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Learning from Chris Norton over three decades—Part II

This is the second of a three-post series on the pro-feminist and activist Chris Norton by Michael A. Messner.

In my 1980 interview with Chris Norton, he spoke of the tensions of being a pro-feminist man, of struggling with how to integrate his commitments to feminism with his daily life as a carpenter, where he worked with men who didn’t always share those commitments. He spoke of Men Against Sexist Violence’s (MASV) internal discussions of sexism and pornography, and of his own complicated relationship to feminism and other progressive politics. When I asked him if he called himself a feminist, his response revealed his ongoing self-criticism at his own internalized sexism, while also telegraphing what would become his next major political commitment:

“I used to; I don’t know if I do right now. Just because I think I’ve been seeing a lot of limitations to feminism or some of the lacks that it has as far as dealing with class and other things… Some feminists, a certain branch of middle class feminists are sort of like “I want more of the pie” and as someone who’s really interested in changing class relationships and in a more thorough-going revolution I don’t really want to identify with that and I don’t feel real supportive of women executives and women in those positions… In my experience in Latin America, seeing the need to deal with class relationships—I see that as a real difference. The starting point of feminist consciousness between the U.S. and Latin America is really different. I think that any kind of revolutionary movement in the US has to pay a lot of attention to women’s issues, just because that’s where we are. But I think there’s like a bourgeois women’s movement that’s really self-centered and on some level I don’t think I’d call myself a feminist—I think I feel guilty about using that term when I have so much (This whole thing about looks)—I feel guilty because I have so much of this stuff that feels unresolved in myself—It’d be dishonest to call myself a feminist.

It’s two different things. On one level I have objections to some of the tendencies that feminism has and on the other hand I don’t think I’m good enough to call myself a feminist. When we were in the radio collective we called ourselves “pro-feminists,” [which] means that you’re supporting feminism, but not being women, we couldn’t be feminists.”

“It’s two different things. On one level I have objections to some of the tendencies that feminism has and on the other hand I don’t think I’m good enough to call myself a feminist.”

Chris continued working with MASV for the next couple of years, but was shifting his attentions to Latin American solidarity work. I got together with him—maybe around 1983 or 1984 or so—and he told me he was planning to go to El Salvador to work as a freelance journalist, covering the brutal U.S. war that was attempting to suppress a popular uprising. At the time, following the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, there was good reason to believe in the possibility of a succession of victorious liberation movements in Latin America. It was the mid-80s now, and Chris wanted to be a part of this history. He told me he dreamed of being in San Salvador when the victorious FMLA marched in.

I wanted to help—to support Chris, to contribute to the revolution—but of course I’d not stray too far from the local comfort of my oak desk, the very same one upon which I now rest my hands as I write, more than three decades later. I organized a big launch party for Chris at my rambling old rented house in the flatlands of Berkeley. The idea was to gather Chris’s friends and political comrades, as well as some of my own, for a fund-raiser to help Chris get to El Salvador and begin his work as a freelance writer. We cooked up industrial-sized vats of spaghetti for the event, and Chris presented an inspiring El Salvador slide show that outlined the political struggles and stakes. As it turned out, Chris and I had lots of friends; the house was packed to the gills with supporters. And, as it turned out, Chris and I had very few friends who had any money. The pittance we raised may have paid for Chris’s first handful of notebooks.

But he got there. During the latter half of the 1980s, Chris wrote from San Salvador, freelancing for the Christian Science Monitor and other magazines and papers. When I would see Chris’s byline in the CSM I would smile and shake my head in admiration. During those years, still glued to my desk, I wrote my dissertation, prepared articles for academic journals that would hopefully secure me a job, and started my salaried faculty job at USC. Oh, I attended anti-Reagan demonstrations in the early 80s, protested U.S. interventions, donated tiny amounts of money to Latin American solidarity and other progressive organizations—but never did I put my body on the line in the way that Chris Norton did. My admiration for Chris grew… but somewhere starting in the early 1990s, I lost track of him. Immersed in my academic career, building a family in L.A. with Pierrette and our young sons Miles and Sasha, Chris’s life and mine headed in different sorts of directions. I’d think of Chris occasionally, wondering what he was up to.

