Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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Demystifying genius

Published by peter on 2009-05-02 in History, Human intelligence and Music. Closed

One of the benefits of training in philosophy is an ability to demystify human ideas, and human language.  A good example is given by Tony Grayling’s article in The Guardian today, which makes the case that human intelligence is more than whatever is measured by IQ tests.  Although Grayling is sometimes prone to unbehooving belligerence (especially when he argues against religious belief), his argument here is clear and calm.  It is not, however, original.  My first investigations into the literature on IQ tests were conducted almost 30 years ago, and even then empirical evidence existed that the test scores of US children were significantly impacted by the race of the persons handing out the test papers; black children do significantly better if the test invigilators are black rather than white.  In the light of such evidence it requires a special kind of either stupidity or malfeasance to believe that only something innate is being tested in an IQ test.  IQ tests test one’s ability to do IQ tests, under the circumstances in which the test is conducted, and nothing more.
However, despite his admirable efforts in demystifying IQ testing, Grayling continues to leave mystified part of the story.  He says:

Some mental aptitudes are hard-wired: gifts for maths and music (which often go together) require no knowledge, and manifest themselves early in life. So does artistic ability. “

Professor Grayling appears to know nothing about mathematics, music or art.   While certainly benefiting from natural abilities (and perhaps lucky wirings of the brain or other physical quirks), no one gets very far without acquiring a great deal of knowledge, and undertaking many hours of training, in each of these fields.  Even Srinivasa Ramanujan, every non-mathematician’s favourite example of a “natural-born genius mathematician” was taught, first by himself (from text-books he found), and then by G. H. Hardy.  Ramanujan was famous for his ability to intuit mathematical relationships between numbers which were completely non-obvious, even to other mathematicians working in the same field.  Some of these intuitions were sublime and very profound.  But even at the height of his powers as a mathematician, these intuitions were just as likely to be wrong as correct.  As John Forbes Nash once remarked of his own madness, there was no difference inside his head between his great mathematical ideas and his paranoid lunacies; only the outside world treated these ideas differently.
The situation in music is the same as in mathematics,   Perhaps the greatest musical prodigy of all time in western culture was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, more advanced even than the young Mozart.   And some of Mendelssohn’s greatest music, and some of the greatest in the western canon, was composed in his teens — for example, the string Octet, written when he was 16. But listen to his 12 string symphonies, composed between the ages of 12 and 14.    There is a discernible increase in sophistication and musicality across the 12, with the last 3 being considerably more sophisticated musically than the preceding 9, and the 3 before that likewise clearly more sophisticated than the first 6.   These are not the works of someone relying on hard-wired gifts or natural ability, with the music arriving fully formed from some untrained, black-box genius-brain, as Grayling would have us believe.  Rather they are the contingent and constructed works of someone struggling with the material – learning, improving, experimenting and visibly maturing as he practiced and trained himself to be a composer.  One can’t compose music without having lots of very specific knowledge — knowledge of the capabilities and constraints of different instruments; knowledge of the rules (as were then believed) of melody and harmony; knowledge of the patterns and styles used for organizing musical materials across long time durations (eg, Sonata form; key relationships across movements).  None of this knowledge (which is both know-what and know-how) is hard-wired in anyone, and all of it has to be learnt, no matter how good one’s musical ear is.   Most of it is socially constructed (ie, it differs from one society to another, and from one time to another), and thus cannot possibly be innate.
No doubt Mendelssohn had some natural abilities, perhaps congenital (since both his father’s and his mother’s families had musicians across several previous generations), but he also had some very strong sociological advantages:  a nurturing and loving home life, the best teachers in the Prussian empire, the best instruments, original manuscript copies of the works of the great composers, and weekly musical salons organized by his mother in the family living room, where Berlin’s best musicians would play the western canon (as it then was) and also play his new compositions.   Who could but prosper in such an environment. If I had to bet on the ratio of nurture (including training and hard-work) to nature in the case of Mendelssohn, I would put it at 95% to 5%.
Coincidentally or otherwise, the demystified view of genius was presented (with references to the literature) by David Brooks in the NY Times yesterday.

44 and 26

Published by peter on 2009-05-02 in History and Politics. 0 Comments

Further to my posts here and here about the resemblance of Barack Obama to previous Presidents, here is commentary by four US historians about Obama’s first 100 days.  They cite, variously, his similarities to Lincoln, FDR, JFK, LBJ and Reagan.   I still think he is closer to TR than to anyone else, in terms of policies, in terms of personal character, and in his use of the bully pulpit.

