Samir Chopra's Blog, page 126

Time Again to Support Academic Freedom

This morning, I received the following email from the Brooklyn College President, Karen Gould:

Dear students, faculty, and staff,

Each semester, student clubs, academic departments, and other groups on our campus host events and invite speakers on a broad range of topics. At times, the issues discussed may be challenging and the points of view expressed may be controversial.

Next week, Students for Justice in Palestine is hosting two speakers who will discuss their views on the BDS movement, which calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. The event is co-sponsored by several campus and community organizations, including the political science department.

As an institution of higher education, it is incumbent upon us to uphold the tenets of academic freedom and allow our students and faculty to engage in dialogue and debate on topics they may choose, even those with which members of our campus and broader community may vehemently disagree. As your president, I consistently have demonstrated my commitment to these principles so that our college community may consider complex issues and points of view across the political and cultural spectrum.

Unfortunately, some may believe that our steadfast commitment to free speech signals an institutional endorsement of a particular point of view. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brooklyn College does not endorse the views of the speakers visiting our campus next week, just as it has not endorsed those of previous visitors to our campus with opposing views. We do, however, uphold their right to speak, and the rights of our students and faculty to attend, listen, and fully debate. We also encourage our students and faculty to explore these issues from multiple viewpoints and in a variety of forums so that no single perspective serves as the sole source of information or basis for consideration.

In addition, as I have said on several occasions, our college community values mutual respect and civil discourse. We ask all students, faculty, staff, and guests on our campus to conduct themselves accordingly so that Brooklyn College continues to be a learning environment where all may discuss and debate issues of importance to our world.

Sincerely,

Karen L. Gould

President

A little while later, I saw Corey Robin post the following as his status update on Facebook:

URGENT: Hi everyone. I need you all to stop what you’re doing and make a phone call or write an email to the administration of Brooklyn College. A few weeks ago, my department (political science) voted to co-sponsor a panel discussion, featuring Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti, on the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement against Israel. In the last week, we’ve gotten a lot of pressure and pushback from the media, students, alumni, and now Alan Dershowitz (who’s been trying to track down our chair to “talk” to him). So far, the administration has held firm, but the pressure is only building and they are starting to ask us whether we endorse these views or are merely seeking to air them (to which we responded: “Was the Brooklyn College administration endorsing the pro-torture and pro-Israel views of Alan Dershowitz when it decided to award him an honorary degree?”) Anyway, I need you guys now to send an email or make a phone call encouraging the administration to stand by the department and to stand for the principle that a university should be a place for the airing of views, ESPECIALLY views that are heterodox and that challenge the dominant assumptions of society. Please contact: President Karen Gould (718.951.5671; klgould@brooklyn.cuny.edu); Provost William Tramontano (718.951.5864; tramontano@brooklyn.cuny.edu); and Director of Communications and Public Relations Jeremy Thompson (718.951.5882; JeremyThompson@brooklyn.cuny.edu. Please be polite and respectful, but please be firm on the principle. Right now, they’re only hearing from one side, so it’s imperative they hear from many others.

Please join us in encouraging Brooklyn College to hold the line against those–especially bullies like Alan Dershowitz–who would stifle the open exchange of views on campus. (Links added above.)

Olympic Lifting: The Power and the Glory

Olympic weightlifting might just be the sexiest sport there is, a near-perfect blend of strength, agility, complexity and grace that if done right, brings the lifter face to face with an acute combination of the strong and the beautiful.  When an Olympic lift comes off, body and mind come together.

An Olympic lift–the clean and jerk, and the snatch–is not a simple lift in the original sense of ‘simple’. It is not one thing. It is complex–and complex things, as Aristotle told us, require analysis into their constituents; it has many parts and all its individual components need to be drilled extensively. The barbell and PVC drills that precede an Olympic lifting session then, are tedious but essential. They are tiring. (Many is the time when my shoulders have ached from just the pre-lifting drills.) In the case of the snatch: the high scarecrow pull, the muscle snatch, the drop under; and then incredibly enough, you combine them into, hopefully, one indivisible movement, and realize how they come together. At lighter weights the drill works; all is well in God’s world. Then, despair, for at heavier weights the lift starts to break down. Here is where grace under pressure is required, a struggle to fight, to remember the drill, to maintain fidelity to form.