Featured image credit: International Women’s Day 2009 in Bogotá (Colombia) by Alex Torrenegra. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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A magical elixir for the mind

The brain is a product of its complex and multi-million year history of solving the problems of survival for its host, you, in an ever-changing environment. Overall, your brain is fairly fast but not too efficient, which is probably why so many of us utilize stimulants such as coffee and nicotine to perform tasks more efficiently. Thus far, no one has been able to design a therapy that can make a person truly smarter. So if we look at the so-called memory boosters and cognitive enhancers on the market today, we see that they contain caffeine, sugar, some amino acids, and a few vitamins that do nothing except make us a little poorer. At this point in time in the 21st century, nothing—let me repeat that—nothing exists that can truly make us smarter.

The fact that science has not yet invented a true brain enhancer has not stopped people from selling magical elixirs obtained from unusual sources, e.g. jellyfish, which have unusual names, with vague claims that it will reduce the effects of aging on the brain or just make you smarter. Why do so many people fall for this nonsense? The answer is easy to summarize in three words—the placebo effect. Essentially, we want these drugs to do something, anything; so we fool ourselves into thinking that they do. After all, you’ve just spent a lot of money on this pill! The Internet and television is bursting with claims that special pills and elixirs that will enhance your focus, mental energy, and memory. Fortunately, most of them are so utterly useless that they will not harm you. Most of these drugs are useless because they are not able to cross the blood brain barrier. This is the Achilles’ heel of so many drugs that might offer something beneficial to the brain – they never get into the brain. Evolution made certain that our brain rests comfortably behind a series of biological firewalls. Many popular remedies depend entirely upon the placebo effect because they cannot cross the blood brain barrier.

One recent case makes the point. Prevagen® is a commercial product currently being marketed as a memory supplement; its active ingredient is claimed to be the jellyfish protein apoaequorin. This incredibly large, highly water soluble molecule would never be able to make it into the brain. First, large proteins are almost completely metabolized by intestinal enzymes so that the individual amino acids are available for absorption. After all, this is the job of the intestines, i.e. to break down foods into the individual components for absorption. Sometimes short strings of amino acids are occasionally transported across the gut-blood barrier; these few molecules will be digested and completely destroyed by the digestive enzymes within the liver. That is the job of the liver. There’s an important lesson here: for a drug to act upon the brain it needs to actually get into the brain.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of charlatans eager to mislead potential customers with flimsy pseudoscientific evidence in order to make profit. Why are we so vulnerable to the placebo effect? When it comes to therapies that claim to enhance brain function, never underestimate the power of your own expectations. Your mind plays a major role in how drugs affect you. We all want to believe that the pills we take will help us feel and function better; thanks to the poorly understood phenomenon of the placebo effect, we do sometimes, but only for a while, benefit even from the most bogus of elixirs. As Tinker Bell once said, “You just have to believe!”

Featured image: Abstract. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Playing God, Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Deep Are the Roots

The question then is: “What does the root gu– signify?” The procedure consists in finding some word in Germanic and ideally outside Germanic in which gu– or g-, followed by another vowel and alternating with u means something compatible with the idea of “god.” Here, however, is the rub. Old Germanic guð– certainly existed, but we don’t know what it meant when it was coined centuries before it surfaced in texts. Several Sanskrit and Greek verbs meaning “to pour” have been pressed into service, to explain the origin of god. Among them are Sanskrit juhote, cognate with Greek khéo (from khewo: w stands for F, the letter digamma), Latin fundere, and Gothic giutan (gush may be related to it; otherwise, English has no modern reflexes of this verb, but German still does: gießen). What could “god” have to do with pouring? The great English anthropologist Edward B. Tylor wrote in his book Primitive Culture: “In certain mountain districts of Norway, up to the end of the last century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every Thursday evening (which seems to have some connection with Thor), smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the seat of honor on fresh straw, and at certain times of the year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the house.”

Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917), the father of cultural anthropology

Many more similar examples exist. Ethnographers described pouring the blood of sacrificial animals into the fire. On the island of Rügen, a medieval priest, prostrate at the feet a god, poured old wine from the goblet the god kept in his hands, filled it anew, and prayed for good fortune for himself and the community. In 1974, the American Indo-European scholar Calvert Watkins interpreted the Germanic word as the “libated one”: “…it is possible that the collective neuter ghutóm of the Germanic word for ‘god’ could refer to the spirit immanent in the heaped-up hallowed ground of a tumulus—perhaps of a kurgan, the characteristic Eurasian burial mound associated by archaeologists with Indo-Europeans.” This interpretation is not too different from the one implied in Tyler’s passage. Libation means “an offering of a drink,” so that the “libated one” should be understood as “the recipient of a libation.” Let us not forget that the Germanic protoform is supposedly a past participle.