White House Cosmopolitanism

Published by peter on 2009-04-13 in History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Following the first seder ever held in the White House, The Guardian’s US correspondent, Michael Tomasky, has a post arguing that the Obamas “are our first cosmopolitan first couple.”  Like the widespread myth that Barack Obama is the first urban US president (he is in fact the third), this is not the case.   Before the Obamas, Presidents John F. Kennedy (mentioned briefly by Tomasky, albeit grudgingly), Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt were as cosmopolitan as the Obamas.
TR was born into a family that had already lived in Manhattan for over 200 years, and his grandfather was arguably the richest man in New York City.  Roosevelt spent his 10th birthday in Europe, as part of a year-long Grand Tour his father had organized to educate the Roosevelt children, visiting Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.  He married his second wife in London, while staying in Brown’s Hotel, perhaps the most expensive hotel in the city.  While Governor of New York state, his dinner table included guests such as the Governor-General of Canada and a young English journalist named Winston S. Churchill.  That TR traveled west to the Dakotas to find himself after the death of his first wife, and so gained a reputation as a courageous frontiersman (a reputation fully deserved) is only evidence of a wider cosmopolitanism, not a provincialism; for instance, his western experience reinforced in him a respect for others according to their values and achievements, regardless of their social status or ethnic origin.  TR was the first US President to dine at the White House with a black American guest, Booker T. Washington in 1901, and he appointed the first Jewish-American to a Cabinet post, Oscar Strauss as Secretary of Commerce and Labor in 1906.  And TR had such a tendency to claim ancestry from different ethnic groups (Dutch, German, Irish, among others), he was nick-named “Old 57 Varieties”.
Hoover, too, had traveled widely before he became President, working in the mines of Western Australia and in China, and seeking to alleviate the suffering of refugees in Europe during World War I.  His fortune may have been ill-gotten, but he declined Lloyd George’s offer of a place in the Imperial War Cabinet during WW I in order to devote his efforts to raising money for war relief.  Whatever he was  – a scheming, get-rich-quick merchant before WW I, a do-nothing President paralyzed by ideology during the Great Depression, and full of self-righteous sanctimony afterwards – Hoover was certainly no provincial.   Indeed, both Hoover and TR were geographically restless – people we’d call Post-Industrial Nomads if they had lived a century later.
And even some other recent Presidents, although perhaps not as cosmopolitan as Obama, were not as provincial as George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan.  Eisenhower had seen overseas military service, in Europe during WWII, as had JFK, LBJ, Dick Nixon and George H. W. Bush,  in Australia and the Pacific.   Bush 41 had also been the US representative in China before becoming President.   Obama is certainly exceptional, but he’s not unique.

At the hot gates: a salute to Nate Fick

Published by peter on 2009-04-05 in Argumentation, Decision theory, Film, Heroes, History, Joint-Action Society, Planning and Team working. 0 Comments

