Normblog estimates how few books we each have time to read. I am reminded of Len Evans’ Theory of Capacity, formulated by the late, great Australian wine-writer and bon viveur, Len Evans (1930-2006). This can be summarized as:
No matter how long till we each die, we only have time left to drink good wine.
The recent death of mathematician Jim Wiegold (1934-2009), whom I once knew, has led me to ponder the nature of intellectual influence. Written matter – initially, hand-copied books, then printed books, and now the Web – has been the main conduit of influence. For those of us with a formal education, lectures and tutorials are another means of influence, more direct than written materials. Yet despite these broadcast methods, we still seek out individual contact with others. Speaking for myself, it is almost never the knowledge or facts of others, per se, that I have sought or seek in making personal contact, but rather their various different ways of looking at the world. In mathematical terminology, the ideas that have influenced me have not been the solutions that certain people have for particular problems, but rather the methods and perspectives they use for approaching and tackling problems, even when these methods are not always successful.
To express my gratitude, I thought I would list some of the people whose ideas have influenced me, either directly through their lectures, or indirectly through their books and other writings. In the second category, I have not included those whose ideas have come to me mediated through the books or lectures of others, which therefore excludes many mathematicians whose work has influenced me (in particular: Newton, Leibniz, Cauchy, Weierstrauss, Cantor, Frege, Poincare, Pieri, Hilbert, Lebesque, Kolmogorov, and Godel). I have also not included the many writers of poetry, fiction, history and biography whose work has had great impact on me. These two categories also exclude people whose intellectual influence has been manifest in non-verbal forms, such as through visual arts or music, or via working together, since those categories need posts of their own.
Teachers & lecturers I have had who have influenced my thinking include: Leo Birsen (1902-1992), Sr. Claver Butler RSM (ca. 1930-2009), Burgess Cameron (1922-2020), Sr. Clare Castle RSM (ca. 1920- ca. 2000), John Coates (1945-2022), Dot Crowe, James Cutt, Bro. Clive Davis FMS, Tom Donaldson (1945-2006), Gary Dunbier, Sol Encel (1925-2010), Felix Fabryczny de Leiris, Claudio Forcada, Richard Gill (1941-2018), Myrtle Hanley (1909-1984), Sr. Jennifer Hartley RSM, Chip Heathcote (1931-2016), Hope Hewitt (1915-2011), Alec Hope (1907-2000), John Hutchinson, Marg Keetles, Joe Lynch, Robert Marks, John McBurney (1932-1998), David Midgley, Lindsay Morley, Leopoldo Mugnai, Terry O’Neill, Jim Penberthy* (1917-1999), Malcolm Rennie (1940-1980), John Roberts, Gisela Soares, Brian Stacey (1946-1996), James Taylor, Frank Torpie (1934-1989), Neil Trudinger, David Urquhart-Jones, Frederick Wedd (1890-1972), Gary Whale (1943-2019), Ted Wheelwright (1921-2007), John Woods and Alkiviadis Zalavras.
People whose writings have influenced my thinking include: John Baez, Ole Barndorff-Nielsen (1935-2022), Charlotte Joko Beck (1917-2011), Johan van Bentham, Mark Evan Bonds, John Cage (1912-1992), Albert Camus (1913-1960), Nikolai Chentsov (1930-1992), John Miller Chernoff, Stewart Copeland, Sam Eilenberg (1913-1998), Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), George Fowler (1929-2000), Kyle Gann, Alfred Gell (1945-1997), Herb Gintis, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Hamblin (1922-1985), Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), Jaakko Hintikka (1929-2015), Eric von Hippel, Wilfrid Hodges, Christmas Humphreys (1901-1983), Jon Kabat-Zinn, Herman Kahn (1922-1983), John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), Andrey Kolmogorov (1903-1987), Paul Krugman, Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), Trevor Leggett (1914-2000), George Leonard (1923-2010), Brad de Long, Donald MacKenzie, Saunders Mac Lane (1909-2005), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Grant McCracken, Henry Mintzberg, Philip Mirowski, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Michael Porter, Charles Reich (1928-2019), Jean-Francois Revel (1924-2006), Daniel Rose, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys) (1935-2014), Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), Gunther Schuller (1925-2015), George Shackle (1903-1992), Cosma Shalizi, Rupert Sheldrake, Raymond Smullyan (1919-2017), Rory Stewart, Anne Sweeney (d. 2007), Nassim Taleb, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009), Scott Turner, Roy Weintraub, Geoffrey Vickers VC (1894-1982), and Richard Wilson.
