Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 34

Truce in our Time

The Olympic Games, it seems to me, illustrate the difficulties of seeing very large social events with any kind of precision, whether it is from up close or from of 5,521 miles away by television—that being the distance, using great circle navigation, between Detroit and Sochi in Russia. At the same time, what with modern media coverage, one can also get a more or less trustworthy general feeling about these games. In our case we have access, this year, to both U.S. and Canadian coverage, and we made good use of both. Our mutual conclusion this year was that the Sochi winter games came very close realizing the ideals of the Olympics. The games were peaceful; the contentious aspects, so jarring in many past games we’ve actually watched closely, were almost absent this time around.
A feature of the Ancient Olympics was the Olympic Truce. The Modern Olympics feature the same truce, officially put in place by the United Nations in 1993. The Ancient Olympics were, of course, a miniature. The games were international, but the regions interacting were all Greek. The games did not move about in those days. They were all held in the region called Ellis, in Arcadia, the southern portion of Greece, Ellis itself its north-western edge. The games were held at the city of Olympia within that region, hence the name of the games. The truce made sense, given the location of Olympia. Athletes had to travel very long distances to get there. The distance between Olympia and Athens, to take a horizontal route separating two edges of Greece, is 163 miles—hence speaking of the Ancient Olympiad as a miniature of the modern makes sense.  Localizing that distance of 163 miles? Well, the distance from Detroit to Chicago is 282 miles; see also the concluding note.
This comparison—between the little and the Big—struck us yesterday as the closing ceremonies ended. A good thing that we have a global Olympics now. Those interlocking Olympic rings? Brigitte thought they stood for continents; I had no idea, but she went and looked it up; and she had been right all along. Each ring stands for one of five regions of the world. Until 1951, the official handbook identified blue as Europe, yellow as Asia, black as Africa, green as Australia and Oceania, and red as the Americas. But since the originator of this symbol, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator and co-founder of the Modern Olympics, made no such association (he chose the colors from uniforms of different countries competing in his time, 1912), the IOC removed any linkage of color to actual regions.
The meaning of “truce,” when unwrapped a little, is rather odd. The very possibility speaks to human power to transcend one level of experience and to establish, if only temporarily, another and superior level above it: to rise above violent hostilities to the level of perhaps grim but actual peace. It would at least seem logical to think that once truce has been achieved, just a small additional effort would also yield lasting harmony. If it can hold for three months—which was the duration of the Olympic Truce in ancient times—it could last four, five, six, and more, until we’ve lost all count.
Truce is a good first step. We’ve gotten that far. As far as world peace is concerned, the Bronze still seems out of reach. But who knows what the future will hold.
The root of that word, in English, incidentally, is centered on the proto-Germanic for “faith,” still almost literally present in the current German word Treue. It takes faith on both sides to make a treaty. Treaties now, faith tomorrow. God speed the day.
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On horses, ships, and volors. In ancient Greece the means of transportation were by foot, on horse, or by ship—the really large ones largely rowed. To achieve global utopia, we need volors. That word comes from a pair of novels by Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (1908) and The Dawn of All (1911). The first is a dis-, the other a utopia. First flight took place on earth on December 17, 1903, courtesy of Orville and Wilbur Wright. In Benson’s projections, the art had been perfected to resemble, and in many ways surpass, the age of the jet in which we make our home. As for The Dawn of All, it is a world where truce has turned to peace—through faith.

The map is from Wikipedia ( link ).

Fatum est Datum

There are three forces which operate in the history of the world—God, fate, and human freedom. That accounts for the complexity of human history.     [Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End]
Berdyaev does not define what he means by fate in a particular way—beyond meaning what I suppose we all think fate might mean. Pondering this statement, and the meaning of fate—and also that of complexity—made me think that fate, in this context, is that which resists our will, which is matter itself, the given. The phrase used as my title came spontaneously with the thought. Fate is the given you can’t do much about.
Or not very much—and even that only with lots of effort. Behind that title, furthermore, is the fact that I’ve just spent two hours removing a vast accumulation of built-up ice which, melting, caused a generous flow of water in our basement as is bypassed poor caulking between brick and concrete and then followed the necessary, fateful force of gravity down to our red-painted basement floor.