Coaching tips for Olympic lifts can thus attain shadings of both the poetic and the everyday. Consider the question of how you should have your knees and hips bent for the ‘jumping position’ as you move into the ‘hip-opening’ position. Well, how would you flex them if you wanted to reach up and touch the ceiling? Think of that position, that flex, that partial squat, poised to head upwards, which every kid, every human perhaps, knows instinctively.  That’s how you want to be when you are in the hang position. Or you will hear Olympic lifting described as ‘jumping with barbells.’ Think about it:  ‘jumping with barbells.’ Would you ever have imagined weightlifting described in those terms? Once you connect that dynamic motion with moving weight, which ordinarily conjured up visions of slow grinding movements, you begin to glimpse the heart and soul of Olympic lifting.

To do well in Olympic lifting is to overcome your sense of disbelief at the sheer unlikeliness of it all: How is that motion possible? Is it really possible to throw that barbell over your head? Of the two Olympic lifts, the snatch is especially improbable: How does the barbell unfurl like that over your head even as you seem to jump up and then down under it? But it can happen; if you pay attention and don’t let frustration get the better of you. And that is where paying attention to the component movements is crucial–they are what make the lift possible–they are what enable the overcoming of the sheer physical improbability of it all.

But the true beauty of the Olympic lift is to realize that this is a strength movement that requires you to have the grace and balance of a ballet dancer, the explosive muscle recruitment and deployment of a sprinter and the strength of a…weightlifter. Because you must concentrate on the lift and its components, you can teach yourself the vital skill of zoning in on a task at hand, an act of concentration and living in the moment that if cultivated, transfers well to life off the lifting platform. And because many attempts at lifts will not come off you will learn patience.

So in learning an Olympic lift you do more than train your body, you train your mind too. And how useful is that?

Wanted: Moar Philosophers in Bollywood

A few days ago, a delightful oddity began making the rounds: a clip of Bertrand Russell in a Bollywood movie.  The background for this clip is straightforward even if improbable:

The year was 1967. Russell was by then a very frail 95-year-old man. Besides finishing work on his three-volume autobiography, Russell was devoting much of his remaining time to the struggle for peace and nuclear disarmament. To that end, he sometimes made himself available to people he thought could help the cause….So when he was asked to appear in a movie called Aman, about a young Indian man who has just received his medical degree in London and wants to go to Japan to help victims of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russell said yes.

The actual conversation between Russell and Rajendra Kumar is quite stilted and staged but still worth a gander nevertheless. Having now witnessed such an encounter though, one’s mind turns quite naturally to the endless opportunities for philosophy-meets-Bollywood, not all of which require the philosophers concerned to just play themselves.

Here are a couple of tentative suggestions:

1. Foucault in Aakrosh: Here, Foucault plays the part of a French expat philosophy professor, now settled in India after originally travelling there as a hippie undergraduate. He has returned time and again to the strange land he has fallen in love with, and slowly come to empathize with the lot of the landless, brutalized, peasant oppressed by feudal landlords. He sees in that sphere of power politics, a visible demonstration of his writings. As Bhaskar Kulkarni the lawyer, struggles to understand why his client Lahanya Bhikhu is speechless, Foucault comes to his aid, helping Kulkarni to understand how the relentless application of power, exerted in multimodal forms upon the body and mind of Lahanya and his family have reached their logical summum bonum: the peasant, having reacted through and via the one visible outlet of power i.e., an act of ‘protective’ violence upon his wife, is now spent and unable to communicate meaningfully. Armed with this knowledge Kulkarni is able to modulate his relationship with Bhikhu, and more importantly, by distributing Foucauldian pamphlets among Bhikhu’s fellow peasants, spark an uprising. At the movie’s end, the peasants gather for a group shaving of their heads in honor of Foucault.

