Oxford University Press's Blog, page 855
January 20, 2014
“Law Matters” for money market funds
In the name of financial stability, institutional and product regulations since the 2008 financial crisis have forced banks and non-bank banks (the so-called “shadow banks”) to create insatiable compliance regimes. But the juggernaut does not stop here. These regulations typically require new “skin in the game” and consolidated regulatory reporting of financial products. In this midst of this vast mixture of regulations, money market funds (MMFs) have been demonized by academics and ideologues stating categorically that since they are “shadow banks,” they must be instruments of contagion posing systemic risks to the financial systems in both the United States and the European Union. But where is the evidence for this claim? And more importantly, on what basis are these claims made? In fact, very little to no research has been done that would justify confirmation or rejection of these claims. Unlike the doctrinaire and ideological motivated opinions of those who believe all financial products and especially MMFs should be regulated at the institutional level with capital requirements, it is important to see the facts.
The major threat, if any at all, to money market funds (MMFs) is not the lack of regulations, but rather the introduction of incoherent regulation, which would treat MMFs as bank-like culprits rather than as investment funds. Many authors who hold the view that MMFs should be treated as banks claim that the social insurance which MMFs appeared to have taken for free post-hoc the credit crisis under the Treasury Guarantee program, also claim that MMFs were the cause as well as the transmitter of contagion. We would beg to differ with this view, since a carrier of risk contagion presupposes that the carrier is somehow infected with the failure itself. This was simply not the case.
From the vestiges of law and regulatory history, we can trace the emergence of money market funds was an outcome of restrictive banking regulation both in the US and Europe. The Reserve Fund was the first US MMF having been established in New York in September 1972. At that time US banking laws had limited the amount US banks could pay on deposits to 4½%. Institutional investors could purchase US treasury bills or bank certificates of deposit in large denominations, but paid market rates of interest. Retail investors, however, having invested cash, suffered low-paying deposit accounts. The original raison d’etre of MMFs was to help small investors receive a higher rate by pooling their small investments and purchasing money market securities in the wholesale market.
In Europe, France led the development of MMFs in the early 1980s. As in the US case, French regulation capped interest rates that banks could pay their clients on term deposits. To contain the resulting client exodus, many banks set up in-house MMFs. These funds circumvented the interest rate cap and offered competitive yields. Within a decade, French MMFs accounted for 90% of the annual inflow into all of the country’s investment funds.
Targeted regulation of money market funds was pioneered by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which codified the then existing MMF portfolio management practices in Rule 2a-7 under the Investment Company Act of 1940s in the early 1980s. Governed by Rule 2a-7, US MMFs developed considerable product standardisation. This was in stark contrast to European MMFs that offered varying risk profiles depending on the risk tolerance of local investors and their investment preferences.
Lawmakers had not considered pan-European regulation of MMF until after the financial crisis. In 2009, as a part of a broader reform of financial regulation, the de Larosière’s Group attempted “a much stronger coordinated supervision for all financial actors in the European Union,” which included establishing a common definition for all European MMFs. Guidelines on a common definition of European MMFs were implemented in the summer of 2011 and are currently administered by the European Securities and Markets Authority. These pan-European guidelines draw substantially on the risk-limiting parameters set out by Rule 2a-7 for US MMFs, while leaving many aspects of disclosure and corporate governance for consideration by national regulators.
Despite the existing regulation, the strengths and weaknesses of money market funds continue to be debated on both sides of the Atlantic. We urge an objective examination of the facts: MMFs are important because they are relied upon for daily liquidity and funding needs by many economic agents. Some authors have argued that the uncontrolled risks of MMF activities contributed to the 2008 crisis and there has to be more regulations to address these risks. This poses a public policy dilemma since MMFs operate by their very nature without social insurance and without access to a “lender of last resort.” There is a lively debate as to how this policy dilemma should be resolved.
Viktoria Baklanova is Chief Credit Officer and Acacia Capital, New York. Joseph Tanega is Reader in International Financial Law, University of Westminster, London, Adjunct Professor of Law and Finance, Grenoble Ecole de Management, Professor of Regulation and Supervision of Retail Banking, Alma Graduate School, University of Bologna, and Professor of Law, King Abdulaziz University. They are the authors of Money Market Funds in the EU and the US.
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Image credit: The US Treasury. By Almonroth (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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January 19, 2014
How secure are you?
