by Brooks Riley
Choose the Axiom III
by Carl Pierer
In the first part of this essay, the axiom of choice was introduced and a rather counterintuitive consequence was shown: the Banach-Tarski Paradox. To recapitulate: the axiom of choice states that, given any collection of non-empty sets, it is possible to choose exactly one element from each of them. This is uncontroversial in the case where the collection is finite. Simply list all the sets and then pick an element from each. Yet, as soon as we consider infinite collections, matters get more complicated. We cannot explicitly write down which element to pick, so we need to give a principled method of choosing. In some cases, this might be straightforward. For example, take an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the natural numbers. Any such set will contain a least element. Thus, if we pick the least element from each of these sets, we have given a principled method. However, with an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the real numbers, this particular method does not work. Moreover, there is no obvious alternative principled method. The axiom of choice then states that nonetheless such a method exists, although we do not know it. The axiom of choice entails the Banach-Tarski Paradox, which states that we can break up a ball into 8 pieces, take 4 of them, rotate them around and put them back together to get back the original ball. We can do the same thing with the remaining 4 pieces and get another ball of exactly the same size. This allows us to duplicate the ball.
The second part of this essay demonstrated a useful consequence (or indeed, an equivalent) of the axiom of choice, known as Zorn’s Lemma and looked at a few applications of this Lemma. Two positions have been mapped out in the course of this essay. On the one hand, the axiom has very counterintuitive consequences, so much so that they’ve received the name of a paradox. On the other hand, the axiom proves to be very useful in deducing mathematical propositions. These considerations lead back to the question that had already been raised at the end of the first part: how are we to decide on the status of an axiom, on whether to accept it or reject it?
In this third and final part of the essay, we will take a more philosophical approach to this problem. In particular, we will look at a possible resolution offered by Penelope Maddy in her Defending the Axioms. The solution offered would lead onto further questions about the nature of mathematics: what is mathematics actually about? At the same time, Maddy’s view is based on a certain conception of proof that does not really reflect mathematical practice. The essay, due to limitations, only hints at a different perspective offered by looking at what mathematicians actually do and what role proofs play for them. Read more »
Clatsop County, Part Two: Kevin
by Tamuira Reid
It’s nearing lunchtime when I make it over to Kevin’s, and beautiful out, but his window shades are still drawn closed, outside light on. I notice the porch slopes ever so slightly to the right, where a few forgotten footballs and beer bottles have now collected. I knock. Wait. Hear some movement and bustling. Then silence. I knock again. Silver masking tape covers large rips in the screen door, big enough for a head to push through. More movement. Finally Kevin emerges, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
He doesn’t say hi, but rather ushers me in, a quick gesture of his skinny body, a bony hand-to-back motion that says hurry.
I am used to this with Kevin. The hurry up and go of it all. When you’ve made the conscious decision to hangout with crystal meth addicts, life becomes a constant hurry-up-and- go, even if you’re only going to the bathroom.
I like Kevin. He’s thoughtful and smart and ridiculously resourceful. He’s also one of the worst addicts I’ve come across during my time in Clatsop County – or in my personal life – which is saying a lot. He will likely never get clean. He might commit more than a few crimes. And he will probably die too young. His life is already pedal to the metal, as he’d tell you. Pedal to the fucking metal. Read more »
How Wine Expresses Vitality
by Dwight Furrow
Although frequently lampooned as over-the-top, there is a history of describing wines as if they expressed personality traits or emotions, despite the fact that wine is not a psychological agent and could not literally have these characteristics—wines are described as aggressive, sensual, fierce, languorous, angry, dignified, brooding, joyful, bombastic, tense or calm, etc. Is there a foundation to these descriptions or are they just arbitrary flights of fancy?
Last month on this blog I argued that recent work in psychology that employs “vitality forms” helps us understand how music expresses emotion. Will vitality forms help us understand how wine could express feeling states or personality characteristics?