2. Martha Nussbaum in a yet to be made movie: Nussbaum is an American philosopher married to an Indian economist who has returned to his homeland to dabble in politics. Nussbaum plunges into Indian life, naturalizes, and joins in. Soon, this dabbling turns serious, and before she knows it, our heroine is running for parliament on a pro-woman, pro-flourishing platform. She comes under attack from Hindu nationalists, who dismiss her as a a rabble-rousing ignorant, Hinduism-hating foreigner. Nussbaum, however, meets them at their own game, learning Sanskrit, mastering Hindu scriptures and defusing her opponents via a series of brilliant written exegeses and public debates. Her marriage does not last, but Nussbaum does not return to the US, choosing instead to make India her new home, now a true daughter of the soil.

Whitewater Rafting on the Cheat River: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

In May 1990, (more precisely, during the Memorial Day weekend) I went whitewater rafting on the Cheat River in West Virginia. A fellow graduate student talked me into joining a group expedition that went every Memorial Day; it was run by a husband and wife pair and was described in suspiciously glowing terms. I had never whitewater rafted before; indeed, I had never set foot in a raft before. Sporting an attitude that has gotten me into trouble more than once–incorrigible curiosity–I decided to play along. I do not know why I thought this might be a good idea: I am a decent swimmer but not an excellent one; I am terrified of drowning; and did I mention I had never rafted before? More to the point, the Cheat features Grade IV and Grade V rapids. More on that below.

As we drove down to West Virginia from New Jersey, we encountered much rain along the way, and indeed, it was still raining when we pulled into camp early in the morning of our intended river run–after a long, tiring drive through the night. A quick breakfast later, we were river-bound, heading for outfitting and orientation.

My first look at the river was enough to induce a symphonic response from my now chattering knees: it was in flood (six feet over), a brown, roiling mass of water, churning and frothing through its broad channel, idly tossing about the odd tree-trunk and swirling over what appeared to be barely visible rocks. We were going to stick a flimsy raft on that matchstick production factory? Why wasn’t this illegal? I approached our river-running guide with some trepidation and asked him if we would be rafting with the river in such spate. My guide nonchalantly replied, ‘Oh, yeah, its goin’ to be a wild ride out theah.’ (He might have preceded this statement with a Clay Davis-esque ‘sheeeeit’ but my memory fails me now.)

That piece of reassurance provided, I changed and got into the raft.  I was a coward all right, but I was even more scared about backing out in company. Our rafting got off to a decent start; the first two rapids were a bit wild, but not too bad. We then encountered the aptly name ‘Decision’ rapids where the weak-willed are given another chance to back out. I declined withdrawal. I was still too scared to back out.

Soon thereafter, I received my first dunking in the river. Our raft hit a rock, flipping me neatly into the water; on cue, I swam madly for the shore, and somehow made it. Others had received a quick wash too, so at least I wasn’t alone in being subjected to this indignity. Our raft, miraculously, was not lost to the river, so sadly, we couldn’t call an end to the madness.

Things got worse from that point on. The rapids grew into monstrous proportions; the river was in flood and every one of its wild sections, was, er, wilder. I navigated each one with my stomach churning, an acute mix of nausea and trepidation, all the while wondering why grown men and women with flourishing lives potentially ahead of them would ever subject themselves to such batterings.

Then, another rock. Our raft rode up on it, tilted, and slid back. As it did so, I fell into the river, and this time, terrifyingly, I felt myself washed away, and for one gut-churning moment of sheer terror, I felt like I was in a washing machine hitting the business end of a spin cycle. Suddenly, my head popped out of the water, and I found an oar stuck in my face by my river-guide, urging me to pull myself aboard. Somehow, I did so. One of our riders had been left stranded on the rock; amazingly, after we got to shore and threw her a lifeline, she pulled herself through the raging river to the shore.

I thought we were done. Surely, after that disaster, the sane thing to do was to pack up, and head for the nearest West Virginian moonshine distillery? But no. A genuine monster, a grade V rapid, awaited. It required some ten minutes of onshore planning and strategizing before we attempted it. Once again, I considered handing in my oars and hiking to the waiting bus, and yet again, I declined.

I’m glad I have forgotten most of the details of how we made it through that watery beast. I remember walls of white water below me, on top of me, and on the sides; I remember brown water; I remember screams and I remember arms and legs that felt as if they were on fire as I dug deep and hard in order to extricate ourselves from what felt like one endless whirlpool after another. I remember too, somehow, the awestruck faces of onlookers watching from the road nearby.

