A Voice of Reason

A New NASA

2011-07-10T10:05:00.003-04:00

I grew up reading science fiction, watching Star Trek, and dreaming of a future in space. I became an Aerospace Engineer, studied orbital mechanics and control systems, and later I earned an MS in Physics (Observational Astronomy). I was star struck. Needless to say, I have been disappointed with our lack of progress in space exploration.

The Apollo program was a cold war effort motivated by beating the Russians and while it was an amazing feat of technological development, it did not leave us with any sustainable capability. The original concept of the Space Shuttle would have been much better. It would have been totally reusable, with a flying delta winged booster carrying the shuttle up before detaching and returning to Earth. But Congress nickled and dimed NASA to death, literally. If that original design had been used, there would have been no solid rocket boosters to blow up, or drop insulation on vulnerable heat tiles. But when the Atlantis touches down, we won't even have that capability any more.

In more recent years, there have been efforts at the privatization of space exploration, and I cheered when Space Ship One won the X-Prize, but more needs to be done, and it is still hard to get the financial resources needed to create the infrastructure that a sustainable presence in space requires. NASA still possesses remarkable facilities and despite their brain drain, they still have a lot of very smart people working for them, but they are being run by bean counters who lack vision and are being strangled by the Government. They need to break free, create a vision for sustainable space exploration, and take their case to the American people, perhaps even to the world. There is an organization, called Kickstarter that allows people who need financial backing to reach out to the public in an effort to gain that backing. I recently supported an independent publisher through Kickstarter, and it has occurred to me that this could be a new model for a number of endeavors, including space exploration.

Another possible method of funding would be to allow tax payers to actually have some discretion as to where their tax dollars go. I read a short story many years ago that used this as the basic premise (it was a Christmas story, and I think it was called World Peace). When the people in that world filed their tax returns they could go through all the possible programs and select those that they wanted to support.

Of course, if our government is really serious about turning our economy around and creating jobs, they could just increase NASA's budget instead of spending money paving roads that don't really need it. Economic studies (see this one, for example) have shown the benefits of spending on space (as opposed to spending on defense). And for those who think that NASA gets lots of money already, they don't. NASA's budget for 2011 is 19 billion dollars, which is less than 1 % of the Federal Budget.

And for the skeptics out there it is already being done:
Scientists Turn to Crowds on the Web to Finance Their Projects

Paul Weindling, “A Virulent Strain: German bacteriology as scientific racism, 1890-1920”

2011-05-24T06:47:00.000-04:00

Race, Science and Medicine, 1700-1960, Waltraud Ernst & Bernard Harris, eds. London: Routledge, 1999. 218-34.

This book is a collection of essays centering on the issue of race in science and medicine. This particular chapter is arguing that bacteriology became racialized as a reaction to transmigrants crossing from the East in the 1890s. This racialization of disease became even more pronounced during the German occupation of eastern territories during World War I.

By the time of the 1892 cholera outbreak in Hamburg, epidemics were seen as belonging to a more primitive time, when Europeans were considered to be more or less on the same cultural level as the ‘colonial’ races. But even as outbreaks of cholera were becoming increasingly rare, bacteriologists were aware of other ‘Asian’ diseases that were threatening the European races. Leprosy was on the rise on the Baltic fringes of Germany, and there were fears about the importation of typhus, small pox and the plague by transmigrants from the East traveling to Ellis Island.

As bacteriological knowledge increased, the identification of pathogens with diseases resulted in a more objective specificity, but it also opened the door for the possibility that susceptibility to a pathogen was a racial attribute. If this could be shown, it could be used to give an objective scientific basis to the notion of different human species. In cases where the animal vector (such as the louse) was identified before the pathogen, anyone infested with the animal vectors were considered a threat to the overall population, and it was easy to conflate the ethnicity of the carriers with the contagion.

In response to the threat of disease from transmigrants, medical stations were set up on Germany’s eastern borders that inspected and disinfected transmigrants. These stations did not, however, have a consistent policy for such cleansing, nor did they necessarily have adequate facilities. Policies could be quite draconian and dehumanizing, and the attendants were often coarse and ill-mannered. Women and men were separated, breaking up families, and sick children were often removed to distant hospital facilities, with no information provided to the relatives, and no visitation by family members allowed. Although there was no official interest in religious background (religion was not generally recorded) the German and American press sensationalized the idea that Eastern European Jews were importing infections. Public prejudice against Russian Jewish refugees increased during the 1890s, and the stereotype of Eastern Europeans as living in filth and squalor was reinforced.

With German and Austro-Hungarian occupation of eastern territories during World War I, the situation only worsened. Occupying troops enforced sanitation standards upon the population, often targeting specific groups within that population (e.g., Polish Jews, Serbian Muslims). Anti-lice pamphlets were prepared in Yiddish, with the help of Rabbis, that urged the cutting of hair, the shaving of beards, and the burning of (infested) wigs of Orthodox women, but they were not effective. Some considered this lack of effectiveness as being due to the ‘primitive’ religious culture of the Jews. In turn, the local communities resented this intrusion into their private lives and viewed the delousing installations with hatred, even burning some down. The Germans compiled lists of Jews that were to be forcibly washed and deloused every week, and closed shops if their owners refused to be deloused.

Labor shortages during the harvest led to the importation of large amounts of Eastern European workers into Germany. Although the workers were deloused, the delousing was not effective and in 1917 there was a severe typhus epidemic in Warsaw, which aroused further racist hostility towards Jews.

In contrast to the attitude of German and Austrian medical officers in Poland, the Austrian medical officers in Serbia prided themselves on respecting local religion. They used Serbian women to inspect Muslim women for typhus. They viewed themselves as “apostles of civilization” (p. 230) and the overall tone of their actions was more moralistic and religious, than racial.

Unfortunately, by 1918 the prejudice of German and Austrian authorities against Polish Jews as carriers of typhus had increased to the point that refugees arriving in Vienna were held in concentration camps, under atrocious conditions that caused deaths among the inmates. Medical officers believed that Polish Jews constituted an epidemic risk, and the Reich authorities closed the borders to these workers. They were vilified as immoral, lazy, opportunistic, dirty and unreliable.

Beatrice Webb

2011-04-18T06:36:00.000-04:00

My Apprenticeship, AMS Press, New York, 1977 (reprint of the 1926 London edition published by Longmans, Green & Co.)

For Beatrice Webb (née Potter) the underlying controversy of life is the struggle between the Ego that affirms and the Ego that denies, and it is upon the course of this controversy that the attainment of inner harmony and consistent conduct in personal and public affairs rests. For Beatrice this debate was resolved into two questions: Can there be a science of social organization, analogous to mechanics or chemistry, that would enable mankind to forecast what will happen in society and allow us to alter those events. And, if there is such a science, is science all we need? Or do we also need religion? This book is a tentative attempt to answer those questions and describes her journey towards socialism, the Fabian Society and her marriage to Sidney Webb.

She concludes, finally, that society is a vast laboratory in which experiments in human relationships are constantly being carried out, consciously or unconsciously, and that to survive and prosper we should equip ourselves with the knowledge of how things happen. And that this knowledge can only be obtained by persistent research into the past and present behavior of humanity. But knowing how things happen does not settle the question of what ought to happen nor should it because, with regard to that question, science has no answer. Answering the question of ‘ought’ depends upon human values, which alter from society to society and over time.

For Beatrice, answering the question of ‘ought’ led her to socialism. Her research in the East End revealed to her the physical misery and moral debasement that was the legacy of the rack-renting landlord and the capitalist profit-maker of nineteenth-century commerce and industry. Some of these ills (low wages, long hours, unsanitary working conditions) she felt could be remedied by appropriate legislative action and pressure from the Trade Unions. This meant a move from early Victorian individualism to an all-pervading control, in the interest of the community, of the economic activities of landlords and capitalists.

But even if this regulation did succeed in alleviating the worst injustices of the capitalist system, there still must be some way to insure a minimum state of civilized existence for every citizen via some form of socialism that would provide public education, public health, public parks, and public provision for the elderly and the ill, and some form of support for the involuntarily unemployed, paid for out of rates and taxes.

To address what she considered the psychological evil of a society divided into the haves and have nots, or the rich and the poor, a schism that would not be remedied by a rise in wages as the United States demonstrated, she recommended an alternative to the modern business model based upon the co-operative movement. In the co-operative she saw the invention of a new type of industrial organization in which an industry was governed by the community of consumers for the common benefit of the consumers. To this organization she wished to add Trade Unions or professional societies, whose purpose it was to protect personal dignity and individual freedom by giving workers the means to participate in the administration of their trades and services.

Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain

2011-03-20T07:34:00.000-04:00

ed. by A. P. Donajgrodzki. London: Croom Helm, 1977
‘Social Police’ and the Bureaucratic Elite: A Vision of Order in the Age of Reform (pp. 51-76).

This book is a collection of essays concerned with the application of the concept of social control (borrowed from sociology) to the study of relationships between the classes in nineteenth century Britain. Although the contributors have different perspectives on social control, all share a fundamental assumption that social order is not only maintained through legal systems (police and prison) but is also expressed through a wide variety of social institutions, both formal and informal. The book purports to be the first collection of historical essays to make use of this concept.

The essay under consideration here, written by Donajgrodzki, is concerned with examining the common foundations in the thought of Hugh Tremenheere, a traditionalist, and Edwin Chadwick, a Benthamite (in fact he was Bentham’s amanuensis and a devoted adherent). Both men, he claims, approached the problems of social control from the perspective of social police. This perspective was characterized by the belief that it was a common morality that produced social order, so that any policy aimed at maintaining it would have to take into consideration not just the legal systems, but also religion, morality, education, leisure activities and even housing and public health. It further held that if left to themselves, the poor were liable to be led astray, that is they were normless. They are, perhaps, like a errant children, who do not know any better and must be guided in their moral development as well as in the everyday acts of life.

Donajgrodzki believes that the notion of social police may be an adaptation and intensification of pre-industrial beliefs about the proper relationship between the classes and the control of the poor. In some parts of the country civil authority was matched by ecclesiastical authority, and this permitted extensive scrutiny of the lives and behavior of the poor and the possibility of social control through the power and influence of the clergy. With industrialization the poor often gained some measure of economic independence, but this independence was not seen to carry over into a right for individualism, which was seen as incompatible with social order. Industrialization tended to intensify the feeling that the poor need to be guided and taught, and led to speculations about how this could best be achieved.

Hugh Seymour Tremenheere, the first mines inspector, was a traditionalist whose duties included both reporting on the technical aspects of mining and also on the state of the people in the mining districts. He felt that the way to maintain social order was to create a controlling and sustaining environment in which all factors, even the most trivial, were carefully considered. His was a theory of reciprocal obligation, employers had a moral obligation to their employees, and the interests of both were the same. He did not fear the intellectual and moral development of the poor and felt that it would contribute to social stability, because once they had been properly educated the poor would understand the nature of the proper relationship between themselves and the rich. Industry would thus play the leading role in creating the proper environment for the working poor, with the state merely ensuring that the socially destructive practices of industry was curtailed. The state should also contribute to the social welfare of the people by increasing the numbers of schools and staffing them with appropriate role models. He also wanted an increase in the number of clergy, seeing them as front line enforcers of proper social behavior.

Whereas Tremenheere approached the problem of social control from a paternalistic perspective, Chadwick approached it from a Benthamite one. They both saw order as being the product of a variety of social processes and thought that it was attainable only if the poor were watched over and guided. But Chadwick believed that harsher and more coercive measures of enforcement were as important as the benevolent provision of the proper environment. And unlike Tremenheere he felt that the state should take a much more active role in creating a systematic, humane and efficient social police. The role of the police was to include not just the apprehension of criminals but also the supervision of public leisure and the enforcement of public health measures. To offset their role as enforcers, police should also take on humanitarian and benevolent roles in a community, such as acting as fireman. He felt that Tremenheere placed too much emphasis on the role of the church and that he was not hard enough on the trade unions, whom Chadwick saw as a disruptive force. While he is often remembered for his advocation of state intervention, he was also enthusiastic about a paternalistic role for the industries for many of the same reasons that Tremenheere was.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

2011-02-21T08:13:00.000-05:00

Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired : Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press,1995.

As the subtitle of this book implies, it is about the role of black women in black health care. The time period under consideration, 1890-1950, was a time of legalized segregation, but it was also a time when the American welfare state was expanding. Unfortunately those benefits generally did not cross the color line. In response to this, and as part of the political agenda for black rights and equal access to government resources, black activists attempted to draw attention to black health issues.

The creation of a black health movement began as a private crusade instituted primarily by black club women. These women constructed the infrastructure of their communities through their work in religious and secular groups, groups that included not only church associations, but also female auxiliaries and women’s clubs. These clubs started day nurseries and kindergartens. They opened working girls’ homes in the North and the Midwest to help young black migrants from the South with housing, employment information, and moral instruction. But because segregation and racism prevented African Americans from getting even the most basic health care, these clubs focused most of their interest on public health work. Despite personnel and monetary limitations, they provided health education and some basic health services to impoverished communities and in Atlanta and Chicago they tried to provide African Americans with the same basic urban amenities that white communities received as a matter of course via tax-supported city services.

In 1915 these reform efforts became part of a national black health movement when Booker T. Washington launched a health education campaign from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This campaign, known as National Negro Health Week, was seen by black leaders and community organizers as a way for advancing the race through the promotion of black health education and cooperation across racial lines. The Tuskegee Institute served as the headquarters for the campaign until it was taken over in 1930 by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and turned into a year-round program.

In the 1930s the statistical information now available revealed the plight of black Americans in the form of higher mortality and morbidity rates as compared to the white population. Growing awareness of the problem among health officials did not necessarily lead to better health treatment for blacks, but rather led white officials to blame the African Americans themselves for their illness by saying that it was due to their behavior and, in the case of venereal disease, to their sexual immorality and promiscuity. In response to these accusations, the black leaders responded with the statement that a population was only as healthy as its sickest members and called for an end to racist practices and the integration of health services, seeing these measures as the only real solution for the health issues facing black Americans.

By the 1940s the medical civil rights movement arose as black health workers struggled to integrate hospitals and medical and nursing schools and associations. The effort was met by resistance within both the white and black communities. But in 1950 the USPHS pronounced the end of the National Negro Health Movement and the Office of Negro Health Work on the grounds that the nation was moving towards integration.

The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England

2011-01-30T08:34:00.000-05:00

by Paul Slack, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985

When he wrote this book Paul Slack (at the time a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Exeter College in Oxford) was more interested in the social response to the disease than in the disease itself, devoting almost half of the book to this subject. But he also realized that to understand the social response he needed to understand aspects of the disease itself, such as frequency of occurrence, which social groups and locales were affected and the mortality rates. The addressing of these questions occupies the first half of the book. The time period that he is covering, as indicated by the title, is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Part I of the book gives us an introduction to the disease and its manifestations, as well as an overview of its impact on society and the attitudes and actions that resulted. The cause of the plague was not known, and it was attributed to both natural and supernatural agents. Similarly, the treatment of it incorporated both natural and supernatural elements. Books and pamphlets were published that included both herbal remedies and prayers. Special sermons were preached during plague outbreaks, and sometimes plague fasts were held. Diagnosis was not exact and there were other diseases prowling the populations such as typhus, the sweating fever and malaria, leading to further confusion and uncertainty. The plague itself was manifested in several ways. There was the bubonic plague with its carbuncles, buboes and spots, which sometimes occurred in a mild form, without marked visible symptoms. A more deadly variant of the disease was septicaemic plague, in which the bacilli invaded the blood stream, causing death before the external symptoms of plague had time to appear. A third variety is pneumonic plague, which may begin as a case of bubonic plague that becomes complicated by pneumonia. This latter variant changes the disease vector from fleas to humans as the bacteria is coughed out in the sputum of the victims and inhaled by the people around them. It was highly contagious, had a shorter incubation period than bubonic plague, and left untreated was almost 100 percent fatal.

Along with the fear and uncertainty that an outbreak of plague invoked, it also placed a much more practical strain on the society in the loss of its members, sometimes in large numbers (a quarter to a third of a town’s population). This depressed the economy as well as straining the infrastructure as those as yet untouched by the disease struggled to deal with the dead bodies that needed to be disposed of as quickly as possible. Knowledge of the plague was passed down essentially unchanged from the time of the Black Death. The first medical book printed in English was a Little Book on plague, published in 1486 probably as a result of an outbreak of the sweating sickness. Outbreaks of diseases often seemed to inspire the printing of books on the plague, and in the second half of the sixteenth century a growing number of them were religious tracts and sermons.

Part II of the book examines the frequency and severity of outbreaks using parish records and the number of wills probated as indicators of the presence of plague. Slack examines the records of Essex and Devon counties in an attempt to understand what kinds of communities were most likely to be affected by the plague. From there he moves on to the urban settings of Exeter, Bristol and Norwich and then to the metropolitan setting of London. From his case studies in the counties of Essex and Devon he draws two conclusions: 1) bubonic plague could cause a greater number of mortalities in a shorter time span than any other epidemic disease; and 2) that most communities suffered at least one epidemic during the course of a century and were lucky if they did not suffer more. The risk was generally greater in towns than in rural areas, although living in the country was not a guarantee of safety.

He finds a more consistent picture when he examines the records of Exeter, Bristol and Norwich. Although they differ in the timing and severity of the epidemics in all three cities the occurrence of plague was connected with the economic and social conditions of the communities. Plague was a part of urban life. It was a regular visitor to all three cities. It struck Norwich in 1544, 1554, 1579, 1584 and 1589. The frequency and severity in Norwich may be due to the fact of its nearness to the Low Countries and its large immigrant population. It struck Bristol in 1565 and 1575 and Exeter in 1570 and 1590. It tended to be concentrated in fringe parishes that were primarily inhabited by poor laborers. In urban areas the occurrence of plague had a definite social dimension.

By the sixteenth century London had already gained a reputation as being filthy and plague was seldom completely absent from it. The best records come from the city itself in the bills of mortality that it published in the seventeenth century. These documented not only the number of deaths but also their locations, making possible the charting of the progress of the disease through the city. A fresh outbreak would often begin, as would be expected, in the east, near the river and the docks, although that was not always the case. Once again, the most affected parishes were on the fringes of the city where the poor resided.

Part III of the book examines the social reactions to the plague and the actions that resulted. The strategies to battle the plague began in London as part of the government’s general pursuit of social policies that might benefit the common man and improve social order. England lagged behind other countries in their adoption of measures to control the spread of plague and often simply adopted and adapted strategies already in use abroad. In 1518 Cardinal Wolsey founded the College of Physicians to improve English medical care, which also marked the beginning of public policy regarding plague. Those policies primarily focused upon separating out the infected to pesthouses or shutting them up in their own homes. Neither policy was rigorously enforced, the former because of the cost of establishing and running pesthouses and the latter in part because of the humanitarian issues raised and in part because of the difficulty of enforcing the isolation. It was much better to prevent the outbreak of plague itself, and to that end quarantines were enforced on ships and goods arriving from areas where a plague outbreak was known to have occurred.

The publication of the bills of mortality in London documented for all to see the incidence and location of plague deaths. The advent of newspapers helped to spread this information outside of the city. This unprecedented supply of information allowed patterns of infection to be seen and helped to rationalize the reactions to plague, at least among the educated. Although the carriers of the plague were not identified and without a germ theory of disease its cause remained unknown it did help to destroy the claims of its supernatural origins.

Plague broke down the social order, existing divisions were often exacerbated. The people resisted the efforts of the officials to impose plague regulations because they saw them to be as threatening as the disease itself. The public resisted the imposition of the regulations and the plague rate rose, which led the government to go to greater and greater lengths to enforce them. While the public were concerned with the suffering of themselves and their fellows, the officials were concerned with maintaining order, and they viewed the plague as part of the broader problem of poverty.

Mission and Method

2011-01-09T08:39:00.000-05:00

The early nineteenth-century French public health movement
Ann F. La Berge, Cambridge University Press, 1992

Drawing from official archives, this book is more a history of institutions than it is of the people who were affected by those institutions. Instead it focuses on a select group of men who served on the Paris health council and as editors of the Annales d’hygiéne publique et de médecine légale and how they created and institutionalized the idea of public health and hygiene, as well as how they put those ideas into practice through their work on health councils, in their publications and in their investigations.