Vitality forms are “the flow pattern” of human experience, “the subjectively experienced shifts in the internal states” that characterize sensations, thoughts, actions, emotions, and other feeling states. Discovered by Daniel Stern and described in his 2010 book Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development, vitality forms constitute the temporal structure of experience, the duration, acceleration and intensity of an experience. Importantly, vitality forms are not tied to a specific sense modality. All five senses as well as thoughts and feelings exhibit vitality forms. “A thought can rush onto the mental stage and swell, or it can quietly just appear and then fade”, as Stern notes. So can sounds, visual experiences, tactile impressions or emotions—anger can explode or emerge as a slow burn. In short, a vitality form is how any conscious experience emerges and changes over time. Read more »
Monday, September 17, 2018
The Lost Summer of William Jennings Bryan
by Michael Liss
He flew so fast and so close to the sun that it took an entire lifetime to fall back to Earth.
William Jennings Bryan was just 36 years old when, on July 9, 1896, he seized the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination on the back of a single, electrifying speech, “Cross of Gold.”
Twenty-nine years later almost to the day, a haunted shell of his former self, he sat at the prosecution’s table, waiting for opening arguments in the Scopes Monkey Trial, unaware it would lead to his humiliation and ultimately hasten his tragic end.
In between, “The Great Commoner” was nominated twice more by his party, in 1900 and 1908, and served as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State from 1913 to 1915. He then threw himself into efforts for causes as diverse as women’s suffrage, direct elections for Senators, and Prohibition. In the 1920s, he shifted his primary focus to his faith, but remained a prominent figure among Democrats through the 1924 Convention, when he was literally heckled off the stage in tears while trying to broker a compromise on an anti-KKK platform plank.
Bryan is an enigma. He failed frequently, but got multiple chances where abler men were passed over. Contemporaries questioned his intelligence and the scope of his interests, yet the exacting, often arrogant Wilson put him in his Cabinet and gave him a free hand with Latin American policy. His durability might best be ascribed to his possession of two tremendous assets: First, he was arguably the best orator of his time, compelling almost whenever and wherever he spoke, and, second, he seemed to have a psychic bond with his base. As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, while other politicians of that era may have sensed the feelings of the people, Bryan embodied them. His people stayed with him through his successes and his disappointments. Read more »
Simone Weil On Attention, Learning, And Compassion
by Anitra Pavlico
I recently read Simone Weil for the first time after having come across numerous references to her over the past year. I broke down and bought Waiting for God despite the intimidating and frankly confusing title. I was not disappointed. One of her essays in particular, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies in View of the Love of God,” has opened and focused my thinking on education and learning in general, whether for children or later in life for the rest of us.
Weil writes that “prayer consists of attention. . . . Although today we seem ignorant [of] it, the formation of the faculty of attention is the true goal and unique interest of all studies.” She explains that by developing our capacity for attention, we can enhance our spiritual practice. Leaving that aside for the moment, it is nonetheless worth exploring what she means by attention. I am very interested (along with countless others) in how we in the internet era are maintaining our ability to focus given ever-multiplying distractions. As a mother of a school-age child, I also have a particular interest in how children are developing their ability to focus in this distracting climate.
Weil essentially promotes a meditative or mindful attitude for children facing challenging subject matter in school:
If someone searches with true attention for the solution to a geometric problem, and if after about an hour has advanced no further than from where they started, they nevertheless advance, during each minute of that hour, in another more mysterious dimension. Without sensing it, without knowing it, this effort that appeared sterile and fruitless has deposited more light in the soul.
Weil’s approach is timely because it makes learning less stressful and more enjoyable for students. Even if it does not seem as if the student is mastering the material, in Weil’s view she is coming closer to understanding by virtue of having focused her attention on it. In an age when students are sleep-deprived and unduly anxious about exams, college prep, and living up to parents’ lofty and usually unreasonable expectations, students may be comforted to hear from Weil that “we confuse attention with a kind of muscular effort. [. . .] Fatigue has no relationship to work. Work is useful effort, whether there is fatigue or not.” What is happening today in our schools is not your typical adolescent turmoil–it is a mental health epidemic. Suicide rates have surged; two-thirds of college students report “overwhelming anxiety.” [1] Clearly, merely applying more effort is backfiring. Read more »
Rorty and Geertz on ethnocentrism
by Dave Maier
If someone accuses you of “ethnocentrism,” they’re probably saying that you come off as arrogant or dogmatic in rejecting other cultures’ practices as illegitimate or inferior. Richard Rorty, however, applies that term to himself, and indeed takes it to be a central part of his own view. Since he’s not, I take it, thereby confessing to arrogance or dogmatism, he must be using the term idiosyncratically. Even so, Rorty’s conception has drawn criticism not only from the usual suspects but also from perhaps the most prominent critic of “ethnocentrism” in its usual sense: anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a thinker with whom, given their shared liberalism (generally speaking), as well as their shared intellectual inheritance from Wittgenstein, we might expect Rorty to agree.