Then somehow, just like that, we were through. We were still scudding along on a frothing river, but the worst was over. I lay back, my palms and wrists aching from the tight grip I had exerted on my oar. I could have wept when I heard the magic words, ‘Time for lunch!’ A post-lunch short ride on the Cheat still had to be carried out but it felt like a breeze after what we had handled before.

That evening, I swapped stories about my ride and my dunkings with my camp mates, and made light of the flip, the toss, the spin cycle. Unfortunately, someone also recounted a ghastly story of a young rafter who had drowned in the Cheat, stuck to a rock as the river pinned him there, its relentless weight preventing him from breaking free and raising his head out of the water.

The weekend over, I drove back home, glad that I had ‘done the Cheat’, glad that I hadn’t backed out of the ride, but entirely unsure that I would ever want to go whitewater rafting again. Six years later, I rafted again, on the Ganges, just  upstream from Rishikesh, and finalized my decision: I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I wasn’t a natural in the water; my amniotic fluid days were too far gone. (Something I would realize years again later, when I went scuba diving, and had to bail out.)

To all the rafters and river-runners out there: respect. I don’t know how y’all do it.

Young Lady, You Too Can Strap On An Ammo Belt

It’s official: American women can now  kill strange people in strange lands, put themselves in harm’s way and die for their country.  The Pentagon’s announcement that women in the US military will now be allowed to serve in combat zones finally brings to an end a discriminatory policy that had looked increasingly ludicrous as women continued to serve in them anyway. It says a great deal about the world we live in that an announcement such as this is cause for celebration. Of course, my preliminary facetiousness notwithstanding, this is not celebration of the kind that says ‘Hooray! I’m gonna go get me some scalps now’ but rather, one of a more sober kind, one that acknowledges the lowering of a long-standing barrier that had served to showcase unquestioned prejudice, reinforced sexism, and more practically, denied employment opportunities and advancement to women. Consider, for instance, that it was always unlikely that in an armed service, one devoted to armed combat, that non-combatants would ever rise to the highest posts, be granted significant executive power, or have their workplace related issues taken seriously. This systematic discrimination continued while one sad truth was sometimes visible to those that cared to peek around the edges of official military policy:

The biggest safety concern for women in the military is actually not so much enemy fire as sexual attacks from fellow members of their own service. Because the crime is so underreported, it’s impossible to say how many women suffer sexual assault while they’re in uniform, but 3,192 cases were recorded in 2011.

These sexual assaults took place in an atmosphere where, thanks to the proscription of women from combat duty, an internal caste system had been created, one which was guaranteed to generate resentment too: while women were deemed unfit for combat, they were also made the brunt of the aspersion that they couldn’t ‘hack it’ and as such ‘had it easy’ while the men went off to die. So a sexist policy engendered a misogynist response. The creation of this two-tier system was always going to be more of a threat to women than enemy fire.

But women did not ask to be kept out of combat. Au contraire, over the years, an increasing number of women actively sought out responsibilities that would move them ever closer to combat: they flew fighter jets for instance. Conversely, modern warfare, at least in the way that the US conducts it, had made it ever more possible for ‘combat zone duty’ to be defined in such a way that the imagined risks were not those of older combat zones.

Having said all of this, I must return to the tone with which I began this post for try as I might, one cannot be too celebratory about an announcement that the largest, most aggressive military power in the world has widened its recruiting pool. The US military faces recruitment difficulties, and keeping women out of combat zones was always going to be an increasingly untenable policy in light of that. When the disenfranchised have always gone off and fought wars, then why not cast the net wider to rope in a few more of them?

Better Living Through Chemistry, Part Deux: Aristotle on Drunkenness

A couple of weeks ago, I made a note here of my stepping onto the decaffeinated wagon in an attempt to prepare myself for the sleepless nights of fatherhood. That bout of abstinence began shortly after Thanksgiving. Besides the caffeine-free wagon, I have also been riding the alcohol-free wagon for about six weeks now, also in an attempt to mitigate the ghastliness of the sleep-interrupted night. (I will, in all probability, break that fast temporarily on the Superbowl weekend, before clambering back on the wagon; football will be over but childcare responsibilities will endure.)

