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Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
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In defence of speaking PC
Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has a profound post on “politically correct” speech, occasioned by the racist attacks from the right on Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Excerpts:
This is a post about Sonia Sotomayor, and an extension of my defense of political correctness. Last week, I got away from my main point, which was that liberal political correctness is not so much an inability to see real facts, but a collective phase in the long process of learning how to talk to, and talk about, people who you don’t know. I am still stumbling through that phase (hence, “Well I’m not gay, but…”) It’s easy for people who aren’t interested in that process, to deride it. The [sic: They] get to stand on the sidelines and laugh, while ignoring the weight of history, and how it presses on us all.
. . .
This [Lindsay Graham’s remarks about Sotomayor, saying that if he made her comments he would be accused of racism] is the sort of logic that leads people to complain that there is no white history month. It’s my great nightmare that I, or my son, ever sound like that–smug, self-satisfied, unreflective, whiny and narcissistic. It’s the sort of comment that betrays a man bereft of any deep interest in this country’s history. But if you’ve never had to grapple with who you are in relation to other people, if you’ve never had to worry much about courting people who aren’t like you, if you’ve never struggled with being politically correct, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d say.
It is, in a word, ignorance.
. . .
I’m a liberal, not so much because I doubt the free market, not so much because I believe in universal health care, not so much because of the environment, but because of political correctness. As awkward as it may be, it at least demonstrates an attempt to see the world through another lense. This is a daunting task, and failing at it is so much more honorable than not even trying. Maybe you never quite get there, but it holds out a hope for your children, that unreflective, false symmetry does not. Conservatives got away with this game for years. The luxury of being the majority in a democracy is the right to act like other people don’t exist. But the world is changing around them and Birnam Wood is on the march.”
Wham, Bam, Yes we can!
The New York Post on the Sotomayor pick abbreviates the name of the 44th President of the United States of America with a friendly familiarity. The headline reads: “SUPREMA Latina NYer is Bam’s historic nominee”
Ol' 57 Varieties
Yesterday, in a ceremony awarding prizes to a successful US Navy football team at the White House, President Obama greeted a fellow Hawaiian with a “hang loose” sign (aka the Shaka gesture), which was of course returned.
On the day before his Inauguration in January, an amateur video showed then-President-elect Barack Obama with his wife, greeting VIP guests at a concert held in his honour on the Mall, in Washington DC; many of these guests were black Americans, and Young Bazza spoke to them in a different accent, different tone of voice, and with different body language to his normal public persona. As a state congressman in Illinois, he once remarked to an aide that the folks he met upstate were just like his Kansan relatives. As is well-known, he was a big-city urban politician from Chicago, of a type that can be found throughout the North-East and in some cities elsewhere – think The Wire (Baltimore), or think larger-than-life city politicians from TR, Fiorello La Guardia, Richard Daley, John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Tip O’Neill, through to Rudy Giuliani and Cory Booker. He was also Editor of the Harvard Law Review, putting him into the intellectual A-league alongside people like Adlai Stevenson, Henry Kissenger, Sam Nunn and both Clintons.
Perhaps the key reason for Obama’s sudden rise to national prominence in the US is his ability to identify with people from all over the map, to make people feel that he is “one of us” in lots of different communities. In this he takes after “Ol’ 57 Varieties” himself, Teddy Roosevelt. Obama, of course, takes this to a new global level, with his family connections to Kenya and to Indonesia.
Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that several successful politicians have had backgrounds or career experiences that enable them to connect with many different communities in their home countries: Harold Wilson for example, who traveled the length and breadth of Britain in his 20s as a researcher for William Beveridge and for the Beveridge Commision; Eddison Zvobgo, another Harvard Law School graduate and Minister for Local Government in Robert Mugabe’s newly-independent Zimbabwe, who used the role to build a nationwide constituency; and Bob Hawke, Australian PM, who spent the main part of his career as first a researcher with and then President of the Australian Council of Trades Unions (the ACTU), a position which enabled him to travel widely, to meet people across the social spectrum, and to make connections internationally (eg, he negotiated with the USSR to allow greater Jewish emigration to Israel).