By a curious coincidence, Gothic giutan “to pour” is related, not conjecturally but certainly, to the word Goth. Goti, as their non-Germanic neighbors called Goths, had no h; th in it is the result of the Greek spelling with the theta (this spelling has been retained in Goethe, which means “God,” probably a stub of a longer compound). And all over the place we find Gautar (those are the Old Engl. Geatas of Beowulf fame) and other tribes whose names are derived from the same root. What was so attractive in the idea of pouring that the root of giutan in different grades of ablaut turned up in ethnic names with such regularity? These questions still await a convincing answer. Yet to substitute “sacrifice” for “pour” and look upon the bearers of those names as worshipers of some god or gods would be too bold a leap into the unknown. Millennia ago, all people were “pourers” and “sacrificers.”

At present, many scholars share the etymology of god, as Watkins formulated it. But not too long ago, another but very similar Sanskrit root—it means “invoke”— was more often believed to be at the basis of the Germanic divine name. It sounds so much alike the one for “pour” that an attempt was once made to merge the two. However, modern researchers discovered insurmountable phonetic difficulties in connecting the verb for invoking with the word for god, though in this context “a being invoked by worshipers” makes better sense than “a libated one.” Among many other interpretations of this recalcitrant noun we find “purifier,” “the invisible, hidden,” “shining,” “apparition, something observed,” and “the one that is outside” (I am leaving out of account several nonsensical suggestions). A borrowing from Persian has been considered and refuted on excellent grounds. Finally, some people think that god is a loan from an unknown language. This of course may be true but dismisses rather than answers the question.

With some trepidation I would like to say that all the hypotheses mentioned above strike me as unconvincing. We know from the days of Scandinavian paganism that the Germanic word guð existed and that it referred to the highest beings in control of the world. However, they competed with other “multitudes,” and sacrifices were made to all supernatural forces. Consequently, “being invoked” or “being the recipient of offerings” did not characterize any group uniquely, and, in general, to call God “the libated one” is as strange as to coin a divine name (such names are called theonyms) cognate with incense, candle, or smoke. Also, the etymology of guð has to account for the universal use of such words in the plural. To Latin numen, mentioned earlier, Hebrew Elohim can be added. We need a group name. Watkins, it will be remembered, spoke about the spirit, not spirits, in a mound.

When converted Germanic clerics searched for the word corresponding to Latin Deus and Greek theós, they must have had enough to choose from in the native resources. For example, in Old Icelandic, the great gods (all together) were called not only guð but also regin, that is, “the governing, ruling forces,” not unexpectedly, a neuter plural. The regin were called holy; sometimes the epithet occurred with a reinforcing prefix. Germanic had two adjectives for “sacred.” One has come down to us as Engl. holy; the other is known from Gothic weihs and German words like Weihnachten “Christmas,” literally, “Holy Night.” Apparently, though the guð could be the holy ones and the governing ones, the word regin (assuming that some of its forms existed in the south) lacked the connotations important to the converted Christians or carried some connotations to be avoided. In practicing the new religion the Church tried to steer away from the vocabulary characteristic of pagan cults, and yet the learned missionaries decided to employ an old term for the most important word of the Christian faith.

It is hard to say boo, shoo, or even goo to a goose.

The neuter plural guð was probably free from the unwanted associations inherent in the other words for the holy ones. As early as 1889, the great Indo-European scholar Karl Brugmann suggested that god was allied to the Sanskrit adjective ghorás “horrible” and Old Engl. gryrn “sorrow.” His etymology, though supported by Evald Lidén, another distinguished linguist, did not win the day because Brugmann wanted both ghorás and guð to be related to Greek theós, and here he was mistaken. But taking theós out of the equation does not damage the credibility of guð. The root of gho–ra-s (o was long in it) may have been a sound-imitative complex, like boo, which some won’t dare say to a goose, or hoo– in Engl. hoot. We also shoo the cat. Guð meant “terror” and struck fear in the worshippers. So much for good God. If this is how the Germanic word for “God” came into existence, it was not a past participle, and d (ð) was not a verbal ending or suffix.

As a postscript, I’ll say something about the Slavic word bog “god.” Its etymology is believed to be certain because its alleged Sanskrit and Iranian cognates mean “dispenser of wealth” and “god.” Russian bogatyi (stress on ga) means “rich.” Yet, with regard to bogatyi, we may be dealing with a case of late folk etymology. Bog, I suspect, belongs with Engl. bogey, Russian buka (the same meaning), and Germanic gu-. I have risked defying the recognized etymologies of two heavily charged words in Germanic and Slavic and supplied this suicidal postscript, because, when all is said and done, it is better to be hanged for a sheep than for a lamb. I also remembered that those who were sacrificed to Othin were sometimes hanged.