So in honor of the absent spirit, to make myself appreciate my sobriety a bit more, I want to point to a couple of astute questions and observations that The Philosopher i.e., Aristotle, was able to offer us on alcohol and intoxication a very long time ago. These have little to do with childcare, but everything to do with how children show up in our lives.

(The excerpts below are from the Problems, a member of the corpus aristotelicum whose ‘authenticity has been seriously doubted.’ Here, I draw from Book III: Problems Connected with the Drinking of Wine and Drunkenness, from The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation, Ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series, LXXI, Princeton University Press, pp. 1340-1350).

First, here is ‘Aristotle’ on the Foster’s Flop or the Drinker’s Droop:

Section 11: Why is it that those who are drunk are incapable of having sexual intercourse? Is it because to do so a certain part of the body must be in a state of greater heat than the rest, and this is impossible in the drunken owing to the large quantity of heat present in the whole body; for the heat set up by the movement is extinguished by the greater surrounding heat, because they have in them a considerable quantity of unconcocted moisture? Furthermore the semen is derived from food and all food is concocted, and those who are satiated with food are more inclined for sexual intercourse. This is why some people say that with a view to the sexual act one ought to take a midday meal but a light supper, so that there may be less unconcocted than concocted matter in the body.

Consider too, ‘Aristotle’ on a related matter:

Section 4: Why is the semen of drunkards generally infertile? Is it because the composition of their body has become full of moisture and the semen is fertile not when it is liquid when it has body and consistency?

The observation contained in Section 11 should be simultaneously reassuring and alarming. Failure to perform after a long night out with the boys at the bar has been a problem ever since a bunch of merry peripatetics found themselves incapacitated after one too many carafes of wine at  the local taverna, but little seems to have been learnt since then. Section 4 seems a little dubious; if anything drunkards seem to cause far too many unplanned pregnancies. And in getting there, an uncomfortably large number of embarrassing encounters. Sometimes the Foster’s Flop can be a deliverance.

Please, Can We Make Programming Cool?

Is any science as desperate as computer science to be really, really liked? I ask because not for  the first time, and certainly not the last, I am confronted with yet another report of an effort to make computer science ‘cool’, trying in fact, to make its central component–programming–cool.

The presence of technology in the lives of most teenagers hasn’t done much to entice more of them to become programmers. So Hadi Partovi has formed a nonprofit foundation aimed at making computer science as interesting to young people as smartphones, Instagram and iPads. Mr. Partovi…founded Code.org with the goal of increasing the teaching of computer science in classrooms and sparking more excitement about the subject among students….Code.org’s initial effort will be a short film…that will feature various luminaries from the technology industry talking about how exciting and accessible programming is….It also isn’t clear that Code.org’s film will succeed where modern technologies themselves have failed: in getting young people excited about programming.

I don’t know what being cool means for programming, but if it means convincing potential converts that those who program don’t need to think logically or algorithmically or in structured fashion, or that somehow programming can be made to, you know, just flow with no effort, that it can be all fun and games, then like all other efforts before it, Mr. Partovi’s efforts are doomed.

Here is why. Programming is hard. It’s not easy and never will be. When you write programs you will hit walls, you will be frustrated, you will tear your hair out, you will be perplexed. Sometimes things will go right and programs will run beautifully, but it will often take a long time to get things working. When programs work, it is incredibly satisfying, which is why some people enjoy programming and find beauty and power in it. Programming can be used to create shiny toys and things that go pow and zoom and sometimes kapow, but it will never be shiny or go pow and zoom or even kapow. Before the pot of gold is reached, there is a fairly tedious rainbow to be traversed.

