Michael E. DeBakey, 1908-2008

by Syed Tasnim Raza

MichaeldebakeyMichael E. DeBakey died on July 11, 2008 of natural causes, just two months short of his 100th birthday. He was a pioneering, innovative, and world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon, whose surgical career spanned close to 70 years. While his name is most associated with Methodist Hospital of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, his career began at Tulane University in New Orleans in the late 1930s. It is at Tulane that he first described surgery for aortic aneurysms (ballooning of the aorta secondary to atherosclerosis) by cutting out the enlarged portion of the aorta and replacing it with a tube made out of Dacron. This operation has been performed millions of times throughout the world since then with great success.

Dr. DeBakey also described surgical treatment of another condition affecting the aorta, so-called aortic dissection, in which case the inner layer of the aorta (the intima) is torn, thus letting blood enter between the inner and outer layers, and as this condition progresses it shuts off the origins of major arteries coming off the aorta, causing stroke, heart attack, kidney failure and death if it remains untreated in a vast majority of patients. The classification of aortic dissection is named after DeBakey (DeBakey Types I, II and III). In December 2006, Dr. DeBakey himself suffered from Type I aortic dissection himself. He was 97 at the time and refused surgery due to his advanced age. But as the condition progressed he went into a coma and his wife and a long time associate, George Noon, asked for surgery to be performed against his expressed wish. The Ethics Committee of the hospital met, and in a controversial decision, permitted the operation to be performed, which was successful, although the recovery was complicated and he was hospitalized for over eight months, at a cost of over a million dollars. He fully recovered and remained active until his death.

Heart surgery was developed during the 1940’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Minneapolis and Rochester in Minnesota. Dr. DeBakey, while working independently and outside of those major centers, made significant contributions in this field also. The heart lung machine was developed by the pioneering efforts of John Gibbon in Philadelphia and first used there in 1952, but it was the roller pump invented by DeBakey as a senior medical student in 1939, which made it much more useable and widely applicable after late 1950’s. Rene Favalaro, a Brazilian surgeon working at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, developed coronary artery bypass operation in 1967 using the saphenous veins from the legs to bypass obstructed coronary arteries in the heart. It turns out that Dr. DeBakey had successfully done this operation as a desperate measure in a patient who could not be weaned off the heart lung machine in 1964 in Houston, but did not report it at the time. It was eventually reported in 1974. Dr. DeBakey developed the first ventricular assist device (VAD), a mechanical pump which can support the heart for weeks or months, 300 of which have been implanted in humans, and newer versions of his device are still being used.

During the Second World War, Dr. DeBakey proposed that surgeons and nurses be deployed on the front lines with army units for providing immediate care to the injured, thus avoiding delays of evacuation to army hospitals. These became the M.A.S.H. units in the Korean war.

Another area in which Dr. DeBakey contributed greatly was making the Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital in Houston one of the great medical education and research institutions in this country. At one time or the other he served there as the Chief Cardiovascular Surgeon, Chairman of Surgery, director of Cardiovascular Center, President of the hospital and Chancellor of the college. He took great pride as a teacher of surgery and trained hundreds of heart and vascular surgeons who are practicing throughout the world. He was known to be very demanding of the residents (though very charming to the patients and medical students), so much so that there are stories about his having slapped a resident on morning rounds, for having missed some minor point.

Another story which circulates among heart surgery residents is that a patient died just before morning rounds and no one wanted to break the news to Dr. DeBakey, so the patient was covered over by a sheet and Dr. DeBakey was told that there was no change in his condition, and they moved on. Another story about his dedication to surgery involves his first wife who died in 1972. Dr. DeBakey was operating when some one came in the room to give him the news. He asked not to be disturbed while he was operating and finished his day’s schedule at 7:00 PM, at which time he asked what was so urgent that could not wait for him to finish! Even if there is partial truth to these stories, they have circulated in the surgical circles for so long that most of us take them as true, since they do reflect his personality. By the time he retired in his late 80’s, DeBakey had performed over 60,000 operations! His former trainees have formed the highly prestigious Michael E. DeBakey Surgical Society.