So what’s going on here? As noted, Rorty’s ethnocentrism (I’m going to stop putting the word in quotes now) plays a central role in his philosophy. In particular, he tells us, it’s the conceptual link between his “antirepresentationalist” view of inquiry, on the one hand, and his (somewhat self-mockingly dubbed) “postmodern bourgeois liberalism” on the other:
“[A]n antirepresentationalist view of inquiry leaves one without a skyhook with which to escape from the ethnocentrism produced by acculturation, but […] the liberal culture of recent times has found a strategy for avoiding the disadvantage of ethnocentrism. This is to be open to encounters with other actual and possible cultures, and to make this openness central to its self-image. This culture is an ethnos which prides itself on its suspicion of ethnocentrism – on its ability to increase the freedom and openness of encounters, rather than on its possession of truth.” (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 2)
That Rorty’s ethnocentrism isn’t just some free-floating doctrine (which shouldn’t be surprising, given his lack of interest in coming up with philosophical theories which (simply) “get reality right”) means two things. First, we’ll need to see what it’s doing in order to see what it is. Second, we won’t be able to dislodge it and replace it with something better unless our suggested replacement isn’t simply a better explanation of, say, belief and inquiry, but also fits just as well with the rest of what we say as Rorty’s ethnocentrism does with the rest of his thought. This may require giving up some of those other things as well – for better or worse. (Was anyone actually happy with “postmodern bourgeois liberalism”?) Read more »
Perceptions
Mariam Ghani. Fugitive Refrains, 2006.
Fugitive Refrains was conceived and produced collaboratively with Butoh-trained dancer/choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly during a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. It was developed for, performed, and shot in six specific sites in the Solitude Rotwildpark forest and the historic Schloss Solitude in summer 2006, and premiered at the Akademie in spring 2007 as an immersive surround sound video installation, with a video projection covering a full wall of the room and both the score (by Qasim Naqvi) and ambient sound moving from speaker to speaker throughout the space. The title of the video is derived from a line in a Wordsworth poem written a few decades after the construction of Schloss Solitude: “That nature yet remembers/what was so fugitive.”
In the Mane
by Akim Reinhardt
Once upon a time there was a cat. He was smarter than you, and smarter than me. For want of a thumb he could have ruled the world. But alas, he was encumbered with paws: black pads and sharp claws.
And he knew. His green eyes, like spiraling jade, he saw through the world, and recognized that which held him back. My immigrant grandfather used to say that if he’d been born speaking the language, he’d be a rich man. I believe he was right. And so it was that this cat could not grab the scepter and claim our little blue globe as his rightful domain. Much as my grandfather had to pick up a brush and a can of paint, the cat was resigned to sitting down and licking his coat, instead of having others do it for him while palm fronds waved.
He knew where the food was kept. Behind the door, in the closet beneath the stairs. And he knew that the door opened when the door knob was turned. He would sit there, staring at that infernal knob, the slippery lock that kept him from his treasure. Then he would lurch upward, grab the knob with both paws, and attempt to spin it. Again, and again. But to no avail. Disgusted with the world’s inadequacies, he would slowly walk away, hop up onto the couch, and nap. Read more »
Report from Salzburg
by Leanne Ogasawara
“Someday, I’d like to visit Salzburg when the Summer Festival’s not going on. That way, I can see if the place is real; for I just can’t help wondering if Salzburg is not some kind of enchanted fairy world, which only comes into being when the music is playing…”
“Nonsense” said our guide matter-of-factly.“In Salzburg, the music never stops playing!” She paused and then added more circumspectly: “But of course, the Summer Festival is the pièce de résistance. And we Salzburgers wait for it all year long.”