Writers write and produce potboilers, pulp fiction, romances, great novels, comedies, screenplays, essays, creative non-fiction, a dazzling array that entertains, beguiles, and fascinates. But is writing fun? FUCK NO. It’s horrible. Yes, you produce great sentences, and yes, sometimes things fall into place, and you see a point made on the page, which comes out just the way you wanted it to. But all too soon, it’s over and you are facing a blank page again. Writing produces glamorous stuff but it is very far from being that; it is tedious, slow, and very likely to induce self-loathing. The folks who write do not try to make writing accessible or fun. Because it isn’t. You do it because you can find moments of beauty in it and because you can solve the puzzle of trying to find the right combination of words that say best what you wanted to say. Programming is like that. Very much so. Word processors can get as flashy as they want, they won’t make writing easier. The slickest programming tools won’t make programming easier either.

Martin Luther King Jr.: Menace II (Racist) Society

As a callow boy, I used to confuse Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr. Fortunately, that ignorant conflation didn’t last too long and I soon got the two of them sorted out. The first one complicated my understanding of Christianity, the second that of my home for twenty-five years, the United States of America, the nation whose passport I carry, and whose citizenship my daughter has acquired by birth.

I have written on this blog about events that modified my relationship with the US: a viewing of Tora, Tora, Tora!, and my reading of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The first brought down the US from a pedestal of invincibility, the second from one of moral superiority. A third event did the same as the second. A solitary viewing of a documentary on the US civil rights movement, one that exposed me to the spoken words of Dr. King, and one searing visual after another of the slow, painful, and as yet incomplete, fight against institutionalized racism. (While I cannot remember precisely which documentary I am referring to, Mukul Kesavan, in his essay ‘On Watching Documentaries’ remembers watching one titled King in approximately the same time period; I have, however, not been able to track that title down.)

I watched the documentary alone, late at night in New Delhi, at my grandparent’s residence.  For some reason, the national television station had decided the best time to show it was at a time when most folks would have turned in for the night. I do not know why I was spending the night at my grandmother’s and I do not know how and why I had the run of the roost as far the television room was concerned. (It was my grandparent’s bedroom.) Be that as it may, I was alone, and I was curious.

The documentary began with the speech given by Dr. King on April 3rd 1968, the night before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The words of the speech, in white, scrolled up the screen against a black background, while Dr. King’s voice played on the soundtrack. It was the first time I had heard him speak; it was the first time I had heard any speech from the civil rights movement; it was the first time I was exposed to that potent combination of preacher, professor and politician. I had never heard a speech like that before in that cadence and rhythm, with that passion and eloquence. By the time it ended, I was primed for the spectacle–composed wholly of archival footage–that followed. When that was over, a cavalcade of impressions ending with King’s assassination, the hapless women on the Memphis motel balcony pointing in the direction the assassin had gone, I was stunned, speechless, and heartbroken.

Water cannons, feral Southern policemen, brave schoolchildren, angry racist women and children screaming obscenities, devious politicians grimly determined to not let their racist citadels fall, snarling dogs, grim, composed, determined marchers for freedom and dignity, the abuse of those asking for a chance to exercise adult franchise; these are the components of the by-now-iconic set of images that we associate with those points in time. They are familiar now, but they have not bred contempt. Perhaps all of us can remember when we were first exposed to them; perhaps we can remember the effect they had. This is my very partial attempt to do so.

A Beating, Dimly Glimpsed, Poorly Understood

Many years ago, I saw a terrible beating and didn’t realize I was looking at one. Till much later.

No experience is unmediated; without membership in a linguistic community, without a background theory, there is no immediate experience to speak of. There is no ‘given’; to ‘experience’ is to know how to deploy a certain linguistic arsenal of concepts, to know how to participate in a space of reasoners and communicators like oneself, to know what to assent to, to know what follows from what. I learned this from books, from the writings of philosophers. But  I might have been exposed to some of the intuitions at the core of these theories when I was a mere child.

In the mid-seventies, the residential division my family lived in–in New Delhi–was not yet fully populated: vacant lots were as numerous as fully built up ones. One of these lay next to a park, one through which I sometimes had occasion to pass. One morning, when I was perhaps seven or eight years old, and had perhaps finished a little session of fooling around with my playmates, I noticed a commotion of sorts in the vacant lot that adjoined the park. I walked over to take a look.

