by Peter Wells

Saving endangered languages is an activity the virtue of which seems to be beyond question among Western liberals. Endangered languages, as conventionally identified, are usually spoken by poor and vulnerable people in remote areas of developing countries, so our sympathies are engaged. The least we could do, it seems, to alleviate their misery and show solidarity with them, would be to preserve their language.

At the same time, it is also urged that the endangered languages are valuable in themselves. Followers of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity) assert that each individual language can express concepts which no other language can express. Therefore, they insist that it is important not only to record these languages before they die, but also to keep the language communities alive so that they continue to use them.

I wish to suggest that this project, while well-meaning, is ill-conceived. It seems to employ an unscientific definition of the term ‘language’, and to rely upon a disputed theory about the nature of language. It is unrealistic in terms of what carrying it out would involve, and finally, and most importantly from the point of view of liberalism, it would tend to reduce, rather than increase, freedom. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Some people claim that the prominent display of statues to controversial events or people, such as confederate generals in the southern United States, merely memorialises historical facts that unfortunately make some people uncomfortable. This is false. Firstly, such statues have nothing to do with history or facts and everything to do with projecting an illiberal political domination into the future. Secondly, upsetting a certain group of people is not an accident but exactly what they are supposed to do.

I start with the point that erecting statues is a political action and therefore subject to a political logic. Statues are political insofar as erecting them has a cost – not merely the direct costs of building it, but also the opportunity cost of using scarce public space this way rather than another – that only successful political mobilisation can meet. In particular, the more controversial the statue, the more political capital is required to overcome the opposition to its public display, and the more distinctly political must be its logic (in contrast to merely decorative public sculptures that no one much minds). So what is the political pay-off that can justify the political expense of erecting controversial statues? I believe controversial statues are a kind of political communication, a signal to supporters and opponents of the values and people in charge, in which the offensiveness of the message is key to its effectiveness.

Such statues communicate to those on the losing political team. They say, ‘Fuck you. We’re in charge’. To black people in America, the wave of monuments in the 1950s to confederate generals who defended slavery sent two clear messages. Firstly, it sent a message about domination: that the civil rights movement had not and would not change who ruled and in whose interests. Secondly, it sent a message about political values: that this domination was justified by nothing but power and would not be constrained by considerations of justice or the rule of law. Deliberately erecting statues that celebrate odious values shows to the oppressed that moral appeals are hopeless and will not even be heard; that – whatever the new voting laws say – they will never recognised as equals. Read more »

Gull on a Spar

I’m a gull on a spar —so much sea,
so little far

this perch is so unsteady
I wonder what my bearings are

the roll and sway and pitch,
the other gull-calls I am hearing

as ship slides into ditch of trough,
this captain must be drunk the way he’s steering

or the helmsman is asleep, his compass eye is off,
the sluggish rudder’s answer is as drawn-out as a stutter

and I’m clinging to this spar like a baby to its mother
as the sun is going down wind screams or it is singing

the ship’s eighth bell is ringing,  the moon is coming up—
the image in that mirror, is that me or is that other?

Jim Culleny
6/24/20

by Paul Braterman

Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world, Marcia Bjornerud, Princeton University Press, 2018/2020, pp 208, sale price $8.84/£7.00 through publisher

There are many excellent overviews for the general reader of how life on Earth has changed over time (see, for a recent example, Neil Shubin’s Some Assembly Required, which I reviewed here recently). The history of the Earth itself has not been so well served, and Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, by Marcia Bjornerud, Professor of Geology and environmental Sciences at Lawrence University, is a welcome and timely addition to this badly under-represented genre.[1] The book is beautifully written, in plain language, with complex ideas explained with great simplicity and the use of strikingly appropriate verbal imagery. Behind this transparency of language lies a deep love and knowledge of her subject. The book should appeal to anyone looking for an overview of the Earth as the abode of life, or a perspective on our place in time, and how recklessly we are compressing the tempo of natural change.

The author presents her book as an argument for what she calls timefulness, the perception of ourselves as living in and constrained by time, of time itself as having both extension and texture, of the acceptance of our own mortality, and of our own responsibilities. This she sees as severely lacking in our society. We expect people to know something about distances on the map, but not about the timescale of the events that have shaped the Earth, as if what happened before we were born and what will happen after we die did not really exist. We have an economic system that (at least in normal times) depends on the expectation of continued growth, although if maintained over a very brief interval of geological or even historical time, such growth is clearly unsustainable.[2] Consumerism, rather than conservation, is regarded as good citizenship. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Mood June 2020.