Image credits: (1) Illustration of E. B. Tylor from Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution & Custom. Photo. Elliot & Fry. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Little Goose Girl by Camille Pissarro (1886). Public domain via WikiArt.

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Discussion questions for Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

We’re just over a fortnight away from the end of our third season of the Oxford World’s Classics Reading Group. It’s still not too late to join us as we follow the story of young Pip and his great expectations. If you’re already stuck in with #OWCReads, these discussion questions will help you get the most out of the text. They come courtesy of the co-editor of the OWC edition of Great Expectations, Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of Madgalen College, Oxford.

Learning from Chris Norton over three decades—Part I

This is the first of a three-post series on the pro-feminist and activist Chris Norton by Michael A. Messner.

The guy at the front of the room was saying stuff I’d never heard a man say before, especially to a room full of young college guys. Through my basketball-player-eyes, I sized him up to be at least 6’5” with the broad shoulders of a power forward. He had medium-length reddish hair and a ruddy face dominated by a bristly mustache that left his mouth a bit of mystery. And what words emerged from this mouth! With a style that seemed simultaneously gentle and passionate, he urged these young guys to think critically about their own relationship to pornography.

Backed up with a slideshow that depicted popular album covers (The misogynist public billboard promoting The Rolling Stones’ album Black and Blue was one of them), he pointed to the links between sexual objectification of women, men’s use of pornography, and men’s violence against women.

This stuff was hard to hear for young men—and I include myself in this. It was 1980. I was 28 and in recent years had come to define myself as a ‘pro-feminist man’. I’d even been in a men’s consciousness-raising group in Santa Cruz. But like many younger men like me who were awakening to feminism, I was still struggling with my own deeply ingrained erotic attachments to conventional sexualized imagery of women, as depicted not only in Playboy and Penthouse, but pretty much everywhere around me. So here was this giant guy standing up there, calling us out—calling me out—on my shit. What struck me most, and what made it possible to hear what he was saying, was how he spoke as one of us—self-reflexively talking about his own immersion in a culture of eroticized sexism and violence against women, how it affected and continued to affect him. He revealed that he was part of a group of men, Men Against Sexist Violence (MASV), that did educational work on sexism with boys and men—in schools, on the radio, in prisons—while also supporting each other to become pro-feminist men.

What struck me most, and what made it possible to hear what he was saying, was how he spoke as one of us—self-reflexively talking about his own immersion in a culture of eroticized sexism and violence against women, how it affected and continued to affect him.

I agreed with everything this guy said in his presentation and I admired his courage. I wanted to talk with him, maybe become friends with him, and for sure I wanted to interview him for my new research project for grad school—in-depth interviews with men in pro-feminist men’s groups. After the talk, I introduced myself. He greeted me warmly and immediately agreed to allow me to interview him.

Chris Norton was his name, and it turned out he was a guy of middle class origin who had moved to Berkeley in recent years, taking up work as a carpenter while also immersing himself in the progressive politics of the time. I had initially imagined he might become a basketball buddy, but we were only two minutes into our interview before he assuaged me of that illusion. When I asked him about his boyhood relationship to masculinity, he said,

“…in sports, I didn’t feel like being aggressive often times and for instance I’m tall and was supposed to be good at basketball, to stand under the hoop and get all the rebounds, and it just didn’t work out—and people’d get pissed off at me for not getting all the rebounds—and then we wouldn’t end up winning and I’d get resentment back, and frustration from people, because I wasn’t doing what I was expected to do and then I’d feel bad about myself and think, “Well I guess I’m a failure, I’m not strong enough or not aggressive enough, maybe there’s something wrong with me or wrong with my masculinity; I’m not a man.”

My 1980 interview with Chris Norton not only helped me to complete a study toward the goal of getting my Ph.D. It also helped to me begin to clarify the sort of person I am. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed thinking of myself variously as a socialist, a radical, a feminist, a progressive, an advocate for social justice. But mostly I don’t do much with these political commitments. Oh, I’ve marched in a few protests and paid dues in some progressive organizations, but I can’t stomach meetings and I hate the grind of building and sustaining organizations. I live so much inside my own head; I read, I write, and the most public thing I do is to lecture and occasionally write an op-ed on some social issue. But this guy, Chris Norton, though he had nearly identical politics as mine, was an opposite character type, a type I admired, even romanticized—a doer, a man committed to acting in the world rather than sitting around thinking about things.