The Secularization of Enthusiasm

While on the subject of words, I might as well record my latest discovery. As usually in English, such come about because English is a kind of Mississippi of a language, carrying innumerable words that aren’t naked, so to say, thus they don’t reveal their etymology; and they do not because they come from Greek, Latin, or yet other languages. Enthusiasm is one of those. We know what it means—and that’s it. If I look at its German equivalent, I get Begeisterung; here the etymology is clear: Geist is “spirit”; the prefix be suggest “possession,” and the ending suggests “state of.” Thus “state of being possessed by spirit.” The Hungarian is lelkesedés; here lélek is “spirit” and the suffix signals “state of being in.”
Well, per Online Etymology Dictionary, enthusiasm derives from the Greek. It deepest root is entheos, literally “in God”; in the Greek sense God would not be capitalized, thus “possessed by a god, divinely inspired” is what they meant, and, by extension, being in an ecstacy (which last means to be “out of place,” beyond the ordinary.) In English, certainly, the word had a strong religious context until the early eighteenth century—the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. With the Puritans (1650s), it took on the negative meaning of excessive religious emotion, marking a transition, you might say. These days the word has become secularized to such an extent that we enthuse about just about everything. For that reason it surprised me when, reading an essay in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Lying Stones of Marrakech, I encountered his own etymological clean-up of this linguistic fossil.
We have also, to be sure, made the first steps back to entheos already thanks to the genius that hides in science fiction. We’ve given spirit another name in Star Wars, to be sure. But you will know what I mean when I close with these words: “May the force be with you.

Sculpting Insubstantial Statues

The roots of the word legacyare two-fold but have the idea of “appointment” in common. In one sense the Latin verb legere means “to appoint by a last will”; the other is to “appoint an agent,” therefore, say, an ambassador. In both senses some actual person does something; the person makes his or her will known. A last will and testament typically disposes of accumulated wealth. And one meaning of legacy, sure enough, is that something more or less substantial is left behind. Property has this tangibility, as does money when things are working properly. Brigitte and I lived through a time, the mid 1940s, when German money, the Reichsmark, lost all value. In those days a “legacy,” even of millions of RMs, was quite worthless—except as kindling. If someone without property leaves a will, it is worth just about the same as RM 1000 was in 1945. From this meaning centered on hard wealth, our media have fashioned legacies—which every President supposedly spends a lot of time worrying about, especially in a second term. These political legacies, however, are strictly speaking quite insubstantial; they are collective memories of an administration. Being insubstantial, they may be shaped. Therefore I get images, thinking about this, of huge, vague statues of thought being hammered, chiseled, and otherwise shaped by op-ed columnists. One such attempt is in today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd doing a little shaping of Lyndon Johnson’s “legacy.”
This last sense of legacyis a long ways from its original meaning—either as an act of appointment or as of something left behind. All the action is by others—all of them looking back. They cannot in the least change what the past has claimed and therefore is now fossilizing. They engage in interpretation and valuation—the intended purpose of which is to shape something equally amorphous: today’s public opinion.
It occurs to me quite often how paradoxical our times are. We seem to live in a materialistic era in which determinism rules, yet our thoughts are always travelling in clouds of thought and feeling most ephemeral. The real power in the United States resides in the legislative branch. Some would add that it is in the hands of those who influence the legislators rather than those who elect them. Okay. I won’t argue the point either way. But since the legislative branch is a large number of people—one might call it an abstraction, being a collective—no one bothers about the legacy of the Congress. It is a sort of fluid permanence, so where would you put down the markers? The President, who is by constitutional wording an executor of the Congressional will, is, however, deemed to have genuine power. But no amount of political science can absolutely prove that the achievements of a President were singularly personal.
What we might be engaging in these days, learning how to shape legacies, is preparing for the day when, following the curve of history, we shall actually be ruled by a single individual. Then legacies will have become just a little more substantial. We know Nero’s legacy rather well, for instance. He fiddled while Rome burned. Now if I managed to acquire, quietly, the actual fiddle Nero used, together with unquestionably solid documentation of its provenance, then I too would have acquired a genuine legacy, the kind you can take to the bank and leave to your offspring in a last will and testament.

Suits, Sponsors, Speed, and Skates

Long before the International Olympic Committee official permitted the participation of professionals,  following the 1988 games, in what had been, more or less a traditionally amateur sports event, de facto professionalization had greatly advanced. And, indeed, no wonder. World-level athletes must engaged in the sports full time. Long before professionalism took firm root, athletes had achieved a sports-related income  linked to sponsorships and such. And purists like us had seen that; by the time the IOC acted, we’d already stopped having fits out of sheer exhaustion.
To give this some dimension, in 2013, according to the website opendorse, $1.1 billion was spent on athletic endorsements ( link ).
Professionalization, of course, means commercialization. Significant “visibility” invariably attracts money; and where money is available, professionalization also means ever more spending on technology. The athletes’ prowess is taken for granted. So where shall we get that extra edge? From modern science and the technology that it can spin.
The current controversy over skating suits—worn by the U.S. speed skating complement—is an interesting illustration. The U.S. team, failing to win medals (thus far—team pursuit is still ahead) abandoned new suits made for them by Under Armour, INC, a major $2.3 billion sports-wear corporation. It’s not the athletes, it’s the technology.
In the Vancouver games four years ago, the U.S. team managed to get four medals out of the total of 36 available (1 gold, 2 silver, and 1 bronze). That was 11.1 percent of the medals. Only men won medals. In those games 177 athletes participated. The U.S. fielded 18. Thus with 10.2 percent of the participants, we got 11.1 percent of the medals—which isn’t bad. Thus far, no such luck.
According to USA Todayand the Wall Street Journal, Under Armour is the chief sponsor of speed skating as well. Last Friday, the company’s stock fell by 2.4 percent. Visibility, of course, is a two-edged sword. And what is clear from this particular episode is that world-class sport is much, much more than sport. It is a kind of nexus which extends all through the economy and society. Such strange and, from a distance, barely recognizable but very firm combinations wrought by money and the media proliferate virtually everywhere. We cannot see them until something unravels; and doing something about it collectively is about as possible as influencing climate change.