Dr. DeBakey received numerous awards throughout his long career, including the Lasker Award, United Nations Lifetime Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, The National Medal of Science, Congressional Gold Medal and at least 38 other major awards form various professional medical associations and societies. I first met and heard Dr. DeBakey during my residency training in Buffalo where he came to receive the Roswell Park Gold Medal, an award given by the Buffalo Surgical Society annually to a distinguished surgeon. At that meeting Dr. DeBakey told us that he had interviewed for the position of Chairman of Surgery at the Buffalo General Hospital in 1963, but then decided to stay on in Houston! The last time I heard Dr. DeBakey was in 2000, when he was 92, still vigorous and active, and was given the American Association of Thoracic Surgery Lifetime Achievement Award.

The greatest protégée DeBakey produced was Denton Cooley, a surgeon originally trained under Alfred Blalock in Johns Hopkins Hospital, who then joined DeBakey in Houston. Within a few years Cooley broke from DeBakey and opened a competing heart center, the Texas Heart Institute, across the street form the Methodist Hospital. The two centers competed vigorously and both became internationally recognized centers of excellence.

Once when Dr. DeBakey was out of town, Dr. Cooley stole an early version of an experimental ventricular assist device from Methodist and implanted it in one of his patients. Dr. Cooley to this day says he did it as a desperate measure to save his patient’s life, Dr. DeBakey says he did it to be the first to implant a VAD! This became a national scandal and Dr. Cooley was censured by the American College of Surgeons. The two did not speak after that and feuded publicly at professional society meetings. Finally after 40 years of this widely reported feud last year the Denton Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society gave Dr. DeBakey a Lifetime Achievement Award, and with urgings from mutual friends, Dr. DeBakey agreed to attend the meeting. There he finally shook hands again with his long-time nemesis.

Michael Ellis DeBakey was born in New Orleans to Shaker and Raheeja Dabaghi (Anglicized to DeBakey), Maronite Christians from Lebanon, who immigrated to the United States because of religious persecution back home. He was one of five children and credits his parents for inculcating in him the values of education and hard work and service to others, which led him to his successful career. Dr. DeBakey is considered one of the greatest surgeons of the last century. His name will live on in many patient’s hearts, on many buildings and departments in Houston, with the work of hundreds of his trainees, and in his numerous publications and the devices that he developed, for many years to come.



Monday Poem

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Unworthy Guide
Jim Culleny

………..

This is the fabulous story of Heracleitus, the philosopher of Flux 

This is the very short version, in which super-misanthropic Heracleitus, who has shunned the family of Man, returns to the city from years in the woods a very sick man with bleak prospects.  He returns to find a cure for his misanthropy and decides on a odd remedy to draw out his bad humors.  He resorts to having himself covered with cow dung
………………….

There are two versions of what happened next, depending upon who’s doing the talking. Heracleitus either drowns, weeping in dung that’s too wet; or he bakes to death under a dry Ionian sun channeling Dante

Either way, the old philosopher no doubt suffered from an information gap —a huge hole concerning the effects of a full cow-dung-immersion in certain climates.

Ignorance is an unworthy guide.

But Heraclitus lived between 540 and 480 BC,
and so, might be excused for his decisions.
He was, after all, ignorant of his ignorance.

So why does this sound so familiar, 
and what’s our excuse?

Person_heraclitus Person_heraclitus_2

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””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Heracleitus

Who can fathom the odd notions
of philosophers?

Whether to be immersed in flux
and cowed by change to the point
of drowning yourself in cow dung, weeping;
or to bake yourself in cow dung, keeping
with cock-sure Horatio
(teller-true of dreams),
waiting long for Socrates
in the land of flaming sun,
braced and curling his digits
into a fist

That, or to say, “Grow up.
–this is our predicament,
let’s make a list.”