My second thought is that this provides us with another way to classify the various US Presidents. Some Presidents, like Obama, are post-industrial nomads, either not from one specific place or from several: TR, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41. Other Presidents are firmly perceived as being from one specific place: Lincoln, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Bush 43. It is interesting that the only nomads before Obama were Republicans.
In these times
You are a man of leisure, a sleepwalker, a mollusc. The definitions vary according to the hour of the day, or the day or the week, but the meaning remains clear enough: you do not really feel cut out for living, for doing, for making; you want only to go on, to go on waiting; and to forget.
Such an outlook on life is generally not much appreciated in modern times: all around you, all your life, you have seen the esteem in which action is held, and grand designs, and enthusiam: man straining forward, man with his gaze fixed on the horizon, man looking straight ahead. A clear gaze, a powerful chin, a confident swagger, stomach held in. Staying power, initiative, strokes of brilliance, success: all of these things map out the too transparent part of a too examplary existence, constitute the sacrosanct images of the struggle for life. The white lies, the comforting illusions of all those who are running on the spot, sinking deeper into the mire, the lost illusions of the thousands left on society’s scrap heap, those who arrived too late, those who put their suitcase down on the pavement and sat on it to wipe their brow. But you no longer need excuses, regrets, nostalgia. You reject nothing, you refuse nothing. You have ceased going forward, but that is because you weren’t going forward anyway, you’re not setting off again, you have arrived, you can see no reason to go any further” (pages 142-143)
Reference:
Georges Perec [1967]: A Man Asleep. (Translation by Andrew Leak published 1990 in London, UK by The Harvill Press.)
Bach in Manchester
Last night I heard a thrilling performance in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, performed by Manchester Camerata, the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and the choristers of Manchester Cathedral, under Nicholas Kraemer. The two orchestras and choirs were arranged on the left and right sides of the stage, with the children’s chorus in between. I have seen this work staged in many different ways, including with the choirs seated side-by-side, and even enmeshed together (overlayed is what a computer scientist would say; gemuddled might be the appropriate German word). I think last night’s staging was probably the best I have heard, since the various parts were much more distinguishable than they are normally, and the stereophonic effects quite powerful.
The evangelist was James Gilchrist, whom I have heard in this part before, and he gave an intense and very dramatic performance, as close to a theatrical performance as a singer can get. The other soloists – Matthew Hargreaves (as Christ), Elizabeth Weisberg, Clare Wilkinson, Mark Le Brocq and Stephen Loges – all gave solid, hall-filling and hall-stopping performances.
The continuo part was played on two small organs, a cello and a lute. This is the first time I have heard a lute in this Passion – I guess finding a viola da gamba player is normally hard enough, let alone a lutist. I was sitting close enough to hear the lute, played by Lynda Sayce, and it added a nice, somewhat bitter-sweet, edge to the overall sound. I doubt this could be heard further back, though. The lute, the cello, played by Jonathan Price, and one organ, played by Ashok Gupta, were physically located around the Evangelist, which had the effect of making the singer and continuo more of a single unit in the recitatives than is usual. Often, the recitatives in the music of Bach seem a little out of place to me – neither quite speech nor quite song – and so putting the singer with the continuo created a mini-ensemble which had its own coherent logic. I was sitting quite close to this group, and thus could see their playing and their co-ordination with one another, as well as hear each part well. I was particularly impressed by Gupta’s confident playing.
The other organ, played by Christopher Stokes, was at the far rear of the stage, and I could hear it less well. I suppose it was placed there to be near the walk-on soloists. In the main, the voices of these soloists did not project so well last night, at least not to my position in the left front stalls, diagonally opposite and down stage from them. (I expect the hall’s acoustics were not designed for projection in that way – most concert hall projection is designed to be up and out from the stage, rather than across and down stage). Perhaps because of his strong voice, the only singer who stood out in this regard was Adam Drew (as Judas), who sang confidently and dramatically.
With a work of such great spiritual depth, I always feel that immediate applause is not appropriate. We should sit, still and silent, for a few moments upon completion, to meditate on the meaning of what we have just heard. I’ve never met an audience that agrees with me, however, and last night was no exception.