Public health measures have generally been dominated by two different missions, emergency measures whose primary purpose is to deal with epidemics and regulations for dealing with public nuisances and waste disposal. The former measures were usually temporary, enforced only in times of crisis, and the latter measures were applied mainly to larger towns and cities, where the higher population density made such regulations a necessity. The idea of public health prominent in late-eighteenth-century France was dominated by an Enlightenment approach that emphasized progress, rational reform, education, natural law, empiricism and humanitarianism. It included preventive medicine as well as practices aimed at improving the quality of life, and reducing mortality and morbidity.

While it had its foundation in the Enlightenment, the public health movement developed amidst the competing ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism and statism, with liberalism and statism dominating. The liberals wanted a minimal amount of state intervention, preferring solutions that were local and individual with the private practice of medicine, while the statists felt that the state should assume the primary role in public health reform and management and that public health experts should serve as advisors to the state, even proposing a medical civil service. The debate between liberalism and statism took place within the context of scientism, the idea that science was the key to progress and that the scientific approach was the best way to achieve positive knowledge.

During the Revolution the national government had accepted responsibility for national health, and both Napoleon and the Bourbons had continued the tradition. By the 1820s several public health programs were in place including a nationwide vaccination program, a national health care program of both epidemic physicians and health officers, a national administration of sanitation and a Royal Academy of Medicine to replace the Royal Society of Medicine. There were institutions at the national level as well as at the local level with municipal and departmental health councils. There also arose the idea of a public hygienist. These were not simply physicians, but rather physicians who were willing to practice empirical science in order to understand the causes of disease and death, who would undergo special training for their job and who would work in cooperation with other specialists including chemists and engineers.

A major component of the mission of public hygienists was to investigate all possible causes of disease and death and to make recommendations for their solution. In the process they encountered a wide range of health problems and issues. Not only were they involved in sanitary reform and ensuring the purity of food and drink, but they also examined more complicated social welfare issues such as prostitution, wet nursing, foundlings and child labor laws. Their approach to such problems varied but they all recommended regulation, inspection, and legislation to help improve public health.

They were aided in their work by the existence of the Annales d’hygiéne publique et de médecine légale, which was unique to France. It was the first journal in the West devoted to public health and legal medicine. In it ideas were exchanged and research published. The journal also reviewed or published most of the major French works on public hygiene and served as an international forum on public health issues, including the coverage of foreign developments and publications. This commitment to promoting and publishing their ideas was also mirrored by their educational efforts at the local level. Because many programs were voluntary (vaccination against small pox, for example), their effectiveness depended upon the public understanding the advantages of compliance and the public hygienists were instrumental in that education process by providing reports of their benefits that were based on more scientific foundations.

This period also saw the application of statistics to the effort to understand the contributing factors of disease and death, if not their causes. Louis-René Villermé did extensive statistical studies of Paris and his findings linking poverty and death contributed to the notion of death as a social disease.

Health Reform in 19th Century America

2010-11-27T08:13:00.000-05:00

Ronald Numbers, Prophetess of health : Ellen G. White and the origins of the Seventh-Day Adventist health reform, Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, 1992

Ellen G. White is one of four nineteenth-century founders of a major American religious sect (the others are: Joseph Smith - Mormon, Mary Baker Eddy - Christian Science and Charles Taze Russell - Jehovah’s Witnesses), but she is not widely known outside of her church. Yet when she died in 1915 she left behind a legacy that consisted not only of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but also sanitariums and hospitals located throughout the world. She also inspired an educational system that is still highly regarded, traveled, lectured, and wrote dozens of books. She was born Ellen Gould Harmon, along with her twin sister Elizabeth, on November 26, 1827.

Her influence sprang from the visions that she began experiencing in 1844, when she was seventeen. These trances lasted anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, and during them she received messages about events both in the future and the past, heavenly and earthly. These visions were accepted as genuine revelations from God, and her followers (with her encouragement) regarded her as a true prophetess on a par with the prophets of the Bible.

On June 5, 1863, in Otsego, Michigan, she received her vision regarding health, in which God revealed to her the hygienic laws that should be followed by Seventh-day Adventists. They were to give up eating meat and other stimulating food, neither drink alcohol nor use tobacco, and avoid medical drugs. When they were sick they were supposed to rely on the remedies of Nature, including fresh air, sunshine, rest, proper diet, exercise and water. Women were to cease wearing the fashionable clothing of the time (including hoop skirts and corsets) and wear “short” skirts and pantaloons. Followers were also supposed to curb their “animal passions” (masturbation was an especial evil leading to deformity of mind and body, not to mention spirit).

Health reform was not new. In the early nineteenth century, America was not a healthy or hygienic place. Americans ate too much meat and not enough vegetables and fruits. Their food was heavy with grease and fats, and they drank too much Brazilian coffee. Public sanitation was horribly inadequate, and personal hygiene wasn’t much better. Most Americans seldom, if ever, bathed.

In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham launched a full-blown health crusade. In the summer of 1830 the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits invited him to come and lecture under its auspices. He accepted and was soon giving lectures featuring his scientific and moral arguments against consumption of alcohol. Reverend William Metcalfe was also preaching in Philadelphia at this time. He was the author of the first American tract on vegetarianism and had brought his English congregation over in 1817 and established the vegetarian Bible Christian Church. Graham added the vegetarianism to his lectures on temperance. In 1831 he broke away from the Society and was lecturing at the Franklin Institute on a broad range of topics including proper diet and the control of the passions. The 1832 cholera epidemic thrust Graham and his health reforms into the spotlight.

Another reformer, important partly because he was associated with the Millerites (as was Ellen White) and also because her reforms mirror many of his, was Larkin B. Coles. His claim to health reform fame lie in two books: Philosophy of Health: Natural Principles of Health and Cure and The Beauties and Deformities of Tobacco-Using. His view of health reform was a moralistic one, and was not unique among health reformers. But both Cole and White saw obedience to these laws of health mainly as a requirement for entry into heaven rather than as a means for living a more enjoyable and healthy life on earth.

Science as a Social Construct

2010-11-13T06:53:00.001-05:00

Douglas, Mary. “Environments at Risk” in Science in Context, Barry Barnes & David Edge, eds. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1982 (pp. 260-75)

Science in Context is a collection of essays focusing on the sociology of science. The purpose of the collection, as stated in the General Introduction, is to “provide a tolerable indication of what is going on in the sociology of science, and, more importantly, of what kind of social activity science is, and what its significance is.” The primary focus of the collection is on the relationship between the sub-culture of science and the wider culture that surrounds it, especially as it relates to science as a source of knowledge and competence and as a cognitive authority for evaluating knowledge claims.

Central to the ideas of sociology of science are the writings of Thomas Kuhn, especially his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. From Kuhn, sociologists of science have concluded that science is a social construct, and that even statements of scientific fact have a conventional character. Because it is constructed and not intrinsic to the natural world, they conclude that it cannot be self-sustaining, and if it cannot be self-sustaining in the sub-culture of science, then neither can it be self-sustaining in mainstream culture. There is nothing in science that implicitly reveals its correctness and so its standing in society depends upon the degree of trust and authority with which society imbues scientists and institutions.

In her essay, Mary Douglas examines the issue of credibility in the context of the ecology movement. She is concerned with how beliefs arise and how they gain support. The approach she takes is of the anthropologist from Mars, an hypothetical being that is agnostic when it comes to beliefs about the Earth’s environment. In her view this suspension of belief is what allows us to confront the fundamental question of credibility. She asserts that civilizations throughout history have viewed their environments to be at risk, although the risks they identified were generally not the same, but she claims that all civilizations pin responsibility for the crisis in the same way. The environment is put at risk by human folly, hate and greed.

In the present, however, we have an added factor: self-knowledge. Because we can compare our beliefs with those of others we lose the filtering mechanism that those earlier civilizations possessed. We no longer have anything to restrict our perception of the sources of knowledge. Credibility is easier in a limited belief system, but how do you determine credibility when opposing sides of an issue both make sense? This is the question confronting environmentalists in our age.

Through various anthropological examples she endeavors to show that the credibility of a belief regarding how the environment will react to human action depends upon the moral commitment of the community to a particular set of institutions. For example, bison do not like fratricide (murder within the tribe), so such an act endangers the well-being of the tribe and as a result has special sanctions. So long as the institutions in question maintain the loyalty of the community, nothing can overthrow the beliefs that support those institutions. If those institutions lose the support of the community, she claims that the beliefs are easily changed. A particular view of the universe and the society holding that view are thus interdependent. They form a single system and neither can exist without the other. Any given environment that we know thus exists as a structure of meaningful distinctions.

In this credibility debate the role of laymen and social scientists is to examine the sources of our own bias. Because we lack the moral consensus that gives credibility to ecological warnings we do not listen to the scientists. Similarly, because we lack a discriminating principle we are easily overwhelmed by our pollution fears. This discriminating principle comes from social structures and it allows a culture to select which dangers it will fear and also to set up a belief system that will address those dangers. Without that structure we are prey to every dread and right and wrong cease to exist. This is the price of full self-consciousness, but it is a price that she feels we must pay. When we do that the classifications of social life will be gone and we will recognize that every environment is simply a mask and support structure for a certain kind of society. Understanding both the nature and value of that society is as important as understanding the sources and nature of the pollution that puts our environment at risk.

Mary Douglas deliberately picks an area of science where our understanding is incomplete and in which the debate over competing theories has become politically charged. Consensus is not the final arbiter of a scientific theory or hypothesis. Unfortunately in the case of the environment politicians and advocates have created a situation where that is the level at which the discussion of the various theories and hypotheses is taking place.

Michael Kater, "Doctors under Hitler", Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

2010-11-01T05:14:00.002-04:00

This monograph is a sociohistorical study of the medical profession under the Third Reich and rests on the author’s previous work analyzing doctors and medicine from Wilhelm II to Hitler. It draws upon documents in the Federal Archive of Koblenz and the Berlin Document Center. Primary material was also drawn from the student archive in Würzburg and other regional West German archives. He also drew on the papers of the former panel physicians’ association, the KVD, as well as the predominant professional journals and memoirs of physicians that lived beyond 1945.

At the dawn of the Third Reich, in 1933, there was a surplus of physicians, inherited from the republican era. These doctors were at first hopeful that the new regime would address issues left over from the health administration of the Weimar Republic, but their hopes were not fulfilled. Under the republic medical graduates had to spend three years as an assistant in a hospital where they were poorly paid, and forbidden to seek other sources of income. Establishing themselves as independent practitioners was almost impossible for a doctor straight out of medical school. One of the complaints lodged by spokesmen for this group was that medical institutions should stop advertising junior positions for bachelors only. They also emphasized that, after public school teachers, high school teachers, and jurists, they represented the fourth largest group of academically trained professionals born after 1900.

But under the Third Reich, the medical profession became a microcosm of the larger Nazi sociopolitical system, governed by the Nazi leadership principle and redefined in National Socialist terms. Physicians now had to present every private contractual arrangement to the Reich Physicians’ Chamber for approval, register with the Nazi medical agencies and keep them informed of any changes in their family status or medical qualifications. They also had to report on their patients. All serious cases of alcoholism, ‘incurable’ hereditary or congenital illness (i.e. imbecilism) and highly contagious diseases such as venereal disorders were recorded and reported to the appropriate authority.

The doctors themselves were required to undergo continued training. Partly this was to break down the distinction between general practitioners and medical specialists, but it was also to teach them National Socialist concepts of health and medicine. The unpopularity of these courses was perhaps offset by another change in their profession implemented by the Nazi legislators, its redefinition. By stating that the medical occupation was not a business, the Reich Physicians’ Chamber was able to exclude anyone who was not properly schooled or licensed.

This did not do away with medical quacks, however, for the Nazi conception of medicine favored the lay element over ‘school’ medicine. Instead they created a new class titled “physician of natural healing” open to anyone who could demonstrate the requisite ability. Anyone in this group with extraordinary talent could enter a medical facility without the usual professional medical qualification, and could even receive a license as a doctor medici. The Nazis further required that regular doctors had to assist registered lay healers at the latter’s request.

Under the Third Reich medicine became the preeminent academic discipline, with approximately 30 percent of all university faculty being composed of medical teachers by 1935. Medical faculty also became dominant in university power politics. Between 1933 and 1945 the percentage of medical faculty serving as rectors increased from 36 to 59 percent. Along with this increase in power and significance there was the establishment of a new discipline that became a part of the medical curriculum after 1933, Rassenkunde or Rassenhygiene, race hygiene or eugenics. This ‘science’ consisted of three parts: anthropological, sociological, and medical, and its goal was to improve the superior race, while eliminating the inferior ones.

Kater thus links the professionalization of medicine in the Third Reich with its corruption. West German doctors saw these events as a struggle between the forces of freedom and democracy against the totalitarianism of the Nazi regime. A battle which the latter eventually won. East German doctors, on the other hand, saw these events as the result of a premeditated conspiracy between fascist-minded German doctors and Nazi political leaders. Kater feels that the truth is somewhere in between, but that it lies closer to the East German perspective, than the West German one.

Treating the Disease vs Treating the Patient

2010-10-10T14:15:00.010-04:00

While I was pursuing my History of Science studies at Notre Dame I took a seminar course on Medicine and Society. My last two posts are from that class. I came to hate that class and it was a large factor in my decision to drop out of the program, but I did learn some important lessons during it. The crux of the message that the professor was trying to get across to us was the way that the medical profession dehumanizes the patient and ends up treating the disease, and not the human being. If you want to see this message in a very disturbing but highly distilled form just watch the film "Wit" with Emma Thompson.

This lesson was reinforced for me this past week when I had to rush home to Ohio because my father was in the hospital. He went in for something relatively minor but ended up in the hospital for a week being treated for another condition. A condition that was due, in part, at least, to actions taken by the hospital staff in their treatment of his original issue. I am not saying that the staff was malicious in their treatment, but they were aggressive and interventionist, so that rather than assuming that the change in his condition might be due to the drugs they had given him they kept chasing symptoms. It quickly became apparent that the treatment was reactive - x happened, so they did y, without ever really trying to understand the whole picture, the patient. In the end my father spent a week in the hospital and underwent a procedure that was probably not really necessary.

It is hard challenging the medical profession when you are a patient, they are so authoritative, and when there is something wrong you get swept up into their treatment course and it takes over your life. I saw this myself when I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. I tried hard to be an informed patient and question the treatment but there was one week in which I had a CAT scan, a PET scan and two biopsies. Everything checked out as fine, but that week was quite an ordeal, both physically and emotionally. My oncologist's conclusion after all of that was that if you did tests and scans you will always find something that is odd, and if you let yourself, you will chase these oddities for quite some time before concluding that while odd, they are not dangerous or unhealthy. My oncologist now uses me as a poster child for not doing more than is necessary. He still feels bad about putting me through that ordeal.

There is a lot of debate going on right now about how to fix the health care system. Well, one of the things they should do is treat the patient, not the disease. One of the hardest things about being a doctor is the process of diagnosis (this is actually a place where expert systems could be useful) and rather than being thoughtful or logical about ordering tests they just order a whole suite of them. It is as if they are throwing a whole bunch of darts at a dart board in the dark, hoping that one of them hits the target. That is simply not a rational or cost effective approach to treatment. It isn't good for society and it isn't good for the patient.

Demographics

2010-10-10T09:56:00.000-04:00

Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940
Simon Szreter, Cambridge University Press, 1996

In the early part of the 20th century there was a growing awareness of a declining birthrate in the industrialized nations. In Austro-Hungary and France the birth rate in some rural areas had begun to decline substantially during the 18th century, with similar declines taking place among the aristocratic and bourgeois groups as early as the 17th century. In 1945 a theory of demographic transition was published. It proposed three stages of demographic development: an initial pre-industrial stage of high birth rates and high death rates, an industrial phase of high birth rates and declining death rates (leading to substantial population growth) and a post-industrial phase of low birth rates and low death rates.

This theory was based upon a single case, that of Britain. It utilized the findings of the 1911 census, which analyzed the fertility patterns of the British population from 1851-1911 and the newly released study conducted for the Royal Commission on Population that covered the period 1901-1946. The 1911 census used what has become known as the professional model of social classification in which all male occupations are assigned to one of five grades (professional upper and middle class, intermediate, skilled workers, intermediate, unskilled workers). The 1911 census analysis found that the higher the social class, the earlier and more rigorously it controlled its fertility.

This classification scheme was based upon three assumptions: 1) the occupation of the male head of household was the best way to classify families; 2) a primary division existed between the higher-status non-manual occupations (they were more professional) and the lower-status manual occupations (assessed according to skill) and 3) the fact that a single hierarchical social grading system was a valid classification scheme. It should be noted that this scheme excludes women and their labor, both paid and unpaid. It should also be noted that those living off private means, and thus listing no personal occupation, were classified alongside paupers in a residual category, labeled the unproductive class.

In 1869 Francis Galton published Heredity Genius in which he examined the families of ‘eminent men’ in England in an effort to determine the heritability of both mental and physical qualities. He went on to coin the term eugenics in 1884. By the end of the 19th century there was widespread concern that modern society was reversing evolution, leading to the degeneration of the English people. This was partly driven by an increase in the recorded rates of lunacy from 2.26/10,000 in 1807 to 29.26/10,000 in 1890, (Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain c. 1870-1959). By the first decade of the 20th century mental defectives became defined as the central eugenic threat facing the nation. Greater social awareness plus universal education led to the growing realization of the presence of mentally deficient people in the population. This heightened awareness coincided with growing fears about the fitness of the population. In 1907 the Eugenics Education Society was formed.

During the period 1875-1883, the Anthropometric Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science provided an hereditary basis for the professional model. The professional model thus acquired the status of an empirically tested theory. Despite the fact that it was based upon unexamined social conventions it had been turned into a naturalistic theory of British society’s essential structure.

In the beginning of the 20th century an environmentalist counter movement emerged opposing the ideas of the eugenicists that the poor were poor because of the way they were, rather than because of social or environmental factors. At the forefront of this movement were the Fabians who, although they shared a nationalistic interpretation of social Darwinism with the hereditarian biometricians, did not agree with them as to the causes or the appropriate political means to achieve the optimal nation. They held that poverty was not the manifestation of inherited biological deficiencies but rather that the environment was responsible for the moral and material degradation of the working man.

The Anatomy Act

2010-09-26T08:39:00.001-04:00

Death, Dissection and the Destitute
by Ruth Richardson, Penguin Books, 1988, 426 pp., appendices, notes, bibliography, index.

In 1518, the College of Physicians was founded to improve the state of medical knowledge in England, but improvements were hampered by one very simple fact: the lack of human bodies for dissection. In 1540, the companies of Barbers and Surgeons were united by Royal Charter and Henry VIII granted them the rights to the bodies of four hanged felons per year. Charles II increased that number to six. But these dissections were ostensibly public affairs and were part of the sentence inflicted upon the criminals. Thus, from the start, dissection was seen in the public eye as a punishment for criminals and as a defilement of the corpse, not as a means of gaining medical knowledge.

This shortfall in supply was made up by one very simple solution, robbing graves. This was done either by disinterring freshly buried corpses, or by waylaying the bodies before they were buried. Work houses, charity hospitals and asylums were favorite sources as their occupants were poor, indigent or had no relatives to claim their bodies. The supplying of anatomists and surgeons with bodies sometimes involved the collusion of grave diggers, sextons, administrators at the facilities mentioned, undertakers and even clergy.

The men who plied this trade were called resurrectionists. Grave robbing was not a crime, per se, since the body was not considered property. While a man could be hung for poaching, he would not be hung for stealing a dead body, unless he also stole the personal effects of the corpse. It was a lucrative business and it is perhaps not entirely surprising that at some point some one would see the advantage of using the anatomists as a means of disposing of murder victims. The most celebrated case was that of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh.

Mrs. Hare was the owner of a cheap lodging house in which an elderly man died while still owing her money. To pay off this debt, Burke and Hare sold him to an anatomist for £7.10s. When another lodger fell very ill, Burke and Hare eased him on his way and sold his body for £10. In all they killed 16 people before they were discovered, and introduced a new verb into the English vocabulary: to burke. Burke was hung and dissected on 28 January 1829, Hare turned King’s evidence and was spared, and the anatomist to whom they sold the bodies, Knox, was never charged.

