wanted to create a different image for himself – not as anxious, angry man, but as positive and composed. Portraits in this way create self-images if we trust in them. Ever since the Renaissance’s rise of this genre they have suggested powerful stories about how we would like to be.

These stories have often broken down or, as in Kepler’s case, been difficult to control when an image has subsequently been used in a different way. What perhaps is most striking historically about the selfie culture then is our unbroken enthusiasm for portrayals, as if they could never trap us, and even if we know better.

I better get used to selfie sticks in the sea then. This summer, one family was caught in a riptide off the Massachusetts coast. The father used a selfie stick to haul the daughter to the beach. Maybe they are a good thing.

Featured image credit: Photo frame, by DiegoRodriguesdeCastro. Public domain via Pixabay.

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“Hotwash,” oral history, and wartime reflection

The military is a total institution and army chaplains are embedded deeply within it. They wear the uniforms and the rank, they salute and are saluted. I was reminded how deeply embedded we are when I arrived at the US Army Chaplain Center and School at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina about two weeks ago. I was there to fulfill my obligations as a reserve chaplain for two weeks. After that, I would be shipping back to Austin, Texas, the post-hippy, techy, progressive university town I call home.

Making sure my uniforms were properly appointed, I walked in the front door and met the new class of chaplains I was to instruct. We were all nervous. All of us were reserve chaplains from all over the country and world. Several of us spoke English as a second language and all of us were from a variety of religious denominations and faiths. I was hoping the class would fit in with our active duty counterparts, who perform this kind of Army duty 24/7.

Power-jokes permeate military culture and the Chaplain Corps is no exception. I heard higher-ranking chaplains immediately joking with junior chaplains that they were going to “write that on your OER (Officer Evaluation Report).” We all laughed, as we all do when the boss makes a joke.

Slowly, over the next few days, Army terminology and acronyms slowly trickled back into my “brain-housing-group,” a military term for cohort if there ever was one. I began to talk the talk as best I could. I said, “We don’t want to re-invent the wheel” about 50 times a day and started sentences with “This is just for your SA (situational awareness).” I said “Roger” instead of “Yes,” and after every event we had a “Hotwash,” which is army slang for “AAR,” an acronym for “After Action Review.” I “back-briefed” my superiors and even pulled out my knife-hand once.

Yes, all the memories came flooding back to me. I was, once again, a young, 27 year old battalion chaplain in a Combat Engineer unit in Baghdad, crunching over the gravel walkways in tan desert boots.

The author, an army chaplain, during his military service. Image courtesy of the author.

I remembered the infinite levels of bureaucracy Army chaplains encounter every day. The online classes and the certifications never stop. On one particular afternoon, when I couldn’t seem to get anything right on the Army computer system, I stumbled into the Chaplain Corps Museum which is co-located at the Chaplains School. I moved through the history of our corps. As I read about the first chaplains appointed by George Washington in his Army, I thought about their role in forging a new nation. It got more complicated as time went on, and I could sense the enormity of this calling to represent God in the hell of war. As I moved toward the exit and into the bright sunlight of an August afternoon in South Carolina, I came face to face with my war, Iraq.

Pictures of chaplains leading services, small and large. Soldiers in dusty fatigues, standing around the Humvee as the priest elevates the chalice off the hood of the vehicle. These were my people. I knew them in war and in the trials of homecoming. The weight of their sacrifice came down upon me and I wept. I wept for their deaths and their wounds. I wept for how little they knew about Iraq and how little I knew about war. I wept because I loved them and I carried their stories.

They were the bravest men and women I have ever seen. Their bravery on the roads and alleys of Baghdad still astounds me. They loved each other and they loved me. I miss that love, especially as I gear up to go back and tackle the confounding intricacies of the Army computer system.

Military chaplains are deeply embedded in military culture. We derive our credibility from this relationship and it gives us access to the most closed off military units and personnel in places civilians and media cannot go. But this deep embedding also means we experience the same suffering our soldiers experience.

The world needs to know chaplains are human and not immune from the grim lottery of death or the wounds of the body, mind, and spirit.

I was reminded of this when I spoke to a chaplain I interviewed. He was just starting to feel a little better after coming home from his deployment, and beginning to think about what he was going to do with his life. The last couple of years were a blur, he said, and he didn’t remember most of them. His statements are echoes of a generation that has been marked by war and the pursuit of purpose in a world that seems driven only by consumerism and self-interest.