Featured image credit: Women’s liberation march from Farrugut Square to Lafayette Park  by Warren K. Leffler. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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How much do you know about sources of energy? [quiz]

Energy consumption is changing. Governments and businesses around the world are exploring low carbon options including biofuels, natural gas and wind in an attempt to achieve longstanding energy security. Production of new sources has led to controversies about economic and environmental impacts and the trade-offs they generate between food and fuel production, energy security and environmental quality.

Test your knowledge about the current landscape of new, alternate, and renewable energy.

Interested in learning more about emerging sources of energy? Discover articles about energy policy in the 21st century, controversy and effects of large scale biofuel use, and economic and environmental responses to the switch from fossil fuels in the latest virtual issue from the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Quiz and featured image credit: ‘Wind turbines, energy’, by tpsdave. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Max Planck’s debt

The great German physicist Max Planck once said, “However many specialties science may split into, it remains fundamentally an indivisible whole.” He declared that the divisions and subdivisions of scientific disciplines were “not based on the nature of things.” And he worked accordingly, moving back and forth between what we would now starkly categorize as physics, philosophy, mathematics, and chemistry. Of the many little-known wrinkles in his long life, Planck’s unsung relationship to physical chemistry was one of the most important.

Most scientists today, if they know anything about Planck, recognize his name at the headwaters of quantum theory. His 1900 discovery of the energy quantum (more like a toe stubbing) launched a revolution that rewrote our physical understanding of matter and its interactions. But his bold steps required a unique mindset. At the age of forty-two, that mindset had been shaped by a wealth of influences, including some that were atypical for a physicist, even in the broad-minded times of the nineteenth century.

When Max Planck was just twenty-one years old, he capped his formal training in theoretical physics with his doctorate thesis, exploring the meaning and utility of entropy. The pillars of thermodynamics were new and wobbly in 1879. Planck’s work on the second law drew very little attention at the time. He refined and clarified entropy as a weather vane for irreversible processes and the flow of time itself. But his professors largely shrugged at his thesis. To make a mark, he would have to apply entropy to something more tangible.

In 1885, Planck began his first professorship in Kiel and pushed his work into the infant field of physical chemistry, including studies of phase transitions and dilute solutions. These interactions with chemistry deeply influenced him. In particular, he embraced the existence and relevance of atoms in the late 1880s, nearly twenty years ahead most physicists.

Applauding the notions of Avogadro and the work of Sweden’s Svante Arrhenius (a physicist turned physical chemist), Planck made critical contributions to thermochemistry and electrochemistry. In his first fifteen years as a professor, he published several papers in the fledgling journal Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie and set forth other physical chemistry contributions in the leading physics journal of the time, Annalen der Physik. And in terms of our modern notion of “impact,” his most highly ranked offerings were not related to his quantum breakthrough at all. To this day, his most frequently cited papers, both from 1890, swim in electrochemistry: “The Potential Difference between Two Dilute Solutions of Binary Electrolytes,” and “Excitation of Electricity and Heat in Electrolytes.”

“Dr. Max Planck” by George Grantham Bain. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the next several years, Planck began a new topic and marched toward quantum immortality. But his days with chemistry and his early adoption of atoms played a key role in his quantum breakthrough. From 1894 to 1899, Planck struggled to model thermal radiation, the warm electromagnetic glow emanating from any object with a temperature above absolute zero. He was drawn to its universal character, first noted by his professor Gustav Kirchhoff: The exact assortment of colors (whether visible or not) emerging from any object depends only on that object’s temperature. So yes, if your telephone could be raised to the temperature of the sun, it would emit perfect sunlight. Incredibly, the composition of an object does not influence its emitted thermal spectrum.

After Max Planck’s different approaches for understanding this spectrum (or “black-body radiation”) failed, he turned to a decidedly atomistic set of mathematics, combinatorics. This tool kit applies to flipping coins, counting cards, etc., all based on discrete items or outcomes. In Planck’s 1900 breakthrough, his key step recycled a combinatorics equation used by a colleague years earlier in modeling a gas, molecule by molecule.

When Planck had at last derived nature’s exact mathematical formula for thermal radiation and introduced the world to the fitting parameter h, Planck’s constant, what most excited him was not the quantization of energy. In December 1900, after zipping through his mathematical derivation for a small audience, Planck lingered on the implication for fundamental physical constants. He derived 6.175 x 1023 for what would become known as Avogadro’s number (the number of molecules in one mole of gas), and 2.76 x 1019 for Loschmidt’s number (the number of gas molecules in 1 cubic centimeter at 0˚C and 1 atm). Planck said that the accuracy of his values was “much better than all determinations of those quantities up to now.” Using his cunning fit to available thermal radiation data, he had nailed down those two landmarks of chemistry to within three percent of their contemporary accepted values.