Of the dozen or so times I have heard this Passion, across three continents, last night’s superb performance was one of the best two or three.
Earlier posts on music are here.
Protagonist vs. Antagonist
A letter in the latest London Review of Books describes the continuation in modern Italy of an old Roman tradition of protagonist and antagonist choruses:
Reading that in the ancient Roman play Octavia, ‘unusually, there are two chorus groups, one pro-Octavia and the other pro-Poppaea,’ I was immediately reminded of a remarkable broadcast I saw recently on Italian television (LRB, 26 February). I was in a hotel in Venice at the time, trawling through the 57 channels in search of some coverage of the Milan soccer derby. It transpired that Italian football, just like its English counterpart, has been sold down the river to Sky; since my hotel did not subscribe, live coverage was unavailable.
I did, however, stumble across a channel that was attempting to give the best possible live coverage without actually showing any of the action. They had a camera at the stadium, but it was trained away from the pitch, on two commentators who were describing the play. The point of it was that one man was an Inter fan, and the other supported AC; as each team gained possession of the ball, their man picked up the commentary (and the other was supposed to stop, though he rarely did). My first thought was that this had to be the lamest and most desperate attempt to cover the game imaginable. I was about to turn the thing off and head out into the night, but something stayed my finger. It turned out to be the best piece of entertainment I’ve seen for years. I realised later that it was drawing on an ancient Italian dramatic tradition. If the two choruses in Octavia came even close to the hilarious interplay the two commentators produced when AC Milan scored, only for the goal to be disallowed, then I think the play is definitely worth reviving.” (Letter from Robert Heath)
Minority politics
The death this weekend of Janet Jagan (1920-2009), former President of Guyana (1997-1999), is a reminder that the election of President Barack Obama in the USA last November was not the first time that a democracy has elected a national leader who was a member of an ethnic minority. Born Janet Rosenberg, Janet Jagan was a ruthless Chicago pol, although far to the left of Young Bazza. Indeed, since no ethnic group in Guyana has a majority, one could argue that every leader which that country has elected democratically (which, sadly, is not all of Guyana’s leaders) has been an example of a majority electing a leader from a minority. Elsewhere in South America, Alberto Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, was three times elected President of Peru from 1990-2000.
And there are other examples, if one widens the definition of ethnicity: Britain currently has a Scottish-born Prime Minister, its second Scottish-educated PM in succession, and disproportionately many Scots Cabinet Ministers. Both Britain and Australia have in the past elected as leaders people whose first language was not English, and both did so around the same time: Lloyd George in Britain (PM 1916-1922), and Billy Hughes in Australia (PM 1915-1923), were second-language speakers of English, both having Welsh as their mother-tongue. Australia’s current Deputy Prime Minister (and this week again Acting PM), Julia Gillard, is also Welsh-born. One of Australia’s most influential politicians in its first two decades, and founder of Canberra as the national capitol, was King O’Malley (1858-1953), who was almost certainly born in the USA. Both Australia and New Zealand had several Cabinet Ministers in their first decades born in the other country. And the Australian state of New South Wales has had a Premier born in Hungary (Nick Greiner, Premier 1988-1992), one born in the USA (Kristina Keneally, Premier 2009-2011), and one whose first language was Armenian (Gladys Berejiklian, Premier 2017- ). Sydney has had a Lord Mayor born in Poland (Leo Port, 1975-1978). Australia currently has a Federal Minister for Finance born in Belgium (Mathias Cormann).
And Britain, as perhaps befits a former colonial power, has had a succession of Cabinet ministers from abroad (although not all of these have been elected). Lloyd George offered a position in his cabinet during WW I to American businessman, Herbert Hoover (who declined the post). In both world wars, the British PM established an Imperial War Cabinet, in which the dominions were invited to be represented, although not all took up the invitation. In recent years, Britons have seen Ministers who were born or raised in Australia (Patricia Hewitt), Dominica (Baroness Patricia Scotland), Ghana (Paul Boateng), Guyana (Baroness Valerie Amos), Iraq (Ara Darzi, although of Armenian descent), Kenya & South Africa (Peter Hain), and Yemen (Keith Vaz). Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Minister and Foreign Minister under John Major (1992-1997), spent part of his early adult life in Africa (in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia), as Major himself did also (in Nigeria).