The Internet has come a long way since the first “electronic mail” was sent back in 1971, but with its rapid advancement come challenges to cybersecurity and the increasing threat of cyberterrorism, both on an individual level and a global scale. In their new book, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, experts P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman warn us that we may not be as secure online as we think we are.
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P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman are the authors of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. P.W. Singer is the Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution. Allan Friedman is a Visiting Scholar at the Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at George Washington University
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Image credit: “Fractal binary one null crash administrator” by geralt. Public domain via Pixabay.
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January 18, 2014
Protecting yourself from the threat of cyberwarfare
With over 30,000 media reports and academic studies on the dangers of cyberterrorism, surely the threat today could not be greater? But as P.W. Singer, author of the bestselling Wired for War and co-author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, points out — not a single person has died in a cyberterror attack. We sat down with Singer to learn how people can protect themselves online by understanding both the people behind these attacks and the people protecting us from them.
The threat of cyberterrorism to the average person
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How to Protect Yourself Online
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P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman are the authors of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. P.W. Singer is Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution. Allan Friedman is a Visiting Scholar at the Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at George Washington University.
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January 17, 2014
Teaching oral history in the digital age
Happy 2014, everyone! To kick off the new year, we have a podcast with managing editor Troy Reeves and 40.2 contributor Ken Woodard. Woodard is the author of “The Digital Revolution and Pre-Collegiate Oral History: Meditations on the Challenge of Teaching Oral History in the Digital Age.” In this podcast, Woodard talks about confronting the digital native stereotype, building the oral history program at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, and the importance of collaboration. Enjoy!
Recipient of the 2005 Martha Ross Teaching Award, Ken Woodard is chair of the Upper School History Department at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Maryland.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
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Image credit: Photo of Ken Woodard by Kate Morin of Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. Used with permission.
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How meaningful are public attitudes towards stem cell research?
When scientists in Scotland announced the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep in 1997, it triggered a frenzy of speculation in the global media about the possibility of human cloning, and elevated ethical questions to the fore of public discussions about biotechnology. This debate had far-reaching consequences, with citizens’ perceived moral objections to human cloning contributing to the imposition of restrictive policies on stem cell research that involves the cloning of embryos. In Canada, for example, work on “therapeutic cloning” in regenerative medicine (i.e., the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT) was classified as a criminal offense in 2004 when the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (ARHA) came into force. This legislative action followed a debate in which opponents of the technique, which involves the harvest of stem cells from embryos cloned using a prospective patient’s nuclear DNA, pointed to an ostensible “social consensus” on the moral undesirability of any type of human cloning as an argument to ban this type of research despite its potential medical benefits.
ARHA can be thought of as a prime example of what the science policy literature refers to as “upstream” engagement — that is, a policy-making model in which public preferences are taken into account by scientists and regulators early on in the development of a new technology. This concept emerged partly as a response to the social and political controversies triggered by the Dolly announcement, the derivation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), and the commercialization of genetically modified crops — controversies that continue to this day. Advocates have argued that early public engagement could increase the impact of citizens’ preferences on the governance of future technologies (thereby increasing the democratic legitimacy of novel regulatory frameworks) and, indeed, prevent social controversies surrounding emerging technologies in the future.
Image credit: Human embryonic stem cells. (A) shows hESCs. (B) shows neurons derived from hESCs. Photos by Nissim Benvenisty (Public Library of Science). CC-BY-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
The value of upstream engagement has, however, been questioned. As Joyce Tait argues, our limited ability to predict the way in which new technologies will develop means that public preferences for the regulation of emerging technologies are likely to evolve over time along with our technical capabilities. ARHA, for example, was enacted prior to the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), yet may inadvertently impact the legality of iPSC research in Canada (despite the wide acceptance of iPSCs as an “ethical” alternative to hESCs by opponents of embryo research). Would Canadians have supported ARHA in 2004 even if they’d know it might prohibit iPSC research? If not, what does this say about the value of upstream engagement?
As it happens, the existence of a social consensus against human cloning in Canada – one of the principal arguments used by ARHA supporters – was itself not supported by contemporaneous public opinion evidence. Instead, opponents of therapeutic cloning who used this argument appear to have been motivated primarily by the more general concerns about inflicting harm on the embryo (whether cloned or not) that underpin moral opposition to all forms of embryonic stem cell research. Yet how many of even those who opposed SCNT in 2004 due to their moral opposition to embryo research would still oppose it knowing what we do today about the potential of stem cell research or, say, if a stem cell therapy derived from this technique was able to cure Parkinson’s?