Salzburgers are not the only ones who look forward to the festival all year long; for year after year—like some gigantic magnet—it draws artists and music lovers from all over the world. To call it larger than life would only be an understatement; for the festival exists outside of regular time; beyond ordinary life. Super-charged and surprisingly playful, artists, who don’t often work together, perform works that are cutting-edge and often quite risky, because –well, it’s the festival! And if you aren’t taking chances then you run the risk of being Disneylandified, a previous festival director once said. Along with the artists, music lovers also arrive to this city like pilgrims. For unlike during the regular season, when music is more of a diversion from our everyday lives, during festival season attendees are able to immerse themselves completely into an enchanted world that begins and ends with art.
Opera as resistance? Music as re-enchantment?
If you don’t like the “high brow” arts –or disapprove of the opera (you know who you are)—beware! Because Salzburg is the belly of the beast! We upped our game by booking a room at the Hotel Goldener Hirsch. I had read in an opera magazine that this was “the place” to stay for opera goers. I hadn’t, however, really thought things through; as we were not quite prepared for the jet-set atmosphere of the place –not to mention being severely under-dressed! Our own inadequacies aside, again and again during those four days I kept thinking about the Japanese expression ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会).
Have you heard of that term from Zen Buddhism? It basically means something like “One time, one encounter.” Read more »
On the Road: Giraffe Spotting
by Bill Murray
It all started with zebras.
Hard to believe, but sustained, hands-on field work in east Africa only has a sixty year history. Today Hans Klingel is an emeritus professor at the Braunschweig Zoological Institute, but when he arrived in Africa in 1962 Herr Klingel was one of only three scientists in the entire Serengeti.
Klingel and his wife made wildlife their career. Their first mission was to recognize individually and study ten percent of the 5500 zebras in the Ngorongoro Crater west of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Zebra stripes are whole body fingerprints. The Klingels took photographs, taped the photos to file cards and carried them into the field. They came to recognize some 600 individuals.
Their file card technique caught on. In 1965 zoologist Bristol Foster studied giraffes at Nairobi National Park, photographing their left sides to memorize their unique patterns. He glued pictures onto file cards too. From 1969 a researcher named Carlos Mejia photographed and carried cards of giraffes in the Serengeti. Scientists swarmed into east Africa and the game was on.
On the open savanna, giraffes and zebras form a natural alliance. Zebras (and wildebeests, their fellow travelers) benefit from giraffes’ strong eyesight, elevated vantage point and superior field of view. Giraffes have the largest eyes among land animals and can see in color. Their peripheral vision allows them to just about see behind themselves. The next time your safari Land Cruiser rattles around the corner into view of a giraffe, you can bet the giraffe has already seen you. Read more »
When We Commemorate The Tragedy of 9/11, Why Do We Ignore The Tragedy Of The Iraqi Women And Children We Killed Because Of It?
by Evert Cilliers aka Evert Eden
When it comes to evil, nobody beats Hitler. He committed the biggest mass murder of innocent humans in all of history.
Six million Jews, and that’s not even mentioning all the people who died because Hitler started the Second World War.
But Hitler is not the only mass murderer in human history: there’s Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
And then there’s us. The people of America.
Often given to calling America the greatest country on earth, we’ve had a very recent example in which we ourselves committed mass murder. President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative cabinet of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and others, persuaded our noble American nation to go to war against Iraq and mass-murder a million and a half innocent Iraqi women and children.
Just like Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and the rest persuaded the Germans to kill Jews, Russians, French, and Brits.
This Iraqi civilian mass murder was our hysterical reaction to the terrorists killing over three-thousand of us on 9/11, a tragedy which we commemorated this past week.
A million and a half innocents. We bombed and shot them to smithereens.
So heck, if you dare to call yourself human, don’t be too hard on Hitler and Germany to the exclusion of ourselves. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
Art Isn’t the Place to Tackle Racism
by Robert Fay
D.H. Lawrence had the goods on America. Like many foreign intellectuals and artists before and after, he was interested in the American “spirit of place” and its people’s curious experiment with displacement. He knew the “old American classics” stood toe-to-toe with the great Russian and French masterpieces of the 19th Century, but he also knew there were a lot of bodies buried out back, and understanding America started from there.
In his masterful Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) he wrote, “at present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act with the unconscious and under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness of the Yankee soul, the inner-malaise that almost amounts to madness, sometimes.”
Lawrence was writing here about James Fenimore Cooper’s novels and the countries’ shameful relations with Native Americans, but it could equally apply to America’s ongoing treatment of African Americans. Lawrence goes on to observe, “America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it.”