But there is hope. The first step in reconciliation after war is to remember rightly what happened. Oral history offers the opportunity for a “Hotwash.” It is my hope that more stories can be recorded and written down before the fog of time replaces the fog of war.

Image Credit: “www.Army.mil” by The U.S. Army. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Literary lottery? Antonio Machado’s reputation at home and abroad

Comparison between the lives of Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca is inevitable and not just because they are the two major Spanish poets of the twentieth century. They had met and admired each other’s work. Both were victims of the Civil War. Lorca was assassinated at the outbreak in 1936 and Machado died only a few days into his exile after the Republican defeat in 1939. Yet, whereas Lorca’s status as a Republican martyr is based on his political sympathies, Machado’s exile, a trauma which contributed to his death, was the direct result of his political action in favour of the Republic. If Lorca’s ambivalent response to modernity is what, according to some critics, defines him as the paradigmatic Spanish modernist, this is a status he should share with Machado. However, in contrast to Lorca, whose legacy has been judged in the context of the European avant-garde and of Modernism, from a wealth of different critical approaches, Machado stands in somewhat lonely eminence, his work mostly considered within the strict boundaries of Spanish literary historiography, singular and unattached to the international scene.

And yet Machado’s poetry engages with great originality with the major artistic and literary movements of his time. The experiments in the visual arts were for him a source of creative energy and a tool for exploring new forms of poetic expression. His poems test the boundaries of the art and its connection to music and painting, and also deploy remarkable strategies for the exploration of self and the world, including the creation of apocryphal poets (an invention more or less synchronous, albeit it seems independently, with the heteronyms of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa). This in itself links Machado in interesting ways with other contemporaries such as Yeats whose use of the ‘Mask’ could be considered a parallel strategy, and even with T. S. Eliot’s notions of impersonality which were being elaborated at the same time. The title of Ezra Pound’s Personae, as well as Eliot’s dramatic monologues, suggest affinities within an international Modernist setting which would prove fertile ground for comparison and would locate Machado’s poetics far more accurately than an exclusively Spanish terrain. The many strands that could connect Machado’s poetry to the great works of his time have largely gone unexplored in the reception of his work, contributing to his unjust neglect in anthologies and critical accounts of Modernism.

Antonio Machado 1910 by Desconocido. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This isolation may partly be the result of his association with the individualist prose-writers of the Spanish generation of 1898 who, as a group, were responding to the country’s sense of decline, and through them his reputation as a national poet was initially forged. But more specific reasons may account for Machado’s neglect. The appropriation of Machado’s legacy by the Spanish right-wing during the first decade of Francoism, might have blinded public perception to those aspects of his work resistant to Christian Nationalist ideology. His transformation into a central figure for Franco’s totalitarian regime, even if short-lived, might have somewhat hindered the reception of his work abroad, but within Spain, this association was soon questioned by critics whose vindication of the formalist qualities of his poetry implied his re-alignment with a poetics of political dissent. But even in the 1970s when there was a renewed interest in Spanish literature within the Anglo-speaking world, Machado’s poetry received nothing like the same attention as that of Lorca or Neruda, the popularity of the latter boosted after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971.

It seems fair to wonder whether the disparate status of Machado at home where he is usually considered the foremost poet of Spain since the seventeenth century, and abroad, where he is often overlooked, may be due to the poet’s reliance of rhythm and rhyme to communicate meaning, something lost in free verse, considered the default mode for English translators. But the numerous translations of Lorca and Jiménez, neither of them averse to traditional forms, invalidate this claim. Perhaps it may be worth considering the point made by Al Alvarez in his anthology of modern European poetry (Faber & Faber, 1992), where he argues that the scarce interest in foreign poetry in England after the war was linked to a widespread distrust of Modernism itself, which was “both American-led and closely tied to continental literature” and he mentions Eliot and Pound among those whose voices were shaped through their work as poet-translators. So, among the reason for Machado’s neglect in the Modernist canon it may well be, after all, that he was a quintessential Modernist poet.