Not surprisingly, available evidence suggests that many would change their mind if the medical benefits of the technique were demonstrated. Public opinion polling has shown that individuals who oppose hESC research on moral grounds often still view it as necessary, and while Americans tend to oppose the use of hESCs to treat less serious conditions like allergies, they view their use in the treatment of serious conditions like heart attack and cancer overwhelmingly positively. In a recent article, I found further evidence for this dynamic in the context of Proposition 71 — the 2004 ballot initiative that created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Using individual-level data from pre-election opinion polls and county-level demographic data, I explored the voting intentions of born-again Protestants, who have been identified by other work as the key US constituency opposed to hESC research (and, therefore, Proposition 71) on moral grounds. What I found is that while the typical born-again Protestant in California was more likely to indicate an intention to vote against the initiative than voters espousing other religious beliefs, this cleavage disappeared in counties with greater proportions of elderly residents and of people suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease. My interpretation of this result is that many voters who were predisposed to oppose Proposition 71 on moral grounds were nevertheless persuaded to support the initiative when the potential benefits of future stem cell therapies — namely, the reduction in the suffering of those afflicted by chronic diseases — was made salient to them.
This finding is particularly important in the context of the rapid demographic aging of the global population. To the extent that the benefits of regenerative medicine are likely to accrue primarily to older individuals suffering from age-related chronic diseases, the aging of the population provides a compelling reason to expect that the benefits of stem cell research and therapies will be much more salient to publics in 20 years than they are today. Assuming the dynamic I observed in California is replicated, this gives us reason to believe that public preferences for the regulation of even ethically controversial areas of stem cell research and regenerative medicine will become more permissive over time – precisely the type of over-time evolution in public attitudes that critics of upstream engagement have pointed to as its underlying flaw. Given that people’s current preferences are likely not representative of those same individuals’ future preferences, then, the wisdom and, indeed, the democratic legitimacy of enshrining current ethical concerns about stem cell research into difficult-to-change laws like Canada’s ARHA is questionable.
Nick Dragojlovic is a science communication and health policy researcher interested in how public engagement with science can boost innovation in the biomedical domain. He is the author of “Voting for stem cells: How local conditions tempered moral opposition to Proposition 71” (available to read for free for a limited time) in Science and Public Policy.
Science and Public Policy is a leading international journal on public policies for science, technology and innovation. It covers all types of science and technology in both developed and developing countries.
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Fractal shapes and the natural world
By Kenneth Falconer
Fractal shapes, as visualizations of mathematical equations, are astounding to look at. But fractals look even more amazing in their natural element—and that happens to be in more places than you might think.
Snowflake
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They’re also present in snowflakes, a gentler product of the sky.
Romanesco broccoli
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Sometimes fractals are edible—such as this common example, Romanesco broccoli.
Pine cone
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The fractal doesn’t fall far from the tree. Pinecone seeds display fractal formations as well.
Peacock
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Fractals appear in walking creatures as well. They are at their most vivid in the tail of the male peacock.
Lightning
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Fractals are in the sky as well, from the clouds to the lightning that strikes out from them.
Trees
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Fractal precipitation then gives way to fractal foliage, such as these trees.
Neurons
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And of course, fractals exist within us—specifically, in our neurons (pictured) and genes.
Fractals in mountains
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Mountain ranges and rivers exhibit branching fractal shapes. The Andes are a perfect example.
Kenneth Falconer is a mathematician who specializes in Fractal Geometry and related topics. He is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews and a member of the Analysis Research Group of the School of Mathematics and Statistics. Kenneth’s main research interests are in fractal and multifractal geometry, geometric measure theory and related areas. He has published over 100 papers in mathematical journals. He is author of Fractals: A Very Short Introduction.
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Image credits:
Snowflake: Creative commons via Gui Seiz Flickr
Romanesco broccoli: Feliciano Guimaraes. Creative commons via Feliciano Guimaraes Flickr
Pine cone: Photo by Don Miller. Creative commons via Don Miller Flickr
Peacock: Photo by Bill Dolak. Creative commons via Bill Dolak Flickr
Lightning: Photo by John Fowler. Creative Commons License via snowpeak Flickr
Trees: Photo by Petteri Sulonen. Creative commons via PrimeJunta Flickr
Neurons: Photo by Jason Snyder. Creative commons via Functional Neurogenesis Flickr
Fractals in mountains: Creative commons via NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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January 16, 2014
The real Llewyn Davis
In the late 1950s, Dave Van Ronk was walking through Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village on a Sunday afternoon. This Trotskyist-leaning jazz enthusiast from Queens thought the crowds huddled around guitars and banjos “irredeemably square.”