FOOTNOTES:
* Which makes me a grand-pupil of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979).
** Of course, this being the World-Wide-Web, I need to explicitly say that nothing in what I have written here should be taken to mean that I agree with anything in particular which any of the people mentioned here have said or written.
A more complete list of teachers is here.
Although born a Melbournite and raised a Catholic, Germaine Greer, while she was a post-graduate student at Sydney University, was a late child of one of Australia’s Bohemian moments, The Push. How odd, then, that she should take against that earlier group of Bohemian artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In her Guardian column, Germaine Greer first criticizes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) for not being original as artists, since their style resembles that of the slightly earlier German Nazarenes. I question the fairness of such a criticism for art made in the days before public art collections, colour photography, satellite TV, and international blockbuster exhibitions. But at least from this we know that she values originality in art over other criteria, and thus reveals herself captive to that insidious idea which has held most of our cultural critics hostage these last two centuries: that only those with something new to express should be permitted to make art. Nice to see you using your own critical faculties there, Dr Greer, and not just swimming with the art-critical tide.
She goes on to say:
It will be obvious to many that, while France was experiencing the dazzle of the impressionists, Britons were happy to applaud and reward the false sentiment, fancy dress and finicking pseudo-realism of a dreary horde of pre-Raphaelites.
The PRB led its followers into a welter of truly bad art: stultified, inauthentic, meretricious and vulgar. Where the Nazarenes went for luminosity, simplicity and piety, the PRB wallowed in elaboration, erotic suggestion and overheated colour. If they hadn’t had sex with their models, they wanted you to think they had. They realised pretty early on that nudes are not erotic; their languorous models drooped, swooned, gasped and died in ever more elaborate, flowing gowns shot through with new synthetic colours: arsenic greens, cobalt blues, alizarin crimsons.”
We learn that she does not like their art. But the justification of her taste leaves a lot to be desired. The art of the PRB is both “dreary” and uses “overheated colours”. How exciting to find an English text by a writer as good as this where precisely one, but only one, of two adjectives is used with the opposite of its usual meaning. But which one? Clearly, her writing is testing our wits here – challenging us to find a version of reality which enables both these conflicting descriptions to be simultaneously true of the same art.
The percipient Dr Greer clearly doesn’t like bright colours, although (as one might expect from someone with a PhD in EngLit) she enjoys finding the precise words to denote them: “arsenic greens, cobalt blues, alizarin crimsons”. Nicely put, and not merely the three primary colours, either. But one does not need the advice of a professional art critic to decide whether one likes certain colours or not. Any child can do that. And nothing provided by the indefatigable Dr Greer justifies – or could ever justify – her individual, peculiar preference here, because colour preference is entirely a matter of personal taste (itself perhaps partly of biology, for the colour blind), and not of art theory or art criticism or even of art newspaper mongering. I find the PRB’s colours and colour combinations riveting, electric and enchanting.
Consider some of those other adjectives the irrepressible Dr Greer applies: “false sentiment”, “inauthentic, meretricious”. How, precisely, does one determine that a work of visual art is inauthentic or meretricious? Oh, I am sure one can do this with literature: a writer’s choice of words may reveal his or her true thoughts even when the surface description is pointing elsewhere. The novel, The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, for example, seems to show a writer reveling in the violence which his own text ostensibly deplores. But those arts which do not use language – visual art, music, dance, etc – have a murkier connection to the world they inhabit, and they do not have this capacity for self-reference and hence self-revelation. So how can the good Doctor actually determine the authenticity or otherwise of a painting? Perhaps by comparing its subject with its treatment, for example if a serious scene were painted in a slapdash manner, or the reverse. But against such an argument, one could just as easily argue that the means do not necessarily vitiate the ends, but instead may empower or ennoble them: ie, a careful, finicky, technically-adept painting of an apparently flippant subject could actually enhance the subject and bring it to our attention, as in Mozart’s operas with their silly plots or those Haydn symphonies containing musical jokes or even Duchamp’s Fountain. Or indeed, with the PRB’s careful, elaborated, and finely-accurate paintings of imagined scenes from myth and history. No, arguing the inauthenticy of visual art would only ever be persuasive if done painting-by-painting, and even then would need greater intellectual subtlety, depth and heft than the inestimable Dr Greer has chosen to provide here.