Featured image credit: DSC02221 by Rafael Jiménez. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Hip hop & Obama playlist

When Obama ran for president in 2008, there’s no question that hip hop artists provided a vital soundtrack for his campaign. Energized by the possibility that Obama could become America’s first black president, deeply optimistic tracks like Will.i.am’s “It’s A New Day” and Kidz in the Hall’s “Work to Do (Obama 08)” celebrated Obama’s historic presidency. But as Obama’s administration failed to meet the expectations of some artists and activists, critical songs like David Banner’s “Evil Knievil” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Hood Politics” began to emerge as well. Songs such as “All I Do Is Win” and “At Last” illustrate Obama’s shrewd use of music to shape his political identity. Hip hop reflects diverse perspectives, hopes, and expectations that can be found across the world in the era of Obama and beyond. A sonic companion to The Hip Hop & Obama Reader, this playlist reveals the complicated relationship between President Barack Obama and hip hop.

Featured image:President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama and are serenaded by Beyoncé at their first inaugural dance at the Neighborhood Ball in downtown Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Suzanne Day, USAF. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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A European victory for the pharmaceutical industry

Following a preliminary reference made in the context of a dispute between Seattle Genetics and the Austrian patent office, Seattle Genetics Inc. v Österreichisches Patentamt (Case C-471/14), the Court of Justice of the European Union (the CJ) has put an end to the uncertainty faced by both the innovative and the generic pharmaceutical industries regarding the duration of the effective patent protection afforded to medicinal products.

The CJ was asked to determine what is the relevant date to be used by national patent offices when calculating the duration of a supplementary protection certificate (SPC). Is it the date when the decision granting the marketing authorisation (MA) is adopted by the health authority, or the date in which the decision is notified to the applicant? Following the opinion of Advocate General Jääskinen, the CJ ruled that the relevant date is the date on which the MA holder is notified that the MA has been granted.

EU legislation provides the possibility of a supplementary protection certificate SPC to compensate a patent holder for the erosion of patent protection suffered due to the lengthy regulatory process leading to the grant of an MA. In the EU, no medicinal product may be commercially exploited before the relevant authority has issued an MA.

However, confusion lies in how the duration of an SPC should be calculated. EU legislation provides that the SPC is to be calculated on the basis of “the date of first authorisation to place the product on the market in the Community”. Yet, following the preliminary reference from Austria, the CJ has cleared all confusion: the relevant date is the date on which the decision is notified to the applicant.

What does this mean for the innovative pharmaceutical industry?

Not only has the CJ’s ruling put an end to the uncertainty faced by both the innovative and generic pharmaceutical industries regarding the duration of effective patent protection afforded to medicinal products, the additional two to five days typically seen between grant of an MA and notification to the applicant are of immense commercial value. This is particularly so as the market for a medicinal product will often reach its peak towards the end of the patent term. Taking this into consideration, the additional days per product, in every member state in which the product is marketed, multiplied by the number of products that an innovative company may have in its portfolio is far from insignificant!

Furthermore, although the SPC regime is harmonised throughout the EU, patents remain a national right and SPCs are granted by national patent offices. Following the CJ’s ruling, divergence should no longer exist between member states regarding the relevant date for calculation of the SPC term allowing patent holders to be certain of a uniform SPC duration throughout the EU and, similarly, allowing competing generic companies certainty as to when patent protection will expire.

In addition, it is our view that the CJ’s decision will also provide authority that the date of notification of grant of an MA to an applicant is the relevant date for calculating the period of regulatory data protection for a medicinal product and the period of orphan market exclusivity for an orphan medicinal product.

Featured image credit: Medical Drugs for Pharmacy Health Shop of Medicine, by epSos.de. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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How to cope when the words don’t come

Imagine someone close to you disappears. She no longer shows up on the day on which she always visited. She does not call or write. No one says where she has gone or if she is coming back. To make matters worse, you cannot ask about her. You experience feelings of sadness, anger, disappointment, and grief, to name a few. The only way you have to express yourself is through your behavior. You may retreat into yourself or lash out at others, but those who provide your care do not understand the source of your behaviors.

This is the experience of too many adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). Because of communication difficulties, social stigma surrounding death, and caregivers’ lack of understanding, the impact of death on people with intellectual disabilities is often overlooked or trivialized.

The death of a loved one is a difficult thing to endure. When this happens, people may look for support in family, friends, or professionals. They may tell their story or hold it in. People with ID also experience feelings associated with loss – fear, anger, sadness, disappointment, loneliness, etc. – however, they may be limited in their choice of expression. The expression of these feelings may be viewed as “acting out” and may be delayed, sometimes occurring months or years following the loss. People with ID need support in identifying and coping with these feelings.