The first Anatomy Bill (Bill for preventing the Unlawful Disinterment of Human Bodies, and for Regulating Schools of Anatomy) was submitted to Parliament by Henry Warburton on 12 March 1829. It did not pass, partly because of its length, the fact that it used the word dissection and because it obviously singled out the poor as the primary source of bodies. In 1831 Bishop and Williams, the London Burkers, were discovered. They had been supplying bodies to schools for some time when they decided to help matters along. They confessed to killing three people before their trial, although on the eve of their execution on 5 December 1831, Williams supposedly confessed that the number was closer to sixty.

Warburton introduced his second Anatomy Bill ten days after their execution. This one was called simply A Bill for Regulating Schools of Anatomy, and the word dissection had been replaced with the phrase anatomical examination. It was shorter than his previous bill and though it still targeted the poor, it did not do so directly. It merely said that unless you or your executor or other lawful party expressly forbid it, your body was liable to undergo anatomical examination. It was eventually passed, but it did little to increase the supply of legitimate bodies. For the most part it simply cut out the middle man of the resurrectionist.

In this book, Ruth Richardson has given us a detailed social and political history of the events leading up to and surrounding the Anatomy Act using numerous primary sources including government documents, official reports, pamphlets and newspapers. She links it with a general change in attitudes towards the poor, culminating in the New Poor Laws, and stigmatizing poverty by connecting their deaths with a fate that had previously been reserved for criminals. She claims that it also lead to a societal fear among the poor of the pauper’s funeral, helping to spur the growth of burial clubs and friendly societies. In addition, the connection of work houses as suppliers of anatomists lead to a general mistrust of these institutions. Other factors that are mentioned are the corruption and nepotism of the Royal College of Surgeons, the establishment of the Lancet by Thomas Wakley as a means of promulgating medical knowledge and as a vehicle for medical reform and the role of the Benthamites in the passing of the Anatomy Act itself.

David Noble - America by Design

2010-09-18T07:46:00.000-04:00

A neo-Mumfordian, Noble enlists science in the conspiracy of Big Money in taking over the world and turning us all into parts of their machine, whose sole motives are profit and power.

C. Hamlin & P. Shepard - Deep Disagreement in U.S. Agriculture

2010-09-18T07:45:00.000-04:00

As we watch policy debates, and technology debates, and all the debates on environmental issues, the question arises: how can we ever hope to resolve all of these differences? How can we ever find a solution that will satisfy all the parties concerned? This book presents a method for doing just that.

By creating a neutral ground, and translating between the various interest groups in a disagreement, academics can enable a rational dialogue between the parties concerned that might actually lead to mutual understanding and maybe even a solution.

Bruno Latour, Aramis

2010-09-12T09:19:00.000-04:00

When a technology fails, how do we explain what happened? How do we understand what happened? In Aramis Latour uncovers the multiple narratives that underlie failure, and perhaps, by implication, success.

Among the themes that he addresses are the sexuality of technology. Latour wants to refute the idea that the theory of evolution can be applied to scientific progress, which assumes that later technology is an improvement over earlier technology and that it better meets/serves the needs of “the environment” (i.e., humanity).

He also advocates heterogeneous engineering in which major social questions concerning the spirit of the age or the century and “properly” technological questions are blended into a single discourse. This leads to the notion of translation, in which a global problem is transformed into a local problem through a chain of intermediaries that are not “logical” in the formal sense.

In addition, in order for a project to succeed, an engineer has to stimulate interest and convince the public. They must market innovation and technology. All of which leads to the question: is technological reality rational? Consumers, like technology, are invented, displaced, and translated through chains of interest.

He recommends two kinds of charts to help understand technology: sociograms, which chart human interests and translations; and technograms, which chart nonhuman interests and translations. Both people and technology (human and nonhuman actors) are alike in that just as you have to compromise when dealing with a number of people, so you have to compromise when integrating any new technology.

But one of the problems of an innovative project is that the number of actors that needs to be taken into account are not known from the beginning. If you don’t have enough actors, the project loses reality, if you have too many actors, the project becomes over-complicated and will probably fail.

Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (1991)

2010-09-09T06:27:00.000-04:00

Jerry Mander is asking “what happened to the future?” and challenging the idea that advances in technology equates to progress and that this is a good thing.

He defines a minimally successful society as one that:
    1) keeps its population healthy, peaceful and contented;
    2) has sufficient food, shelter, and a sense of participation in a shared community experience;
    3) permits and encourages access to the collective wisdom and knowledge of the society and whose members have a spiritually and emotionally satisfying existence.

Mander wants to encourage awareness, care and respect for the earth’s life support system.

But while technology has given us an improved standard of living, with greater speed, greater choice, greater leisure, greater luxury (bigger, better, faster, more), we haven’t eliminated poverty or crime and we don’t even have universal education. So, while our society may be a material success, it doesn’t work. And, even worse, the technological advances that have made this all possible have led to environmental degradation, but no one (except Mander?) seems to be questioning the price of technology.

In response, Mander wants to challenge what he calls the Pro-Technology Paradigm that is characterized by:
    1) dominance of best-case scenarios
    2) the pervasiveness and invisibility of technology
    3) the limitations of the personal view - we don’t see the wider effects of our tools, only how they help us
    4) the inherent appeal of the machine - its flash and promise
    5) the assumption that technology is neutral and the idea of a scientific priesthood - nuclear power leads to autocratic systems, while solar energy leads to democratic systems (centralized power vs. distributed power)

Philip Scranton, “Determinism and Indeterminacy in Science & Technology”

2010-08-31T06:04:00.000-04:00

Does Technology Drive History: the Dilemma of Technological Determinism (1994)

How do we write the history of science and technology? If we set aside technological determinism than we must also abandon the idea that changes and shifts in technology govern the restructuring of social formations and organizations or of cultural practices. So how do we capture the dynamics of the interactions of science and society without resorting to new reductionisms that substitute a new universal for an old one? Neither can we assume that technical change represents a unified process.

Deterministic approaches to the history of technology have meant that the situational links between technical changes and social and political relations have often been left unspecified and under-investigated, because technological determinism insulates technological change from extra-technical initiatives. But once we move past linear and reductionist accounts of technological change we can begin to fill in some of the gaps and silences of the history of technology and science. Gaps such as non-Western concepts of technology and technical practice, technical-environmental relations, technologies of sexuality and family limitation, or to technologies of the management of the incarcerated or the dead.

It is Scranton’s belief “that technological change proceeds in the absence of overarching rationalities; that it proceeds along multiple coexistent trajectories; that links between technical change and sociopolitical relations are intimate and underspecified; and that stepping beyond reductionist teleologies reveals an array of intriguing silences in the history of technology.” (p. 163)

Daniel Boorstein - The Americans: The Democratic Experience

2010-07-04T09:06:00.000-04:00

The meta-narrative: that the century following the Civil War was an Age of Revolution in which the meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future was being continually revised. It was a century in which a new democratic world was being invented and discovered by Americans.

This is the story of how we got to where we are. The creation of the everywhere community. Mass production, chain stores, suburbia, everywhere you go, there you are. The same commodities, the same merchandisers. The same television shows, the same radio shows. The homogenization, the democratization of American society. For Boorstein it is a good thing. Remember those Popular Science reels that showed us what the future was going to be like? The glorification of the gadget, gee whiz science.

But by the end even Boorstein seems a little out of breath. The pace of scientific and technical progress has become so fast, is it out of our control? Has it become its own power?

Edelstein, Michael - Contaminated Communities - 1988

2010-06-27T08:28:00.000-04:00

The aim of this book is to identify the major social and psychological impacts that stem from residential toxic exposure and to examine their significance. Edelstein bases his analysis on four postulates: 1) that the social and psychological impacts of toxic exposure involve complex interactions among the different levels of society as well as differing across time and with environmental context; 2) that these impacts affect how the victim behaves and how they understand their lives both in the short and long term; 3) that toxic exposure incidents are traumatic and invoke coping responses in their victims; and 4) that contamination is inherently stigmatizing and the very possibility of such contamination arouses fear in the public.

Toxic exposure undermines the very fabric of society. It leads to a loss of trust, the inversion of the home (formerly seen as a safe haven, now hopelessly poisoned), a sense of a loss of control in one’s personal life and over the present and the future, a different relationship to and assessment of the environment (now seen as dangerous, and insidious in it’s dangers) and a pessimistic attitude towards one’s expectations about health. It places the adults in contaminated families under a great deal of stress as they become isolated and stigmatized by their contamination and it teaches children to fear.

Toxic victims also become absorbed by government agencies and bureaucracies that threaten the victim’s social identity. This is compounded by the fact that the government’s aims and values may not be the same as the values of the victim’s, especially with regard to acceptable risk, which has more to do with economic and political forces. The regulator’s, on the other hand, have their own restrictions that they operate under. They are bound by regulations, political realities and limited resources.

Toxic contamination in other communities leads to anticipatory fear in communities as yet untouched, resulting in the “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) response, which serves to articulate citizens’ frustration over the manner by which projects are sited. It arises, in part, from the failure of the regulators to take the psychosocial impact of these facilities seriously. The citizens, seeing no room for compromise in the response of the regulators, regard the situation as an all-or-nothing, win-or-lose, battle.

One of the lessons that Edelstein draws from his study is the engineering fallacy, which involves the assumption that problems can be solved in isolation, away from the complicating factors and uncertainties of the real world. If we narrow a problem enough, it will be controllable, and solvable. He points out Bateson’s 1972 book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind as a source for an alternative method to that of traditional science and engineering. In this approach, any learning is done within a context. Called metalearning, it seeks to recognize the context of a problem, rather than deduce and isolate it.

Wynne, Brian “Misunderstood misunderstandings” (pp. 19-46)

2010-05-23T08:53:00.000-04:00

Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science & Technology (1996)

A case study of hill sheep-farmers of the Lake District of northern England that were affected not only by Chernobyl, but also the nuclear reactors at Sellafield (formerly Windscale). Wynne examines the interplay between social and cultural identities, especially those of the sheep-farmers, as they see themselves threatened by the scientists interventions. What is revealed is arrogance on the part of the scientists who discount the local knowledge of the sheep-farmers, even when that knowledge is essential to understanding the scientific issue at hand, namely radioactive contamination.

The relationship between the scientists and the sheep-farmers is further undermined by the lack of full disclosure on the part of the scientists, and also by the changing assertions of the scientists. At first they said there would be no effects from Chernobyl, but six weeks later (20 June 1986) the Minister for Agriculture announced a ban on sheep sales and movement in several of the affected areas. Once the scientists had admitted the contamination, they insisted that the initially high cesium levels would fall soon, but their predictions were based upon a false scientific model. Their model was based upon empirical data of alkaline clay soils, not the acid peaty soil found in these upland areas.

The degree of certainty that the scientists expressed in their statements denied the ability of the farmers to cope with ignorance and lack of control, and the degree of standardization of knowledge denied the variation of the conditions in the region from their models and even from farm to farm. We thus see scientists inappropriately applying their specialized knowledge and not acknowledging the specialized knowledge of the sheep-farmers, but where the farmers were willing to work with the scientists, the scientists did not seem to be willing to work with the farmers.

The distrust that the farmers soon came to have for the scientists, and then for the government that was employing them, also caused the farmers to question the government’s assertions about Sellafield. The scientists asserted that contamination from Chernobyl could be distinguished from contamination due to Sellafield, thus making Chernobyl a convenient cover or scape goat for previous misdeeds. As the distrust grows you transition from considering the scientists merely as arrogant, to thinking that maybe there has been some kind of coverup or conspiracy, all of which only serves to further undermine the public’s trust and understanding of science.

Wynne sees the conflict as one between social identities, both groups, the scientists and the sheep-farmers, have their identity threatened by the other. These sorts of conflicts bring to light the whole issue of knowledge systems and the problems that arise when formal knowledge systems interact with informal ones. The formal knowledge systems often don’t know how to acknowledge or understand the informal knowledge systems because the former have a hard time quantifying the latter. The problem may simply be one of communication, these two types of knowledge systems simply may not speak the same language, or, even worse, they may speak the same language but mean subtly different things.

B. Campbell - “Uncertainty as Symbolic Action in Disputes among Experts” - Social Studies of Science 15 (1985): 429-53

2010-05-16T15:06:00.000-04:00

Campbell claims that uncertainty does not cause controversy because the content of scientific knowledge is a social construction. Therefore uncertainty is something that is negotiated, discussed and argued about. He further argues that the adequacy of empirical evidence thus becomes a prop in the social negotiations that occur over the credibility of expert statements made in public arenas, where the authority of a scientist as an expert is connected to the image of the relationship between scientific understanding and empirical evidence.
    He is attempting to establish five points.
    1) uncertainty is a strategic element of argument as opposed to something that causes argument;
    2) adequacy of evidence and knowledge is relative and varies with the social situation of experts;
    3) the social structuring of expert arguments does not mean that the scientists’ arguments have been ‘distorted’ by the social circumstances of their expertise;
    4) uncertainty arguments don’t necessarily undermine the credibility of scientific expert knowledge;
    5) the approach that he takes emphasizes the political dynamics of expertise and the complex relationships between scientific and policy issues.

E. Chargaff - Heraclitian Fire (1978)

2010-05-02T07:09:00.000-04:00

An idealist, a romantic, a classical man in a modern world. He never found his place, never found himself. [Oscar Levant: It’s not what we are that hurts, it’s what we aren’t.] In the 20th C, especially in the latter half, the pace of scientific advances became inhuman, and science became inhuman, accumulating facts, but not understanding. Increasingly fragmented, increasingly specialized, a Red Queen’s Race. There is no time to understand the ramifications or the importance of a discovery, because a new one is just around the corner. Even the sciences are forgetting their history. The citations and references of research papers rarely go further back than a decade. Everything is compressed, eternally in the present. Without a past how can there be a future. Scientists need to ask why they are doing what they are doing, to what ends are they working, how will their knowledge be used.

Echoing Mitroff, Chargaff is a humanist scientist making a plea for the development of Dionysian science.

Ian S. Mitroff - The Subjective Side of Science (1974)

2010-04-25T07:51:00.000-04:00

The author, a practitioner of applied social science, believes that disagreement (rather than consensus) is the essence of scientific inquiry. He further claims that the causes of the disagreements between scientists are social in kind and that they are also psychological, and that truth is as much psychological as it is logical. This view is in contrast to the Descartes-Locke view that all humans are endowed with the common capabilities of reasoning and observing, and that if we strip away (purify) the personal and social contamination, then scientific inquiry will necessarily yield results that are acceptable by all who have also achieved this “pure state.”

The aim of the book is to lay a foundation for modeling scientific practice on a critical analysis of the actual behavior of scientists, and to also ask what a science looks like that better understands itself. The book (and the author) is critical of what he calls “The Storybook Image of Science.” This myth depicts scientists as emotionally neutral, willing to change their opinions when confronted with reliable evidence, humble about their knowledge and understanding, loyal to the truth above all else, and possessed of an objective attitude and the ability to suspend judgement until the issue under consideration has been investigated.

What Mitroff fails to realize, though, is that myths and archetypes have an important psychological place in our existence. Would science be better off if the storybook image of science was dispelled? Or would science, and the world, lose their ideal of what a scientist is supposed to be? And if that happened, would science suffer as a result?

As a sociologist of science, he is concerned with examining the norms of science, which he defines as: faith in rationality, emotional neutrality, universalism (rational knowledge is the realm of all), individualism (anti-authoritarian), community (knowledge is not private property), disinterestedness (no personal glory), impartiality (concern is with knowledge, not with its consequences), suspension of judgement, absence of bias, group loyalty and freedom of investigation.

And yet he’s willing to accept the norms as ideals.

Mitroff bases the study in this book on the Churchmanian program in the philosophy of science in which the logic of research and the social psychology of research are not viewed as being antagonistic to each other, but rather vital, although partial, components of scientific research as a whole. He is a supporter of Kuhn, rather than Popper.

After interviewing scientists studying moon rocks he comes to the following conclusions: 1) there are two sets of opposing norms of science; 2) there are distinct styles of inquiry in science and distinct psychological types of scientists; and 3) the method that scientists use to test their ideas involve adversarial proceedings that combine formal and informal elements.

Styles of Inquiry:

Leibnizian: formal-deductive;
Lockean: experiential, inductive, consensual;
Kantian: synthetic multimodal;
Hegelian or Dialectical: conflictual, synthetic;
Singerian-Churchmanian: synthetic, interdisciplinary, holistic.

Psychological types of scientists (based upon Jung):

Hard experimentalist (sensation);
Abstract theorizer (thinking);
Intuitive synthesizer (intuition);
Humanist scientist (feeling).

Science as a Game possesses the following features: 1) individual players; 2) coalitions, teams; 3) designation of teams as home side and opposing side; 4) special field of play; 5) entrance fees or skills; 6) schedule of games; 7) recruitment and development of talent; 8) rules; 9) umpires; 10) objectives; 11) awards; 12) historians or preservers of the tradition; 13) fans; 14) public sponsors; 15) societal sanction or support. It is intensely human and personal, and also mostly masculine (conquering nature), and has at least four general aims or ideals: the knowledge ideal (perfect knowledge); the politico-economical ideal (efficient pursuit of knowledge); the ethical-moral ideal (conflict removal between scientists and science and society); the esthetic ideal (enlarge the range and scope of scientific inquiry). And even though it does have subjective elements, it is not completely subjective, irrational or relativistic. We have reached Apollonian science that knows how to reach “the starry heavens above,” but we still don’t know how to develop Dionysian science that knows how to reach “the moral law within.” We may be intellectual giants, but we are still moral dwarfs, and tackling that problem is the task of the future.

S. Hillgartner - “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems” Social Studies of Science, V. 20, #3, 519-41

2010-04-18T07:23:00.001-04:00

Hillgartner asserts that scientists develop scientific knowledge and after that it is popularized, and that this popularized knowledge is seen (by the scientific community) as either an appropriate simplification or a pollution, something that is distorted or misunderstood. This view serves scientists by providing a vocabulary of non-science for rhetorical use and by demarcating ‘genuine’ science from ‘popularized’ knowledge. It asserts that there is a ‘gold standard’ of knowledge, and that only scientists know the ‘truth’ and gives scientists the authority to decide which popularizations are appropriate simplifications and which are distortions.

But there are problems with this view. Popularized knowledge feeds back into the research process, especially by scientists outside the field, who use it, and whose beliefs about the content and conduct of science are shaped by it. Simplified explanations of science are used in communicating with students, funding agencies and specialists in adjacent fields. And scientific knowledge is seen as constructed through the collective statements of the scientific community and popularization is a part of this (social studies of science perspective).

In drawing the line between genuine knowledge and popularization, the scientific community prefers a binary mode. When scientists communicate with other scientists they are exchanging genuine knowledge, when scientists communicate with the public, it is popularization. The difference between these two modes is one of content, the nature of the claims, and the precision with which they are stated, and also the difference between ‘original’ knowledge and the subsequent spread. But drawing the line between appropriate simplification and distortion is not that easy, since virtually every ‘downstream’ retelling involves some simplification. How do we know when simplification becomes over simplification becomes distortion (the telephone game).

The dominant view of popularization reinforces the epistemic authority of scientists because ‘genuine’ knowledge is only available to them. It also provides scientists with a rhetorical tool for representing science and communicating it to non-scientists. Because scientists often control the simplification, they can shape public opinion by how and what they simplify. They can even use the notion of distortion via popularization to debunk popular claims and reassert their authority. But...there is no ‘central’ bank to enforce the ‘gold standard’ of knowledge, and there is no ‘police force’ to detect counterfeit claims.

Scott L. Montgomery - Science as Kitsch: The Dinosaur and Other Icons, Science as Culture, Volume 2, part 1, No. 10, 7-58, 1991.

2010-04-11T06:38:00.000-04:00

The word ‘kitsch’ may come from ‘verkitschen’, which means ‘to turn out cheaply’, but regardless of its origins, it represents a style of mercenary aesthetics. For Montgomery, it connects aspects of the role that images play in modern society, and the ability to turn thought and feeling into formula, and hence into products for consumption. The resulting power of this connection between images and the consumer industry helps ingrain and recycle the existing modes of thought and helps stabilize particular institutional structures.

