by Dave Maier

A contemporary truism, ironically enough, is that we now live in a “post-truth” era, as attested by a number of recent books with that or similar titles, related by their authors with varying degrees of chagrin. We all know the ultimate, or at least proximate, source of this concern: that fount of untruth which is Donald Trump’s Twitter feed (with a side of Brexitmania for those across the pond). Even among his supporters – and this is indeed, I think, the most charitable interpretation of the phenomenon in question – Mr. Trump is, as his aide Ms. Conway has put it, best taken “seriously but not literally.” That is, he is not particularly concerned with whether what he says is true, but instead with its effect on his readers and listeners, friendly or hostile.

I’m not going to defend this attitude toward truth-telling, which has become known, thanks to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, as “bullshitting,” and in fact dates back to the ancients, when Plato’s Socrates criticized what were called “sophists” for similar attitudes. However, it does seem that some of today’s self-appointed defenders of truth can paint their targets with an excessively broad brush. Naturally there is a lot of complaining about “postmodernist skepticism about truth,” but since most of our writers are not philosophers, their somewhat vague griping is hard to evaluate. (Michiko Kakutani, for example, clearly doesn’t like Derrida; but that’s just about all I got out of what she said.) But I’m not here to defend postmodernism any more than I am to defend “alternative facts.”  Read more »

by Michael Liss

“He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.” —Frederick Douglass, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, April 14, 1876

In October of 1859, Abraham Lincoln received an invitation to come to New York to deliver a lecture at the Abolitionist minster Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn.  

Although Lincoln was, at this time, largely a regional figure among Republicans, and held no public office, the invitation was not accidental. The party was still a bit like a Rube Goldberg contraption, made up of pieces (former Whigs, Know-Nothings, disaffected Northern Democrats) that didn’t all quite fit together. People of influence, notably the newspaper publishers William Cullen Bryant and Horace Greeley, knew the new movement needed a coherent, inclusive platform, and an articulate, attractive man to lead it.

They weren’t, by any means, anointing Lincoln—in fact, they had no idea what he could do. He had acquitted himself well in his 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas, the presumed 1860 Democratic Presidential nominee, but he had also lost. There were other questions as well: Would a person some described as a “backwoodsman” play in front of a New York audience?

What was obvious was that the most likely Republican candidates for the nomination were either flawed or disliked, or flawed and disliked. The presumed frontrunner, William Seward of New York, was unquestionably competent, but had made some radical-sounding speeches and was seen by many as a captive of Thurlow Weed’s political machine. Seward’s support was also thin in lower North states like Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois—all of which Republicans had lost in 1856 and were essential to victory this time. Other potential candidates had different weaknesses: Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase was an able Governor, but lacked what we would now call retail political skills. Pennsylvania’s favorite, Simon Cameron, was undeniably corrupt. The fourth “first tier” candidate, Edward Bates of Missouri, was 66, barely a Republican, and almost certainly the most conservative. It was hard to see how he could have ignited a movement. Read more »

by Bill Murray

47-year old Teburoro Tito stood at the head of his delegation on an island way out in the Pacific Ocean. At the stroke of midnight on January 1^st, 2000 the President of Kiribati handed a torch to a young man, ceremonially passing the future to a new generation.

Nobody lived there. Nobody ever went out there. When the designers of the International Date Line put marker to map, they drew right through the 33 islands that wouldn’t become Kiribati for 95 more years. They were just trifling bits of land, of no concern to cartographers 9050 miles away in London.

But there the little group stood because in 1994 the I-Kiribati president “applied to have a slight loop inserted into the date line that included all its islands in one time zone…. The Greenwich Observatory sanctioned his proposal and thus it was that his little nation profited greatly from the millennial hoopla.”

Dancers in grass skirts played to the cameras and the Kiribati archipelago made its claim to be the first to welcome the new millennium. The US Navy submarine Topeka made its own claim, positioning itself 400 meters underwater straddling both the date line and the equator.

New Zealand claimed the new millennium’s first sunrise. Their Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of the rest of New Zealand, got about a forty-minute jump on the rest of the country.

The real first dawn over land was near remote Dibble Glacier in Antarctica, but it was midsummer there, and you couldn’t really call it dawn, because the sun had never even set. If anybody was there, they never mentioned it. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

Amidst all of the disheartening immigration news, it was refreshing to see the recent D.C. district court decision in Grace v. Whitaker. The A.C.L.U. and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies brought the case on behalf of twelve adults and children who fled domestic violence in their home countries and were denied entry by United States border officials. Judge Emmet Sullivan reviewed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ extraordinary decision in Matter of A-B- last summer, which imposed heightened requirements for asylum-seekers entering the U.S. and moreover stated that domestic violence and gang violence were “generally” not grounds for asylum. Judge Sullivan found that Sessions’ decision and the subsequent Policy Memorandum that the Department of Homeland Security issued were unlawful.

Asylum law in the U.S.