The Muslim Religious Wars

A while back now (June 3, 2013)—but I glimpsed it again just the other day while making order—I saw an op-ed column by Bret Stephens in the WSJ titled “The Muslim Civil War,” subtitled “Standing by while the Sunnis and Shiites fight it out invites disaster.” The story deals principally with the Syrian conflict, but it got me thinking—and recalling. I recalled a post I’d put up on January 18, 2013 here ( link ) entitled “The Muslim Reformation.” In that post I noted the age of the Muslim religion and compared it with that of Christianity—and concluded that what we’re now witnessing is an intra-Muslim conflict of a religious nature comparable to the religious wars that plagued Europe for a period of 124 years following the Reformation.
These wars, briefly listed by Wikipedia ( link ), extended from 1524 until 1648. They began with the German Peasants’ War (1524-1525) and include the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that involved the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, Bohemia, France, Denmark, and Sweden.
In my earlier post I noted that the Muslim religious wars are viewed by us through a lens formed by modern ways of thought in which religion is, at most, a minor factor used in propaganda. All is about economics and power. But while secular concerns are alwayspresent in all wars, the deeper motivation is what sets the tone. Therefore, I suggested, even if the Americas and Europe suddenly disappeared, as if by magic, the Muslim civil wars would continue on exactly as they are doing now. Whether we stand by or participate should be guided by our sober and narrow self-interest. To misunderstand these wars as the yearning in Arab hearts for democracy and free markets is to misunderstand the current turmoil.
If my sense of history is at all on target, the great religious wars of civilizations are followed, in due time, by secularization, heralded roughly a hundred or so years after these wars have run their course by an Enlightenment. In 2214, give or take, Arabs might be agitating for democracy. Right now something else is happening.

Country Standings

Four years is a long time. Every four years, about this time in an Olympics, I get confused when I see the country rankings.  In today’s presentation, for example, the Netherlands and the United States both have 12 total medals, but Norway ranks higher than the US. In the same list Russia with 10 total medals is ranked below Switzerland with a mere 4. So then the next question is, how much weight does each medal have to produce this result.
It turns out that the various ranking schemes one can find on the Internet merely confuse the issue, as illustrated in the following spreadsheet layout:
Sochi Standings as of February 13, 2014 Rank as Points for each kind of medal Reported Medal count Gold Silver Bronze Total Total Gold Silver Bronze 4 2 1 Medals Points 1 Germany 6 2 1 24 4 1 9 29 2 Canada 4 4 2 16 8 2 10 26 3 Norway 4 3 6 16 6 6 13 28 4 Netherlands 4 3 5 16 6 5 12 27 5 USA 4 2 6 16 4 6 12 26 6 Switzerland 3 0 1 12 0 1 4 13 7 Russia 2 4 4 8 8 4 10 20
I’m showing the countries in rank order as reported by Sochi Olympics itself. To these rankings I’ve applied one of the ranking schemes (4/2/1) in which gold is multiplied by 4, silver by 2, and bronze by 1. There are also other schemes, e.g., 3/2/1 and 5/3/1. Notice that, in the last column, Canada should be fourth, with the US, and Russia sixth. Indeed no matter what the ranking scheme, each produces the same results. 
Well, it turns out that no “weighting” is used at all. What actually happens, I discovered, is that the results are subjected to a sorting algorithm with five parameters. The data are sorted by (1) gold count, then (2) silver, then (3) bronze, then (4) total metals—and if two countries are identical at that point, the last ranking is (5) alphabetical. No “points” or weights need to be applied—and Excel does a right fine job.