When applied to science, as in science as kitsch, he is referring to pseudo or crank science and to the use of science to legitimate political ends or culture prejudices. It also refers to mass-media science (including some popularization), science as myth and as effect, such as tabloid science. Even the scientist as celebrity falls under the heading of science as kitsch, as does the notion of a national mission of science, or the use of science as intellectual deputies of the state.

(So to popularize anything is to vulgarize it? Popular culture is obsessed with images and consumption, and to popularize science is to sell out, to turn it into a mass-market consumable, the appearance of which has little if anything to do with the reality?)

According to Montgomery, kitsch is society’s favored discourse about itself, it is ‘integrational propaganda’, and acts through textbooks, films, TV, toys, and any other mechanism that helps to condition or otherwise limit one’s curiosity about and critique of existing concepts and social realities. The result is that kitsch blocks the will for new insight by dominating our images. We do not move past the old myths and legends and the inaccessibility and mystery of science is maintained. “It keeps alive concepts and beliefs that are false and closed, that dazzle or distract with an appeal to distant expertise, and that attempt in every case to satisfy without the benefit of substance.” (56)

John Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost, 1989

2010-04-05T06:01:00.000-04:00

The skeptics claims against superstition are that it involves defective reasoning about the natural world or the inexplicable, that certain people encourage superstitious beliefs for their own reasons (usually not altruistic) and that superstition represents the surrender of the rational point of view. And the skeptics fear that the irrational might destroy civilization.

The major tenet of the religion of science is that scientists offered natural explanations of all natural events, including human beings and their thinking. In the 1930s, the last days of the undiluted religion of science, the aim of the popularizers was to get the reader to see the world as scientists saw it, orderly and unified, and to get people to think scientifically using the scientific method. Their goal was the evolution of human beings and society into a progressively scientific civilization.

In the late 19th century the man of science was someone who was devoted to the scientific method, and who believed that such devotion led to moral superiority. They upheld a traditional view of culture, while at the same time adding to it, and they believed that science stood for objectivity. In their pursuit of knowledge, they sought to eliminate the self, forswearing subjective emotional and personal advantage. They sought to emancipate themselves from the misconceptions and prejudices of society and saw it as their duty to popularize science, to spread the religion of science. (The myth of the man of science. Scientists as a priesthood.)

At first popularization was the teaching of what scientists knew, but as science became professionalized and specialized, the function of popularization became the translation between scientists and the public. Burnham identifies four main phases in the popularization of the natural sciences.

The first half of the 19th century is characterized by the dominance of natural theology and an increase in the number of full-time scientists. In the 1820s the popularizing activity grew rapidly with schools, colleges, magazines and lyceums, and by the 1830s the popularizing activity was concentrating on the practical applications of science. In 1850 and 1852 year books were published chronicling the progress of science and technology. A connection was made between popularization and modernization, promoting a sense of human power connected to the natural sciences and the idea of progress. After the Civil War there was a period of positivism and scientism, an ante-bellum synthesis of piety and practicality in popular science in which nature began to substitute for God. The legacy of the early 19th century popularizers was a set of institutions and a concern for meaning and context, with the goal of conveying science to the public and diminishing superstition.

In the late 19th century, these popularizers emphasized facts, progress, practicality, but at the same time science was being more intensely applied to human beings and human affairs. This was the dawn of the men of science and the beginning of the professionalization of science. From the 1870s to the end of the century, scientists took the lead in presenting science to the public and science was part of high culture, something to be aspired to. To love science was to love Truth. Reductionism followed, and the belief that facts serve to explain the unexplainable, to illustrate discovery and to show the practical contribution of scientific knowledge. In the 19th century popularization of science was a missionary activity aimed at converting people to the scientific way of life. (Let’s all become Vulcans, live long and prosper.)

In the first half of the 20th century the religion and ideology of positivistic science peaked and popularization ceased to be under the control of the scientists. After 1945 the media changed the characteristics of the popularization of science and it no longer supported the religion of science. In the 20th century, as science becomes specialized, popularization shifts from science to technology (basic to applied).

Joseph Ben-David - Scientific Growth - Ch. 9: The Profession of Science and Its Powers

2010-03-28T07:04:00.000-04:00

Ben-David is looking at scientific research as “profession” with certain defining characteristics including: higher education as an entry requirement; a monopoly over the practice of their profession; control over who is admitted to their ranks; and a limitation over their contractual obligation to their clients. But the corporate institutions of scientists need to legitimate their activities within the social order, lest they be seen as subversive, and the scientific method as it is practiced by scientists is one of the tools that is used to prevent subversion, by promoting self-regulation.

Another aspect of the professionalization is the creation of autonomous academies with some official standing, which can provide scientifically competent judgements that would be accepted and honored by the general public. Such institutions include: the Royal Society of London, which represented science to the public and rewarded scientific discovery and the Paris Academy of Sciences, which was more controlling and came to be perceived as a political body regulating science rather than representing it.

Ben-David claims that in pure or basic science, only the scientific community has the competence to assess the results of research and to make informed estimates about the scientific potentialities of persons and projects (shades of Polanyi) but that when it comes to the application of science, the scientific community is not more capable of judging the practical results of the research or guessing the practical potential of people or projects. Nor does he believe that the scientific community should act as the allocator of funds between different fields, because purely scientific considerations do not provide all the necessary criteria for a rational choice (shades of Weinberg’s trans-science). Scientists can, however, estimate the upper limits of the funds that can be expended on research without undue risk of waste and the lowest limit needed to maintain scientific capacity.

He seems to want a middle ground between science and the public, science and governments, and the republic of science and trans-science.

Alvin M. Weinberg - “Science and Trans-Science” - Minerva 10 (1972); 209-22

2010-03-21T07:21:00.000-04:00

For Weinberg, the relationship between science and society is more complicated than the view that science provides the means and politics provides the ends. He wants to introduce the notion of trans-science, the idea that there are questions of fact that can be asked of science, but cannot be answered by science. Questions such as the biological effects of low-level radiation, or the probability of extremely improbable events. And even entire disciplines have aspects of trans-science, engineering judgment, for example, or simply the elements of scientific uncertainty that are inherent in any advancing technology. He also considers the social sciences as trans-scientific, since we can’t predict human behavior (no psycho-history á la Asimov), because the subject matter is too variable for rationalization. There is also the axiology of science. Questions of scientific value, criteria for scientific choice, the valuation of different styles of science, moral and aesthetic judgments. All of these fall into the realm of trans-science.

But how do we settle the issues of trans-science? How do we weigh the benefits and risks of new technology? There is the political process, which establishes priorities and allocates resources. There are adversary procedures. The formal, legal and quasi-legal proceedings where opposing views are heard before some sort of board empowered to decide the issue. But in order for these processes to work, scientists must help define the science/trans-science border and inject some intellectual discipline into the republic of trans-science.

M Polanyi, "The Republic of Science: its Political and Economic Theory," Minerva 1 (1962): 54-73

2010-03-14T08:50:00.000-04:00

Polanyi wants to model the scientific community as a republic, and hence as a political body, with activities coordinated by the mutual adjustment of individual initiatives; each taking into account the activities of the others. Under this model the problems to be investigated are chosen by the scientific community in order to guarantee that their efforts and resources will not be wasted. The criteria for their selection are: plausibility; scientific value: accuracy, systematic importance, intrinsic interest; and originality. He recognizes that there is a tension between the first (plausibility) and the third (originality) criteria.

As a republic, the authority of scientific opinion is mutual and is established between scientists, not over them. He claims that scientific activities cannot be controlled from a central authority or directed from outside the community in order to serve public interest. It is an organic growth from existing knowledge to new knowledge and cannot be predicted or shaped. Any such attempts at direction or shaping will only result in mutilation. The paradox of the republic of science is that its tradition is one that upholds authority while at the same time cultivating originality. It is an association of independent initiatives that combine towards an indeterminate achievement. It is a society of explorers.

No authoritarian technics, here, but neither do we have the federal government controlling science.

D. Kevles, "The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America" (NY, 1978)

2010-03-07T08:47:00.000-05:00

Kevles is writing a history of the professionalization of science (and perhaps of the “Greatest Generation” of scientists?). He traces the professionalization of science back to the late 19th century (post Civil War). The goal of the emerging class of scientists (the name was coined by William Whewell in 1840, and replaced the tern “natural philosopher” during this time) was to exclude amateurs, improve the condition of science in the colleges and universities and enlarge the role of science in the federal government. One of the early marriages between science and the government was the Army sponsorship of geographic and geologic surveys, a connection that linked science and western exploration.

Even at this early stage of things, the scientific community made the distinction between “abstract” and “practical” science. Abstract science was the study of nature for the sake of understanding its substance, its workings, its laws. Practical science was the exploitation of nature and of nature’s laws for the sake of material development. But the public did not understand this distinction, nor did they understand the dependence of technology on scientific progress.

Of course the connections between science and government grow tighter during military conflicts, especially World War II, where it can probably be claimed that science won the war. (The Atomic bomb ended the war, radar won it). The story that Kevles tells us is one of the growing involvement of science with government. We see increases in federal spending on science, the creation of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, the National Science Foundation, the Atomic Energy Commission, the expansion of military research laboratories. (Is this authoritarian technics taking over democratic government?) And ultimately we see the politicization of science with the formation of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and scientists speaking out against government policies and research efforts (ABM, for example, or SDI).

So does science serve society or does society and government serve science? With the political and social changes that take place in the 60's and 70's we see science going from a position of prestige to one of distrust. Does science get tarred with same brush as the political institutions? Or do failures in big science contribute to the distrust of government? Big science, big government, where do we draw the lines? Or has government fallen into the technology trap? Only technology can save us from the problems that technology has created, only technology can provide us with the security that is increasingly hard to find in an increasingly unstable world. Can we spend our way out of a recession? Can we invent our way out of the mess that our inventions have left us in?

If science won WWII, did it lose Vietnam? Are we giving too much agency to science? Ultimately it all comes down to human beings and how we use the knowledge available to us. If science has agency, it is because we have given it to it. The Frankenstein of the novel is the scientist, not the monster, only in the movies does the monster get a name.

Lewis Mumford, "Technics and the Nature of Man," Technology and Culture 7 (1966): 303-17

2010-03-01T06:45:00.000-05:00

In this article, Mumford is challenging the basic assumption that defines man as a tool-using animal. Many anthropologists and ethnologists have made the claim that it was tool use that led to the development of the human brain, but as Mumford rightly points out, there are other species that use tools (chimpanzees, for example) and their tool use has not led them into the same developmental pathways that man has followed. He would argue that it was the creation of significant modes of symbolic expression, rather than more effective tools, that was the basis of Homo Sapiens’ further development. As evidence to back up this claim he points out the creation of the cave paintings by an early man that was still quite primitive in terms of the tools he had.

The fixation upon man as the tool user, which may also be an expression of presentism, casting our modern day obsession with machines back upon our ancestors, has led to a fascination with the machine to the exclusion of other aspects of humanity’s existence. But, Mumford, would argue, at its origins, technics was life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered. The greatest technical feat of early man was the domestication of plants and animals, a feat that did not require great sophistication in our tools, but did require a concentration upon sexuality in all its varied manifestations, a concentration that was abundantly evident in cult objects and symbolic art (the Venus sculptures, for example).

The mechanization and regimentation of society through industrial and bureaucratic organization eventually replaced religious ritual as a means of promoting the stability of mass populations. Leading us, ultimately to a present in which the focus of human activity has shifted form an organic environment to the Megamachine, and a future in which all forms of life and culture will be reduced to something that can be translated into the current system of scientific abstractions and transformed en masse to machines and electronic apparatus.

In order to bring technics back into the service of human culture, we need to cease our further expansion of the Megamachine and instead concentrate on the development of those parts of the organic environment and the human personality that have been suppressed. We must replace automation, the proper end for a machine, with autonomy, the proper end for a human being.

Lewis Mumford, "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics," Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 1-9.

2010-02-21T08:48:00.000-05:00

For Mumford, democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part, and only living human beings are an expression of that whole. Associated with this central principle are ideas of communal self-government, free communication, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external control and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behavior that affects the entire community.

Democratic technics, then, is characterized by small scale methods of production that rest mostly on human skill and energy and that remains under human control, even when machines are used. But in society, as in technics, there is a tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation. The irony of civilization is that as our societies have been moving from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones, our technology has been moving from democratic technics to authoritarian technics.

Mumford traces democratic technics back to the earliest use of tools, claiming that it has been the underlying support of every historic culture, balancing the authoritarian regimes of the day. Authoritarian technics, on the other hand is a more recent trend (relatively speaking), traced back to the fourth millennium B.C., coinciding with the rise of civilization in the form of centralized political control. Drawing on inventions and discoveries in mathematics, writing, irrigation, and astronomy it created complex human machines - the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. Authoritarian technics was tolerated, despite its potential for destruction, because it also created abundance.

Unfortunately, through mechanization and automation authoritarian technics has overcome its greatest weakness: its dependence upon human beings as its component parts. And now the center of authority no longer lies with people but with the system itself, even the scientists that created it have become trapped within the organization that they have created. The ultimate end of this technics is to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective (we are the Borg, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated). And the only way to maintain our democratic institutions is to make sure that our constructive efforts include technology. We must reconstruct our science and our technics so that it includes the human personality and favor variety and ecological complexity over uniformity and standardization. We must put humanity back at the center of our technology.

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harper, 1934)

2010-02-08T06:56:00.001-05:00

In the Fall of 2001 I did a directed reading with my advisor. The subject was technology/science and society. For coursework I wrote summaries of the books that we read.

Mumford wants to know how and why Western Europeans carried the physical sciences to the point where the whole mode of life had been adapted to the pace and capacities of the machine so that, in effect, the society had surrendered to the machine. He traces this development to the invention of the clock, which allows time to be divided up and measured in the same sense that space is and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.

The first wave of the machine was in the 10th century and was characterized by an effort to achieve order and power by purely external means. The second wave occurred in the 18th century with improvements in mining and iron-working. Attempts were made by the disciples of Watt and Awkright to universalize the ideological premises of the first effort to create the machine, and to take advantage of the practical consequences. With the third wave (20th century) the machine ceases to be a substitute for God or for an orderly society and its success is now measured by the mechanization of life.

He also links the emergence of the present-day form of capitalism with the beginning of the machine age and the substitution of money-values for life-values. In the quest for power by the means of abstractions, one abstraction reinforces another. Time is money, money is power, and power required the furtherance of trade and production, and increases in production drive increases in mechanization. This abstraction of capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science so that the power that was science and the power that was money became the same kind of power - the power of abstraction, measurement and quantification.

Because of this link between technics and capitalism, technics takes on the characteristics of capitalism, which utilized the machine not to further social welfare but to increase private profit. It was capitalism that destroyed the handicraft industries, even though the machine products were inferior. It was because of the possibilities of profit that the place of the machine was over-emphasized and the degree of regimentation pushed beyond what was necessary to harmony or efficiency. It was because of capitalism that the machine (a neutral agent) has been the malicious element in human society, careless of human life, indifferent to human interests. The machine has suffered the sins of capitalism and capitalism has taken credit for the virtues of the machine. (Marxism)

The development of the machine civilization is divided into three successive but over-lapping and interpenetrating phases. The Eotechnic phase is characterized by wood and water with the primary inventions being mechanical clocks, the telescope, cheap paper, print, the printing-press, the magnetic compass and the scientific method. The Paleotechnic phase is characterized by coal and iron. After 1750 industry passed into a new phase with different sources of power, different materials and different social objectives that multiplied, vulgarized, and spread the methods and goals of the first wave that were directed towards the quantification of life. The source of mechanical power in the Paleotechnic phase was coal, and its industry rested on the mine, whose products dominated its life and determined the characteristics of its inventions and improvements. This period is also marked by environmental degradation and the treatment of the environment as another abstraction along with money, prices, capital and most of human existence. It also saw the worker as a resource to be exploited, mined, exhausted and discarded.

In the Neotechnic phase the scientific method took possession of the other domains of experience and turned the living organism and human society into objects of systematic investigation. It is characterized by electricity and alloys and in order to survive it has to organize industry and its polity on a worldwide scale. This phase is marked by instantaneous personal communication over long distances, and this instantaneous personal communication is the mechanical symbol of the world-wide cooperation of thought and feeling that must emerge if the world is not to sink into ruin. (Wells’ World State?)

Stalin and the Bomb

2010-01-25T06:24:00.000-05:00

Stalin and the Bomb by David Holloway - Modern European Intellectual History 12
(The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956)

Science was seen in Russia, by both its friends and its enemies as a progressive and democratic force. But even after it was assimilated into Russian culture, it was mistrusted by many because it was seen as embodying Western values. We have already seen the influence of the Bolshevik revolution on biology with Lysenko and physics was also at risk of being politicized. It was saved from that fate because Lenin understood that science and technology were essential for defense and economic security (“it is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed”).

The first 30 years of the 20th century saw a rising interest in nuclear physics in the West, reaching a peak in the early 30s with the realization of the possibility of fission and the consequent release of energy. Soviet scientists followed the advances in nuclear physics as well as participating in them, although they were hampered in their research by not always having access to the best equipment. The State wanted science that would benefit the people, pure research was harder to justify. Although in the West the notion that nuclear fission could be used to create an extremely powerful bomb was being discussed at this time, in the Soviet Union the primary interest was in the possibilities for power generation. Physicists in the Soviet Union did not grow concerned about the possibility of the atomic bomb until work in the US, Britain and Germany was already underway.

In 1942, a review of journals by Flerov revealed that articles on fission were no longer appearing and that the scientists doing the research on fission were not publishing on other research. From “the dogs that do not bark” he determined that research on fission had gone secret in the US, which meant that the Americans were trying to build an atomic bomb. He wrote to several people, including Stalin. There was no response. An ongoing concern in the Soviet Union, however, was the supply of uranium, needed for power plants as well as for bombs and over the years there were attempts by physicists to get the state to organize the search for sources of uranium, with varying degrees of success.

Stalin, it seems did not really understand the significance of the bomb, even when he knew that the Americans possessed one. (The Soviets had details of the Manhattan project as well as the Maud Commission’s report). It was not until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima that Stalin took a real interest in it, and only then did the Soviet Union begin a concerted effort to build one of their own. The detailed intelligence that they obtained was not shown to all the scientists working on the project however, it was only shown to Kurchatov, who was in charge. He then used this knowledge to help guide the work. The Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949. It had taken them only a little longer to develop than it took the US to develop theirs.

It is important to remember that the relationship between politics and science was not an easy one in the Soviet Union. Stalin distrusted the scientists, probably because he could not really understand what they were doing, and it is extremely likely that had the test on August 29th been a failure the scientists in charge would have been taken out and shot.

Stalin perceived the US foreign policy as being one of Atomic Blackmail. After WWII, when the US was the only nation that had the bomb, he expected them to use it to establish an hegemony over the world. This was something that the Soviet Union must, at all costs, resist. The only people who feared the atomic bomb were those who had “weak nerves.” This led to a war of nerves and of atomic brinkmanship, especially once the Soviet Union had their own bomb. They didn’t want to give in to the US in international affairs, because that would make them look weak, but at the same time they didn’t want to provoke a war. Stalin, however, believed that another war was inevitable so long as capitalism survived in the world. WWI had heralded the Bolshevik revolution, WWII the rise of the Soviet Union, WWIII would crush capitalism forever.

After WWII, Stalin invested heavily in other military technology besides nuclear weapons, including jet engines, radar and missile technology, the size of the military also increased markedly. Immediately after building the atomic bomb, the Soviet physicists were set to work on the hydrogen bomb. In this effort they did not duplicate the work being done in the US, but rather developed the technology on their own. They tested their hydrogen bomb on August 8, 1953. Under Stalin’s leadership the command economy, combined with the large defense industry and large military establishment set the Soviet Union on a path of militarized development from which it was unable to escape, even after Stalin’s death.