Pre-Raphaelite art, for reasons unclear to me, has almost always been unpopular with art critics. Depending on which historical era you select, art critics of the time have tended to believe that all art should celebrate us, or uplift us, or provoke us to thought, or confront us, or even attack us. Almost never have art critics wanted art merely to entertain us, to give pleasure to us, to be enjoyed by us. One has to ask what is wrong with a profession so opposed to simple beauty and pleasure. And what does our Germaine think? Well, she describes the PRB’s art as “vulgar”. Now this is a very interesting adjective, and in this word I believe we have found the deep ground of her dislike. This word is usually used to refer to objects and activities which are popular, which ordinary people do or which they enjoy, but of which the person deploying the word disapproves. That one word “vulgar” gives her game away. It is a word heard often by anyone having an Australian Convent education. And it is certainly indicative of the irony-rich subtlety of Greeresque thought that this word should be deployed by someone who has appeared on reality TV.
By an accident of historical timing, one of the great world collections of Pre-Raphaelite art is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney. I have no way of knowing if that collection and her time in Sydney and in The Push are connected to her present dislike of this great, technically-sophisticated, life-affirming, ennobling, and pleasing art. By the very same accident of timing (local people made good, collecting the latest in British art when the PRB were active), the other great world collections of Pre-Raphaelite are in the northwest of England, particularly the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, the Lady Lever Gallery in Birkenhead, and Manchester City Art Gallery.
Marbury reports on the reaction of US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to a question asked by a university student in Kinshasa about her husband’s opinion on some issue. She appears to have taken umbrage at being asked for Bill’s opinion, as if she would have no opinions of her own.
If the questioner were an Australian journalist (Norman Gunston, say*), then she would have been correct to take offence. But the questioner was Congolese, and the question could have been asked sincerely. Perhaps no aspect of African culture is more distinct from contemporary, post-Protestant, western culture than the relationship between individuals and families. In traditional African society, individuals would not normally have their own opinions; rather, they would defer to the group opinion of the extended family to which they belong. These family opinions are reached in different ways, in some cases by discussion among the adults until a consensus emerges, in other cases by diktak by the most powerful family member (who may not necessarily be the eldest male). The means of reaching shared opinions differ from one society to another, from one family to another, and even, within a single family, from one occasion to another. In short, the locus of decision-making is not an individual but a group.
Traditional Catholic culture has more in common with this idea than our post-Protestant western culture because in Catholic belief, it is the Church, as a whole, that mediates communications between Man and God, and which is the recipient of Christian grace. Protestants allowed each person to speak to God him or herself directly, thus promoting (or perhaps examplifying or accompanying) the trend to individualism that has been a feature of western life these last two centuries or so.
This fact of African life has implications for anyone doing market research or opinion polling in Africa, since the standard method used for random variation of respondents within households in sample surveys (the so-called Kish Grid) does not work. People speaking to sample surveyers, if they are willing to speak, want to give their family’s opinion not their own (if indeed, the concept of “their own opinion” makes any sense to them), and usually they want the designated household spokesperson to do the speaking. Depending on the specific culture, this designated person might be the eldest male, or it might be the youngest child, or the person with the most formal education. I know this from my own experience doing market research surveys in Southern Africa, and I wrote about this experience for an anthropology journal. Similarly, there are important implications for anyone designing and executing marketing campaigns or public health information campaigns in Africa, and perhaps elsewhere in the world (eg, Latin America).
On balance, I think Mrs Clinton should probably not have taken personal offence at the question. But the fact that she did take umbrage points to the very profound cultural difference at play here.
Footnote:
* At a US press conference given to announce a movie about Watergate, Norman Gunston asked if the film would have any 18.5 minute gaps in it, as Nixon’s secret Oval Office tapes did, and whether former President Nixon would receive complimentary tickets to the film.
Reference:
P. J. McBurney [1988]: On transferring statistical techniques across cultures: the Kish Grid. Current Anthropology, 29 (2): 323-5.
George Santayana writing in Character and Opinion in the United States (1918):
Even what is best in American life is compulsory – the idealism, the zeal, the beautiful happy unison of its great moments. You must wave, you must cheer, you must push with the irresistible crowd; otherwise you will feel like a traitor, a soulless outcast, a deserted ship high and dry on the shore. In America, there is but one way of being saved, though it is not peculiar to any of the official religions, which themselves must silently conform to the national orthodoxy, or else become impotent and merely ornamental. This national faith and morality are vague in idea, but inexorable in spirit; they are the gospel of work and the belief in progress. By them, in a country where all men are free, every man finds what most matters has been settled for him beforehand.”