“We thought of it as ‘hillbilly shit,’ a bunch of guys who didn’t even know how to play their instruments and just got by with ‘cowboy chords.’ The little I heard while passing through the Square on Sundays confirmed my new-found snobbishness. It was essentially summer camp music, songs those kids learned at progressive camps that I think of generically as Camp Gulag on the Hudson.
“The sight and sound of all those happily howling petit-bourgeois Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster….So for a couple of years I avoided the place like a plague, for fear of contamination. If I had to pass anywhere in the vicinity, I would walk through as quickly as possible, obviating any possibility that I might get sucked in by something like ‘Blue Tail Fly’ and shortly find myself dancing the Hora around the fountain and singing ‘Hey, Lolly, Lolly, Lo.’”
—Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street
Photo by Joe Mabel. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
By the time Inside Llewyn Davis begins in 1961, the film’s putative hero, Dave Van Ronk, was “King of the Street in Greenwich Village. He ruled supreme,” according to Bob Dylan. The film’s protagonist, on the other hand, hopes to break in, one of the many ways the film removes historical reality. Now moving from its Academy-qualifying run to theaters nationwide, the movie illustrates the fascinating question of what happens in historical fiction, when you separate the surroundings from the characters, the stage from the actors.
Inside Llewyn Davis challenges historians. Though musically adept, if not authentic, the film portrays the circumstances of the second folk music revival in the United States, that of the 1960s. Yet its lead character, aside from his hirsute looks, has very little in common with Dave Van Ronk, whose life the film closely follows.
There’s a joke on one of David Bromberg’s albums: the story of how he propositioned the right woman at the right time in the wrong place, after which her husband, the bartender…. With Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers have the right man in the right place, but in entirely in the wrong mood. Robert Cantwell’s analysis of the 60s revival, When We Were Good, is a lot closer.
The film tells the story of a young guitarist who sings folk tunes (drawn almost entirely from Van Ronk’s repertoire) who struggles to play his music, sleeping on couches wherever he can. But the number of living rooms open to him shrinks by the day, because of his boorishness. He continues to sing his soft, intense songs, as his world unravels about him.
Reviewers have been generally indulgent, calling it “a well-crafted look at the American folk music scene of the early 1960’s of sometimes hilarious dry comedy” (United Press). “If you love the Coens or follow folk music or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord” (The New Yorker). Slate called it “a dark Valentine to both its hero and his milieu.”
As one of those Washington Square kids gawking at the real Dave Van Ronk, one leg lifted to support his oversized guitar (a Gibson J-45, as opposed to the film’s diminutive instrument), I watched Dave hypnotize audiences with his soft, jazzy changes in “Cocaine” or a Reverend Gary Davis song.
Van Ronk was a big man with a big guitar and a big voice. Llewyn Davis is small, with small ambitions, a small guitar, and a small repertoire. Yes, he shipped out with the merchant marine, as Van Ronk did; yes, he sings Van Ronk’s songs in Dave’s precise arrangements. Yes he hangs out at Reggio’s and the Gaslight; and yes, the character and Von Ronk show a temper and a dry wit. Somehow the filmmakers have captured Van Ronk’s bad habits and repertoire, without his trademark growl, stature, or socialist politics.
Otherwise, the work includes actual personalities: Moe Asch at Folkways Records and his assistant, Marian Distler (an apparently accurate cameo, taken—as many as the details of the film are—from Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street). Folk groups like Jim and Jean, Albert Grossman, Jean Richie, Gordon Lightfoot, the Chieftains, Peter, Paul and Mary, and even the newly arrived Bob Dylan are either named or ruthlessly parodied. The interior of the Gaslight Café and Chicago’s Gate of Horn are spot-on. The camera is positioned as if the viewer sits in the coffee house, sipping then-exotic cappuccino. This setting becomes the origin of countless stereotypes of the urban folk singer—bearded, with scruffy, restless hair, a lone figure on an odyssey with a guitar or friendless at the bus-stop. This was where Beat met Hip in the early Sixties.
But actually, it was the Van Ronks, Dave and his wife Terri, who were the hospitable ones, putting up local couch-surfers such as Bob Dylan. And Van Ronk was actually a Left intellectual; he’s is known as co-author of the anti-Communist Bosses Songbook: Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent.