Digital Photograph.

by Alexander C. Kafka

John Lewis: Good Trouble couldn’t be more timely. 

The new documentary, which will be available Friday on demand, arrives amid Black Lives Matter protests and renewed and deepening threats to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It shows one of the architects and key drivers of that legislation, the longtime civil-rights activist and congressman from Georgia, in both his soft-spoken private sphere and in his amiable but passionate public life. As he despairs over a democracy in peril, both his sadness and his hope resonate profoundly, even as the 80-year-old widower battles stage-four pancreatic cancer. 

The film avoids his illness, as it does health details around his wife Lilian’s death in 2012. I wish it dealt more forthrightly with Lewis’s cancer, because a reminder of his mortality would underline how fragile is the progress he has helped bring about. It is too tempting to take this icon and his life’s work for granted.

What shines through in the film, directed with unobtrusive clarity and empathy by Dawn Porter, is Lewis’s fundamental kindness and gentleness. There is one key exception: a low-blow tactic he used against his close friend Julian Bond when they were pitted against each other in Lewis’s first congressional race in the 80s.  Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio version:

Tourists visit Germany for four main reasons: to drink beer, taste sausages, and see Schloss Neuschwanstein. Germans are understandably annoyed by this. They point to the country’s remarkable contributions to the arts and the sciences and bemoan the image of Germans as corpulent, Lederhosen-clad Bavarians, with a beer mug in one hand and a sausage in another. But there is more to tourists’ mental image of Germany than that. If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that I said that tourists come to Germany for four reasons but proceeded to list only three. The fourth is naked people. Germans are so comfortable with nudity, I sometimes wonder whether they would bother getting dressed at all if it weren’t for the weather.

A professor of mine from university – we’ll call him Adam – spent a week visiting me in my department at the University of Munich shortly after I moved to Germany. I was delighted that he had accepted my invitation. Adam is a reticent Englishman with anxiety issues. He hates travelling, but agreed to come to Germany because he had some notion that Germans are an orderly bunch, so he would not have to deal with any unpleasant surprises.

My office at the time was in a lovely Jugendstil villa belonging to the university, just off the English Garden. On a warm summer’s day during his visit, I suggested to Adam that we take a little walk and lunch in the Garden. We left the office, grabbed some sandwiches at the nearby Italian shop, and found ourselves a shady corner at the edge of the park. We had an unfettered view of a lawn sloping down to the Isar river, which twinkled as it meandered lazily through the trees. It was idyllic. Adam and I had been having a rather serious discussion on our walk, about the meaning of life and what not. We settled down on the bench and unwrapped our sandwiches, took our first bites, and then looked up as one is wont to do when chewing a sandwich. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric Miller

1.

Tell me, what could be more pleasant than to play, in the summertime, a Stone Age re-enactor? A couple of them sat in the flowery grass near a hunebed—a Giant’s Grave or cromlech, some five thousand years old—in the town of Borger, in Drenthe, the Netherlands. The shadow in which this ersatz ancestral couple sat was of the mitigated, oscillatory sort that broadleaf trees in August cast. The year was 2014. Yellowhammers and wagtails called; bulky wood doves reminded me of their Canadian cousins, the passenger pigeons extinct exactly a century before. A puffy dog rested, tufted tail bent round nose, beside the pair who practised some craft proper to their era, I believe it was weaving. The life of a re-enactor at a hunebed cannot be called “pastoral”; it aspires to precede the idea of the pastoral. This idyll took place by the enormous side- and capstones of the megalithic monument I had come to visit. The hunebed, a sort of junior Stonehenge, had the look of a great reptile skeleton; it appeared, though it was inanimate, to enjoy mere basking. Imagine if our bones alone could relish the felicity of life! This is the rude sweetness of nude sunbathing, taken to the posthumous degree: mineral, sparkling.