Watching Season 2 of Mad Men with its arc of the rise of a female copywriter (Peggy Olsen, played by Elisabeth Moss), I was reminded of that real pioneer woman in advertising, Florence Skelly, who died in 1998 aged 73. I never had the good fortune to work with her, but I have worked with lots of people who did. The stories about her were legion. I recall especially hearing about a series of detailed presentations she gave in the mid-1990s on the attitudes and aspirations of teenagers — those in what we would now call late GenX and early GenY — a group she seemed to know better than any other researcher around. The irony was that she herself was at the cusp of her eighth decade!
Interestingly, season 1 of Mad Men had a couple of scenes involving market researchers, but the one woman was a PhD psychologist with a Central European accent, apparently unable to be creative and clearly instantiating a different (albeit then-common) archetype to Flo Skelly.
On Mad Men, a reminder that Ta-Nehisi Coates, mashing Karl Rove, last October captured the demographic of the typical viewer with great precision:
Even if I’ve never met you, I know you all. You guys are that dude at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette, standing against the wall and making snide comments about all the CSI-viewers who pass by. And you’re also a Muslim. Can’t forget Muslim.
While on the subject of public health policy making under conditions of ignorance, linguist Louise Cummings has recently published an interesting article about the logical fallacies used in the UK debate about possible human variants of mad-cow disease just over a decade ago (Cummings 2009). Two fallacies were common in the scientific and public debates of the time (italics in orginal):
An Argument from Ignorance:
FROM: There is no evidence that BSE in cattle causes CJD in humans.
CONCLUDE: BSE in cattle does not cause CJD in humans.
An Argument from Analogy:
FROM: BSE is similar to scrapie in certain respects.
AND: Scrapie has not transmitted to humans.
CONCLUDE: BSE will not transmit to humans.
Cummings argues that such arguments were justified for science policy, since the two presumptive conclusions adopted acted to guide the direction and prioritisation of subsequent scientific research efforts. These presumptive conclusions did so despite both being defeasible, and despite, in fact, both being subsequently defeated by the scientific research they invoked. This is a very interesting viewpoint, with much to commend it as a way to construe (and to reconstrue) the dynamics of scientific epistemology using argumentation. It would be nice to combine such an approach with Marcello Pera’s 3-person model of scientific progress (Pera 1994), the persons being: the Investigator, the Scientific Community, and Nature.
Some might be tempted to also believe that these arguments were justified in public health policy terms – for example, in calming a nervous public over fears regarding possible BSE in humans. However, because British public policy makers did in fact do just this and because the presumptive conclusions were subsequently defeated (ie, shown to be false), the long-term effect has been to make the great British public extremely suspicious of any similar official pronouncements. The rise in parents refusing the triple MMR vaccine for their children is a direct consequence of the false assurances we were given by British health ministers about the safety of eating beef. An argumentation-based theory of dynamic epistemology in public policy would therefore need to include some game theory. There’s also a close connection to be made to the analysis of the effects of propaganda and counter-propaganda (as in George 1959), and of intelligence and counter-intelligence.
References:
Louise Cummings [2009]: Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty. Argumentation, 23 (2): 171-188.
Alexander L. George [1959]: Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II. (Evanston, IL, USA: Row, Peterson and Company).
Marcello Pera [1994]: The Discourses of Science. (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press).
The usually sensible James Fallows joins the debate about obesity in America with some arguments of, ahem, dubious logical value:
If you’ve been around the US as long as I have (ie, if you’re as old), you have seen very significant aspects of public-health behavior change in your own lifetime. When my dad went to medical conventions in the 1950s and 1960s, most of his fellow doctors smoked. By the time he retired in the 1990s, very few of them did. For better and worse, smoking has become a class-bound phenomenon in America: better for the people who don’t smoke any more, worse as one more disadvantage of being poorer and less educated. The difference is startling and obvious if you spend time in, let’s say, China, where many more people of all classes smoke. As individuals, Americans have the same human nature as they did 40 years ago, and the same nature as people in China. Will power, compulsions, addition-seeking instincts, etc. But their overall behavior about smoking has changed. Some individuals did not or could not change their behavior. (One of my grandmothers, who had started smoking as a flapper in the 1920s, died of a horrible case of emphysema, sneaking cigarettes on her last conscious days.) But average behavior changed dramatically. In my view, no sane person can deny that public anti-smoking campaigns have made a huge difference.