In the last century, people with ID have experienced a positive shift in health, life experience, and life expectancy. With the increase in life expectancy and community involvement has come the opportunity for an increased number of significant relationships, and thus an increased opportunity for experiencing loss. What hasn’t evolved as quickly is the recognition of the population’s ability to experience loss or the development of skills to help one cope with the loss.

Music therapy is one way to address the needs of people with ID who have experienced a loss. I explored the use of music therapy interventions to address the feelings associated with loss – sadness, anger, loneliness – in a nine-week group music therapy setting. Music interventions such as improvisation allowed participants to communicate without words. Songwriting was used as a way to aid participants in organizing and expressing thoughts and feelings related to their loss. Songwriting was also adapted to accommodate a variety of communication aids such as pictures and voice output devices.

The findings of this study led me to consider the fact that emotions such as sadness and anger are experienced not only when a death occurs, and that the ability to recognize, identify, and cope with feelings is important to people with ID. In my current clinical work, I routinely incorporate emotional recognition and coping skill development in treatment of adults with ID who exhibit difficulty with these skills.

Regardless of your clinical orientation, the following five tips may be useful in treating adults with ID who are experiencing a significant loss.

Consider communication: If a person uses communication aids, these will be helpful in communicating about the loss.
Keep it concrete: Don’t be afraid of the word “death.” Many times, we try to make death more palatable by making abstract references to the “seasons of life” or “crossing over.” For people who have difficulty with abstract thinking, these references may increase confusion. The use of picture books written for adults may be helpful.
Honor the reality of one’s feelings: The inability to express one’s feelings does not diminish the intensity or felt experience.
Recognize the significant relationships: Family members are not the only significant people in one’s life. Due to institutionalization and custodial care, significant relationships may be with staff. The significance of a familial relationship may be related to the length of time one lived at home.
Teach coping skills now: The ability to recognize and cope with feelings is key in one’s ability to cope with a death. For people with ID, these skills may need to be taught with intention and in a formal setting (therapy, education). The acquisition of skills will be easier if the person is not currently dealing with a loss.

There is a growing awareness and body of literature to support the treatment of mental health issues in people with ID, including those who experienced a significant death. With continued research and acceptance comes hope for people with ID to receive the treatment and support they need to cope and live fuller lives.

Featured image credit: Dandelion by George Hodan. Public domain via PublicDomainPictures.net.

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Why global health matters

It is every human being’s right to enjoy a state of complete mental, physical, and social well being on this planet. However, health is also a right that is unequally distributed throughout the world due to lack of access to proper healthcare facilities and professionals, lack of sanitation, feeble vaccination delivery systems, and treatment-oriented healthcare systems rather than preventative systems.

Today there are more than 1 million avoidable child deaths per year, and more than 6 million children still die before their fifth birthday each year. More than half of these early child deaths are due to conditions that could be prevented or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions. According to the WHO 2014 report, 842,000 diarrheal disease deaths per year are attributable to inadequate drinking water and proper sanitation.

Unequal distribution of healthcare professionals typically results from a lack of delivery of quality healthcare to under-served regions of the world. These critical shortages, inadequate skill, and uneven geographic distribution of health professionals pose major barriers to achieving the preferred state of the global healthcare system. In developing countries such as Tanzania, physician-patient ratio is 1:100,000. Meanwhile this ratio drastically changes for the developed parts of the world with the approximate ratio of 70:10,000. It is an urgent involvement call for the developed parts of the world’s medical schools to make policies that involve distribution of healthcare practitioners. Distribution of medical students to developing parts of the world through the addition of Global Health Clinical Rotations in medical schools’ third and forth year curriculum, which lasts between 4 to 8 weeks, would provide a setting for students to provide primary health education, prevention, and delivery of technology for the purpose of achieving the preferred state of the global healthcare system. This constant influx of medical students from developed parts of the world such as the United States, through the use of technological innovations, will provide an opportunity to build up a healthcare system that the developing parts of the world cannot accomplish on their own. Medical students who are traveling to under-served regions with the help of tablets can create electronic databases, and also through the use of healthcare applications can eliminate possible preventative diseases. Medical students can also bring a “Prevent-in-a-Box” kit with them and share the primary items of hygiene to the local people. The kit contains a toothbrush and toothpaste, water filter, hand sanitizer, de-worming pills, insecticide nets, micro-nutrient fortified supplements, and umbilical cord treatment. As the rotation is a part of the curriculum, the students can be replaced continuously during the whole year.