At the end, Llewyn Davis comes to the same conclusion Van Ronk does in his memoir: “After a few days of aimlessly banging around the Village, spending money like a drunken sailor (apt metaphor that) I decided I had no place here anymore, that there was a big world waiting for me, and that as soon as my money ran low I would ship out again. After all, what kind of future could I expect from music? I had been hacking away at it for three years and all I had to show for my trouble was a taste for Irish Whisky and a borderline case of malnutrition.”
David King Dunaway is the author and editor of eight volumes of history including Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals and How Can I Keep From Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger. His numerous honors include the 2010 Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi award from the Oral History Association. He serves as professor of English at the University of New Mexico and distinguished professor of broadcasting at San Francisco State University.
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What (if anything) is wrong with infant circumcision?
Public controversies over non-therapeutic infant circumcision have become frequent occurrences in our time. Recently, an Israeli religious court fined a mother of a one-year-old for refusing to circumcise her son. We all remember last year’s circumcision controversy in Germany. A public outcry of Jewish and Muslim representatives followed after a local court in the city of Cologne banned the procedure under the pretext of violation of children’s human rights. Several months later, the German parliament revoked the decision of the local court and adopted a new law that provided for the discretionary right of parents to have their infants circumcised for non-therapeutic reasons.
Reasons for Circumcision
Lewis Sayre. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Male circumcision is one of the oldest medical procedures known to mankind. Historical evidence suggests that it is more than 6,000 years old. Early Sumerians and Semites in the Arab Peninsula practiced it as a form of initiation into adulthood, while Australian Aboriginals performed it as a test of bravery. Modern humans started practicing it in the early 1870s, when American orthopedic surgeon Lewis Sayre suggested circumcision as a prophylaxis for a number of diseases, including paralysis, syphilis, epilepsy, and similar. By the end of the century, circumcision became universally accepted in the United States and Western Europe and recommended as a routine medical procedure.
However, by the late 20th century, most medical experts refuted Sayre’s theories and argued that there is no evidence of the procedure’s medical benefits. Australian, Canadian, and some European national medical associations went so far as to recommend against routine non-therapeutic circumcision. The American Association of Pediatrics remained neutral, claiming that since there is no decisive indication about circumcision’s medical benefit or harm, it is up to parents to decide if they want their infant boys circumcised.
The lack of equivocal scientific data about health benefits or harms of circumcision has left the center stage of defending the practice to reasons external to medicine, most notably to culture. If no medical reasons for performing (or refraining from) circumcising boys are decisive, then social and cultural reasons can provide the rationale. This was the rallying cry of those who opposed the Cologne court decision.
Some philosophers and bioethicists have taken on this claim to argue that parents are justified to have their sons undergo circumcision for social and cultural benefits. In a famous article on the topic, Michael and David Benatar argue that circumcision would be morally impermissible only if we could prove that there are no clear non-medical benefits to the child. But, as the reader can infer from their analysis, circumcision may benefit boys in a number of ways, from integration into their community to conferring metaphysical meaning to providing access to communal wealth. More recently, Joseph Mazor argued that circumcision can serve a number of the child’s future (social and cultural) interests, and that it doesn’t necessarily violate any of his rights because he is not sufficiently autonomous to exercise such a right.
But, are the arguments about potential social and cultural benefits of circumcision sufficient to justify the procedure? I will argue that they are not. By analyzing what may be the putative cultural benefits, I will show the reasons why circumcising boys is morally wrong. So, what may be cultural reasons for circumcision?
Religion
Among the most prevalent cultural arguments offered in support of infant circumcision are metaphysical and religious claims. In Judaism, circumcision is brit milah, a covenant between man and God. The flesh of foreskin testifies a bond between humanity and its creator, which is never to be broken. In Genesis (17:10-14) God ordered Abraham to be circumcised and commanded his followers to do the same. By circumcising their children, Jews perpetuate this bond and keep the covenant alive to this day.
Is this claim sufficient for moral justification of infant circumcision? No, because it builds on several problematic presumptions. First, it presumes the existence of a divine entity that commands the performance of circumcision. While the question about the existence of such an entity is a matter of personal persuasion, the mere presumption can hardly warrant authorizing invasive intervention into the body of another human being, even in cases of parents and their children. Without definite proof that such an intervention would bring metaphysical benefits to the child, circumcision cannot be justified.