With this step, Planck and his heritage in physical chemistry had, in some sense, pushed physics into a new age of accuracy and precision. The grandchild of his quantum notion, quantum mechanics, would later stand as the most precisely testable theory in all of science.

Image Credit: “Dr. Max Planck” by George Grantham Bain. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Will we ever need maths after school?

Over the next few weeks, Snezana Lawrence, co-author of Mathematicians and their Gods, will be taking us into a Summer journey around the beauty of mathematics. In this first post, Snezana gives her personal and professional insight to the long time unanswered question: will we ever need maths after school?

What is the purpose of mathematics? Or, as many a pupil would ask the teacher on a daily basis: “When are we going to need this?” There is a considerably ruder version of the question posed by Billy Connolly on the internet, but let’s not go there.

When I was a teacher some years ago I tired from the question to such an extent that I bought myself a crystal ball to keep on my desk in the classroom in case someone would dare pose this question again. If that happened, I would put my hands on the ball, look at the ceiling, and very studiously wait for everyone to get quiet for a few moments, to exclaim some time and date in the future far enough for pupils to not be able to test it… It worked actually, but they kept asking just for the sake of the spectacle.

Nevertheless, this is a very serious question in fact. With the students who actually asked this type of question, not in order to avoid doing mathematics, but out of real curiosity, I spoke at length about it. Different societies, cultures, and people, have debated the very same question and given mathematics very different meanings. Plato for example, discussed at length how important mathematics is to teach the principles of thinking. His dialogue with Meno, leading the slave boy to ‘find’ the knowledge and understanding within himself is a case in point.


In the middle ages, questions such as “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” (or, as another version has it, how many can sit), was not only theological but also included considerations relating to mathematics in terms of space, dimensions, and extension. In this case, mathematics was given the role of rational explanation.

Portrait of John Dee from the Wellcome Trust. CC-BY-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The 16th century scholar, mathematician, philosopher, magus, spy, and one of the most famous intellectuals of English Renaissance, gave a different role to mathematics. John Dee’s immortal fame is earnt by his Preface to the first English language edition of Euclid’s Elements in 1570, in which he boldly states that:

“Many other arts also there are which beautify the mind of man: but of all other none do more garnish and beautify it than those arts which are called Mathematical. Unto the knowledge of which no man can attain, without the perfect knowledge and instruction of the principles, grounds, and Elements of Geometry. But perfectly to be instructed in them, requires diligent study and reading of old ancient authors…”

In the same vein, some years later, in 1612, Piticus, who is credited with the invention of the term trigonometry, states that:

“Nothing makes men more gentle than the cultivation of that heavenly philosophy (mathematics). But, dear God, how rarely is this gentleness a quality of theologians! And how desirable it would be in this century if all theologians were mathematicians, that is, gentle and manageable men!”

Nevertheless, the more utilitarian view of mathematics remained and is recorded in various places. During the French Revolution, one of the most revolutionary of the mathematicians, the one who is given the title of the father of École Polytechnique, Gaspard Monge, saw mathematics as a way of training the minds of young people for the prestige of his nation:

“In order to raise the French nation from the position of dependence on foreign industry, in which it has continued to the present time, it is necessary in the first place to direct national education towards an acquaintance with matters which demand exactness, a study which hitherto has been totally neglected…”

A 18th century Italian mathematician, Milanese Maria Gaetana Agnesi, saw mathematics as a way of training the mind to concentrate. By sharpening it as a mental tool for learning, the mathematical mind also becomes an instrument through which spiritual enlightenment becomes possible.

So you see, mathematics can be given different roles and is assumed to beautify, free, and educate the mind. In these roles, mathematics is also considered to be dangerous; it can train people to think for themselves. Perhaps the most succinct expression I have ever come across in this respect is given by the Christian Orthodox Archibishop Gritorios V, who in 1819 issued a warning to all students and teachers of mathematics: “cubes and triangles, logarithms and symbolic calculus . . . bring apathy . . . jeopardizing our irreproachable faith…”.

So what is mathematics? It assumes different roles and meanings in different cultures, places, and times. The common factor to them all is that this is a universal tradition of abstract thinking which, with study and perhaps some adaptations, can be understood and contributed to universally. As such, it is the international language that, whilst still conditioned on locality, all of humanity is able to, if not necessarily speak, then understand. To study is to link, via mathematics, to that tradition of humanity.