After viewing The Wire, certainly the best television series I have ever seen (and perhaps the best ever made), I naturally sought out Generation Kill, from the same writing team – David Simons and Ed Burns.  Also gripping and intelligent viewing, although (unlike The Wire), we only see one side’s view of the conflict.   The series follows a US Marine platoon, Second Platoon of Bravo Company of the 1st  Reconnaissance  Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, as they invade Iraq in March-April 2003.   Like Band of Brothers, we come to know the platoon and its members very well, feeling joy at their wins, and sorrow at their losses.  The TV series is based on an eponymous 2004 book by a journalist, Evan Wright, who was embedded with the platoon in this campaign.
The TV series led me, however,  to read another book about this platoon, written by its commanding officer Lt. Nathaniel Fick (played in the series by actor Stark Sands).    The book is superb!    Fick writes extremely well, intelligently and evocatively, of his training and his battle experiences.  His prose style is direct and uncluttered, without being a parody of itself (as is, say, Hemingway’s).  His writing is remarkably smooth, gliding along, and this aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing, on one of her good days.   Fick clearly has a firm moral centre (perhaps an outcome of his Jesuit high school education), evident from his initial decision to apply to the military while still an undergraduate classics major at Dartmouth.     Having felt a similarly-strong desire as an undergraduate to experience life at the hot gates, I empathized immensely with his description of himself at that time.   Fick’s moral grounding is shown throughout the book, not only in the decisions he takes in battle, and his reflections on these decisions, but also in the way he refrains from naming those of his commanding officers whom he does not respect.    He also shows enormous loyalty to the men he commanded.
And Fick’s experiences demonstrate again that no organization, not even military forces,  can succeed for very long when commands are only obeyed mindlessly.   Successfully execution of commands requires intelligent dialogue between commanders and recipients, in a process of argumentation, to ensure that uttered commands are actionable, appropriate, feasible, effective, consistent, ethical and advisable.  Consequently, the most interesting features of the book for me were the descriptions of decision-making, descriptions often implicit.   Officers and non-officers, it seems, are drilled, through hours of rote learning, in the checklists and guiding principles necessary for low-level, tactical decision-making, so that these decisions can be automatic.  Only after these mindless drills are second nature are trainee officers led to reflect on the wider (strategic and ethical) aspects of decisions,  of decision-making and of actions.   I wonder to what extent such an approach would work in business, where most decision-making, even the most ordinary and tactical, is acquired through direct experience and not usually taught as drills.  Mainly this is because we lack codification of low-level decision-making, although strong fmcg companies such as Mars or Unilever come closest to codification of tactical decision-making.
Fick’s frequent frustrations with the commands issued to him seem to arise because these commands often ignore basic tactical constraints (such as the area of impact of weapons or the direction of firing of weapons), and because they often seem to be driven by a concern for appearances over substantive outcomes.   In contrast to this frustration, one of Fick’s commanding heroes is Major Richard Whitmer, whose unorthodox managerial style and keen intelligence is well described.  A military force able to accommodate such a style is to be admired, so I hope it is not a reflection on the USMC that Whitmer appears to have spent the years since the Iraq invasion running a marine recruitment office.  Next time that I’m CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ll actively try to recruit Whitmer and Fick, since they are both clearly superb managers.
I was also struck by how little the troops on the ground in Iraq knew of the larger, strategic picture.  Fick’s team relied on broadcasts from the BBC World Service on a personal, non-military-issue transister radio to learn what was happening as they invaded Iraq.   We who were not involved in the war also relied on the BBC, particularly Mark Urban’s fascinating daily strategic analyses on BBC TV’s Newsnight.  Were we remote viewers better informed than those in the ground in Iraq?  Quite possibly.
Nathaniel Fick now works for a defence think tank, the Center for a New American Security.  A 2006 speech he gave at the Pritzer Military Library in Chicago can be seen here.   A seminar talk to Johns Hopkins University’s series on Rethinking the Future Nature of Competition and Conflict can be found here (scroll down to 2006-01-25).  And here is Fick’s take on recent war poetry.
References:
K. Atkinson et al. [2008]: Command dialogues. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008), AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.
Nathaniel Fick [2005]:  One Bullet Away:  The Making of a Marine Officer.  London, UK:  Phoenix.
Evan Wright [2004]:  Generation Kill. Putnam.

Minority politics

Published by peter on 2009-03-31 in Africa, Culture, History and Politics. 0 Comments

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.

On prophecy

Published by peter on 2009-03-31 in Decision theory, History, Prophecy and Religion. 0 Comments

They know not what to make of the Words, little time, speedily, shortly, suddenly, soon. They would have me define the Time, in the Prophecies of my ancient Servants. Yet those Predictions carried in them my authority, and were fulfilled soon enough, for those that suffered under them . . . I have seen it best, not to assign the punctual Times, by their Definition among Men; that I might keep Men always in their due distance, and reverential Fear of invading what I reserve, in secret, to myself . . . The Tower-Guns are the Tormenta e Turre aethera, with which this City I have declared should be battered . . . I have not yet given a Key to Time in this Revelation.”

John Lacy, explaining to his followers among a millenarian French Huguenot sect in Britain in 1707 why his prophecies had not yet been fulfilled, cited in Schwartz 1980, p. 99.
Reference:
Hillel Schwartz [1980]:  The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press)

A salute to Zdenek Mlynar

Published by peter on 2009-03-29 in Communism, Heroes, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Continuing our series of heroes, I would like to honour Zdenek Mlynar (1931-1997).  Mlynar was an idealistic Czech communist who, as the principal author of the Action Programme of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSC), was the key theoretician of the Prague Spring in 1968.  Mlynar had earlier been selected by the party to study Marxist theory and law in Moscow in the 1950s, where he was a fellow student and friend of another young, idealistic communist, Mikhail Gorbachev.   Upon his return to the CSSR, Mlynar worked within the KSC to increase democracy, both internally within the party and in public life, becoming one of the reformers around Alexander Dubcek in the mid 1960s.

After the invasion of the CSSR by forces of the Warsaw Pact in 1968, Mlynar refused to submit to the reimposition of stalinism (during the so-called “normalization” period), and was expelled from the KSC.   After co-organizing and signing Charter 77, he was forced into exile.    In contrast to the courage and integrity of Mlynar, of Vaclav Havel and of their fellow members of the Czechoslovak opposition, the man who is currently Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, kept quiet during this period.

After departing Moscow in 1955, Mlynar and Gorbachev met again next in 1967.   When Gorbachev visited Prague in 1969, he was not permitted to see Mlynar.  They did not then meet again until 1989.    Mlynar was married to Rita Budinova (later Rita Klimova), the first post-Communist Ambassador from Czechoslovakia to the USA.