Providing vaccines to under-served regions is one way to improve global health. Image Credit: Steven Deplo, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The implementation of the Global Health Clinical Rotation program will provide opportunities for medical students to increase their awareness of current status on global health, thus raising incentives to depart to developing parts of the world as future physicians, which will increase the amount of doctors and availability of medical services in under-served regions of the world. Increase in healthcare practitioners will provide an opportunity to introduce technology that will bring many benefits in the current status of the healthcare system in developing parts of the world since the usage of technology can prevent many possible diseases that result in deaths, and build a healthcare system and educate the locals. Involvement of technology and constant involvement of healthcare professionals promote preventative healthcare, which will increase life expectancy in developing countries, enrich quality of life, decrease child mortality rate, and ensure all children live long, healthy lives.

Humanity and medicine cannot stay insensitive toward the inequality that more than half of the world is facing at this point because health is not luxury and is a basic human right for all. Minor steps that are taken by medical schools in developing parts of the world can have a major impact on how the rest of the world develops and frees from deterioration, which in the long term has significant effects on overall well-being for all of humanity. It is clear at this point that under-served parts of the world that are lacking basic infrastructure will not be able to decrease the physician and patients ratio without help from developed parts of the world. Providing quality of life to all human beings is an oath that every healthcare professional takes and faith in medicine and technology can provide hope to people who live in poverty and think that suffering is their destiny.

Feature Image: Access to adequate drinking water is an important element of quality world health. Image Credit: McKay Savage, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Genius loci: war poets of place

It’s curious how intensely some writers, especially poets, respond to place. Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, of course, John Clare at Helpston, and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. But there are earlier names: William Cowper and Olney, Alexander Pope’s Windsor or Twickenham, Charles Cotton in Derbyshire…

I found myself thinking of this as I heard of the deaths of two poets associated with Gloucestershire; Charles Tomlinson and P.J.Kavanagh. Both wrote regularly about their adopted county, its landscapes, its secrets and their particular attachment to it, although Tomlinson was equally drawn back to the Stoke of his boyhood, and to certain places in America and Italy. In Kavanagh’s case the love affair was tied up with his fascination for the work of the Gloucester-born First World War poet and composer Ivor Gurney, whose reputation he rehabilitated through extraordinary close work on the manuscripts, clarifying what had appeared to be misprints, showing him to be less incoherent, more original than anyone had realised.

Ivor Gurney was above all a poet of place. Specific localities, particular walks, thread his poetry and stayed with him even when he was incarcerated far from any that he knew. For him, the battlefields and billets were physical locations whose names carried the same kind of power as Foscombe Hill or Leckhampton. Editions of his poetry cry out for maps. Indeed, Edward Thomas’s widow, Helen, had the brilliant idea of bringing him ordnance survey maps to pore over in his Dartford asylum. While not all the poets of the First World War have this almost visionary reaction to where they physically are (Owen is moved more by pity, Sassoon by anger, Rosenberg by what he sees, hears), it is a common feature in their work. Certainly it is true of Edward Thomas, who famously picked up a clod of English earth to demonstrate what he would be fighting for, and even more so for Edmund Blunden, who was one of the very first to bring Ivor Gurney to the world’s attention, editing an early edition of his verse.

Image credit: Agny Military Cemetery, France. Photo by John Greening, used with permission.

The very nature of the 1914-18 land-war, with its colourfully named trenches, its endless battles over lyrical-sounding villages, seemed to encourage what Irish poets call dinnseanchas: place poetry. Even a severe but not life-threatening wound was referred to as a ‘Blighty’, the place you hoped it could get you to. For soldier poets brought up in the pastoral tradition (which depends on fastidious contrast between court and country), to witness fields, orchards, farmsteads violently torn up was a stylistic earthquake. And although a century has passed, a simple place-name, Passchendaele, can still raise a shudder. Those, like Blunden, who survived, often found themselves returning to the sites again and again, like medieval pilgrims. Repeating the names became as inevitable a stylistic feature of their poetry as breaking the pentameter, or allowing ‘whizzbangs’ and corpses alongside woods and flowers.