Featured image credit: Apis florea nest closeup by Sean Hoyland. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Technology and the evolving portrait of the composer

It’s a cartoon image from my childhood: a man with wild hair, wearing a topcoat, and frantically waving a baton with a deranged look on his face. In fact, this caricature of what a composer should look like was probably inspired by the popular image of Beethoven: moody, distant, a loner… a genius lost in his own world. To some degree or another, this clichéd portrait of a “typical” composer has been in the popular lexicon for many, many years, and has been stamped on composers from Mozart all the way to those in the middle of the 20th century. Stravinsky and his contemporaries seem to fit the character description quite nicely. These European men all shared many common traits with their fellow composers. They were all (primarily) keyboard players, were supported by rich benefactors (or the church), and, to varying degrees, followed an established path in the progression of Western Classical music.

Somewhere during the 1960s, the popular profile of a composer began to slowly evolve. Electronic music entered the concert halls, music from other cultures was given a much more important role in new pieces, and women composers began to inch their way into the long-held male bastion of orchestras and composers. Perhaps most importantly, after World War II American composers began to be widely accepted as serious contenders in the world of art music.

The ever-increasing influence of technology greatly opened up the world of art music and further changed the face of “the composer.” In the 1950s and 1960s, the tape recorder, electronic music, and television all fueled the fires of change, but the transformation really took off at the end of the 20th century with the advent of the Internet. Suddenly audiences were able to hear a vast array of music from composers who had not necessarily been processed through the filter of the traditional classical music world. Audiences could experience these new composers and their music and judge for themselves if it had any merit for them personally. The communication between the composers themselves and their audiences also grew exponentially. All of these factors fed and continue to feed the rapid evolution of the profile of a contemporary composer.

“Beethoven” by Joseph Karl Stieler. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

It might be argued that composers have always incorporated technology in their music; after all, Beethoven used the pianoforte and the metronome, both of which were cutting-edge inventions of the time. It also could be said that the use of musical elements from various cultures outside of Western music has a long tradition. For example, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all wrote pieces influenced by Turkish music. The significant difference today is that technology has enabled a revolution not only in the sounds that composers are able to produce but also in the way they create and present their art. It has even changed who the composers themselves are and how they interact with the world and each other. These differences are fueled by technology, and result in a significant variation in the types of people who compose music.

One of the most interesting aspects of technology’s impact on composers and music, in fact, on art in general, is the social change it has both helped to bring about and, at the same time, reflect back at us. As an example of how things have changed, one composer uses his computer skills to bring his audience from around the world together in one virtual concert hall; the Internet allows musicians and audiences from every reach of the globe to take part in his musical events. Along that same line of thinking, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, another composer speaks of a wonderful conversation he had discussing Bach’s music with an elderly woman he met in a most unlikely locale, a rural oasis in a far-flung desert. She had listened to Bach’s music over the Internet.

Of course there are some concerns about the fallout from the new technologies. Student composers are able to produce sounds on their computers that are not reproducible by actual instruments. They also don’t necessarily learn the traditional “nuts and bolts” of musical training and so may lose some fundamental skill sets (such as sight reading and score realization) that technology allows them to bypass. Continuing changes will continue to alter the definition of what it means to be a composer, some worry to the detriment of the music. On the other hand, photography did not prove to be the end of visual art as predicted, although it obviously influenced its development.

The diversity of composers and their music available to us today can only be a good thing. The old caricature of the composer is gone forever, which is, in my opinion, another good thing. As a composer myself, I strive to put my creativity first, no matter what tools I may use to realize my ideas. As technology continues to evolve at dizzying speeds, we almost have no choice but to move in response to it, even if our response is to try to ignore it. We might take a cue from Alan Watts, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

Featured Image: “Don Lewis’ LEO (Live Electronic Orchestra) synthesizer organ” by doryfour. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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The new social contracts

Fire and collapse in Bangladeshi factories are no longer unexpected news, and sweatshop scandals are all too familiar. Conflicting moral, legal, and political claims roil about them. But there have been positive moves, and there is a promise of more. The best hope for progress may be in the flexibility and power of individual contracts.

Accord and discord

Bangladesh factory disasters are only the latest chapter. The problems, at least to some, seem obvious: merchandise is made in a developing country without the safety, labor, environmental, or human rights standards expected in the developed world. Human trafficking, child labor, forced labor (slavery?), and unsafe conditions are among the most egregious problems. Disasters of tragic proportions occur every few years, or a horrifying practice comes to light. Companies scramble to contain the public relations fallout and sometimes contribute money for victim compensation or facility improvements.