“Only in America!”, as Yogi Berra might say.
POSTSCRIPT: Writing this, I forgot Bill Skate, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea from 1997-1999; Julius Chan, Prime Minister 1980-1982 and 1994-1997; and Peter O’Neill, Primer Minister since 2011. All three men are of mixed race ancestry. And there was also Paul Berenger, Prime Minister of Mauritius from 2003-2005, a Christian leader in a majority Hindu nation, and Guy Scott, briefly President of Zambia (2014-2015). These have been the only Caucasian leaders of African nations post Independence or majority rule.
POSTSCRIPT 2 [2012-03-14]: And one could also mention the leaders of various places who were members of religious minorities, and whose elections sometimes excited controversy: JFK in the USA is the most famous. Before him, we had various Jewish premiers in predominantly Christian or gentile dominions: Julius Vogel (PM of New Zealand, 1873-1875), Vaiben Solomon (Premier, South Australia, 1899), Francis Bell (PM, New Zealand, 1925), David Marshall (Initial Chief Minister, Singapore, 1954-1956), Roy Welensky (PM, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1956-1963), and John Key (PM, New Zealand, 2008-2016).
POSTSCRIPT 3 [2024-07-31]: Perhaps this is the place to mention Mr Stuart Comberbach, a white Zimbabwean diplomat, who has been a senior diplomat with the governments of successively Rhodesia, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe since 1974. He has previously been the Zimbabwean ambassador to Italy and to Japan, and is currently the country’s ambassador to various UN agencies in Geneva. His first overseas posting, under the rebel Rhodesian Government of Ian Smith, was as leader of a representative trade office in Gabon from 1974 to 1979. Who knew Rhodesia had enough trade with Gabon to justify a permanent trade mission there?
And here is a list of people who served in more than one Parliament or Assembly.
The decade around 1664
We noted before that one consequence of the rise of coffee-houses in 17th-century Europe was the development of probability theory as a mathematical treatment of reasoning with uncertainty. Ian Hacking’s history of the emergence of probabilistic ideas in Europe has a nice articulation of the key events, all of which took place a decade either side of 1664:
- 1654: Pascal wrote to Fermat with his ideas about probability
- 1657: Huygens wrote the first textbook on probability to be published, and Pascal was the first to apply probabilitiy ideas to problems other than games of chance
- 1662: The Port Royal Logic was the first publication to mention numerical measurements of something called probability, and Leibniz applied probability to problems in legal reasoning
- 1662: London merchant John Gaunt published the first set of statistics drawn from records of mortality
- Late 1660s: Probability theory was used by John Hudde and by Johan de Witt in Amsterdam to provide a sound basis for reasoning about annuities (Hacking 1975, p.11).
Developments in the use of symbolic algebra in Italy in the 16th-century provided the technical basis upon which a formal theory of uncertainty could be erected. And coffee-houses certainly aided the dissemination of probabilistic ideas, both in spoken and written form. Coffee houses may even have aided the creation of these ideas – new mathematical concepts are only rarely created by a solitary person working alone in a garret, but usually arise instead through conversation and debate among people each having only partial or half-formed ideas.
However, one aspect of the rise of probability in the mid 17th century is still a mystery to me: what event or phenomena led so many people across Europe to be interested in reasoning about uncertainty at this time? Although 1664 saw the establishment of a famous brewery in Strasbourg, I suspect the main motivation was the prevalence of bubonic plague in Europe. Although plague had been around for many centuries, the Catholic vs. Protestant religious wars of the previous 150 years had, I believe, led many intelligent people to abandon or lessen their faith in religious explanations of uncertain phenomena. Rene Descartes, for example, was led to cogito, ergo sum when seeking beliefs which peoples of all faiths or none could agree on. Without religion, alternative models to explain or predict human deaths, morbidity and natural disasters were required. The insurance of ocean-going vessels provided a financial incentive for finding good predictive models of such events.