There’s a growing consciousness among (some) white Americans that racism is not simply a societal ill creeping toward extinction (“Look, we just had a black president!), but more like a malarial parasite that cleverly adapts itself to new circumstances, new opportunities. Read more »
Telling your disruption story from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the Slopes of Enlightenment
by Sarah Firisen
Many years ago in 1991, in my first job out of college, I worked for a small investment bank. By 1994, I was working in its IT department. One of my tasks was PC support and I had a modem attached to my computer so that I could connect to Compuserve for research on technical issues. Yes, this was the heydey of Compuserve, the year that the first web browser came out and a time when most people had very little idea, if any, what this Internet thing was.
As a tech geek, I signed up for one of the early, local Internet Service Providers and had an email account on their Unix based system. I actually met my now ex-husband through that email account, which is a whole other story. During this period, the ex and I were just starting our email correspondence and I would dial into my ISP at work to check my email. At some point, these minimal phone charges came to the attention of the firm’s Managing Director who took me aside and asked what I was doing. I told him about this wonderful new thing, the Internet! He told me to stop using the company’s modem to connect to anything but Compuserve. I protested, somewhat, and tried to tell him what a wonderful innovation the Internet was (and bear in mind, at the time, there weren’t a lot of websites and they loaded incredibly slowly, so even a geek had to use some imagination to see the future possibilities). He told me that the company would not be doing anything with the Internet anytime in the future. And by the way, this is a company who had already made a lot of its money from deals and IPOs in the entertainment and technology sector, so that they might have been interested in what I had to say wasn’t an outrageous idea.
Suffice it to say, that Managing Director was wrong and over the years that investment bank has been involved in many of the most significant deals with some of the biggest Internet-related companies. So what was the missed opportunity there? Clearly, that Managing Director was no visionary but my old company also ended up doing just fine and caught onto the Internet early enough to make a lot of money anyway. But, how much more money could they have made if someone had listened to me back then? I was young and very junior at the company and felt ashamed to have been “caught” and told off. But in hindsight, what I could have done was tell him a better story about this new, disruptive technology. Read more »
Feed Me Donald! – Trump, Musk, the Internet, and Monsters from the Id
Seen on Google search, Friday morning, September 9, 2018:
I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Rogan lit up a blunt, and Musk took a toke. The next day Tesla’s stock tanked. Well, not exactly tanked, but it was down seven points, and the drop can’t be attributed entirely to that toke–there’s been some turmoil in the executive ranks–but that made for a good lede.
Not to mention the image! Billionaire inventor, boy wonder, real-life Iron Man, with his “Occupy Mars” T-shirt, head cloaked in a cloud of smoke. Get it? Share-holder value, up in smoke?
It’s the stuff of mythology, of realityTVnews.
But that wasn’t the most interesting thing in the interview by a long shot. Read more »
A Faint Distrust of Words
INTERVIEW BETWEEN ANDREA SCRIMA (A LESSER DAY)
AND CHRISTOPHER HEIL (Literaturverlag Droschl)
Novels set in New York and Berlin of the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, just as subculture was at its apogee and the first major gentrification waves in various neighborhoods of the two cities were underway—particularly when they also try to tell the coming-of-age story of a young art student maturing into an artist—these novels run the risk of digressing into art scene cameos and excursions on drug excess. In her novel A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil, second edition 2018), Andrea Scrima purposely avoids effects of this kind. Instead, she concentrates on quietly capturing moments that illuminate her narrator’s ties to the locations she’s lived in and the lives she’s lived there.
When she looks back over more than fifteen years from the vantage of the early 2000s and revisits an era of personal and political upheaval, it’s not an ordering in the sense of a chronological sequence of life events that the narrator is after. Her story pries open chronology and resists narration, much in the way that memories refuse to follow a linear sequence, but suddenly spring to mind. Only gradually, like the small stones of a mosaic, do they join to form a whole.