Archie Brown has noted that the reformers of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were the same generation as those who reformed communism in the USSR twenty years later.  In both cases, the reformers were people who were born in the 1920s and 1930s, and who thus came of age after the imposition of communism.   Also, in both cases, the reformers were true believers in socialist ideas, and neither cynics nor opportunists. Unlike the situation in Hungary, Poland, and the DDR between 1945 and 1989, change to communism in the CSSR and the USSR came not from below but from above.

Past entries in this series are here.

Footnote:  Not only were the reforms of Gorbachev driven, leninist-fashion, from the top.  Charles Fairbanks [2008, pp. 64-65] has argued that there may be a direct link between the ideas of left-Stalinist Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948), and Gorbachev’s reforms, via Finnish and Soviet politician Otto Kuusinen (1881-1964), Kuusinen’s protegé politician Yuri Andropov (1914-1984), and economists Aleksey Rumyantsev (1905-1993) and Aleksandr Yakovlev (1923-2005).  Rumyantsev was founding editor of the international journal Problems of Peace and Socialism in Prague from 1958-1964, and the journal’s Russian editorial staff in this period had been selected by Kuusinen and Andropov.  For example, Gorbachev’s close aide, Georgy Shakhnazarov (1924-2001), had twice worked for this journal in Prague, in between stints at the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, working indirectly for Andropov, via Fedor Burlatsky (1927-2014).

References:

Charles H. Fairbanks [2008]: “The nature of the beast”.  Chapter 6, pages 61-75, of Gvosdev [2008].

Nikolas K. Gvosdev (Editor) [2008]:  The Strange Death of Soviet Communism:  A Postscript. New Brunswick, NJ, USA:  Transaction Publishers.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar [2002]:  Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, The Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism.  New York, USA:  Columbia University Press.  Translated by George Shriver, with a Foreword by Archie Brown.

Zdenek Mlynar [1980]:  Night Frost in Prague:  The End of Humane Socialism.  London, UK:  C. Hurst and Co.

The decade around 1664

Published by peter on 2009-03-29 in Culture, History, Matherati, Probability theory, Prophecy, Science and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

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.

Urban Precedents

Published by peter on 2009-02-23 in Culture, Heroes, History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

In the excitement over the USA’s first black American President, some people have become over-excited. An example is Marbury, who claims Barack Obama is also the nation’s first urban President.  This is simply not the case.

Although most US Presidents are creatures of the countryside or the suburbs, there have been at least two Presidents with as much claim to be urbanistas as does young Bam. Most recent was John F. Kennedy, raised in Boston and a sophisticated habitue of London, Washington and New York City before becoming President. Of course, as all rich kids of his time did, he spent summers sailing on the Cape or vacationing in Florida, but JFK was as urban as they come.

And before JFK, a century ago, there was Teddy Roosevelt, born and raised in Manhattan, and urban to the core. Of course he loved Nature (he could justly also claim the title of the country’s first Environmentalist President), and he decamped to the wilderness of the North Dakota Badlands to find himself after the death of his first wife. But this was a man who was such an urban-dweller that he took the job of President of the Police Commission of the New York City Police Department – the NYPD! – literally running to his office on the day of his appointment, according to the account of his friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens. While in that post, Roosevelt spent his evenings walking the streets of Manhattan to meet his policemen on the beat:

T.R. went about  at night with [journalist Jacob] Riis as his guide to see the police at work.  He had some bizarre experiences.   He caught men off post, talking together; he caught them in all sorts of misconduct and had funny, picturesque adventures, which Riis described to all of us [journalists] (so fair was he as a reporter) and which we all wrote to the amusement of newspaper readers.  But what T.R. was really doing – the idea of Riis in proposing it – was to talk personally with the individual policemen and ask them to believe in him, in the law, which they were to enforce.  T.R. knew, he said, the power they were up against, the tremendous, enduring power of organized evil, but he promised he would take care of them.”

Walking the streets of Manhattan at night is not the behaviour of a President Cornpone. Obama is the third urban President the USA has had, not the first.

Reference:
Lincoln Steffens [1931]:  The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.  (New York, USA:  Harcourt Brace and Company.)

Abraham Lincoln

Published by peter on 2009-02-17 in History and Politics. 0 Comments

This month is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln is not the offspring of a people’s revolution.  The ordinary play of the electoral system, unaware of the great tasks it was destined to fulfill, bore him to the summit – a plebian, who made his way from stone-splitter to senator in Illinois, a man without intellectual brilliance, without special greatness of character, without exceptional importance – an average man of good will.  Never has the New World scored a greater victory than in the demonstration that with its political and social organization, average men of good will suffice to do that which in the Old World would have required heroes to do!“

Karl Marx [1862-10-12]: “On events in North America.” Die Presse, Vienna.