Hacking notes (pp. 4-5) that, historically, probability theory has mostly developed in response to problems about uncertain reasoning in other domains: In the 17th century, these were problems in insurance and annuities, in the 18th, astronomy, the 19th, biometrics and statistical mechanics, and the early 20th, agricultural experiments. For more on the connection between statistical theory and experiments in agriculture, see Hogben (1957). For the relationship of 20th-century probability theory to statistical physics, see von Plato (1994).
POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2011-04-25):
There appear to have been major outbreaks of bubonic plague in Seville, Spain (1647-1652), in Naples (1656), in Amsterdam, Holland (1663-1664), in Hamburg (1663), in London, England (1665-1666), and in France (1668). The organist Heinrich Scheidemann, teacher of Johann Reincken, for example, died during the outbreak in Hamburg in 1663. Wikipedia now has a listing of global epidemics (albeit incomplete).
POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2018-01-19):
The number 1664 in Roman numerals is MDCLXIV, which uses every Roman numeric symbol precisely once. The number 1666 has the same property, and for that number, the Roman symbols are in decreasing order.
References:
Ian Hacking [1975]: The Emergence of Probability: a Philosophical study of early ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lancelot Hogben [1957]: Statistical Theory. W. W. Norton.
J. von Plato [1994]: Creating Modern Probability: Its Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy in Historical Perspective. Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
The rain in Spain is mainly declaimed
Through painful experience over many years, I have learnt to avoid any movie with a script written by David Mamet. Hailed as a great American playwright and screenwriter by many, he appears to have – sadly – a tin ear for human speech and dialogue. His film characters do not converse or speak as we humans do. Rather, in some variant of a weird, artificial language I call americantheatrespeak, they declaim: their words are enunciated clearly and loudly, with neither pauses, nor stumbles, nor mumbles, nor muttering, nor cross-talk, all the while speaking in entire sentences and paragraphs, pre-composed and uttered with a formality that would provoke laughter if you heard anyone actually speak like that. It is not how we human beings speak, except sometimes in formal settings such as courts of law and important congressional or parliamentary sessions. After seeing Montgomery Clift, with his pauses and false starts and mid-sentence hesitations and on-the-fly mods, how could anyone think to write movie speech of the stilted, unnatural style of Mamet’s? In The Misfits, Arthur Miller wrote dialogue for Clift that played to his superb abilities, so we know it is possible for a theatre playwright to write natural-sounding speech for film. As I said, Mamet must have a tin ear.
I now learn I am not alone in this assessment of Mamet. Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker article about Damon Runyon, also notes Mamet’s formal, unnatural, language. Gopnik, however, admires it, for no compelling reason that I can see. Perhaps americantheatrespeak works OK on the stage, and people who see a lot of theatre don’t notice it when used on film. Yet, against that, Clift was New York’s leading theatre actor before he ventured onto film. But on film this style of speech is a disaster, as Mamet’s 2004 film Spartan demonstrates; no, Virginia, it is not the wooden acting or the unexplained gaps in the plot that make this film unwatchable, but Mamet’s stilted, wooden dialogue. Ditto for the other scalps on his film pelt: House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc. Someone else seems to be writing (or de-Mametizing) the script of The Unit, although even here (unlike, say, The Wire), people rarely pause, mumble or cross-talk.
POSTSCRIPT: Thinking some more about this, the issue arises because of what Gopnik calls film’s arch-naturalism. Concepts that could work perfectly well as theatrical productions often fail on film, as, for example, the black backdrops and absurdism of Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Wittgenstein, which was irritating in the extreme. We have a problem suspending disbelief for film, a problem we don’t usually have for the theatre. Perhaps the cause, as some film theorists have noted, is that films are akin to dreams, and dreams don’t require us (at least, not consciously) to do work ourselves to imagine whatever is missing from the production. We are happy to do this work when watching theatre (and when reading books and listening to the radio), but are less so for watching films or TV.
Reference:
Adam Gopnik [2009]: “Talk it up: Damon Runyon’s guys and dolls.” The New Yorker, 2 March 2009, pp. 66-71.