Olympic Curlicues

Curling is my most favorite winter sport in the Olympics. I watch the sport in other years as well thanks to an accident. Both in Minneapolis and later in Detroit, we’ve had access to Canadian television, and Canada is the curling-Mecca of the world.
Now comes a story in the Wall Street Journal  titled “How Russia’s Plot for Mercenary Curlers Failed.” (Yes. Rather milking the WSJ for posts today, but it’s a special season.) Evidently, a while back, at the Vancouver games, Russia decided to achieve medal-status in curling at Sochi. Its powers-that-be decided to hire high-ranking players and coaches from Canada and to give the players Russian citizenship when the time came. Internal resistance in Russia foiled this attempt; the Russian curlers we shall see this year (if they managed to get into the run-offs) will have been born (rather than born-again) Russians.
This got me thinking. The first thought was that Russia shouldn’t have hired Canadians; instead it should’ve hired some modestly competent Chinese coach, and never mind the sport. The Chinese know exactly how to excel in any Olympic sport they target. They’ve got the largest possible population from which to choose potential talent, and Communism (of late jettisoned by Russia) still helps them persuade the talent to undergo the herculean labors required to succeed. This then led to the second thought. The most potent tool for achieving Olympic Victory is no doubt Communism—recall, as Brigitte suggested, the East Germans’ always stellar showings while they called their country the GDR. The “free market” model just doesn’t cut it—not in the minor sports. Something more muscular is needed, like Communism.
Today Norway leads with 11 medals and Russia has 7. One of Russia’s medals comes from a South Korean named Victor An, a born-again Rusky. We laughed: All these nation-states competing at Sochi. And one truly International Competitor: Russia. For all we know their best talent has been recruited from every country in the world.
HT to Brigitte for flagging this story for someone who rarely gets to the sports page even in Olympic times…

The P Stands for Peru, the O Comes from Bolivia

I knew about the nightshade plants, family of Solanaceae, while I was still a child. It was the time of the transition from World War II to peace. We were in Germany then, emigrants from Hungary. I was learning German, and the word, Nachtschatten Pflanzen, made some big impression on me. At a certain age one thinks about new words—and sometimes that habit becomes permanent. There was an oddity about shadows at night, something oddly eerie.
I’ve always associated nightshades with what we call Latin America today. It wasn’t until the Internet made quick research rather easy that I learned, in my seventies, that Solanacea are found on every continent except Antarctica. The South/Central American imprint in my mind comes from the fact that these plants reached their greatest diversity there. All those we naturally associate with the family—tobacco, tomato, potato, chili and bell peppers—originate from that realm. Of that list, certainly these days, tobacco alone has a sinister reputation, but for me they all spell delight. The peppers, I think, are not routinely so classified in the popular mind. And the other day we’d come to wonder whether the potato belonged there. I thought so, but asked how certain I was, I said that I was very strongly inclined to think so, but I wasn’t dead certain.
Well, the potato comes from Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia, its domestication dating back a good while by any measure, between 8000 and 5000 BC. Another thing that happens over extended periods of time, in a human being, is that memory decays. It was only after learning this, again, that I remembered once studying the almost bewildering varieties of potatoes that had once flourished in South America. Of these the common types available at Kroger are the minutest tip of an iceberg—but represent the great mass of all potatoes grown.
Looked at through a geological lens, the potato has done rather well considering the remoteness of its arising at such great distances from the center of human population density. A snapshot taken  in 2011 indicates that China grew the most potatoes in that year, followed by India and Russia—representing 43 percent of the world’s crop, 374,400,000 metric tons. Pretty good showing for a plant growing in nightshade.

Genetically-Modified Lit

A story in the Wall Street Journal today tells me that Tor Books (part of Macmillan now) has established a collaboration with NASA to produce science fiction. To quote: “The partnership pairs up novelists with NASA scientists and engineers, who help writers develop scientifically plausible story lines and spot-check manuscripts for technical errors.”
“Aha,” I thought. “Genetic modification in literature has now reached visibility.” Such things, of course, go back a long time. Writers who produce books based on publishers’ tightly written formulae are as old as certain popular romance fiction series. I recall once seeing very elaborate specifications—up to some 12 or more points described as “must” contents—for each of some five different sub-categories of romance fiction by one publisher. The process also began in science fiction much earlier. At least twenty years ago, one publisher approached me to write sci-fi novels for them based on specific content. I turned them down.
Consider the parallels. Literary talent is clearly in-born, present early. It is shaped by the person’s family and life experiences and indirectly by his or her times and circumstances. The works produced echo their producers and their times. Now to modify this natural talent from the outside artificially so that it will produce a uniform “fruit” matched to “market demand” in look, feel, sound, and smell is quite the same thing as genetically modifying all manner of agricultural products so that they will appeal to the Kroger and Safeway shopper instantly. The taste is sometimes off. Just recently Brigitte said something rather startling—quite spontaneously. She was eating an oddly shaped strawberry and said: “Amazing, actually. It almost tastes like a strawberry.”
Almost. Yes. Almost.
Full disclosure. Long ago Tor turned down my Ghulf Genes (the novel), despite efforts by my agent to get it read. I never imagined that, at some future time, I might be glad that they did.