,,,,

Monday, July 7, 2008

Dispatches: A Post-Wimbledon Dialogue

To recap an exceptional tournament, tack-sharp tennis mind Lucy Perkins has kindly agreed to take part in another dialogue.  (For our pre-tournament conversation, click here.)  Because of time constraints, we’re going to stick to the men’s final, despite the fact that Venus and Serena Williams produced their best match at a major tournament–it’ll have to suffice to say that we both hope they’ll be repeating the exercise at Grand Slams for years to come. 

Asad Raza: Hello Lucy.  I believe “epic” is the only word that adequately describes today’s events, no?  I can’t think of another match that left me as emotionally drained–I’ve been more devastated (Sampras d. Agassi, U.S. Open, 2002), and more euphoric (Ivanisevic d. Rafter, Wimbledon, 2001), but never has a tennis match seemed… larger, of such scope and importance.  Not only did Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer together produce tennis at a surpassing level, but they produced a match with a dramatic quality unseen since Borg and McEnroe squared off in 1980.  This was tennis as the highest form of controlled, dancelike movement and tennis as exhausting, warlike struggle.  It will be hard to come up with superlatives sufficient to describe it.  How are you feeling?

Lucy Perkins: I am utterly drained and highly conflicted: highly disappointed for Federer, who deserved to win, unexpectedly pleased for Nadal, who deserved it more, and filled with admiration for both men.  Like you, I watch a lot of Grand Slam tennis, and like you, I can’t remember any final matching this one for importance, for drama, for sheer quality.  Federer-Nadal, the rivalry, often has the flavour of a classical Greek drama, all thwarted ambitions and tragic flaws, but Federer-Nadal, the matches, are often disappointing.  This one, needless to say, lived up to its billing.  I don’t think it could’ve been scripted any better.

Asad Raza: I think the script would have been thrown out on the grounds of crossing over from drama to melodrama.  But this was real.  At nine a.m. this morning, New York time, a small group of mostly casual fans gathered at my apartment to watch the match.  It was all wisecracks and theorizing about Federer’s royalty and Nadal’s peasantry.  By five p.m., there were teary eyes and a shared sense of having lived through something completely unglib in my living room.  Strangely, even though Federer lost, I don’t know if I’ve ever admired him more.  Of the three shots that I remember most clearly from the match, two were hit by Federer: the stunning backhand pass down the line on Nadal’s match point in the fourth set tiebreaker, and the equally stunning backhand return of serve winner on Nadal’s match point in the fifth.  I’ve never seen a better played match, in several senses.

Lucy Perkins: Funny, that.  I can only clearly remember maybe four or five points of the entire match, but that second one you mention, the crosscourt return with Nadal serving at 8-7, 40-30 in the fifth, is the most vivid.  It exemplified exactly what is great about Federer.  Even down match point, facing extraordinary pressure, and after five hours of play, he has the courage and the skill to come up with a blistering angled return.  In the short term, the stories will be – are already – about the fall of the king, but over the long run, in a funny way, I feel like Federer’s involvement in this match will only heighten the Federer myth.  Even though he lost in the most excruciating fashion.

Asad Raza: But this final also demonstrated how the best tennis matches exceed tennis, and reach some kind of sublime human drama–the strongest memories we’ll all have of it, I bet, are faces: Federer’s wan smile as Nadal accepted his trophy, and his regal acceptance of Rafa’s post-match compliments.  The euphoria that was indistinguishable from sadness on Nadal’s face as he reached his parent’s embrace.  The desperate, nearly unglued look Federer had late in the match, unseen at any other time in his televised life, the transparency of Nadal’s determination.  This was a match that seemed to expose the souls of these two.  And maybe the most remarkable thing about about it, was that it exposed both to be competitors who cared deeply for each other after the struggle: the exchange of pats on the shoulder as they circled Centre Court with their trophies showed me that.  It was pretty glorious.

Lucy Perkins: Right, and that, I think, is why it’s so hard to remember the points in the match, because it was so much more than forehands and volleys and service returns.  The mutual regard between them, and the genuinely conflicted response of both, was almost unbearably touching.  This rivalry is unique, I think, in that it’s become almost impossible to like one without feeling at least some empathy for the other.