In 1984, a crucial change takes place in the life of the 24-year-old art student: a scholarship enables her to move from New York to West Berlin. Language, identity, and place of residence change. But it’s not her only move from New York to Berlin; in the following years, she shuttles back and forth between Germany and the US multiple times. The individual sections begin with street names in Kreuzberg, Williamsburg, and the East Village: Eisenbahnstrasse, Bedford Avenue, Ninth Street, Fidicinstrasse, and Kent Avenue. The novel takes on an oscillating motion as the narrator circles around the coordinates of her personal biography. In an effort of contemplative remembrance, she seeks out the places and objects of her life, and in describing them, concentrating on them, she finds herself. The extraordinary perception and precision with which these moments of vulnerability, melancholy, loss, and transformation are described are nothing less than haunting and sensuous, enigmatic and intense. Read more »
Monday, September 10, 2018
Visual Histories: Discovery
by Timothy Don
Speak the word “discovery” and familiar images of explorers, scientists, ships, and treasure chests come to mind. To look into the visual record of “discovery” over the past 50,000 years, however, is to witness the concept expand, swell, and overwhelm the imagination. There is a wonder that arises in the wake of one’s research with the realization that the deeper and closer one looks, the wider, richer, and more capacious the topic at hand becomes. Consider the egg.
A simple egg. The familiarity of its shape is unnerving, even disarming. Hovering there, alone in space, it has the weight of a moon or a planet. A red planet. A symbol of discovery in its expansive, exploratory sense: to discover is to reach out into space, to land on the moon, to plan for Mars. But…this object is not Mars. It is an egg. It is an ostrich egg, more than 5,000 years old, from the predynastic period of Northern Upper Egypt, dug out of a tomb. Mars remains undiscovered. This is an artifact from an era now lost to us, uncovered by a forgotten Egyptologist from the 19th century. It belongs to the past. This is an actual discovery. And it is wonderful. It is pure potential. It has been discovered, but it remains uncracked. Full of mystery, this old egg from the past, it fills you with wonder. At that moment a gestalt switch gets thrown, and one realizes that discovery’s arrow points not only forward and outward to unexplored planets, but backward and inward to things lost, buried, and forgotten. To discover a thing is also to discover the past, and the act of discovery is about the recovery of the past just as much as it is about the probing of the future. And so a planet (symbol of the undiscovered future) becomes an artifact (material expression of the discovered past), and the artifact (the egg) becomes a mystery, a wonder, a promise. To be an egg is to promise discovery. Every egg, from this one (c. 3400bc) to the one you opened into a frying pan this morning, contains and shelters something utterly familiar and utterly unique, something waiting for you to find it. Every egg is a discovery.
There are certain artists who seem to have something to say about everything and whose work as a result appears regularly in the pages of the journal at which I serve as visual curator. Hieronymus Bosch is one. Caravaggio is another. Paul Klee and William Kentridge make the list. The genius of these artists (and many others) makes their work ever-contemporary, as immediate and compelling today as it was when they made it. The density of their work allows it to absorb the assault of time, so that its meaning can shift and apply itself to any period without diluting the purity of its original conception and execution. Read more »
Monday Poem
Little Miracles 2:
—Cloudmaker
you, generator of clouds,
are indispensable. you
fling them up as if
they were mere vapor
your creativity is unsurpassed
much like cloud yourself
you may be dark or bright
free and light or stretched
like a cowl under stars,
in daylight white grey saffron
pink
at night you draw curtains
cross a moon
but you are not mere vapor
as you stride
and dance with wind
waving arms to fan the air
you cool it down to give
us drink
Jim Culleny
8/2/18
Drawing, Cloudmaker
Jim C. 1997
Apportioning Democracy
by Jonathan Kujawa
Despite what he may wish, the President of the United States is not a king. We have Congress to act as a check and to ensure the varied opinions of the citizens are represented [1]. In principle, a representative democracy is straight-forward: the voters vote, select their representatives, and the legislature gets down to the business of running the country.
The devil, of course, is in details. The framers of the Constitution had knock-down, drag-out fights over basic questions like: does the legislature represent individual citizens or the states? On one side you had those who saw the new country as a joining together of independent, co-equal states. William Patterson of New Jersey compared a large state having more votes than a small one, to the idea “that a rich individual citizen should have more votes than an indigent one”. Those on the other side took the view if this is to be a true common enterprise, then every voter should be treated equally regardless of where they happened to reside. In what can only be a coincidence, a founder’s position on the issue almost invariably matched whether they came from a large state or a small one.
They finally agreed the Senate would have two representatives from each state, regardless of size, while the House of Representatives would have its members allocated to the states according to their population. Even this reasonable compromise nearly failed. Read more »