However, one may claim that circumcision represents an expression of the deepest concern and love for the child by parents who sincerely believe that without the procedure, their child will suffer eternal damnation. This claim is plausible, and it may be true for many families. But, in any similar case, in which an objectively unwarranted parental belief about some benefit would authorize an invasive intervention into the child’s body, our basic intuitions militate in the opposite direction. Take the hypothetical case of parents who would wish to surgically engineer an irreversible removal of hair from their newborn child, so to secure his or her eternal salvation in the eyes of God. One may have no doubts that such parents or systems of belief might exist, but it is difficult to accept that such beliefs can justify the procedure. The reason feeding this intuition is the notion that infant bodies should not be instrumental to satisfaction of unwarranted (metaphysical or other) beliefs of their parents. The intuition would hold even if the putative salvation-conferring procedure were not scientifically proven to be decisively beneficial or harmful, such as circumcision.
In addition, the claim about metaphysical salvation presumes that the child will necessarily share his parents’ metaphysical beliefs once he is grown. It is plausible to assume that most children end up having the same religious beliefs as their parents, but this is not always or necessarily so. Individuals often change their beliefs, shed the religious assumptions inherited from parents, or adopt new ones. Undergoing an irreversible bodily modification when non-autonomous to provide consent can significantly affect the subsequent development of the individual. It can diminish the sense of selfhood by limiting the degree of self-determination and control over one’s life.
Community Integration
Another religious type of argument might claim that circumcision represents an initiation of the infant into the community of faithful. This would be the case for both Jews and Muslims. Muslims in particular believe that circumcision is obligatory because the Prophet Muhammad advised so – it is sunnah, the perpetuation of the Prophet’s tradition. Through circumcision, so the argument could go, male children become fully-fledged members of the community and receive all benefits that accompany that membership.
While this argument may certainly reflect parental concern for a child’s social well-being and integration, it is hardly justified because it also builds on an unwarranted assumption and implies a mistaken conception of the relation between individuals and communities. Namely, presuming that the child will want to be a member of the given community once he reaches adulthood is unwarranted. True, most men circumcised for cultural reasons stay within the communal bounds of their birth, but many don’t. Valuation of communal membership must be accompanied by the exit option that allows members to opt out freely at any time without grave consequences. When membership is involuntarily imposed and marked by an irreversible bodily modification, the exit avenues are significantly narrowed. The fact that few men choose to opt out later in life may actually reflect the fact that they have been physically marked as members, rather than the assumption that they do not wish to opt out because they value their community.
However, one may also suggest that opting out from Muslim and Jewish communities has nothing necessarily to do with circumcision: men can freely exit these communities and circumcision does not prevent them from doing so. Furthermore, one may claim that circumcision is a fairly inconspicuous modification of the body, so no necessary stigma is attached to communal disintegration of the individual. True, circumcised men may be free to exit one community and integrate into another without visible marks, but this argument is valid only against an externalist assumption about identity. One’s identity is not necessarily affirmed or altered through a visible (external) change. Inner self-understanding and perception play an important role as well. A bodily modification such as circumcision can significantly diminish the ability of a person to perceive himself as a member of the non-circumcising community.
The claim about communal integration also sustains an implausible conception of the relation between the individual and the community. Namely, the argument about benefits implies that circumcision is a small sacrifice (both in a literal and a symbolic sense) of the infant individual for the large cultural (and sometimes even material) benefit that comes with communal membership. It is assumed that the practice is a form of a trade between individuals and their communities, where the community reciprocates the individual sacrifice with access to communal wealth. In other words, circumcision is a form of investment that will yield cultural capital to the infant once he reaches adulthood.
As far as the exchange of symbolic and real sacrifices for the benefit of cultural capital goes, this assumption is right. Individuals do trade their personal energy, time, aesthetic preferences, and even bodily parts for some forms of social and cultural capital. But, the assumption is plausible only if we accept that the trade between individuals and the communities reciprocating with cultural capital takes place voluntarily. The argument about trade, thus, makes sense only against the background of a free exchange of goods and benefits. If not free, the exchange of goods is not a trade but an extortion. Therefore, performing circumcision on a non-autonomous infant as a form of his sacrifice for future gain in cultural capital is contrary to the meaning and the spirit of trade relations between individuals and groups.