Francis Galton

2010-01-17T08:02:00.001-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 11

Francis Galton - Hereditary Genius
Mathew Thomson - The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain c. 1870-1959

Francis Galton published Heredity Genius in 1869, a second edition was published in 1892. The point of the book was to show that both the mental and the physical faculties of individuals obeyed the laws of heredity. To demonstrate the heritability of mental faculties he examines the families of what he calls “eminent men” in England: judges between 1660 & 1865, statesmen, English peerages, commanders, literary men, men of science, poets, musicians, painters, divines and senior classmen of Cambridge. To demonstrate the heritability of physical faculties he examines the families of oarsmen and wrestlers of the North Country.

In order to do this analysis he must quantify mental and physical faculties, and his solution is to apply the law of “frequency of error,” which is used by mathematicians to estimate the value that is probably nearest to the correct one from a collection of measurements of the same quantity. This method had been extended to the proportions of the human body by Quetelet on the grounds that differences in something like physical stature could be treated as if they were errors from some norm.

Galton felt that just as we breed our dogs and our horses for certain traits, so we could influence the mental and physical fitness of the human race and that we owed it to the future generations of humanity to attempt such an improvement. He coined the word eugenics in 1884. Two decades later a movement emerged with the formation of the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, which began publication of the journal Eugenics Review in 1909. The core concerns of the eugenics debate developed within the framework of social Darwinism.

By the end of the 19th century there was widespread concern that modern society was reversing evolution, leading to the degeneration of the English people. This was partly driven by an increase in the recorded rates of lunacy from 2.26/10,000 in 1807 to 29.26/10,000 in 1890. By the first decade of the 20th century mental defectives became defined as the central eugenic threat facing the nation. Greater social awareness plus universal education led to the growing realization of the presence of mentally deficient people in the population. This heightened awareness coincided with growing fears about the fitness of the population. In addition, the declining birth rates among the middle class combined with increasing birth rate among the lower class led to the fear of mental defectives breeding without control. Feeble-minded women were seen to be especially at risk for sexual exploitation by men, which created a link between morality and mental deficiency, leading to the notion of immorality as a sign of mental deficiency. All of these factors contributed to the growing feeling that the ills of society could be traced back to mental deficiency.

In response to these growing concerns the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded was created. Their 1908 report contained the conclusion that mental deficiency was in large part hereditary. In 1913 Britain passed the Mental Deficiency Act, which proposed mass segregation of the ‘feeble minded’.

Among the institutions proposed to deal with the problem of mental defectives in society were colonies, community care and sterilization. Colonies were seen as ways of segregating mental defectives from society at large in a positive environment in which they could be useful and maybe even educated to some degree. Community care provided supervision, guardianship and occupation centers but with limited resources it was difficult to provide the tight moral and sexual control over the defectives within the community as a separate colony would. This led, in the 1930s with the notion of linking community care with sterilization.

Sterilization as an option for dealing with mental defectives had been resisted both by the eugenics community and the mental institutions in Britain. They did not want to separate sex from reproduction and were worried about the sexual exploitation of mental defectives and the spread of venereal disease in the community. But by the 1930s it had become obvious that segregation was unable to cope with demand, that sterilization could relieve this pressure on the colony institutions as a part of community care and that it would also reverse the current trend of rising mental deficiency and improve the eugenic fitness and social welfare of the population as a whole.

The Eugenics Society failed to get sterilization adopted via legislation, the issue was simply too hot, politically. Sterilization was used, however, and by the 1960s the legislature approved it as a fait accompli. The operation was directed at just that class of women that had concerned eugenicists in the 1930s.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2010-01-10T08:10:00.001-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 10

He was born at Röcken, Prussia, on October 15, 1844 - the birthday of the reigning Prussian King, Frederick William IV, and was named after him. His father was a minister, and had tutored several members of the royal family. His mother was a Puritan. He was raised in a very religious household by women (his father died when Nietzsche was still young). He read the Bible a great deal, and even read it to others. This led to him being called by his school mates “the little minister” and described as “a Jesus in the Temple.”

He lost his faith in the God of his fathers at 18, and spent the remainder of his life searching for a replacement (he thought he found one in the Superman). At 23 he was conscripted into the military, but a fall from a horse injured him and he was released from service. His brief experience of the military left him with almost as many delusions about soldiers as he had on entering it–the hard Spartan life of commanding and obeying, the endurance and discipline appealed to him. He worshiped the ideal of the warrior although he could never become one. Instead he became a scholar. He earned a Ph.D., and at 25 was appointed to the chair of classical philology at the University of Basle.

This conflict of opposites, of Parsifal and Siegfried, underlie Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887) he is trying to destroy the old morality and pave the way for the morality of the superman. He seeks an understanding of the current morality through an understanding of the etymologies of the words and finds two contradictory valuations of human behavior, two ethical standpoints and criteria: a morality of masters and a morality of the herd (or slaves). The master morality values manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery. The herd morality was born of subjection and values humility, altruism, and the love of security and peace. Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic.

But this morality is merely a veneer covering our secret will to power. Love is a desire for possession, courtship is combat and mating mastery. This passion for power makes reason and morality helpless. The Judeo-Christian ethos has subverted the true nature of mankind by exalting the herd morality and suppressing our instincts, which are the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence. Moral systems are not universal, different functions require different qualities and the “evil” virtues of the strong are as necessary as the “good” virtues of the weak. The ultimate ethic is biological: Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives way and fails. Morality, as well as theology, must be reconstructed in terms of evolution theory. The function of life is to bring about “not betterment of the majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types,” but “the creation of genius,” the development and elevation of superior personalities.” (Schopenhauer as Educator)

The goal of human effort, therefore, is not the improvement of mankind (who exists only as an abstraction) but superman. At first thought of by Nietzsche as a new species, he later came to think of the superman as superior individuals rising out of the mire of mediocrity, and owing his existence to careful breeding and education. Such a man would be beyond good and evil because what is good is all that increases the feeling of power, the will to power and what is bad is what is weak. Mankind should give themselves to this goal of creating the Superman just as Europeans once gave themselves as the means to the ends of Bonaparte. But the Superman cannot come about from democracy, which was born in Christianity’s rebellion against everything privileged, only from aristocracy.

Democracy means the worship of mediocrity and the hatred of excellence. Great men are impossible in a democracy, because they would not submit to the indignation of a system that presumes equality. Great men are like wolfs among dogs, and the dogs hate the wolf, the free spirit. Along with democracy, Nietzsche also condemns feminism, by which women become more like men, and socialism and anarchism, which are the offspring of democracy. If you have social equality, why not economic equality, why have leaders at all? But nature abhors equality, all life is exploitation and subsists ultimately on other life.

Isaiah Berlin - Two Concepts of Liberty

2010-01-03T07:06:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 9

For Isaiah Berlin one of the dominant issues of the world was the question of obedience (Why should I, or anyone, obey anyone else?) and coercion (If I disobey, may I be coerced?), a question that he felt had long been a central one in politics. In investigating the answers to this question Berlin proposes two concepts of liberty, negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty addresses the question: “What is the area within which the subject–a person or group of persons–is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?” Positive liberty addresses the question: “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” While these questions are different, he acknowledges that the answers to them may overlap.

Political liberty in the sense of negative freedom (he uses the terms freedom and liberty interchangeably) is the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented from so acting by the deliberate interference of other human beings I can describe myself as being coerced or even enslaved, depending upon the degree of interference. But for human society to avoid dissolving into chaos, some limits on individual freedom must exist. The question is, then, where are those limits drawn? Where is the line between private life and public authority?

Notions of positive liberty derive from the desire on the part of the individual to be their own master. It is not freedom from, but freedom to–freedom to live as you see fit. These notions may not seem to be very far apart, but Berlin claims that these ideas of freedom historically developed in different directions and ended up coming in direct conflict with each other. This can be seen by examining the question of what it means to be one’s own master. We can be slaves to our nature, or spiritual slaves, just as we can be physical slaves. And we can justify coercion by claiming that we are acting in the best interests of those whom we are coercing, and that if they were but more self-aware they would recognize the probity of our actions. Berlin believed that conceptions of freedom are derived directly from conceptions of what constitutes the self, a person, or a man. Manipulate the definition of what it is to be a man, and you can change the definition of freedom into whatever you wish it to be.

One way of attaining freedom is to liberate yourself from desires for things that you cannot attain. If we cannot change our environment (social, political or physical), change ourselves to suit it. But this attitude results in the reduction of the sphere of negative liberty, and leads Berlin to the conclusion that the definition of negative liberty to do what one wishes will not work. If I can do little of what I wish, I need only reduce or eliminate my wishes and I am free.

Another way of attaining freedom is through knowledge and understanding. This is the rational approach to liberty. If I understand why things must be the way they are then, as a rational creature, I must will them to be that way. Our knowledge liberates us not by offering us more choices, but by keeping us from attempting the impossible. Berlin calls this the positive doctrine of liberation by reason. But is such a rational life possible not just for the individual, but also for society? And if it is, how is it to be attained? I wish to be free and to live my life as my rational will commands, but so does everyone else. How do we avoid the collision of wills? Where is the line between my rationally determined rights and the rationally determined rights of others? And is there only one variety of rational society?

Will our rationality save us from tyrants and oppression? Will it lead us to truths that cannot be disputed, that are universal? There is also a notion here (perhaps naive?) that rational men would not want to oppress or exploit others. But who defines what is rational? And what do we do about those individuals who do not meet that criteria? Can we legitimately coerce them for their own good? Can we educate them or re-educate them, even against their will?

Berlin believed that the positive notion of liberty was at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction that resulted in the most powerful and morally just public movements of his time. But at the same time he thought that the idea that a single formula could be found that would harmonize all the diverse ends of humanity was wrong. Instead, pluralism, with the measure of negative liberty that it entails, seemed to him a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek the ideal of positive self-mastery by classes, people, or humanity as a whole. In his view, pluralism is truer because it recognizes the fact that human goals are many and that they are not all commensurate with each other, and that some may in fact be in a state of perpetual rivalry.

John Stuart Mill - On Liberty

2009-12-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 8

In this essay Mill is focusing on civil or social liberty (not the issue of free will). He is concerned with the limits of the power that can be exercised by society and government over the individual. Before the spread of representational governments, the struggle between liberty and authority was primarily a struggle between subjects and governments, and people sought ways to limit the power of authoritarian rule. With the rise of representational governments and the notion of a government by the people and for the people a new threat arises, however, that of democratic tyranny or a tyranny of the masses. The problem arises because the power of the people often really means the power of the most numerous people, or because the people who are exercising the power are not the same people as those over whom the power is being exercised. Self-government is not government of each by themselves, but the government of each by all the rest.

Mill believed that the only reason for society to interfere with the liberty of an individual was for self-protection or to prevent harm to others. Protecting an individual from their own actions was not grounds for interference. The only part of an individual’s behavior that society should be concerned with is that which concerns others. Any action of an individual that concerns only themselves, or like-minded adults, is not the concern of society at large. Mill had noted the tendency of society to try to enforce its customs on all members through either social pressure or laws. This pressure to conform stigmatizes individuality and leads to mediocrity because individuality is connected, in Mill’s mind, with self-development. The only way for humanity to grow and develop is for its members to be free to grow and develop. By enforcing conformity society hindered the further development of its members and ultimately of itself.

But being free to think our own thoughts is not enough, we must also be free to express them. We are never justified in silencing the opinion of others. Mill gives several grounds for the necessity of this freedom of expression: 1) the opinion being expressed may be true, to silence it assumes our own infallibility; 2) even if the opinion may be in error, it may still contain some truth and it is only through free discussion that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied and 3) if the opinion is true, it must still be vigorously discussed and contested lest it become a prejudice that is not held on any rational grounds.

Being free to form and express opinions is an essential part of individuality and the development of the intellectual and moral character of man, but we must also be free to act on those opinions. We must be able to carry out our lives, without hindrance by society, so long as in doing so we do it at our own risk and peril. So long as we do not molest others, we should not be molested or interfered with. Some would claim that without societal pressure, mankind would behave in an immoral fashion, but Mill believed that the moral development of man is an important component of the intellectual development and was an advocate of personal responsibility. An individual’s behavior should be a balance between personal freedom and moral responsibility.

Education is essential to the development of humanity, but it should not be left in the hands of the government. It may enforce universal education through examinations, but should not necessarily provide it. Instead it should facilitate by helping to defray costs. The only time it is justified in establishing and controlling education is if the society is in such a backward state that there is no other way for the members of that society to be educated. Governments should concern themselves with those tasks that they can perform better than individuals rather than interfering in the lives of its peoples. It should aid and stimulate individual development, because the worth of a state is the worth of the individuals comprising it.

Havelock Ellis

2009-12-20T13:11:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 7
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
The Modernization of Sex, by Paul Robinson

In his essay on Havelock Ellis, Paul Robinson defines a sexual modernist as someone who: 1) held that sexual experience was neither a threat to moral character, nor a drain on vital energies; 2) wanted to broaden the range of legitimate sexual behavior (beyond adult, genital, heterosexual intercourse); 3) argued that women had a sexual existence on a par with that of men and 4) expressed doubts about the traditional institutional contexts of human sexuality (marriage and family) and promoted debate about the human sexual psychology and the paradoxical need for both companionship and variety in erotic life (Robinson, pp.2-3). By this definition, Havelock Ellis is definitely a sexual modernist.

The seven volumes of his monumental work Studies in the Psychology of Sex (which he began publishing in 1897) cover the following topics: 1) The evolution of modesty, The phenomena of sexual periodicity, Auto-eroticism; 2) Analysis of the sexual impulse, Love and pain, The sexual impulse in women; 3) Sexual selection in man; 4) Sexual inversion (homosexuality, this was actually the first volume published); 5) Erotic symbolism, The mechanism of detumescence, The psychic state in pregnancy; 6) Eonism (male transvestism) and other supplementary studies; 7) Sex in relation to society. From my, albeit partial, reading of his works his presentation of the material consists of cultural, historical and biological survey and analysis. Thus, when he considers marriage (in vol. 7) he presents an historical survey of the institution of marriage going back as far as the Romans, as well as considering how marriage is defined in other cultures in our own time. He also looks at the animal kingdom, bringing biology and nature into the picture that he is developing. He casts a wide net in an effort to gain as complete an understanding as possible of the origins and evolution of our sexual behavior.

Ellis considered the sexual impulse in women to be comparable with that of men, but that mere quantitative comparison did a disservice to the sexuality of women. He concluded that the sexual impulse in women was more passive, more complex, less apt to appear spontaneously, more often needing to be aroused and that the orgasm developed more slowly in women than in men and is less easily reached. He also believed that the sexual impulse became stronger after the establishment of a sexual relationship. He was one of the first people to identify erogenous zones, and recognized that women possess more than one. As he put it “the sexual sphere is larger and more diffuse.” He also noticed a marked tendency for periodicity in the spontaneous manifestations of sexual desire in women. He believed that society repressed the sexuality of women, and that the ignorance of both sexes was an impediment to a fulfilling sexual union between them.

With regards to sexual morality, Ellis wanted more personal responsibility on the part of both sexes. In the case of women, this personal responsibility also entailed greater equality under the law (it is difficult to be personally responsible for your behavior when the law regards you as little more than the property of another individual) as well as economic independence. He believed that prostitution and the patriarchal marriage system, which he considered to be linked, were both incompatible with personal responsibility. In his opinion, men had created a system whereby one group of women ministered exclusively to their sexual needs, and another group of women (brought up in asceticism) were candidates for the privilege of ministering to their household and family needs. By abolishing the latter, he hoped that we might abolish the former.

Ellis was not a fan of the institution of marriage as it was defined by the State and the Church (especially the Catholic Church). He believed that the sexual relations of adults were a private matter and not one that society should be involved with. Where society became involved was in the case of children, because these were new members of society. Once again he comes back to personal responsibility, because when a couple brings a child into the world they should be prepared to accept the responsibility of providing for that child. He was very concerned with legitimacy and illegitimacy, and thought that when a birth was registered it was important to identify the father. Having a child does not mean that the couple was compelled to marry, or even live together. He believed that one parent could be as effective as two, especially when the two were not compatible.

In examining alternatives to conventional marriage he rejected the idea of marriage as a contract, as the State might have it, because the parties entering into it don’t really have a good idea of what is in store for them and so could not knowingly enter into such a contract. To him, a marriage should be a free union, willingly entered into, easily dissolved and defined by the individuals involved in it, not the Church and not the State. The only involvement of the State should be to ensure the proper support of any children.

Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952)

2009-12-13T07:04:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 6
Red Love - a novel
Selected Writings - Alix Holt, tr. & ed.

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born in St. Petersburg on April 1, 1872. Her father was a tsarist general, her mother the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant. In 1893 she married Vladimir Kollontai, for love, and spent five years as an engineer’s wife, raising their son. In 1898 she went to Zurich to study political economy. In 1917 she met Pavel Dybenko, the Bolshevik leader of the sailors of the Baltic fleet. In 1918 they registered their marriage under the new marriage act. In 1922 the relationship ended. As she put it in her letter to him: “I am not the wife you need, I am a person before I am a woman” (Selected Writings, p. 19). She was a diplomat, an activist, and a crusader for women’s rights, but she was not a bourgeois feminist. She believed that women would become equal only in a socialist world in which communism thrived over capitalism, and she did not separate women’s rights from worker’s rights.

She saw marriage and the family, as practiced in the capitalist society, as outmoded. In earlier societies the family was a unit of production, but in the capitalist society it had become a unit of consumption. Where in the past, women had performed valuable, productive, tasks in their home, now they were reduced to unproductive drudge work. By entering the work force women were becoming productive members of society once more, but they still had all the housework and childcare to deal with. Kollontai believed that the communist society should lift that burden from women’s shoulders and play a greater role in raising the children. She advocated such things as maternity leave before and after the birth, on site child care so that the mother would not have to be separated from the child during its infancy, and the creation of kindergartens and creches to help raise and educate the child. Without such social institutions, children of working mothers grew up with inadequate supervision, perhaps roaming the streets and getting into trouble, and certainly did not grow up to be good communists.

As far as the relations between the sexes went, she advocated equality and the mutual recognition of the rights of the other. It has been said that she advocated “free love,” but this is true only in the sense that she was against the possessive idea of love and the jealousy that went along with it. With the rise of communism, the traditional family as defined in the capitalist system would naturally wither away (because it was a consuming unit, not a producing one) and with its demise a new morality would arise to replace it. This new morality would not be based on the idea of an exclusive, inwardly directed love that separated the couple from society, but would be a comradely love that included the society. Above all, women should not have to sell their bodies, either in the form of prostitution or in the form of marriages of convenience for material security. She saw both of these as instances of women not being productive members of society, which is what made them wrong in a communist society. She abhorred the double standard and the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.

She explores some of her ideas concerning the relationship between the sexes in her novel Red Love, published in 1927. The main character is Vassilisssa (Vasya), a twenty-eight year old working girl (a knitter), who is a communist and a Bolshevik. She is not pretty, although she has beautiful, observant, thoughtful eyes. Thin, and with short hair, she is androgynous. Like Kollontai, she is an activist and an advocate of women’s rights, but again in the context of worker’s rights. She falls in love with Volodya, who is nicknamed “the American” because he spent time working in America. He is an anarchist. He doesn’t like to follow directions. He likes to do things his way. While they work together as comrades they have a happy relationship, but their work for the party keeps them apart. While he is managing a factory in another province he falls in love with another woman, Nina (the relationship has not been a monogamous one on his part from the beginning). Where Vasya is of the new world, Nina is of the old. As a manager, Volodya lives a more comfortable life, a bourgeois life. When Vasya comes to visit him he wants her to play the role of “manager’s wife,” a role that she is not at all suited for.

She discovers that he is maintaining two households and ends up leaving him to return to her work, and to freedom. Although the idea that he no longer loves her bothers her, the fact that Volodya is no longer her comrade bothers her more. She does not like the way he is living his life, or the sorts of friends that he has. After she leaves him she discovers that she is pregnant, but when a friend asks her how she will raise the child on her own, she replies that she will not be raising the child on her own, at her new job (in the textile industry) she will institute a nursery, the society will help her raise her child. She writes a letter to Nina, forgiving her and giving her permission to marry Volodya. Nina needs a husband, Vasya does not.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky - “What is to be done?”