Near the museum attached to the hunebed is a field of stones, boulders really. Glaciers deposited them in this neighbourhood, and the ancient engineers who built the hunebed—archaeologists have named them the Funnel Beaker People—used such granite erratics to build their tombs or temples. In 1685, a poet named Titia Brongersma came to Borger and she directed the first dig at the site. She found articles of funerary pottery; they crumbled at the crisis of their extraction. So much the eloquent guidebook informed me. At that moment, I felt Brongersma call me: in the elusive instant when, having extracted a buried urn, Titia saw it fall to bits in her palms. The act of translation is similarly precarious. Later, I looked for her only book, De bron-swaan, The Swan of the Well. No one had ever rendered more than a few verses from it into English. To write is manual labour, and a kind of re-enacting. Titia used a feather, I am pretty sure. I could sense this quill scraping while I puzzled over her words. I translated them all. Her Swan of the Well makes its reappearance this year. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

One frustrating aspect of the problem of police-enforced repression of Black people in the United States is how timeless it can seem.

Consider this real-life example:

An up-and-coming musician, only days away from releasing his breakthrough album, was finishing a two-week engagement at a famous club in Midtown Manhattan. He was on a break; he had just escorted a young white woman to her cab and was smoking a cigarette before returning to the club for his next set.

A white police officer was walking by, saw the musician, and told him to “move on”. The musician replied that he was playing at the club, and was only outside smoking a cigarette on his break.

The officer wasn’t happy with that response, saying “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.” As the officer reached for his handcuffs, three police detectives joined in and began beating the musician bloody.

The story made national news, but the account in the local papers — one that contradicted the testimonies of literally scores of eyewitnesses as well as of photographs taken on the night of the incident — seemed to suggest that the musician himself had been violent, perhaps even grabbing for the policeman’s nightstick.

Care to guess the name of the musician, or when the incident occurred?

Before you hazard a guess, consider the fact that many municipalities still have statutes potentially making it a crime to walk on a public street outside of a designated crosswalk or even just to spend time in a public place without an apparent reason.

Walking on a public street — even on a street that lacks sidewalks! — constitutes “jaywalking”. But of course, not all instances of jaywalking are criminalized by the police. For example, just in the first three months of 2020 alone, 99% of the jaywalking tickets issued by the NYPD went to Blacks or Latinos/Latinas. Read more »

Shadow self-portrait on aster amellus, the European Michaelmas daisies, in Vinschgau, South Tyrol, in June, 2020.

by Emrys Westacott

The coronavirus pandemic has massively disrupted the working lives of millions of people. For those who have lost their jobs, income, or work-related benefits, this can mean serious hardship and anxiety. For others, it has meant getting used to new routines and methods of working. For all of us, though, it should prompt reflection on how we think about work in general–both as a curse and as a blessing. Here, I want to focus on how work relates to time.

In ‘The Superannuated Man,’ Charles Lamb writes,

that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s times, not his.

This is a basic and obvious reason that many people resent having to go to work. Work takes up time, and time, as many sages have observed, is supremely valuable, irreplaceable, priceless. It is precious because we each know that we are granted only a limited amount of it.

Time is, in the words of Ben Franklin, “the stuff life is made of.” So insofar as work consumes your time, it consumes your life. If your work is what you really want to do, this is not a problem. But if much of the time when you are working–whether you are selling your services to someone else for an agreed number of hours, or drudging away at home–you would really prefer to be doing something else, then your working hours represent an enormous sacrifice. You are using up your supply of a decidedly finite, non-renewable resource. Read more »

by David Copp and Gerald Dworkin

In a survey released at the end of May by the AP and the NORC Center for public affairs research, 49% of Americans said they intended to be vaccinated against the new coronavirus, 31% said they were unsure, and 20% said they would not get the vaccine.

The Supreme Court (Jacobson vs. Massachusetts) has ruled that mandatory vaccination was a legitimate use of State police powers. Justice Harlan wrote “There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common ground.”

Whether that legal ruling would stand up in the current political situation, and this particular Supreme Court is an open question.

Some more background. We know that vaccination rates for measles and chickenpox have declined in recent years. We know that there is a growing and vigorous anti-vaccination movement in the US.  We know that New York State allowed exemptions for religious or personal reasons and that at least partially as a result, New York had the largest measles outbreak in 25 years. As a result the legislature removed its exemptions, the removal was challenged and the State court dismissed the challenge.