This instinct for place applies to poets of peace too (as with Tomlinson and Kavanagh, although the latter fought in the Korean War) but one could trace the very history of war poetry since 1918 through locations: from John Cornford in Aragon to Louis Simpson’s Carentan O Carentan and Norman Cameron’s Green, Green is El Aghir; from Edwin Muir’s Orcadian post-nuclear horses to Denise Levertov’s What Were They Like? about Vietnam, Moniza Alvi’s Partition sequence or recent dispatches by Brian Turner (‘Al-A’imma Bridge’), Dan O’Brien, and Kevin Powers. It’s understandable that anyone should feel strongly about somewhere they were traumatized. War makes non-combatants (which includes some of those just mentioned) exceptionally conscious of a location’s vulnerability, too: think of Eliot’s masterpiece of the Second World War, Four Quartets, full of phrases about ‘significant soil.’ Seamus Heaney’s idea of the ‘omphalos’, too, a sacred still centre, could be seen as a reaction to the Troubles; and Jo Shapcott’s Phrase Book, about sitting watching the Iraq war on television, is a war poem about place – even if that place is the sofa.

As for me, my first book was entirely about Egypt, where my wife and I lived as volunteers from 1979-81 when Sadat was making peace with Israel; and a quarter of a century later a collection about Iceland was an exploration of the country where my father was stationed during the Second World War. But inbetween I found myself writing a good deal about the largely imaginary county where we live, Huntingdonshire, a thinned-out Forest of Arden, far (or so I thought) from the world’s concerns. Yet it had once been at the epicentre of the English Civil War; Little Gidding, with echoes of Eliot’s ‘broken king’, was only a cycle ride away. Next to the US cruise missile base, John Clare’s brambles were barbed wire fencing around that base, and fighter jets seared the open sky that had heard William Cowper sing ‘God moves in a mysterious way’. All this proved in the end fruitful material for a trilogy of Huntingdonshire ‘Eclogues’, ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘Elegies’.

So I am a poet of place, yes, but there is more of the war poet than I might have admitted. Even my latest homage to the genius loci – a collaboration in verse with Penelope Shuttle about the area around Heathrow Airport where we both grew up – turns out to be ticking ominously. Hounslow Heath was where revolutionary armies used to muster.

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Cyber war and the question of causation

Opinio Juris hosted a book symposium on Cyber War: Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts in September. In the first two posts, Duncan Hollis gave a short introduction to cyber war, and Kevin Govern examined the duty to hack and the boundaries of analogical reasoning. In the third post, reproduced here, Jens David Ohlin explores the difficulties arising from causal investigations in cyber attacks.

Everyone knows that the increasing threat of cyber attacks will place immense pressure on the operational capacities for various intelligence and defense agencies. Speak with anyone in military operations (from several countries), and their lists of security concerns are remarkably similar: Russia, ISIS, and cyber (in no particular order). What is more controversial is whether the current legal regime regarding jus ad bellum and jus in bello is sufficient to adequately regulate cyber-attacks and cyberwar, or whether new legal norms should be developed to specifically address these issues.

My own view is that there is insufficient clarity right now regarding the required causal connection between a cyber attack and its kinetic consequences, especially with regard to what counts as an armed attack for purposes of triggering the right to self-defense under Article 51, and what counts as an attack for purposes of jus in bello. I argue that the lacuna is not terribly surprising since the law of war has generally avoided issues of causation because, unlike tort and criminal law, issues of causation are usually (with some notable exceptions) fairly uncontroversial in wartime. Cyber might change that.

Let me explain in greater depth why I think that the increasing threat and deployment of cyber-weapons will force (or should force) the law of war to develop a sophisticated and nuanced account of causation. Causation is largely irrelevant (or at the very least uncontroversial) to the basic structure of the law of war. If you drop a bomb on a village, the results are fairly obvious. The one area (or one of the few) where causation is controversial is dual-use infrastructure targets that have some relationship to both civilian and military operations. Under the law of war, a target is only a permissible military target if, among other things, its destruction will make an effective contribution to the military campaign.