Aside from the obvious, and the collective handwringing, agreement about the issues is in short supply. Companies disagree on how to compensate victims and improve conditions: the refusal of the US-led effort on Bangladesh, called the Alliance, to join the European effort, called the Accord, is a case in point, but the disagreements are not limited to Western buyers. The NGOs disagree with the businesses, and those in the developing world of course have their own views.

Image Credit: ‘NGWF-organized demo in Dhaka demanding charges against owners of Tazreen Fashion for the deaths of 112 workers in a factory fire’, Photo by Derek Blackadder, CC by SA 2.0, via Flickr.

Some argue that attempts to export Western standards is a form of cultural and economic imperialism, an effort to raise the cost of goods made in the developing world to make Western-made goods more attractive: a disguised protectionist move benefiting overprivileged workers and powerful developed countries. Other evidence suggests that jobs available outside the maligned garment factories in Bangladesh are even worse, involving dangerous welding work or child prostitution. Or that without the factories, a lack of jobs will push people into crushing, perhaps fatal, poverty.

The flexibility and pluralism of contract

Satisfactory public solutions, given the disparate viewpoints, collective action problems, and more powerfully, jurisdictional and political limits, seem distant. Efforts like the removal of Bangladesh from its “most favored nation” status in the US can only go so far. Individual contracts, while hardly a perfect solution, offer some promise, and at the moment, perhaps the best hope. That is because of their flexibility: their ability to accommodate different goals, commitments, standards, and models.

One model is the ordinary two-party contract where the buyer (say, a large Western clothing retailer) contracts to buy goods from a manufacturer (say, a factory in a developing country). The factory owner promises to adhere to standards set out in the contract. Other provisions govern recordkeeping and inspections. The parties have almost unlimited freedom. They can take on whatever legal and moral commitments they like and not the ones they don’t. But this model is expensive. Bespoke contracts are even more costly than custom-made suits or high couture.

Molecular federalism

Instead, the retailer and the manufacturer might opt into a three-dimensional regime. Their contract might obligate both parties to be a member of or be certified by an organization that promulgates standards and that monitors its members or clients for compliance. Such an organization acts like a substitute for a state or a regulator. Picture the organization at the apex of a pyramid. Then parties can opt into this regulatory regime through their contracts, forming the base of the pyramid, generally without regard to borders. It doesn’t matter if they’re located in the US, Bangladesh, China, or wherever — which is important now as companies move to new places. These flexible private regimes can be thought of as an extraterritorial federalist system, but on a small scale — “molecular federalism.” Just as companies can move to Delaware for corporate law, companies can choose an organization that gives them the standards and the monitoring that they think appropriate.

Image Credit: ‘Vergaderruimte Boardroom’, Photo by Jannes Linders, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In consumer industries, there is a further check: the companies don’t choose just what they want. They need to satisfy their customers; hence the recent moves to “fair trade” fashion. And there is further good news as corporate lawyers and boards bring the moral impetus into the boardroom under the leadership of the American Bar Association. The beauty is that the ABA movement is led by people already inside the boardroom. They can get corporate policies adopted and, we’ll hope, eventually implemented in actual supply contracts.

Legal and political jujitsu

Those contracts are crucial because they allow a kind of political and legal jujitsu. In many jurisdictions, plenty of laws protect labor, the environment, safety, and so on. The laws are not enforced, and efforts to get them enforced may be seen by the government as unwelcome agitation that could land the agitators in jail. But the contracts change the dynamic, as Blair et al. found in China: attempts to get better working conditions are flipped from being anti-business and anti-government agitation and become efforts to help the factory hold onto its contract and to keep the jobs in the community.

These are hopeful moves. Progress seems possible, and that is the main point. There is no room for Pollyannas, though. Each of the ideas mentioned above comes with pitfalls. Some will argue against them. Even at their best, careful analysis, drafting, and judgment will be required to manage the legal risks. But, again, the possibility of progress is the point. When matters seem hopeless, doing nothing is safe and convenient. Rafts of PR firms can handle scandal. Little or no legal liability faces companies with good lawyers. Legal and moral windowdressing can be mounted as easily as holiday displays. But contract allows a way forward, and companies will do right to use their supply contracts as a tool for change.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Welder, Indian Steel Factory’. Photo by Jay Hariani, CC by SA 2.0, via Flickr.

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