Secular Reasons
Cultural claims in support of infant circumcision also come in non-religious forms. Namely, physical similarity with parents, bodily aesthetics, and genital hygiene are often invoked as secular forms of the argument about non-medical benefits of infant circumcision. All three of them are problematic for the same reason: they assume the parents’ rather than the child’s standards of physical semblance, beauty, and responsibility for cleanliness and thus position the child as a mere means for his parents’ ends. Children should not bear the burden of their parents’ views about what constitutes a sufficient physical resemblance between family members and physical aesthetic, nor should they bear the burden of the parents’ responsibility for their hygiene. The cultural belief about hygiene is especially problematic, given its striking discrepancy with moral intuitions about the status of other parts of the human body that are even more demanding in terms of cleanliness. The belief that a child’s body parts can be surgically removed because they demand additional hygienic attention is unwarranted and unjustified.
Conclusion
Clearly, claims about putative social and cultural benefits of circumcision are insufficient for moral justification of the procedure. We should not circumcise our sons just because people in our culture have been doing so for the past two or four thousand years or because we entertain a particular view about bodily beauty. We lack moral grounding for such practice and violate the rights of our children to have a future in which they will be the ones deciding to undergo such a procedure. We have no right to remove parts of their body to justify and strengthen our beliefs or secure the continuity of our ethnic group. Similarly, we have no rights to shape their bodies according to our aesthetic standards or demands for hygiene without sufficient medical reason. If they decide to undergo circumcision for whatever reason they see fit once they reach adulthood, so be it. But, until they do, we need to protect their right to a future where they will be the sole deciders about what happens to their bodies.
Eldar Sarajlic is a final year PhD Candidate at the Central European University in Budapest. He was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York in 2012 and 2013. He writes about personal autonomy, neutrality and perfectionism in contemporary liberal thought. He worked for universities in Edinburgh (School of Law) and Oxford (European Studies Centre) on two research projects. He has published peer review articles in Citizenship Studies and Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, as well as book chapters in volumes by Routledge and Penn Press. This article is based on research conducted for the European Studies Centre at Oxford University and the full paper is currently under peer review for the Hastings Center Report.
If you are interested in this subject, check out Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America by Leonard B. Glick. He offers a history of Jewish and Christian beliefs about circumcision from its ancient origins to the current controversy. He shows that Jewish American physicians are especially vocal and influential champions of the practice which, he notes, serves to erase the visible difference between Jewish and gentile males.
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The post What (if anything) is wrong with infant circumcision? appeared first on OUPblog.
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Cybersecurity and cyberwar playlist
After writing Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, P.W. Singer compiled a playlist filled with songs to help readers explore the emerging security challenges that continue to arise in the new digital age. His final playlist features a wide range of artists and genres, from the Rolling Stones to Daft Punk to “Weird Al” Yankovic, and each song contains specific lyrics that relate to the realm of cybersecurity and cyberwar. Can you guess which chapters relate to each song?
"War" by Edwin Starr
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“War, h’uh/ What is it good for?/ Absolutely nothin’”
"We Are Young" by fun.
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“Between the drinks and subtle things/ And the holes in my apologies/ You know I’m trying hard to take it back”
"SHAKEDOWN" BY BOB SEGER
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"You can shake me for a while/ Live it up in style/ No matter what you do/ I’m comin’ after you"
"Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons
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“I’m waking up, I feel it in my bones/ Enough to make my systems blow/ Welcome to the new age, to the new age”
"How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths
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“When you say it’s gonna happen 'now'/ Well, when exactly do you mean?”
"The Sharing Song" by Jack Johnson
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"It’s always more fun/ To share with everyone"
"NO MORE" BY JUNOON
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"I’m sick of spying eyes/ Wearing suits and secret ties"
"Living in the Past" by Jethro Tull
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“Now there’s revolution, but they don’t know/ What they’re fighting/ Let us close out eyes/ Outside their lives go on much faster”
"Cooler Online" by Brad Paisley
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"There's a whole 'nother me/ That you need to see"
"How’s It Going to Be (When You Don’t Know Me)" by Third Eye Blind
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“I wonder how it’s going to be/ When you don’t know me/ How’s it going to be/ When you’re sure I’m not there”
"Never Going to Give You Up" by Rick Astley
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“Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you”
"It’s All About The Pentiums" by Weird Al
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“What y’all wanna do?/ Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers/ Wastin’ time with all the chatroom yakkers?”