According to Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I:

attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. Insofar as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

The problem is that destroying almost any civilian target will create some military advantage, if only because it might demoralize the civilian population and spur them to pressure their civilian leaders to sue for peace. But that is clearly overbroad. The difference between permissible and impermissible attacks has to do, in part, with the nature of the causal connection between the attack and the military advantage that it confers. Something about the causal relationship between the terror-killing of non-combatants and the resulting military advantage is impermissible and dangerous. So that is one area where IHL needs a good account of causation. But I think this is a rare case.

I believe that cyber-attack scenarios will trigger immense pressure on IHL to develop an account of causation that is consistent with the unique ways that IHL is adjudicated. I place less emphasis on which account of causation is abstractly correct and instead support the more modest claim that cyber-attacks implicate the concept of causation in previously unseen ways. The result is the emergence of a primary research agenda for IHL at both levels: theory (scholarship) and codification (via state practice and potential treaty provisions). The Tallinn Manual was an excellent start to this process, but I also encourage scholars of causation in other fields to join the conversation.

One reason why this question is so difficult to answer is that traditional theories of causation cannot be reflexively and uncritically grafted into the law of war. Simply put, IHL demands a level of publicity and transparency that generates a significant asymmetry as compared to other fields of domestic law, where the fact-finding machinery of domestic courts is more suited to parsing complex causal phenomena. George Fletcher (in Rethinking Criminal Law) famously distinguished between the pattern of subjective criminality and the pattern of manifest criminality. While the former is appropriate for the criminal law’s extensive fact-finding system, IHL is burdened by the lack of fact-finding resources, and must necessarily rely on the pattern of manifest criminality. Of course, there are international tribunals to adjudicate violations of IHL that constitute war crimes, but let’s remember: (i) only the worst violations of IHL will be adjudicated at an international tribunal; and more importantly (ii) tribunal adjudications are always ex post, never contemporaneous decisions within the moment. The law of war needs a theory of causation that allows all participants to clearly and quickly evaluate the legality of the conduct without needing a courtroom and a fact-finder to make complex factual (and even normative) assessments that may take months to finalize.

Cyberwar presents an especially acute case of this general phenomenon within IHL; the causal processes of a cyber-attack and its downstream consequences are difficult to chart, thus suggesting that the law governing cyberwar should place a premium on transparent rules that, like the pattern of manifest criminality, can be applied by a reasonable third-party observer.

A version of this article originally appeared on Opinio Juris.

Featured image: Photo by Jay Wennington. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Biodynamic wine

All vineyards and thus the wines they produce are not created equal. Two Chardonnays grown in neighbouring plots but with slightly differing soils, slopes and sun exposure will taste subtly different, even if both will still taste of Chardonnay too. This unique ‘somewhereness’ is what the French call terroir.

So imagine the shock French government soil scientist Claude Bourguignon caused in 1988 when he told a group of leading French wine-growers their supposedly blue chip wines had lost their individuality, their terroir-ness. Several decades of intensive farming with man-made fertilizers, weedkillers and pesticides had obliterated the subtle differences their individual terroirs should show, Bourguignon told them, making all wines taste the same. He then added insult to injury by telling them their vineyards soils “had less life than Sahara desert sand.”

To re-vitalize the soil life Bourguignon suggested how a form of organic farming called biodynamics redressed imbalances in soils, and thus in vines, grapes and wines, by creating the conditions in which worms and smaller organisms like beneficial fungi and bacteria thrived. At that time there were a mere handful of biodynamic vineyards in France, small under-the-radar growers like Eugène Meyer in Alsace. He was the first to convert in 1969, but not because he was thinking about the making his wine taste more terroir-like. “The optic nerve in one of my eyes was paralysed by vineyard pesticide and my homeopath suggested biodynamics as an alternative,” he says.