Asad Raza: Although judging by thousands of partisan comments on our friend Pete Bodo’s blog, many fans of the players have a zero-sum level of empathy–what is given to one is taken from the other.  Pete, by the way, called this “the best match of of the Open Era,” and he was present at most of them.  (Quoted by the excellent Tom Perrotta.)  As a Federer fan, how do you feel towards Nadal at the moment?  Is he the true number one right now?

Lucy Perkins: Well, if Pete Bodo is saying that, who are we mortals to disagree?  You know, I have some difficulty with the notion of “true number one”.  The number one in the rankings IS the true number one, the player who has gained the most ranking points in the past year, as determined within a transparent, consistently applied system.  So no, he is not the “true number one” until the computer damn well says he is.  But if you’re asking if he is the best player in the world right at this minute, I can say, unequivocally, yes.  He’s beaten Federer in two consecutive finals on two anthetical surfaces.  He is, at the moment, the better player.  My emotional response to him is somewhat more complicated.  On the one hand, I remain a Federer fan through and through, and when the two are playing, I seize on any little peccadillo of Nadal’s.  (“He’s keeping Roger waiting AGAIN while he rearranges his water bottles? Is he serious? This is gamesmanship!”)  But after the match, I was, you know, happy for him.  In a way.  Although I was also pretty busy crying for Federer, to whom Wimbledon means the world.

Asad Raza: Spoken like a very mature drinker of Federer Kool-Aid (apologies for those offended by the reference).  And it’s true, I felt much sympathy for Federer too, in his post-match suffering–but then I remembered how blessed he is to have talent of such magnititude, and how much he has achieved using it.  I don’t go in, anyway, for all the sorrow about the end of streaks and consecutive titles and pursuits of Bjorn Borg, who I don’t think could have competed with these two, just as I don’t think William Renshaw, the man who won six consecutive Wimbledons in the nineteenth century, could have tied Borg’s shoelaces on a court.  Maybe that’s just my presentism.  But the paradoxical lesson I draw from it is that the here and now is what’s important, not victories as data points in a historical case being constructed for Best Player Ever.  Finally, I think that’s what this match showed us: that the battle is really about today, and what’s in front of you, and not legacies and arguments.  Today, Nadal and Federer represented tennis played at its absolute highest level and with its most generous and admirable spirit, and that’s why I think they are the greatest rivalry the sport has known, since I’ve been watching.

Lucy Perkins: Yes, in a way it’s a shame to think of this match as anything other than an end in itself, a magnificent example of sport-as-drama, and a reminder of why we’re so willing to get up at odd hours to watch people hit a ball back and forth.  On the other hand, even while I watch a match like this, part of me starts to take the historical view: imagine what we’ll be saying about this when it’s all done and dusted.  And: I wonder what Borg makes of all this? It’s hard not to do that when you know you’re watching history.  I second your “greatest rivalry” nomination, and am a little sad that we might just have witnessed its apex.  Not because I don’t think they have other great matches in them – on the contrary, I am already excited for the next installment – but because I find it hard to believe anything could surpass today’s effort.

Asad Raza: Until next time, Luce!

Lucy Perkins: In the spirit of today’s match, hasta luego!  (Cheers!)

Monday Poem

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The Pool of Buddha’s Eyes
Jim Culleny

The asphalt of the walk to the door is black
but not as dark as the silence
of the concrete Buddha on the porch
as I climb the steps to work.

The Buddha sits center on the top step
with downcast eyes, a nascent nest
in his hands, eyeing bits of straw
a bird has brought and placed
as if it thought the safest site
to build this spring was in the lap
of the grey Buddha upon a porch
in a small town on a planet
in a galaxy among billions
in a small universe swimming
in the pool of Buddha’s eyes.

04/03/08

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Monday, June 30, 2008

down, i say, down with malcolm gladwell!