Well, certainly over the last 50 years, the proportion of Americans (as in other western nations) who smoke has declined significantly. Some of this decline may even have been due to smokers quitting, and some of those quitters may have done so in response to government anti-smoking campaigns. But the overwhelming reason for the decline in proportions is the death of the smokers and the failure of the newly-born to take-up smoking. “Will power, compulsions, addition-seeking instincts, etc” (does he mean “attention-seeking instincts”?) has little to do with this. Average behaviour certainly changed, but so did the people who comprise the averaged population. It is NOT the case that there are fewer smokers now than in 1959 in the USA simply because lots of smokers just exercised some will-power.
A second logical flaw Fallows makes is in the very analogy between smoking and obesity. Unlike the use of nicotine, eating is necessary to live. Unlike smoking, it is not possible to give up eating by complete withdrawal (ie, going cold-turkey). It is even not possible to give up eating less quickly than complete withdrawal without usually suffering serious adverse health effects. Moreover, it is not even certain that eating less food will lead a person to lose weight. The human body is a complex adaptive system with many non-linear relationships between its components. Decreasing food intake, for example, may lead the body to storing proportionately MORE of the nutrients in the consumed food than previously, so that total body weight does not necessarily decline in proportion to the fall in consumption. Whatever it is, the relationship between food consumption and human body weight is certainly not linear, as the scientific evidence makes clear.
The main problem here for public health policy is that we do not yet know the ultimate causes of the obesity epidemic now seen in parts of the West. It surely is not lack of exercise (since what little scientific evidence there is says that regular exercise seems to INCREASE weight, by stimulating appetite and adding to muscle mass); and the cause is surely not over-eating, since the epidemic has arisen faster than the major changes in people’s eating habits (20 years versus 60 years). The ultimate cause could be a virus; it could be a consequence of particular food-additives (eg, the increased use of sucrose, or trans-fats, etc) or some particular adverse combination of these additives; or it could be a consequence of the particular combination of proteins, carbohydrates and nutrients in our diets; or indeed any number of other causes – medical, nutritional, lifestyle, and/or sociological.
The medical profession has such a shameful historical record of wrongly blaming the victim of an illness for the sickness before discovering the real cause (eg, cholera, stomach ulcers, RSI, CFS, ADD) that it ill-behooves anyone, in the current state of medical ignorance, to lecture people that the cure for their obesity is just to eat less.
Merlyn to Wart in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone:
‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.’
Following my earlier post about the possibility of a work of art being an argument, I want to give another example. This example is also drawn from Australian aboriginal society, and involves a 1997 claim for legal title to land by the Ngurrara people over land in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Frustrated by their inability to convince the Native Title Tribunal of their right to the land, the Ngurrara community decided to create a collaborative painting (photographed below) which would demonstrate their traditional rights. The painting was presented, and accepted, as evidence before the Tribunal and is therefore a work of argument, as well as a work of art.
(The Ngurrara Canvas. Painted by Ngurrara artists and claimants, coordinated by Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, May 1997. 10 metres x 8 metres. Photo: Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency.)
The case is mentioned in a 2003 New Yorker magazine article about aboriginal art by Geraldine Brooks, who says:
“In 1992, the Australian government first recognized the right of Aborigines to claim legal ownership of their ancestral lands – provided they could show evidence of having an enduring connection with them. Before proceeding to court, Aboriginal groups had to make their case before a Native Title Tribunal. Frustrated by their inability to articulate their arguments in courtroom English, the people of Fitzroy Crossing decided to paint their “evidence”. They would set down, on canvas, a document that would show how each person related to a particular area of the Great Sandy Desert – and to the long stories that had been passed down for generations.
“Ngurrara I”, the first attempt, was a canvas that measured sixteen feet by twenty-six feet and was worked on by nineteen artists. It was completed in 1996. But Skipper and Chuguna [two of the artists involved], in particular, didn’t feel that it properly reflected all the important places and stories, so more than forty additional artists were invited to produce a more definitive version. In 1997, “Ngurrara II”, which was twenty-six feet by thirty-two feet, was rolled out before a plenary session of the Native Title Tribunal. It was, one tribunal member said, the most eloquent and overwhelming evidence that had ever been produced there. The Aborigines could proceed to court.” (page 65).
References:
Geraldine Brooks [2003]: “The Painted Desert“, New Yorker, 28 July 2003, pp. 60-67.
Australian National Native Title Tribunal [2002]: Native Title Determination Summary – Marty and Ngurrara. 27 September 2002. Background press release here.
Also, here is a transcript of a radio story (broadcast 1997-07-15) on Australian ABC radio about the submission of the painting as evidence to the Native Title Tribunal.
More on different forms of geographic knowledge here.