Biodynamics is the oldest form of alternative, or post-industrial farming. It dates from a series of ‘Agriculture’ lectures given in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner of Steiner school fame. Steiner’s audience was a group of farmers who’d found adapting to new, labour-saving agricultural technologies like pesticides and heavy farm machinery had not been a boon but had caused a decline in the health of their crop seeds, livestock and soil. Steiner’s basic message was farming which ignores “living processes” – sacks of fertilizer made by synthesising atmospheric nitrogen don’t contain any worms– produces food and farmers who lack the ‘will’ to get a more natural way of farming back on track. Steiner also predicted our bees would face extinction from around the year 2000, but that’s another story…

Steiner’s main biodynamic precept was each farm should have the right balance of crops for economic sustainability, of livestock whose composted manure maintains soil fertility, and of wild habitat to avoid creating unsustainable farm monocultures. The ‘organic’ movement which appeared after the Second World War derived its name from Steiner’s farm ‘organism’ idea. But organics, in French wine as elsewhere, remained marginal. Its late 1960s pioneers relied on seaweed-derived treatments to correct soil imbalances, useful perhaps for carrots and cauliflowers but old-fashioned for aspirational crops like wine. One lone organic Champagne grower, a maker of honest but dull fizz, erected tall poles in his seaweed-treated vineyards to dissuade his wealthier neighbours from spraying their pesticides using low-flying helicopters – but his efforts were in vain. Wine-growers are a nervy, suspicious bunch. Whereas a bad sowing of annual crops like carrots or cauliflowers can quickly be corrected, wine-growers get but one chance a year to put wine in the bank.

So why trust Claude Bourguignon, a man who said he was sure biodynamic methods helped vines put down better root systems; but he was also absolutely sure he could not explain exactly how biodynamics worked? Step forward Anne-Claude Leflaive from Domaine Leflaive, a Burgundy estate with world-renowned vineyards but wines whose quality had been slipping due, she felt, to an excess of conventional ‘chemical’ fertilizers.

‘Production of horn manure (BD preparation 500) at Granton Vineyard’ by Stefano Lubiana. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

In the early 1990s Anne-Claude divided one of her Chardonnay plots into three: one ‘chemical’, one organic, one biodynamic. Over the next few years the taste differences in the wines from each farming system were clear, to her and the wine-growers, wine writers and wine importers she travelled the world showing the wines to. The biodynamic wine had the most intense, interesting and even challenging narrative to relate in terms of smell, taste and texture. Let the wine do the talking, said Anne-Claude. Far easier than trying to explain the nuts-and-bolts of biodynamics with its reliance on teas and composts based on cow manure, minerals and medicinal plants like stinging nettle, chamomile, and dandelion, with the complication that biodynamic work be timed (ideally) to tune with lunar and other celestial cycles. But these were complications wine-growers, not just in Burgundy in particular or even France in general, but across Planet Wine as a whole, seemed increasingly prepared to accept.

The 1990’s and 2000’s were decades in which wine reached arguably its maximum point of polarization. On the one hand the craze for dense, over-ripe wines exuding sex appeal and whiffs of expensive new oak barrels, wines pre-designed by winemakers to gain the maximum 100-point score from the leading critic of the day; and on the other subtler wines from soils re-stocked with the worms and microbes that allowed the grapes to re-connect with the earth in the way that Anne-Claude Leflaive’s had done.

But for biodynamics to grow worldwide, influential Leflaive-esque pioneers prepared to take the plunge and potential ridicule – a key biodynamic practice is burying cow horns filled with manure to create a worm-friendly soil inoculant – were needed: step forward the Frey and Fetzer families in California, Alvaro Espinoza of Antiyal in Chile, James and Annie Millton in New Zealand, Michel Chapoutier in the Rhône, Jean-Pierre Fleury in Champagne, Nicolas Joly and Domaine Huet in the Loire, Dr Bürklin-Wolf in Germany, Southbrook in Canada, Bodega Noemía in Argentina, Johann Reyneke in South Africa and Stefano Bellotti in Italy.

The wine commentariat now appears to be moving “beyond” biodynamics. A wave of ‘natural’ wines is grabbing the headlines from worthy yet dull organics and effective but inexplicable biodynamics. Natural winemakers are iconoclastic rule-breakers, claiming wine makes itself best when left to, well, make itself. But wine doesn’t make itself. Wine is the mid-point between grape juice and vinegar (Fr: vin aigre = vinegar). Wine-growing and winemaking are interventionist acts: pruning, ploughing, picking, pressing and packing (bottling) cannot be left to chance.

Biodynamics encourages the interventionism of man, of the human spirit, of our will to action. Because as Rudolf Steiner set out in his 1924 Agriculture lectures: to think better we need to eat – and drink – better, and to do that we need to grow stuff better too.

Featured image credit: ‘Production of horn manure (BD preparation 500) at Granton Vineyard’ by Stefano Lubiana. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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