Asylum law in the U.S. recognizes refugees belonging to a few specific categories: political opinion, race (encompassing ethnicity), nationality, religion, and “membership in a particular social group.” People fleeing abusive domestic situations and gang violence have been able to gain asylum in the U.S. through the last category, social group. To qualify as a refugee, someone must have a “well-founded fear of persecution” either by governmental actors, or, what is often crucial for social-group applicants, by non-state actors that the government is “unable or unwilling” to control. This language will come up a little later, as Sessions’ decision attempted to morph it into something quite a bit more restrictive. Read more »

by Richard Passov

Milton Friedman, in his essay The Methodology of Positive Economics[1], first published in 1953, often reprinted, by arguing against burdening models with the need for realistic assumptions helped lay the foundation for mathematical economics. The virtue of a model, the essay argues, is a function of how much of reality it can ignore and still be predictive:

The reason is simple. A [model] is important if it explains much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone.

Agreement on how to allow predictive models into the canon of Economics, Friedman believed, would allow Positive Economics to become “… an Objective science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences.” What Friedman coveted can be found in a footnote:

The … prestige … of physical scientists … derives … from the success of their predictions … When economics seemed to provide such evidence of its worth, in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, the prestige … of … economics rivaled the physical sciences.

Friedman appreciated the implications of the subject as the investigator, to a degree. “Of course,” he wrote, “the fact that economics deals with the interrelations of human beings, and that the investigator is himself part of the subject matter being investigated…raises special difficulties…

But he loses the value of his observation to a spate of intellectual showboating:

The interaction between the observer and the process observed … [in] the social sciences … has a more subtle counterpart in the indeterminacy principle … And both have a counterpart in pure logic in Gödel’s theorem, asserting the impossibility of a comprehensive self-contained logic …

The absence of an ability to conduct controlled experiments, according to Friedman, was not a burden holding back progress or unique to the social sciences. “No experiment can be completely controlled,” he wrote and offered astronomers as an example of scientists denied the opportunity of controlled experiments while still enjoying the prestige he coveted.

But though moving economics forward as a positive science – one where predictions are formulated through math and then tested against alternative formulations – he did not want to see mathematics supplant economics. “Economic theory,” he wrote, “must be more than a structure of tautologies … if it is to be something different from disguised mathematics.”

When Friedman penned his article, the simplest mathematical formulations exhausted computational capacity. Read more »

by Robert Fay

In the winter of 1927 James Joyce was in desperate need of a kind word. It didn’t seem to matter that he was a genius, the man who’d published Ulysses five years earlier, an artist of such magnitude that another Irish genius—a young Samuel Beckett—worshipped him and acted as his personal secretary. Joyce was completing a new novel under the working name, Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake), and nearly everyone who had read drafts hated it.

His wife, Nora Joyce, badgered him: “Why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?” while his longtime patron, the sophisticated Harriet Shaw Weaver, wrote him scathing letters. She found the work nearly indecipherable. “I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darkness and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system,” she wrote. Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann in his definitive chronicle James Joyce (1959), tells us that Joyce was so upset by this letter he “took to his bed.”

In Joyce’s three previous books he had explored and mastered the limits of the short story and the autobiographical novel, and then proceeded to write a maximalist “avant-garde” novel,  Ulysses (1922), that was arguably three-to-four decades ahead of its time. In baseball terms, Ulysses remains the equivalent of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. A record of human achievement that is unassailable and will forever remain a sacred Mount Sanai for writers across the globe.

Yet this great book burdened Joyce too. Like DiMaggio, he had to know his achievement was not repeatable. “In Dubliners he had explored the waking consciousness from outside, in A Portrait and Ulysses from inside,” Ellmann wrote. “He had begun to impinge, but gingerly, upon the mind of sleep…that the great psychological discovery of the century was the night world he was, of course, aware.”

Ellmann, we can’t forget, is referring to the writings and work of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theory, which was an intellectual bombshell of the early 20^th Century that was only rivaled by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In Finnegans Wake Joyce was looking to create an entirely new language for the new territory of the unconscious, of sleep, of the dream world. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

I first found Freud in the basement of the house on Luther Road. There was a small closet in the corner and my father had a box or two of paperback books in it. I don’t remember but a few titles; in fact, I’m only sure of two: Wodehouse on Golf, which I never read, and 1984, which I most certainly did read, as it had a pulpy cover that promised sex – a buxom brunette in a tight blue jumpsuit emblazoned with “Women’s Anti-Sex League” – in THAT costume! Of course, the book wasn’t quite what the cover advertised, but that was OK. I may also have found Brave New World there, I’m not sure. Come to think of it though, that probably IS where I found War of the Worlds. So that’s three titles I’m pretty sure of.

I probably found some Bertrand Russell, too, though just exactly what, I can’t recall. I went on to buy a bunch of Russell, including his history of Western philosophy. I also found something by Theodore Reik (Listening with the Third Ear?), and went on to buy more of THAT. And I found Freud, perhaps Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; after all, it has that magic word in the title: S E X.

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Johns Hopkins I read The Interpretation of Dreams. Somewhere in there I picked up a five-volume set of The Collected Papers from a book club. I’ve still got them, though they’re in storage along with some other Freud. But I’ve still got Totem and Taboo, Civilization and It’s Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion on the shelves in my apartment. They’re slender volumes and so don’t take up much space and Civilization plays to my interest in cultural evolution. Read more »