I didn’t understand what I was looking at. There was a gaggle of onlookers, fixated on a spectacle; two men locked in a strange encounter with each other. One of them had a wooden beam and was using it to ‘hit’ the other man; he would bring the beam down, raise it, take a couple of steps back, and repeat; the recipient of his ‘blows’ lay limply against a fence. He had worn a turban once; now it had come loose, and his hair flowed down. I do not remember if I saw blood, though it must have been there. Perhaps I refused to acknowledge its visibility.  There seemed to be an eerie silence pervading the proceedings, though again, wood on bone and flesh must have emitted some sound. Again, perhaps I refused to hear. Or perhaps, I did not have the resources with which to understand what I was witnessing. (I put quotes around ‘hit’ and ‘blows’ above because I don’t think they understood they were blows.) Like me, others were watching, all of us transfixed. Unlike me, the others were adults; perhaps their stupefaction stunned me into silence and incomprehension; if they found nothing to react to, then perhaps there was nothing there for me either. I stared and stared; one dim corner of my brain perhaps understood what was going, perhaps had the resources at its disposal to make sense of this ragdoll victim and his tormentor.

Finally, I broke away, and walked home. I did not talk about what I had seen with anyone else. I did not mention it to my parents, to my brother, to my friends. I never heard about the incident from any one. Not that I would necessarily have understood what was being referred to. Its memory receded from my brain. Other childish preoccupations, far more germane to my life, took over.

Years later, unbidden, that image presented itself to my mind’s eye again. I felt nauseated; what had I seen? Had I really witnessed as brutal an act as it now seemed? What else could it have been? In the meantime, I had seen movies, read books, understood the meaning of ‘violence’ and ‘assault’, seen photos of broken, bloody, beaten men. Now I could fit those images witnessed that day into a framework that let me make sense of them. I had gained retrospective knowledge of a very painful kind.

Note: The story above is subject to the usual caveats pertaining to memory.

David Runciman is a Little Confused About the Power of Confusion

In reviewing Ferdinand Mount‘s The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy: Power and Inequality in Britain Now (‘Confusion is Power‘, London Review of Books, Volume 34, Number 11, 7 June 2012), David Runciman writes:

James Burnham, author of the The Managerial Revolution (1941) envisaged a post-democratic order in which power was concentrated in the hands of an elite managerial class, who controlled the global forces of production. Burnham supposed that the members of this elite would be made up of scientists and engineers, because knowledge was power. ‘Finance-executives’, as he called them would be reduced to the level of servants of this new breed of supermen. But in fact it’s the finance executives who have come to rule the roost, and it’s often the scientists and engineers who are forced to do their bidding. That’s because knowledge is not always power. Sometimes confusion is power as well. The finance executives don’t really know what they are doing, as we have discovered in the last few years. But they have created a world that no one else understands either, which gives them all the freedom they need. [links added]

Runciman is a little confused here. He is right, of course, that scientists and engineers are, today, at the beck and call of the suits. But he is wrong about why. If confusion is power and a more important and significant kind of power than knowledge, then scientists and engineers would still sit at the top of the pile. The confusion they can create via the technical obfuscation that is theirs to summon up and dispense is immense. Beyond the barest details very little is known of the computing devices and the mathematical sciences that so animate, regulate and populate our modern world; there is ample opportunity here for the deployment of confusion. But the technical wizardry of the scientist and the engineer is always trumped by the knowledge of the suit. It is the right kind of knowledge, that of: how power works, how to delude and beguile, how to manipulate, how to accrue power and hold on to it.

If a finance executive does not know what he is doing it is because he is dealing with the products of scientists i.e., the quants–financial engineers perhaps–who have devised the terribly complicated financial instruments that Runciman has in mind. The financial executive has ‘created a world that no one else understands’ via these technical aids. But it is what he does with the power granted him by those aids that shows how he is in possession of an even more significant knowledge.

For contrary to Runciman’s assertion, knowledge still remains power. It is not confusion that trumps power; it is that one kind of knowledge can trump another, that the kind of knowledge needed to rule the world is not just technical or scientific; it is the knowledge of what makes human beings susceptible to the right of kind of inducement. It is the knowledge of human weaknesses and greed, so that the ersatz, tinsel, fragile world of the financier, his artful promises and the visions he peddles of the soft life can come to seem so alluring to those that fall for it.

This is why the suit will trump the scientist and the engineer.