2009-12-06T06:10:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 5

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was born in Saratov in 1828. Although he was the son of a village priest he became an atheist. In 1846 he left the seminary for St. Petersburg University, studying there until 1850. He taught for three years in Saratov, where he married. He then returned to St. Petersburg where he wrote for and eventually edited the journal The Contemporary. His other writings include: The Aesthetic Relationships of Art in Reality (1855, his M.A. Thesis), Sketches of the Gogol Period of Russian Literature (1855-56), and The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860). In 1862 he was arrested (on trumped up charges) and he wrote this novel in 1863 while he was confined to the Peter-Paul Fortress.

The Basic Plot: What is to be done? or A Vital Question is a romance that examines, among other things, the institution of marriage and the place of women in society. The heroine is Vera Pavlovna. Her father is weak, her mother is a venal and mercenary woman who wants to marry Vera to a fairly well-off nobleman. She is rescued from this fate by Lopukhóv, a medical student who gives up his career to save her from her “cellar” existence. The marriage is a good intellectual match, but not a good emotional one. At a point in the marriage when one would perhaps expect the birth of a child, Vera announces that she is going to open a sewing union. This is a collective organization, with the girls sharing in the decisions of running the shop and also in the profits. The workers, for the most part, live in a collective apartment building.

Against her will, Vera falls in love with Kirsánov, a friend of Lopukhóv’s. They both fight their mutual attraction. When Lopukhóv figures out what is going on, he fakes his suicide to free Vera to marry Kirsánov. In this now emotionally as well as intellectually fulfilling marriage Vera announces her intention to study medicine, and does go on to become a doctor. Lopukhóv reappears later on as Charles Beaumont, marrying the daughter of a factory owner, Katerína. The Beaumonts and the Kirsánovs live happily ever after in adjoining apartments.

Some of the Themes

Marriage: In Russia at that time, a married woman had no legal rights, in the novel Chernyshevsky puts forth the idea of marriage as an equal partnership, respectful and courteous, which either person may terminate if they should fall in love with another. In a conversation with Julie (a prostitute with the proverbial heart-of-gold) Vera tells her “I do not want to be anybody’s slave!...I want to do only what I have it in my heart to do, and let others do the same; I do not want to ask anything of anybody; I do not want to curtail anybody’s freedom; I want to be free myself!” (p. 40). To be free means to be financially independent, therefore women must be able to earn a respectable living in society (p.121).

Children: Children are seen only on the periphery. Both Vera and Katerína have children but they are not really mentioned after their birth.

Women: Women are goddesses in this book. In Vera’s dreams we see the Empress of Love and her sister the Empress of Science and Love of Humanity, who have guided Vera on her path through life. We also see woman as the embodiment of the goddesses Astarte and Aphrodite and the ideal of chastity. Kirsánov believes that women are more intellectual then men, and that the organism of women is stronger than that of men (they mature earlier and live longer). Up to this point women have been restricted to a very narrow path, the sphere of domestic life. In Vera’s view women have been crowded into this narrow existence and until women are allowed to branch out they will not be able to live an independent life. But custom is hard to change, it is hard to find new paths, trail blazers are needed, and so she decides to become a doctor.

The Collective: The sewing union is a utopia. When Vera is setting it up she wants only girls of good character, no misfits. She educates them, first by reading to them while they work, then by bringing in tutors to give them lessons. Many of the girls live in the collective apartment house, with siblings and parents. As at the sewing shop, the domestic duties are shared out according to ability. Everyone has some purpose, some duty to perform.

Progressive People: Although Chernyshevsky at one point says that he is writing about ordinary people, not heroes, there is a sense of a progression in humanity. There are some people that, through their intellect and character are better or more evolved, and as time goes on, there will be more. Of course these progressive people are epitomized by the Kirsánovs and Beaumonts.

The overall theme of the novel is perhaps best summed up in a song that Vera sings in a ‘teaser’ that Chernyshevsky presents to us before he begins the novel proper: “Industry without knowledge is fruitless; our own happiness is impossible without the happiness of others. As soon as we become enlightened we shall become rich; we shall be happy; we shall form one brotherhood and sisterhood.... Let us learn and be industrious; let us sing and love; we shall have a heaven on earth!....” (p. 4)

A. Bogdanov - Essays in Tektology

2009-11-29T06:49:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 4

Tektology, from the Greek word “tekton,” which means builder, is A. Bogdanov’s[1] dynamic science of complex wholes. It is organizational science. According to Bogdanov, in our struggle with the elements our aim is dominion (which he defines as a relationship of the organizer to the organized) over nature and to that end we organize the universe. To help us do this we have developed tools, which he calls the instruments of organization.

The first instrument of organization is the word, because every conscious collaboration of people is organized by means of words. The second instrument is the idea, which for Bogdanov always appears as an organizational scheme. The third instrument is social norms (custom, law, morals and decorum), which establish and regulate the relations among people in a collective and thus strengthen their connections. These instruments are the product of organized experience. Where Engels (according to Bogdanov) expressed the content of human life as production of people, production of things, and production of ideas, Bogdanov saw the concept of organization hidden in the term ‘production’ and expresses the content of human life as the organization of external forces of nature, organization of human forces, and organization of experience. In his view mankind has no other activity except organizational activity, since the only problems are organizational problems.

He saw the conflict between societies, classes and groups as a struggle of organizational forms. He also saw the unity of organizational methods everywhere, in living and dead nature, in the work of elemental forces and the work of people. His goal was to investigate this unity through the establishment of a general organizational science.

In primitive and religious societies the organization of thought was determined by the organization of labor, whose ends it served. If a man was not acting on the instructions of another, it was assumed that he was acting on internal instructions and that he was thus his own organizer. The organizational side of man Bogdanov equated with the soul, the passive side of man that carried out these instructions was equated with the body. The unity of the organizational point of view at this point is maintained by the authoritarian mode of life in which the laws of nature and the laws of man are prescriptions of divine power.

As mankind evolved this original unity was broken up by changing social relationships, the increased division of labor and specialization of skills and by the increase of knowledge that was secular. As this knowledge grew it was organized into separate sciences. The growing specialization of society and the accumulation of facts led to increasing specialization in the sciences and their continued fragmentation. An understanding and awareness of the underlying unity was lost so that the world of Bogdanov’s day appeared uncoordinated and anarchic both in thought and in practice. In his view this is the organizational experience of the bourgeois world.

What was needed to change this was a new mode of thought, but he felt that this would only come about through a new organization of society characterized by a new social class: the industrial proletariat. In his view the obstacles to a monistic and scientifically organized thinking were specialization and the splintered system of labor, which he considered anarchic. The industrial proletariat with machine production and a generally stable social life was to be the point of departure for overcoming this specialization and anarchy. The perfection of the machine and the resulting industrialization changed the character of the role of the worker. No longer did a worker have to specialize in a trade or craft. No matter what sort of machine a worker was controlling there was a commonality with all other workers controlling machines.

In Bogdanov’s vision the social anarchy, which arose out of the division of labor and the competition and struggle of man against man would lose its influence with the growth of the labor class. Common interests with respect to capital would continue to strengthen the influence of the labor class leading gradually but inevitably to a world union. The working class would combine the organization of things in its labor with the organization of its human forces in its social struggle in a special ideology: the organization of ideas. This organization of ideas is the science of tektology.

Tektology unifies and controls the particular sciences. All the results they obtain form the basis of its work and all of their generalizations and conclusions are subject to its verification. For tektology the methods of the sciences are only modes for the organization of material supplied by existence. It is a universal natural science and the entire organizational experience of mankind belongs to it.

Notes:

[1]A. Bogdanov was the pseudonym of A. A. Malinovskii, a medical doctor born in 1873. He was also a prominent Russian philosopher, economist, biologist, writer, revolutionary and political figure.

Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals

2009-11-22T07:08:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 3

At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, François-Noel (Gracchus [1]) Babeuf published the Cadastre perpétuel [2], which was ostensibly a guide to local authorities charged with the administration of taxes on land and personal revenues, but was actually Babeuf’s first attempt at a practical program to achieve “the common happiness of the peoples.” Among other things it proposed that money would be raised by imposing taxes upon those most able to bear them, and spent on those most in need. Since his proposed system involved confiscating the property of the rich and distributing it among the poor, Babeuf had to demonstrate that the right of property was conditional and subject to regulation. To do this he used four distinct arguments.

The first argument came from Rousseau’s exposition of the social contract. The second was based on the natural right of all to an equal share of the adequate but restricted bounty of nature. The third was an attack on the origins of feudal rights, claiming that feudal property derived originally from usurpation and fraud. The fourth was a pragmatic argument based on the number of Frenchmen without property (some 15 million in a population of 24 million). It was inconceivable to Babeuf that the majority would continue to respect the rights of the nine million property owners if that would mean their starvation. Little came of the Cadastre perpétuel, both as a commercial venture and as a political manifesto [3].

In 1794, Babeuf started publishing the Tribun du peuple, created from the Journal de la liberté de la presse and in 1796 he became a member of the “Insurrectional Directory.” It was Babeuf’s duty to give a lead to “the party which desires the reign of pure equality,” and to “outline to the people the plan, the mode of attack.”[4] It was at this point that Babeuf, along with Philippe-Michel Buonarroti, began to work seriously on the exposition of their common dream of a communist society without private property and with a collective administration of production and distribution.

On 10 May 1796, Babeuf was arrested and the Conspiracy of Equals was ended. He was indicted on 20 February 1797, and executed on 27 May. The trial at Vendôme lasted just over three months, but as the first trial in which a verbatim record was kept of the proceedings it made legal history. As his final address to the jury, The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf was both a political treatise and an attempt to justify his actions.

Babeuf felt that society was created in order to guarantee the natural rights of man, these rights being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If society fails to guarantee these rights, the social compact is dissolved and the people have the right, even the duty, to rise up against usurpation, oppression and tyranny [5]. He also believed that the three roots of public woe were heredity (inheritance of property), alienability (ability to lose property) and the differing values assigned to different types of social product. All of these stem from the institution of private property, which thus leads to all the evils of society. Private property isolates the people from each other and converts every family into a private commonwealth that is then pitted against society at large resulting in an ever growing emphasis on inequality. The only way to avoid this is to suppress private property, set each person to work on a skill or job that they understand, require each to deposit the fruits of their labor in kind into a common store, which then (via an agency) distributes the basic necessities to all. (Babeuf uses the army as an example of this kind of system. [6])

In 1828, Buonarotti published his account of the conspiracy, at which point the socialists, including Marx and Engels, began to recognize the significance of the communist objectives of the conspirators.

References:
Scott, John Anthony, ed. & trans., “The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf before the High Court of Vendôme,” The University of Massachusetts Press, 1967.

Rose, R. B., “Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist,” Stanford University Press, 1978.

Notes:
[1] After the brothers Gracchi, Tiberius and Caius, members of the Roman nobility who placed themselves at the head of the peasant movement for land distribution. They were both assassinated by their political enemies.

[2] Literally a perpetual register of the land. Before the Revolution, Babeuf had been a feudiste (a notary specializing in the legal aspects of the administration of feudal estates).

[3] R. B. Rose, “Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist,” pp. 49-54.

[4] Ibid., p. 229.

[5] Defense of Gracchus Babeuf, pp. 20-21.

[6] Ibid., pp. 54-57.

John Locke - An essay concerning human understanding

2009-11-15T09:04:00.000-05:00

Modern European Intellectual History - 2

John Locke (1632-1704) - born in Wrington, Somerset. 1646 - entered Westminster School, studied the classics, Hebrew, and Arabic. 1652 - elected to a studentship at Christ’s Church, Oxford. 1656 - B.A., remained in residence for the master’s degree. Lectured in Latin and Greek. 1664 - appointed censor of moral philosophy. Studied medicine. 1665 - diplomatic mission accompanying Sir Walter Vane to the elector of Brandenburg at Cleves. Rejected a secretaryship under the earl of Sandwich, ambassador to Spain. Returned to Oxford and began to seriously study philosophy. Descartes. 1662 - Met Lord Ashley, earl of Shaftesbury. 1667 - became his personal physician. Assisted Shaftesbury in the framing of a constitution for the colony of Carolina. Secretary for the presentation of benefices and then secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations. Became a fellow in the Royal Society. 1675 - visited France for his health. 1679 - returned to an England torn by intense political conflicts. 1683 - Fled to Holland. 1689 - returned to England, escorting the princess of the Orange, who later became Queen Mary. 1689 - published Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Purpose of the “Essay” - to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent. Our understanding and knowledge fall far short of all that exists, but we have a capacity for knowledge sufficient for our purposes and matters enough to inquire into.

Ideas - whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks; whatsoever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking.

No innate ideas - we get all our ideas from experience. The senses provide us with particular ideas, which the mind abstracts to general ideas. General ideas, general words, and the use of reason grow together, and assent to the truth of propositions depends on having clear and distinct ideas of the meaning of terms. We have natural faculties or capacities to think and to reason. No innate moral or practical principles, since there is no universal agreement on them. There are eternal principles of morality, which we come to know through the use of reason and experience - but they are not innate.

Source of ideas - sensation or reflection.

Ideas and the real world - physical realism - the ideas we have do represent real things outside of us and do constitute the links by which we know something of the external physical world.

Identity - existence itself constitutes the principle of individuation.

Origin of sensation - a man first begins to think when he has any sensation.

Simple and complex ideas - simple ideas are nothing but one uniform appearance or conception in the mind, and are not distinguishable into different ideas. Once it has them, the mind can combine simple ideas any way it likes, but it can never generate new ones on its own. With simple ideas the mind is passive, they are given by experience. Some ideas, such as pleasure, pain, power, existence, and unity, we have from both sensation and reflection.

Primary and secondary qualities - primary qualities are utterly inseparable from body (solidity, extension, figure, mobility). Secondary qualities are powers to produce various sensation. These ideas do not resemble the qualities of the body themselves (color, odor, sound, warmth, smell). They are signs of events in real bodies.

Ideas of reflection - perception is the first faculty of the mind and without it we know nothing else. The idea of perception is the first and simplest idea we have from reflection.

Memory and contemplation - the retention manifested in contemplation and memory is the second faculty of the mind. Contemplation consist in holding an idea before the mind for some time. Memory - the ability of the mind to revive perception which it has once had, with this additional perception attached, that it has had them before.

Other ideas of reflection - discerning and distinguishing one idea from another, comparing and compounding, naming and abstracting.

Complex ideas - the mind can join several simple ideas together to form one complex idea. Three categories: modes, substance, and relations. Modes are dependencies or affection of substances. Simple modes are variations or different combinations of one simple idea, whereas in mixed modes several distinct ideas are joined to make a complex idea. Ideas of substances represent distinct particular things subsisting in themselves. Complex ideas of relation consist in comparing one idea with another. The mind does not construct complex ideas arbitrarily - objective reality.

Relations - the mind can consider any ideas as it stands in relation to any other. Relations are external. They terminate in simple ideas.

Causation - cause is that which produces any simple or complex idea, and effect is that which is produced.

Identity and diversity - the relation of a thing to itself, particularly with respect to different times and places. Personal identity is consciousness of being the same thinking self at different times and places.

Language - the primary functions of language are to communicate with our fellow men, to make signs for ourselves of internal conceptions, and to stand as marks for ideas. Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them. We suppose they stand for the same ideas in the minds of others. Words stand for things only indirectly.

Definition - definition by genus and differentia is merely a convenience by which we avoid enumerating various simple ideas for which the genus stands.

Names - names of simple ideas are not definable. Complex ideas consisting of several simple ideas are definable and intelligible provided one has experience of the simple ideas that compose them. Simple ideas are perfectly taken from the existence of things and are not arbitrary at all. Ideas of substances refer to a pattern with some latitude, whereas ideas of mixed modes are absolutely arbitrary and refer to no real existence. They are not, however, made at random or without reason. It is the name that ties these ideas together, and each idea is its own prototype. Since names for substances stand for complex ideas perceived regularly to go together and supposed to belong to one thing, we necessarily come short of the real essences, if there are any. Essences are of our own making without being entirely arbitrary. The boundaries of the species of substances are drawn by men.

Connective words - signify an action of the mind.

Knowledge - the perception of the connection and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. This agreement or disagreement is in respect to four types: identity and diversity, relation, coexistence or necessary connection, and real existence.

2 sources of knowledge: sensation and reflection. In reflection the mind observes its own action.

Propositions - where there is knowledge, there is judgment, since there can be no knowledge without a proposition, mental or verbal. Truth is the joining or separation of sings as the things signified by them do agree or disagree one with another. There are two sorts of propositions: mental, wherein the ideas in our understandings are, without the use of words, put together or separated by the mind perceiving or judging of their agreement or disagreement; and verbal, which stand for mental propositions.

Judgments - ideas are the materials of knowledge, the terms of mental propositions. They are, insofar as they are given in sensation and reflection, the subject matter of reflection. If perception of agreement or disagreement in identity and diversity is the first act of the mind, than that act is a judgment.

Degrees of knowledge - 2 degrees of knowledge: intuition and demonstration. Intuition is the more fundamental and certain - the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other. Irresistible knowledge, no room for doubt or hesitation. The mind perceives not a third idea, but its own act. In demonstration the mind perceives agreement or disagreement, not immediately, but through other mediating ideas. Each step in demonstration rests upon an intuition. A third degree of knowledge is employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us, which going beyond bare probability and not yet reaching perfectly to either of the foregoing degrees of certainty, passes under the name of knowledge (sensitive knowledge).

Limits of knowledge - knowledge extends no farther than our ideas and, specifically, no further than the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas. We cannot have knowledge of all the relations of our ideas or rational knowledge of the necessary relation between many of our ideas. Sensitive knowledge goes only as far as the existence of things, not to their real essence, or reality.

Knowledge of existents - even though are knowledge terminates in ideas, it is real. Simple ideas are not fictions of our fancies, but the natural and regular production of things without us, really operating upon us; and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended; or which our state requires. All our complex ideas, except those of substances, being archetypes of the mind’s own making, not intended to be copies of anything, not referred to the existence of anything, as to their original, cannot want any conformity necessary to real knowledge. Universal propositions, the truth of which may be known with certainty, are not concerned directly with existence. We have intuitive knowledge of our own existence. We have a demonstrable knowledge of God’s existence. We have sensitive knowledge of the existence of other things.

Probability - faith was the acceptance of revelation. It must be sharply distinguished from reason, which is the discovery of the certainty or probability of such propositions or truths, which the mind arrives at by deduction made from such ideas which it has got by the use of its natural faculties, viz. by sensation or reflection. Though reason is not able to discover the truth of revelation, nevertheless, something claimed to be revelation cannot be accepted against the clear evidence of the understanding. Enthusiasm sets reason aside and substitutes for it bare fancies born of conceit and blind impulse.

Error - error cannot lie in intuition. 4 sources of error: the want of proofs, inability to use them, unwillingness to use them, and wrong measures of probability.

Science or human knowledge is divided into 3 classes - natural philosophy, practical action and ethics, and the doctrine of signs.

Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments

2009-11-07T07:29:00.000-05:00

Back in my grad school days at Notre Dame I took a course called Modern European Intellectual History. It was a small class, only 5 of us, and met on Friday afternoons. Each week our professor would assign each of us a reading centered around a theme. The next week we would have to present our reading and hand out a short precis of it to the other members of the class. The professor would tie them all together. It was one of the best classes I have ever taken. It started at 2pm and sometimes we didn't get out of there until 6pm, but I always felt jazzed afterwards. This is the first precis that I did.

Adam Smith - (1723-1790). Born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. Entered the University of Glasgow in 1737 (attended Francis Hutcheson’s lectures). Entered Balliol College, Oxford in 1740 as a Snell exhibitioner, stayed for 7 years. In 1748 moved to Edinburgh and became the friend of Hume and Lord Kames. Elected professor of logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751, exchanged logic for the professorship in moral philosophy the next year, an appointment he held for 10 years. Published Moral Sentiments (from his course of lectures) in 1759.

Sympathy - arises from our capacity to imagine ourselves in the situation of our fellows and form an idea of what they are going through by examining our own reactions to their situation, with the understanding that our emotions will not (in general) be as strong, since we are not actually in their situation. Smith believes that this fellow-feeling is something that we all desire, and that the fact that the spectator does not feel the emotions to the same degree as the participant or principal leads the principal to tone down their own emotional reaction, to be more in line with that of the spectator. This ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, as well as the need of mankind for the society of man, forms the basis of Smith’s moral philosophy.