"The Game has Changed" by Pharrell/Daft Punk
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“In and out of dimensions, I walk through walls/ Just sayin’ you can’t put me in a box, tha's all”
"Somebody’s Watching Me" by Rockwell
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“I always feel like/ Somebody’s watching me/ And I have no privacy”
"Madness" by Muse
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“I tried so hard to let you go/ But some kind of madness is swallowing me whole”
"Demons" by Imagine Dragons
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“I wanna hide the truth/ I wanna shelter you/ But with the beast inside/ There’s nowhere we can hide”
"Wake Me Up" by Avicii
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“I can’t tell where the journey will end/ But I know where to start”
"Down in the Park" by Foo Fighters
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“Down in the park where the match men meet/ The machine and play kill by numbers”
"Paint It Black" by Rolling Stones
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“I could not foresee this thing happening to you”
"Obsession" by Animotion
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“I will collect you and capture you”
"All I Want" by Kodaline
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“All I want is/ And all I need is/ To find somebody”
"Cyberpunk" by Billy Idol
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“All information should be free. It is not. Information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit…”
"Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" by Arcade Fire
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“Cause nothin’s hid, from us kids/ You ain’t foolin’ nobody with the lights out”
P.W. Singer is the Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution. He is the co-author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.
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Printing and the heat death of the universe
In 1901 it was calculated that Oxford University Press took in more than twice the tonnage of material that it sent out, much of the difference being accounted for by coal and machinery. The efficiency of coal was not a new concern in the printing industry. In 1880, Edward Pickard Hall, then responsible for printing Bibles at the Press, had compiled a list of the ‘Evaporative power of Different Coals’ in a notebook and had concluded that ‘Nixon’s Steam Navigation’ at 13.45 was distinctly more efficient than ‘Wyekam’ coal at 11.42. On the following page the wear and tear on printing machines — ‘including Engine, Shafting, &c.’ — had been calculated. The ‘Large Scotch Platens’ cost 14s a week, while the Rich platens cost 10s a week. Large and small cylinder machines were much cheaper at 4s and 2s a week respectively.
Any industry dependent on engines driven by coal could not avoid the consequences of processes described by that branch of physics which emerged in the nineteenth century and dealt with heat and work: thermodynamics. And what thermodynamics taught was that no process involving the use of an engine (or any form of exchange of energy) was ever one hundred per cent efficient: energy was lost or, rather, became unavailable to do useful work. Using a hydraulic image beloved of physicists at the time, energy flowed down a slope and ended up a lake which was too low to allow further flow. The ineluctable expansion of this lake was a measure of the growing entropy in the universe. As the Oxford author Balfour Stewart observed, commenting on Thomson’s work:
He has shewn that when mechanical energy is transmuted into heat by friction or otherwise there is always a degradation in the form of the energy; and inasmuch as this heat cannot be entirely converted back again into work from its diffusive nature, the final result of continually converting mechanical motion into heat will be that the amount of mechanical motion obtainable from the system will be always growing less, until ultimately all the energy has taken the unavailable form of equally diffused heat.
This was the ‘heat death’ of the Universe which H.G. Wells was to describe in The Time Machine (1895). The very OUP machines that were inefficiently using up energy were sometimes employed to print books that made the whole process vividly clear. There was Robert Edward Baynes’s Lessons on Thermodynamics published in the Clarendon Press Series in 1878, and Practical Work in Heat for Use in Schools and Colleges by Walter George Woollcombe published in the CPS in 1893. Most impressive of all was one of the first titles that emerged in the Clarendon Press Series: An Elementary Treatise on Heat by Balfour Stewart ‘Superintendent of the Kew Observatory and at Examiner at the Universities of Edinburgh and London’, first published in 1866. This went through no fewer than six editions — each adding further pages to the text — in the following 22 years: the second in 1871, the third in 1876, the fourth in 1881, and the fifth in 1888. A sixth edition, revised by R. E. Baynes, emerged in 1895.
The subject was even explored in the OUP’s night school, where the Revd. Spencer offered a lecture on ‘the properties, power etc of steam’ which was illustrated ‘by a small engine, the air-gun, & by diagrams’. Despite the audio-visual aids, Spencer’s lecture was clearly hard going: ‘The many long words & hard names, tho’ admirably explained by the lively lecturer, will, it is feared, not make a very lasting impression on the obtuse minds of some of his hearers’.
Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is general editor of The History of Oxford University Press, and editor of its Volume II 1780-1896.
With access to extensive archives, The History of Oxford University Press is the first complete scholarly history of the Press, detailing its organization, publications, trade, and international development. Read previous blog posts about the history of Oxford University Press.
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