However interesting the legal issues are, in this blog we  are interested in examining the moral or ethical considerations which bear on the issue of whether, if ever, and if so, under what conditions, people are morally required to accept vaccination, even if they object to it.  Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him…And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. ―Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

After two days of celebrating my 40^th birthday in Atlantic City, I barely could put two words together. I slumped over my sunny-side up eggs in the Continental diner across the parking lot from the Dunes motel. Battered from salty air and indifference, it was the perfect place to crash when you knew you wouldn’t be getting much sleep. The year was 2007 and the end of history was bleeding into tomorrow like a hemophiliac walking across a field of broken glass.

I poked my fork into one of the yolks and watched it slowly creep across my plate toward the enormous pile of canned corned beef hash. I gratefully sipped the hot, black coffee while choking down a slice of buttered rye toast. Paul, one of my oldest friends, sat across from me, stoned and chill, staring into the white and silver-speckled formica tabletop, looking for answers to questions only he knew. I rarely smoked weed, but his state of placid contentment was a good argument to start smoking more. The sound of eggs, green peppers, melted cheddar, and onions mashing and churning in his cottony mouth made me shiver with nausea and want to kill him with my butter knife. I ground the base of my hands into my eye-sockets trying in vain to quiet the hive of hornets that tore through my brain. My heart hammered against the back of my chest and even though the diner was ice-cold, I was sweating like a mule. My clothes still smelled of smoke, gin and Paco Rabanne cologne. My bloodstained eyes betrayed my desire for more of everything. Read more »

Authoritarian

if hubris were astronomical
it would appear as a black hole
at the center of its galaxy
in tie and suit
which would not be seen,
but whose influence,
its dragging presence,
would be known
by the stars around it
that vanish into its maw
—would not be seen
because its mass’ draw
would snuff their heat and light,
would distend and bend them,
crush their radiance, their potential,
in the sphere of its gnawing vacancy
—would not be seen, but known
by its constant crushing,
the mastication of its
insatiable jaw
—but hubris is not astronomical,
is earthy, insistently visible,
and routinely crushed in turn
by natural law

Jim Culleny
6/21/20

Patrisse Cullors. A Prayer For The Runner, June 2020.

“Patrisse Cullors, the performance artist and activist best known for co-founding Black Lives Matter in 2013, unveiled a new work on Saturday in collaboration with UCLA’s Fowler Museum. The performance piece, A Prayer for the Runner, honors the life of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old who was murdered in Georgia this year for the crime of jogging while black.

Conceived during our era of social distancing, A Prayer for the Runner debuted on a Zoom webinar as a two-channel video. On one side of a split screen, Cullors appeared in a candlelit room, barefoot, dressed in a gauzy emerald robe and silver metallic pants, the words “BLACK POWER” written across her black t-shirt. Writing in black marker on a knee-high stack of blank paper, she presented “LAPD BUDGET” to the viewer as a sacrificial offering, then fed it through a shredder suspended from the ceiling. One by one, as she shredded “JAILS,” “PRISONS,” and “POLICE,” the sheets momentarily held their shape in midair as they fell out of the machine, shattering to pieces as they landed on the growing mound of shreds below. In the background, a pair of outstretched wings hung on the wall.”

More here, here, and here.

by Michael Liss

Had enough of the 2020 election? Take heart, there are just 134 days left until Vote-If-You-Can Tuesday. That’s less time than it took Napoleon to march his Grande Armée into Russia, win several lightning victories, stall out, and then retreat through the brutal winter, with astronomical casualties, all the while inspiring the equally long War and Peace and the 1812 Overture. 

Who will win? My renowned tea leaf collection seems a little wilted today, but it still says that absolutely nothing is out of the realm of possibility. We really could go anywhere from a 2016 redux to a Democratic sweep. Given the vintage nature of the two candidates, you can’t even rule out a variation on the West Wing Leo McGarry scenario. Expect the asymmetric.

Under any circumstances, the electoral math would have been fascinating. Conventional wisdom has always been focused on the six Obama 2012 states that Trump flipped in 2016 (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa). A key portion of the “Biden Electability” argument was based on his presumed appeal in those states. They would be the battleground because that’s where the winner would be determined. Read more »