Impartial Spectator - viewing ourselves not as we may appear to ourselves, but as we appear to others. Analogous to conscience. The standard of our conduct is held up against what is acceptable to society, with the understanding that society is composed of humans who have sympathy for each other. In evaluating the appropriateness of our own behavior, we should examine it in the light of the impartial spectator.

Virtue - born of the combination of the impartial spectator and the ability to feel sympathy for our fellows. The ability of the spectator to enter into the sentiments of the principal leads to the virtues of “candid condescension and indulgent humanity;” the ability of the principal to bring their emotions down to what the spectator can identify with leads to the virtues of self-denial, self-government, and the command of our passions.

Smith examines at some length three virtues:

Propriety - we judge the propriety or impropriety of the affections of other men by their concord or dissonance with our own. If we approve of the passions of another, we entirely sympathize with them, and if we don’t approve of them, we don’t entirely sympathize with them.

Prudence - concerned with the care of the health, fortune, rank, reputation of the individual, those objects upon which the comfort and happiness of this life are supposed to depend. This involves a certain amount of care and foresight - hence prudence.

Benevolence - the willingness to sacrifice personal interest for the greater good or public interest. Associated with the wisdom of the Deity.

These virtues, which arise out of sympathy and through the notion of the impartial spectator should, if practiced, lead to a just society, and Smith’s concept of justice.

Justice - the concept of the impartial spectator and the desire for the approval of our fellows leads us to behave in a just manner. Though we are, by nature, inclined to think of our own needs first and foremost, if we desire to live in the society of man, we must not act upon that inclination, where such actions would cause harm to others.

H. G. Wells - The World Set Free

2009-10-25T09:17:00.000-04:00

(Back when I was studying the history of science at Notre Dame I took a class called The Technology of War and Peace. In that class we had to give a presentation on a related book, this is a transcript of my presentation.)

The World Set Free
by
H. G. Wells

It is impossible to discuss the writings of H. G. Wells without also discussing the man, for his writings reflect both his deepest fears and his greatest hopes. He was born in 1866, a member of the lower-middle-class. His mother was a domestic, his father an unsuccessful business man. Although he was apprenticed to trades several times, his escape from this existence came in the form of a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington in 1884. One of his teachers in his first year there was T. H. Huxley, the staunch defender of Darwin. Despite early success, Wells did not take a degree. He wound up in London, teaching, and writing essays and popularizations of science. In 1895 he published The Time Machine. In it he presented a theme that was to dominate all his works. The narrator says of the Time Traveler that he “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.” But, the narrator continues, “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” (The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells by McConnell, p. 11)

By the turn of the century he was the darling of the British literary world. In 1903 he joined the Fabian Society, a group that strongly supported socialism but believed that the change would only come gradually through reasoned argument rather than class warfare. By 1905 he had written some 24 books, including almost all of his science fiction (McConnell, p. 17), and this level of productivity continued for most of his life. But by 1911, the tenor of his works changed and they became little more than vehicles for his ideas of social reform and his prophecies of the doom that awaited mankind unless they woke up and listened to him. In 1914, on the eve of the first World War, he published The World Set Free. This is the novel that gave the world the ‘atomic bomb’ and depicted an atomic war. For the most part, in telling the story of this novel I shall let Wells speak for himself, quoting liberally and often, and only adding explanatory and connective details as needed.

It opens, as Wells was wont to do, with a sweeping panorama of human history in which he begins with the statement that “the history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power” (p. 7) the greatest expression of this is mankind’s desire to find “the snare that will some day catch the sun” (p. 13). Inspired by Soddy’s writings, Wells concludes this prelude in 1910, with a professor of physics named Rufus giving a lecture on Radium and radioactivity in Edinburgh.

The first chapter opens in 1933, when the scientist Holsten manages to set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth; it explodes with great violence into a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrates in turn over a period of seven days. Coincidentally, it was in 1933 that the Joliot-Curies first produced radioactive phosphorous by bombarding aluminum with electrons (H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future by Haynes, p. 41). It takes Holsten another year to show that the final result is gold. The Alchemist’s Dream. In this first experiment, however, “Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power” (p. 26). He is stunned by his discovery and the ramifications for the future of mankind and spends the next day wandering around Hampstead Heath in a daze. He “felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche” (p. 28). In the evening he stands outside the doors of Saint Paul’s Cathedral listening to the service. He feels oppressed and scared “by his sense of the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for its practical applications” (p. 30).

Holsten continues his soul searching: “His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life” (p. 31). Finally, he concludes that “It has begun. It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the armory of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of years had passed some other man would be doing this...” (P. 32).

And so Holsten relieves himself of responsibility, yet one of the things that Wells believed was that we should think about where our science is leading us. We should think about what the future may hold. We should not let ourselves merely drift along.

It takes another twenty years before Holsten’s discovery bears fruit, with the first Holsten-Roberts engine replacing the steam engine in electrical generating stations. Other engines quickly followed, the Dass-Tata engine, used chiefly in vehicles and the American Kemp and Krupp-Erlanger engines. By autumn 1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and machinery was taking place. Within 3 years the old polluting automobiles were replaced with “light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel” (p. 34). The light weight of the engines revolutionizes aircraft design, creating a new age in personal transport: “The Leap into the Air” (p. 34). Technological innovation flourished. The prosperity of the patent holding companies was enhanced by the fact that the recoverable waste product in both the Dass-Tata and the Holsten-Roberts engines was gold. But beneath this brightness of wealth and productivity “there was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production, there was also a huge destruction of values.”... “Millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled laborers in innumerable occupations were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every center of population, the value of existing house property became problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic” (p. 35).

In 1955 the suicide rate in the United States quadrupled. Violent crime increased. “The thing had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains” (p. 36).

The story then shifts to the experiences of Frederick Barnet, told through the pages of an autobiographical novel that he published in 1970. It is through Barnet’s eyes that we see the collapse of the old world and the outbreak of war. Barnet was of the upper class, until his father was ruined by the atomic revolution and took his own life. In an instant, Barnet’s world was turned upside down. He finds himself on the streets with the millions of other displaced workers. As he wanders the city of London, now recreated with elevated side walks that raise the haves above the ground, to which the have nots have been relegated, he sees a society literally stratified by class. Above him the rich flit about in their personal aircraft, below him are the beggars and dispossessed. And he thinks to himself: “I saw an immense selfishness, a monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would have been the same. What else can happen when men use science and every new thing that science gives and all available intelligence and energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago?” (P. 54).

This catalog of the decline of human society brought on by the sudden changes of atomic power is cut off by the outbreak of what Wells calls “The Last War.” He does not give us details about how it started although prior to its outbreak there was talk of war looming on the horizon. Talk of the “Central European powers suddenly striking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the Slavs” (p. 55). We don’t even get many details on the waging of the war itself. We know that it was primarily a ground war, but Wells does not have machine guns, just infantry and rifles. At the beginning, airplanes are used primarily for reconnaissance, and only later do they get used in aerial combat, and of course, for dropping the bombs. The center of command of the allies fighting the Central European powers is in Paris, and is destroyed by bombs. With the allied military effectively decapitated, the scientists and airmen decide to carry out their own plan, a plan that they would have carried out with or without approval from the military commanders. As one of the airmen puts it “now, there’s nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat” (p. 67).

The bombs that they drop on Berlin use a substance known as Carolinium, which is analogous to plutonium in many of its properties. It is a continuing explosive, meaning that once its atomic decay process has been started, it continues with a furious radiation of energy that cannot be stopped. The bombs used by the allies are black spheres with handles for lifting them. They are composed of pure Carolinium, coated with a substance that induces the radioactive decay of the Carolinium when exposed to air, the whole thing being covered over with a nonreactive substance. A small celluloid stud between the handles is bitten off to admit air to the device, activating the radioactive decay. Thus resulting in a chain reaction. The picture is this: Two airmen in a plane, the pilot and the bombardier. The bombardier sits with these spherical bombs between his legs. He lifts one up by its handles, bites off the celluloid stud, and drops the bomb over the side of the airplane. “What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxydized and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinium sphere began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big inanimate nucleus wrapped in flames and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as more and more of the Carolinium became active, the bomb spread itself into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinium, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances for dispersal. Once launched the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapor and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinium, and each a center of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far” (p. 73).

On a mountain-side above the town of Brissago in Switzerland, the surviving rulers of the world meet. They are called together by the French ambassador to the US, a man named Leblanc, “to arrest if possible, before it was too late the debacle of civilization” (p. 93). “For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of destruction. Power after power about the armed globe sought to anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilizing. It must have seemed plain at last to everyone in those days that the world was slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganized and every city, every thickly populated area was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames” (p. 95).

Against this backdrop of destruction, Leblanc manages to gather the remnants of the world leaders in Brissago. A place chosen for its remoteness, for its distance from old associations. The natural leader of this conference is one King Egbert of England, who is going to show the rest of the leaders how to create a world government by being the first to give up his sovereignty. The only no-show is the King of the Balkans (also known as the ‘Slavic Fox’), who attempts to turn back the clock and make himself king of the world by sending airmen to bomb the conference. The plane is shot down, without dropping its bombs, and although there is no identification on the airmen, it’s pretty obvious to everyone who is responsible. Egbert travels to visit the Slavic Fox, ostensibly on an inspection mission, to verify that the Balkans do not possess atomic bombs. The Fox tries to smuggle the bombs out of the capital city, is caught, and killed. Now nothing stands in the way of the world government.

And so, out of the ashes of destruction of the old world, rises the new. There is not much to say about this utopia, it is like most utopias, long on dreams, short on practicality. It does not include capitalism, democracy (as we know it), or nations, states, or flags. English is its language. Education is universal. An index of human knowledge is being created, a world encyclopedia, in a sense, a world brain, long a dream of Wells.

Shortly after the publication of this novel, World War I broke out. Wells felt, in some way responsible. He began a shrill and vociferous journalistic campaign leading off with an essay titled: The war that will end war. It became a national slogan. Interestingly enough I have not yet found any evidence that the novel itself had much of an impact on the political tenor of the time. Perhaps it was simply that then, as now, science fiction is read more by scientists than by politicians. We do know that it did influence scientists. Leo Szilard read it and was impressed by the vision that Wells presented.

In 1939 war loomed once again upon the horizon. Wells was seventy-three, ill and tired. Sir Ernest Barker saw him sitting alone at a reception and asked how he was. “Poorly, Barker, Poorly,” he said. Barker asked him what he was doing. “Writing my epitaph.” He asked him what it was. “Quite short,” Wells said, “just this–God damn you all: I told you so.” (McConnell, p. 9). And what was Wells telling us? As Frank McConnell put it, in his book The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells it was this: “That the major disease of modern man is that his scientific and technological expertise has outstripped his moral and emotional development; that the human race, thanks to its inherited prejudices and superstitions and its innate pigheadedness, is an endangered species; and that mankind must learn–soon–to establish a state of worldwide cooperation by burying its old hatreds and its ancient selfishness, or face extinction.” (McConnell, p. 11).

H. G. Wells died on August 13, 1946, a year after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

What is Insurance for?

2009-09-14T11:22:00.000-04:00

The health care debate has stirred up a lot of emotion and generated a lot of rhetoric, but the debate still doesn’t seem to be getting at the fundamental issue: what is insurance for? Insurance is to protect you against catastrophic circumstances. You don’t use your auto insurance to pay for routine auto maintenance do you? You don’t use your home owner’s insurance to pay for routine home maintenance do you? So why is it that we expect our health insurance to pay for our routine visits to the doctor?

I think that there are actually a few simple changes that could reap a large benefit to both individuals and society at large. First, you have to reform Tort law. This is necessary so that the malpractice insurance rates can be decreased, which will help bring down the cost of health care. Second, we should institute Health Savings Accounts for everyone who wants one. This would be pre-tax income. I’m not sure how the amount that could be contributed would be calculated (percentage of income, perhaps, or maybe no limit), but the money should not disappear at the end of the year if it hasn’t all been spent. Once the accounts are established, link a debit card to them and use them to pay the doctor directly at the time of service (no paperwork to file). Third, there needs to be transparency in health care cost. And last, but not least, health insurance should only be used for catastrophic illness or accident, not for routine visits to the doctor, and it should not be linked to your job.

If you do this, you will probably cover the majority of people, and then you just need to have a government program to catch the folks that fall between the cracks, because there will always be those people.

One thing that we should not do is require that everyone buy health insurance. This simply burdens the young and poor. We have the same problem with requiring everyone to have auto insurance. If we went to true no-fault auto-insurance we wouldn’t need to do this either and young people just trying to get started and poor people trying to improve their lot would not get hit by these unfunded government mandates.

We keep hammering at the existing mess and making things more complex (and increasing Government in the process), when we should be taking a step back and asking ourselves if our underlying assumptions are correct. That is the way to true reform.

At Last! Comfortable Shoes!

2009-05-15T15:44:00.000-04:00

For the past few years I have been wearing LL Bean Comfort Mocs. These are inexpensive, but quite comfortable, slip on shoes. Unfortunately this past year not only did LL Bean redesign their Comfort Mocs, but they also got rid of my favorite color - Purple Night. I held out for as long as I could, but my pair was wearing out so I finally broke down and bought a pair of the redesigned Mocs, in Coffee. I bought size 7.5, which is the size that I wore in the original Comfort Mocs. They fit okay in the heel, but were too tight in the toe box. Sigh. So I bought a pair in size 8. They were too loose in the heel, but still did not have enough room in the toe box - I don't like the feel of the shoe pressing down on my toe nail. Sigh. Two returns to LL Bean. The search continued. The search was complicated by the fact that I really wanted purple shoes.

In my quest I found a cute pair of purple suede Mary Janes at Lands End. They were in the girls section but I bought them anyway. They are cute, and pretty comfy, but not much arch support, and they definitely look like girl shoes. I also picked up several pairs of boiled wool Mary Janes at LL Bean (which they don't seem to be carrying anymore). Although not great for wearing all day long, they are pretty comfy and I figure I can wear them with my dresses and skirts. I tried a pair of purple Klogs that I found at Amazon but decided that they must have been designed for aliens because the contours of the shoes did not resemble the contours of my feet. I tried a pair of purple Hush Puppies that fit, but just didn't feel right on my feet. More returns.

The search continued and I finally abandoned the idea of finding purple shoes and just concentrated on finding comfy shoes. I don't know if it is my practical nature winning out over my vanity but I am of an age now where I prefer comfort to fashion and where I now find practical, well-made things more attractive than things that just look cool.

At last, it seems, the search is over. Last week I found The Walking Company. I discovered this place through the Concurring Opinions blog (a great blog on legal issues). It was just a throw away line in a blog written by a woman who seemed to have reached the same place that I had, at least with regard to shoes. I clicked on the link and started browsing their site. The first thing I liked was that you could browse not only by shoe type and brand, but by comfort level. I went for the ultimate comfort. The prices gave me a bit of a start but I told myself that if the quality and comfort match the price tag it is worth it. I finally settled on a pair of Dansko Calista shoes in Chestnut. They came this week. The only modification they required was a piece of moleskin in each heel. I have narrow and boney heels and unless there is enough padding in the heel of the shoe I will rub my foot raw.

Today is the first day that I have worn them to work and I am happy to say that they are living up to expectations. I like them so much that I ordered a pair of Dansko Suri in Cordovan.

Ah, happy feet!

In the Bag

2009-05-12T20:46:00.000-04:00

Before I bought all this cool technology my typical load out for work consisted of my Baggallini bag (in purple), my lunch cooler and my knitting bag (a small custom color boat and tote from LL Bean.

When I got the Kindle I tucked it into my knitting bag. No big deal. The Kindle is small and light and didn’t take up much room. When I got the Dell Mini I tucked that (and the charging cord) in the knitting bag as well. That made it a wee bit heavier, and combined with the Kindle was starting to eat into the knitting project space. What to do.

Well, once again, my techie friend Terry came to my rescue. He pointed me to the Waterfield Designs web site where all manner of bags can be had for your cool techie toys.

First I bought a sleeve case and Vertigo bag for the Fujitsu Sytlistic. I haven’t used it much, yet, mostly because I haven’t had the occasion to. The Sytlistic lives under my coffee table or in my lap.

When I got the Dell Mini I purchased a sleeve case for that as well. At the same time I picked up a slip case and bag for the Kindle. I haven’t used the Kindle bag yet either, other than to store accessories in, but I am keeping the Kindle in the slip case rather than the cover that came with it. I like the Kindle cover that comes with it, but when I’m reading the Kindle I found that the cover got in the way, so I got the slip case instead.

Unfortunately, while these bags were great for toting the technology, none of these fine bags could replace my purse and knitting bag. The search continued. First I looked at knitting bags. They all featured lots of pockets, but none of them seemed to have a mesh pocket for my water bottle, an absolute must. I tried a Baggallini messenger bag. It had lots of pockets and it even had a mesh pocket, inside the main compartment, that I could just fit my water bottle into. It required a bit of surgery before I used it – they had magnetic clasps and I didn’t want those near my credit cards. I used it for a week or so and it worked…okay. But I really wanted something that was just a wee bit deeper front to back and not quite so long side to side (between the shoulder strap ends).

I was feeling pretty frustrated and discouraged. I dug through the closet stash of old bags from my college days, but nothing would work. Then I came across an old LL Bean bag from my grad school days. It was called the Traveler. It had some distinct possibilities but was somewhat the worse for wear. So I went back to the LL Bean site and found the Travel Touring Bag. It has sturdy construction, an ample mesh pocket on the outside for my water bottle; a front pocket with flap that can hold the stuff from my purse; an inside zipper pocket that holds the Dell Mini with its charging cord; adequate room in the main compartment for my knitting; and a pocket on the back that holds my Kindle and iPod.

It still is not a perfect solution. Now I have the problem of what to do when I just need a purse. Sometimes I pull out the old Baggallini purse and stuff what I need in it, sometimes I just grab my wallet and cell phone and stuff it into one of my LL Bean custom boat and totes that I use as knitting bags. But really, some kind of modular system would be ideal, where I could detach the purse portion, or the technology portion or the knitting portion but I have yet to see that kind of design approach being applied to bags. We tend to approach bags from the single use perspective. Hmm, I know a woman who used to design bags for a living, and she usually comes to Bead and Button, maybe I’ll have a little chat with her this year…

Another Computer ?!?

2009-05-12T11:46:00.000-04:00

The last bit of technology that I've acquired recently is a Dell Mini. Yes, I know, in a previous post I said I didn't really like it, and I didn't like it as a design computer. The Fujitsu Stylistic is far superior for that use. But the Dell Mini does have a place - in my bag.

The main reason I bought it was to have a small portable computer that would be easier to lug around than your typical laptop, especially when I go to the Bead and Button show in Milwaukee. You see, for the last couple of years I have been lugging an older Dell laptop to Bead and Button so my sister Virginia would have a way of staying on top of the email to the bead store. But after seeing the Dell Mini and then looking at the old laptop, well, who can blame me for wanting the smaller package that could still do everything, and in fact do a whole lot more.

I went to my techie friend Terry for help picking one out. We went to the Outlet page at Dell and started looking through the list of available models. He convinced me that I should get one that had the expansion slot for the air card so I could use a cellular network if there was no WiFi or Ethernet connection available (it didn't really take much convincing on his part). It didn't take us long to find what we were looking for. A Dell Mini 9 (Terry said that the screen on the 9 is superior to the one on the 10) with Windows XP, the air card expansion slot (he had a card he could sell me) and BlueTooth. No built-in camera, but I don't care. A 16 gig hard drive. Only 1 gig of RAM, but he advised me to upgrade that to 2, which was easy enough.

I've had the Dell Mini for a little over a month now, and I've been pretty happy with it. I use the air card a lot, every day at work, in fact. I even used it in the car one time when we were going into town to make sure that the local Lowes would have what we needed. I like the size and the fact that the drive is solid state. The screen size doesn't bother me and the resolution and color are great, but the key board does take some getting used to, especially the location of the single quote/double quote key. On a normal size keyboard that key is just to the left of the Enter key. Yeah, I keep hitting enter when I use contractions. I guess I could stop using contractions...

The sim card that I use to connect to the cellular network pops out from its little slot easily and I can put it in the USB connecter that it came with and use it on my Fujitsu as well. We'll see how my sister likes it in a couple of weeks.

To Boldly Go...

2009-05-10T11:22:00.000-04:00

(SPOILER ALERT)

Yesterday Bruce and I went to see the new Star Trek movie. It's been a long time since we've been to the movies but we're both Trek fans and the review in the NY Times was favorable, so we went. I'm happy to say that we enjoyed the film.

First, the casting was superb. Chris Pine captures the brashness of Kirk while Zachary Quinto captures Spock's conflicted nature. Their initial confrontations form a nice foundation for their future deep friendship. Karl Urban does a splendid job as a young McCoy - I've liked him ever since I saw him on Hercules and Xena. Zoe Saldana as a super-sexy super-smart Uhuru and Simon Pegg as the irreverent Scotty round out the main crew. John Cho does a nice job as Sulu and Anton Yelchin is fine as Chechov, although he seemed awfully young and why was he so smart?

I wasn't too crazy about the Romulans, but they were renegades so I could overlook the tattoos. I still don't know what to make of their ship.Yeah, it was big and scary and kind of cool but it really didn't make sense to me as a functioning spaceship. It was a mining ship, which I guess would account for the drill. But Red Matter? Seriously? Couldn't they have come up with something better?

I liked Leonard Nimoy showing up as Spock from the future and his ship was very cool. It reminded me of the Vulcan ship from Enterprise. The time travel angle creating an alternate future was a clever idea. It allowed the writers to pay homage to the original series without becoming locked in by the existing canon. I am not, however, a big fan of this technique as a plot device.

Ben Cross does a nice turn as Spock's father Sarek. I especially liked the scene between Sarek and the young Spock when Sarek explains that Vulcans are actually deeply emotional, but that they cultivate logic so that they are not ruled by their emotions. This was something I had twigged to when I was watching the original show, leading me to use Spock as one of my early role models.

Unfortunately Winona Ryder was not very memorable as Spock's mother Amanda. And what was the deal on the costumes for the female Vulcans?

But these criticisms are really just quibbles. Overall, a very good movie, and a worthy addition to the franchise. It might even give it a new lease on life. I especially liked the way the movie ended - with on updated version of the opening of the original show complete with a big E beauty pass and soaring original sound track, but with Leonard Nimoy doing the voice-over narration.

Sharp-eyed viewers will spot Paul McGillion (Dr. Carson Beckett of Stargate: Atlantis) in the scene where everyone is getting ship assignments.

My only other WTF moments: building a starship on Earth? Spock and Uhuru? A green Orion girl in Star Fleet?

And what about Nurse Chapel? Of course Majel was the computer voice. What will they do now that she is gone?

Oh, yeah, and where was Yoeman Rand?

Live Performances, Over Amplification, and Hearing Loss

2009-05-08T16:29:00.000-04:00

This past St. Patrick's Day, Bruce and I went to see Celtic Woman up in Baltimore. Other live performances that we have seen lately are Cats, in Charlottesville, and Cirque du Soleil, also in Charlottesville. Before that, we had been going to the Opera in Philadelphia.

In our minds, one of the reasons to go to a live performance is to hear the artists without the mediation of electronics. As any audiophile can tell you, there is a loss in sound quality when you convert between analog and digital. Unfortunately, except for the Opera, too many performers are relying upon electronics in their performances. The primary form of this electronic assistance is amplification. This amplification generally leads to two basic problems - the performance is too loud, and the different instruments (including voice) are not well-balanced. So at Cats, for example, the accompaniment tended to overpower the singing. At Celtic Woman they had both problems. The performance was too loud for the space (the Hippodrome) and the different instruments were not always well-balanced.

This is a very disappointing situation to encounter. Why don't they have competent sound engineers help them set up the sound system for the space? And why do they think that cranking up the volume is going to give us a better experience? Don't they realize that too much amplification just results in distortion? Here you have performers with lovely voices, but we can't appreciate them because they are over-amplified. This is a disservice to both the performers and the audience. It makes me not want to go to live performances, which is a shame.

I just wish that the people responsible for setting up the sound systems would actually go sit in the theater and listen and tailor the sound to the space. I'm not even sure how much amplification you need in these theaters. They were designed, after all, to amplify the acoustic energy naturally.

Sound systems cranked up too loud are also why I don't like going to movie theaters anymore (well, that and the sticky floors). I've also noticed a tendency for the soundtrack to overwhelm the dialogue, another balance issue. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, when you were watching a movie on DVD, you could control the sound track separately from the dialogue?

And while we are on the topic of noise, why do some restaurants play their sound systems so loud? Before the show we had dinner at Oliver's up in Baltimore, a recently opened Brew Pub. It was a nice place, good food, reasonable prices, and great beer, but it was too noisy. They had the stereo cranked up so loud that you couldn't hear each other talk unless you shouted. How does that make your dinner an enjoyable occasion? It's also hard on the wait-staff, because they have a hard time hearing us and we have a hard time hearing them. So, not only is the pub making their jobs harder, but it is also probably causing permanent hearing damage.

It just doesn't make sense to me.

A Computer You Can Curl Up With

2009-05-08T10:43:00.000-04:00

The next bit of new technology that I have acquired is a Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC. This acquisition was paid for by my Federal Tax Refund - hey just doing my part to stimulate the global economy. What I was looking for was a design computer that I could load my sewing, knitting and weaving design software on that was portable and that I could curl up on the daybed with. I tried a Dell Mini, compliments of Terry, but didn't like the keyboard, or the small size. I just couldn't curl up with it. So then Terry loaned me his old Fujitsu Stylistic and I was hooked.

It's like a heavy clipboard. It's about an inch thick, weighs about 4 pounds, and the display is not quite the size of a sheet of paper. You can use it in portrait or landscape mode and it has a special pen for input. It has a little keyboard screen that slides off side when you're not using it. There are three modes of entry. You can hunt and peck on a miniature keyboard - tedious and slow; you can write in little boxes a letter at a time - perfect for the Times crossword; or you can write on a line as if you were writing on a piece of paper. As you fill up the line, more magically appear. This latter method proved to be a lot faster than I expected, and the hand-writing recognition rocks.

It comes with every connection device you can imagine: BlueTooth, WiFi, Ethernet, even a lowly phone modem and two USB ports. It doesn't have an internal CD/DVD drive, but you can plug one in easily enough to load software, which is what I did. I also transferred over all of the pdf files that I have collected of knitting and beading patterns, and the weaving articles that I have found.

Now when I come home, I curl up with my Fujitsu on the daybed. It has become the computer that I use the most when I'm at home. I leave it on all the time and it sits under the coffee table on a magazine box, always close at hand. I find that I spend a lot more time on the computer now reading my email, the blogs that I've subscribed to, and cruising Facebook and Ravelry. I haven't spent much time with my design software, but I am getting myself more organized. This past weekend I started cataloging my bead stash - so much easier to do now that I can take the computer to the beads rather than bringing the beads to the computer.

iPod Touches Me

2009-05-07T12:37:00.000-04:00

Many years ago I bought an Apple Newton. This was another technology turn-on from my techie friend Terry. I even had a Newton holster. I wore it low-slung on my hip. I took notes on it and kept a calendar on it. At some point I abandoned it.

Last fall my techie friend Terry introduced me to the iPod Touch. It fit my hand so well, it was so intuitive to use, the touch screen was wonderful, there were all those cool apps, and it had built in WiFi. Oh, be still my techie heart! I thought about it for a while, and then bought one for myself for Christmas. It goes with me everywhere.

When I first got it I resisted the urge to over-indulge in apps. I picked up a few essentials, the Amazon app (free), the Wikiamo app (free), GroceryIQ, Spore (just couldn't resist), Solitaire. Mostly I used it to check my email without having to turn on my big computer and to look up things on imdb when we were watching movies and wanted to know who that actor was.

Well, since then, my app count has risen considerably. I have a number of apps for learning Japanese - we get Japanese customers in the booth at Bead & Button. I have apps for learning French. I have a few more games. I have an HP 42C app. I have knitting apps. I have a table of elements app, a conversions app, an app that will calculate how many grams/mole of a substance, a map of the moon app that shows all the Apollo landings. I have an app that keeps track of all the books that I might like to read one day (Next Read). I have the Facebook app and now I have the Kindle app.

I resisted getting any kind of e-reader for the iPod because I already had the Kindle, and the screen is just so small, but when the Kindle app came out I had to give it a try. It is very cool. The other night we were going out to dinner, so I downloaded one of my Kindle books to the iPod and tucked the iPod into my coat pocket. While we were waiting for our table I pulled out the iPod and started reading. Of course the screen is great. Color! And the page turn is an intuitive finger swipe. When I picked the Kindle up the next day and opened up the same book it synced to the spot I was reading on the iPod. Very nice.

Recently, one of my nieces posted a note on Facebook telling her friends to shuffle the songs on their iPods and then write out the first line from each of the next 20 or 30 songs. I had to chuckle at that note, you can put music on these? Wow, what a concept, and here I was thinking it was just a really cool little computer. I have actually bought a couple of albums for my iPod, but I'm still warming up to that aspect of the technology. Partly it is because I really don't like listening to music with headphones or ear buds, and partly it is because you don't get the liner notes if you don't buy the CD. I have recently invested in a high end small speaker for my iPod (a Soundwave), although it hasn't gotten much use yet.

I am going to be taking a trip in a couple of weeks that involves four days of driving. In the past I've taken a box of CDs, but maybe this time I'll just load some stuff on my iPod.

Kindle to the rescue.

2009-04-18T09:42:00.000-04:00

So, the other day at work I was talking to my program boss about a cool camera that I had read about in the latest Technology Review that I thought might be useful for our project. I told him I would send him a link. Back at my desk I dug the email out of my sent folder and prepared to forward it to him. But first I checked the link. It didn't work. I tried searching the Technology Review web site. No luck. But wait! I have the issue in question on my Kindle. I pulled out my Kindle, opened up the magazine, and went right to the section in question using the section list. Voila! The short article had a link to the producer of the camera, which I sent to my boss (after checking it first). Success.

Now, I know that in my previous post I had said I didn't like reading magazines on the Kindle, but after further experimentation I find that I prefer the Kindle despite the limitations. For one thing, I like the e-ink, it's easy to read. But I also like the size of the Kindle. I like not holding the magazine open. I like the fact that you don't get uneven lighting on the page or reflected glare from the paper. And I love the fact that I can carry a veritable library in my hand.

Kindle Girl

2009-03-11T17:14:00.000-04:00

Lately I’ve been investing in some new technology. It all started back in October of 2008 with a Kindle (version 1). I was talking to my techie friend Terry one day and mentioned that I was thinking about getting one as a birthday present to myself. Well, says he, I happen to have one that I am not using if you would like to borrow it. Of course I said yes.

It took me a little while to warm up to the Kindle. I wasn’t put off by the form factor, unlike a lot of people who have been writing and speaking about the Kindle. No, I had to figure out how it fit into my life because I am a bibliophile. I have a house full of books.

I immediately took to the idea of being able to browse and buy books right from the device. So, Bruce and I would be watching The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart would have some author on, and before the interview was over I would be browsing the book in question on my Kindle and reading the reviews.

The first book that I read on the Kindle was “The Hogfather” by Terry Pratchet. This was a book a friend had recommended to me. I haven’t read any Prachet before and tend to stay away from never-ending series, but her descriptions of a couple of scenes piqued my curiosity enough that I bought it and read it. I didn’t feel bad buying it on the Kindle because it wasn’t a book that I would have bought ordinarily. It was, for me, a throw-away book, an experiment to see if I would enjoy the reading process on the Kindle. Well, I did. I like the grey-scale screen, and the page turn delay doesn’t bother me at all. Mostly, I like the fact that I can read it with no hands, which means that I can read while knitting.

The next thing that really got me excited about the Kindle was all the classics that are available. It didn’t take me long to get the complete works of Shakespeare, Jules Verne and most of H. G. Wells. Also, Jane Austin, E. M. Forster, Alexander Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. I now have something like 100 different items on my Kindle, including a lot of samples. That is the other very cool thing about the Kindle, you can try a sample of a book for free. The free sample satisfies the instant gratification bug without costing you anything. And believe me, the instant gratification of the Kindle is a big temptation to spending too much money on books. It is just so easy. Other than the credit card statement there is no evidence of your indulgence. You don’t even have to find more bookshelf space.

I have tried reading magazines on the Kindle, but that hasn’t worked as well. Books tend to be read in a more linear fashion, although I still miss being able to easily flip back to a previous passage. But the magazine experience is different. There is the whole layout of a magazine page, which is not reproduced on the Kindle. And you really can’t flip through or browse the way you would with a print magazine. There is no art work to catch your eye, just text. Having the latest issue appear magically on your Kindle is pretty cool, though. You also don’t want to read books that have a lot of graphics or photographs in them. The grey scale does pretty well, but it is not color. But for reading novels it is great.

I have looked at the NY Times on the Kindle, but just couldn’t really figure out how to read it effectively. It just seemed to be too big for the Kindle, you know? I also tried out some of the blogs. They’re okay, but I really didn’t like the fairly steady stream of updates being downloaded and sucking my battery life. In the end I settled on just reading books on the Kindle, mostly fiction, but some non-fiction as well. Anything in paperback is definitely a Kindle read because I can’t read a paperback and knit at the same time.

Once I got hooked on the Kindle I took it with me everywhere. Bruce even started calling me Kindle Girl. Since I got the Kindle I have been reading more. I still buy real physical books but only if I really want the hardcopy, or if it is something that the Kindle just won’t handle well, or if it is something that Bruce will want to read – he doesn’t like reading on the Kindle, he needs more contrast.

The Kindle is not the end of the e-readers, it is the beginning. The reason it has done better than the others is because it has the weight of Amazon behind it providing a lot of titles (Oprah’s endorsement didn’t hurt). Yeah, it is spendy, and the price discount on the books is not that substantial, except on the classics, and there are the issues of digital rights management (thank goodness iTunes has gone DRM-free!) but the Whispernet is great. I don’t think that Kindle 2 is that much of an improvement over 1. More contrast, slimmer, but you can’t change the battery yourself, and they did away with the memory expansion slot. They did up the on-board memory, but I’ve probably exceeded that on my Kindle 1 (I have a 15 gig SD card).

The Kindle is a sign of things to come and I, for one, am looking forward to the future.

When security takes over

2009-02-12T18:45:00.000-05:00

The other day at work I was taking my annual Information Assurance Awareness Training. This training is supposed to teach me how to protect our information systems, also known as our computers. One of the first statements that I was presented with, after I got past their paranoid scenario whereby hackers have brought down our economic system by taking over the federal pay system and writing themselves paychecks, is the fact that, I, as an insider, am the greatest threat to our information systems. Now, I realize that inside threats are the most difficult to protect against. We have, after all, deliberately been given access to those systems. But I really think they could have worded it better. They could have told me that I was a key element in information system security, thereby trying to enlist me as an ally rather than immediately branding me as an enemy. This sort of thing does, however, shed some insight into the mindset of the security people. In their universe, it seems, everything and everyone is a potential threat.

Now, in my day job I am a system safety engineer on military systems and I understand the necessity of evaluating risk. In fact, evaluating risk is something that we all do, whether or not we realize it, everyday. But if I adopted the mindset of the security culture, I wouldn’t let anyone do anything because I wouldn’t trust them to do the right thing. This is a road that our information security folks seem to be heading down. For several years now, I have not had any administrative privileges on my computer, I can’t even open up the system clock to look at the calendar because I might change the time. Recently they have restricted our emails to plain text only, ostensibly to reduce the bandwidth of our email traffic to make room for the digital signatures that have now become mandatory. Yeah, I don’t really buy their reason, either, but at least they gave us a reason, which is more than they did a couple of months ago when they suddenly banned us from using thumb drives.

Banning the thumb drives actually created a lot of problems. It isn’t easy for us to share our files on our computer networks because we are limited to 10Mb for our email attachments. Fine, you say, why not just post the file to a server. Well, that works, if you’re in my immediate organization, and if I’ve been given write permission to that folder, but access is restricted, and we have limited server space. We have been cleared to use USB hard drives, but not everyone has those, and it is not so easy for us to order supplies, so a lot of CDs are getting burned. Of course, they never told us why we couldn’t use the thumb sticks, and they probably won’t ever let us use them again. Maybe they think that sharing their reasons with us will somehow weaken their security posture. Or maybe, somewhere, deep inside, they know how utterly absurd what they are doing is. Nah, I don’t buy that either.

All of this shows what happens when one factor outweighs all other considerations. In this case that factor is security. Someone, somewhere, doesn’t want to balance security with our ability to perform our jobs. It is just easier to ban things than it is to put an intelligent security policy in place. It is also apparently easier to turn us all into enemies, rather than to enlist us as allies. If I used this approach in my system safety work I would end up killing our soldiers because I would have made the system so safe they wouldn’t be able to use it effectively when they needed to.

The end result of this securitizing (ugly word, isn’t it, well it’s an ugly concept) is the empowerment of the security elements and the disempowerment of the productive elements of our society. Look at what the Federal Government has been doing with airport security? How many hours are being wasted every day by business travelers? How many millions of dollars of tax payer money is being wasted every year on this Security Theater? With security, as with system safety, a little bit of effort will get you a lot of return, but you can never achieve absolute security, just as you can never achieve absolute safety. It is wasteful, and an abuse of power, to even try.

The Demise of the Beer Fairy

2009-02-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

Twice a month, for the past four years, the beer fairy has been leaving boxes of beer at my door. Sadly, the beer fairy will no longer be visiting us. Why? Because of the Adult Signature Required.

This wasn't a problem with the previous shipper that the company was using, because they left the packages, but a couple of months ago they had to switch shippers. First they went to FedEx. I had almost worked out an arrangement with the FedEx delivery guy to leave our boxes of beer in our shed, but not before we had to actually go to the local home delivery shipping center to pick up one of our deliveries. Let me digress a minute and talk about the customer service at FedEx - there isn't much. All you can do is call their 800 number, you can't talk to anyone local, and they didn't even list the address of the local shipping center on the notice I received. To find out the hours of the local shipping center I had to call the 800 number and they had to put me on hold while they called the local shipping center.

I imagine that the company that was sending me my beer received a lot of complaints, because after shipping with FedEx for only two months, they switch to UPS. UPS is better to deal with than FedEx, and their customer service center is at least easy to get to. (Finding the FedEx local shipping center required a guide dog and a Ouija board.) Unfortunately, I was unable to work out an arrangement with the UPS driver to leave my beer in our shed, even when I provided a padlock for the latch. Unable to make any other arrangements for delivery - my neighbors all work, and receiving regular deliveries at my work place was not possible - I had to cancel my subscription.

When I talked to the customer service at the company sending me the beer I did suggest what I considered the best solution - go back to FedEx, arrange for Saturday deliveries and email me a shipping notice so I knew it was coming. I don't know if they will adopt my suggestions.

What bothers me the most about this, besides the fact that I will no longer have yummy beer delivered to my door step every month, is that the laws that we have governing access to alcohol are hurting a productive business. I understand that the purpose of requiring an adult signature is to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors. But I'm not really sure that, at least where I have lived, this is really that great a risk. For two of those four years I lived in an apartment complex that had a lot of families, including teenagers, and I never had my beer stolen. The boxes are not labeled. Frankly, I think boxes of Godiva chocolate are more at risk - they advertise their contents boldly on their boxes. I don't know about you, but if I saw a box of Godiva chocolate sitting unattended on a door step, I might be tempted to filch it.

But there is a deeper issue here - the idea that our government, whether it be state or federal, needs to protect us from ourselves, even if that means infringing on our rights. Despite all of the best (or worst) efforts of our law makers, you can't legislate morality or common sense. Laws will never replace the bonds of civil society. Laws are necessary, to protect property rights, for example, but too many of our laws are focused on restricting the actions and choices of people. I am a libertarian and I believe in individual freedom and responsibility. I know that our society has a lot of problems, but laws will not solve them, only people and communities can solve them. Unfortunately, our modern civilization is not human centered and as a result the social bonds that are so essential for a civil society have been weakened and even broken, but that is a topic for another day.