I have been harboring a nagging suspicion about Malcolm Gladwell for some time now. There is a word that keeps knocking at the back of my mind. That word is ‘fraud’. I suspect, in short, that Malcolm Gladwell is a fraud. I finally picked up his book from a couple of years ago, Blink. He subtitles it “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” The book oozes with a slickness, a snake oil salesman’s set of cheap tricks and pseudo-intellectual come-ons. My feeling of distaste is so strong that I’ve come in a perverse way to admire Mr. Gladwell. He has caused me to hate again. I hate Blink.

But allow me to calm down. Allow me to state the case. Allow me to endeavor to prove that Blink is a piece of shit.

Malcolm Gladwell is a good writer and a clear writer. He also knows how to entertain. Blink is driven by a series of anecdotes and stories about people using their “adaptive consciousness,” that faculty of the brain that makes intuitive decisions before the conscious brain has even realized it. Gladwell’s first story is about a kouros (an ancient Greek statue of a young boy) purchased by the Getty museum. The museum hired lawyers and experts and scientists to authenticate the statue. They got the green light for the purchase. But another handful of experts not directly involved in the process didn’t feel right about the statue. They came to a number of snap conclusions just by glancing at it that told them something was amiss. As Gladwell puts it, “In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at Getty was able to understand after four months. Blink is about those first two seconds.”

The stories keep coming. Stories about a marriage expert who can interpret just a few facial expressions during a married couple’s fight and deduce whether or not they will be together in fifteen years. Stories about our worst President, Warren Harding, who looked and sounded so much like a President that first impressions alone carried him to the White House, where he drank and whored around for a couple of years and then died. There are stories about the snap decisions of cops who ended up murdering an innocent man, Amadou Diallo. These stories are inherently interesting and dramatic. Some of them are gripping.

The stories aren’t the problem. The sliminess and outright incoherence comes out when Gladwell starts telling us about what these stories are supposed to mean. He is not shy about his claims. These are not just amusing stories about the complicated and sometimes contradictory ways that human beings make decisions. Gladwell positions himself as more than an observer and as something closer to a life coach or a guru. He is going to teach people how to harness and make use of the power, the magic, of unconscious thinking. He is going to make things that were difficult and well nigh unfathomable a lot easier. And if people listen to him Gladwell predicts that it “would change the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted, and on and on. And if we were to combine all those little changes, we would end up with a different and better world.” How nice, how very nice.

The oddest thing about Blink, though, is the disconnect between these transformational claims and the actual arguments to be found inside. Throughout the book, Gladwell sorts his stories and anecdotes into two broad categories. On the one side are the stories about the so-called experts being shown up by the simple power of thinking without thinking. In these cases, we learn about the magical powers we all harbor within ourselves. On the other side, are stories about first impressions that have, in fact, led people astray. In these cases, we learn how to fine-tune and perfect our blinking skills in order not to get it wrong.

The problem, of course, which Gladwell never sufficiently addresses, is that it is extremely difficult to know beforehand whether, in this or that instance, a person’s power of thinking without thinking is working as a strength or a weakness. Here’s an example of the ridiculousness of it all. At one point, Gladwell discusses a musician called Kenna. Kenna grew up in the US as the son of Ethiopian immigrants. His music is hard to categorize. But it has one hell of an impact on all the people who know something about music. Gladwell is very much taken with Kenna. He writes, “people who truly know music (the kind of people who run record labels, go to clubs, and know the business well) love Kenna. They hear one of his songs and in the blink of an eye, they think, Wow!” But for all the high-powered support, Kenna’s albums have so far been a disappointment in terms of sales. Gladwell draws the conclusion that Kenna has suffered from being taken out of context in the market research that goes on in the modern music business. People listen to a short clip of his music without getting the full picture. Gladwell writes,

The people at the Roxy and the No Doubt concert saw him in the flesh. Craig Kallman had Kenna sing for him, right there in his office. Fred Durst heard Kenna through the prism of one of his trusted colleagues’ excitement. The viewers of MTV who requested Kenna over and over had seen his video. Judging Kenna without that additional information is like making people choose between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test.

Later in the book, Gladwell brings in another example from music, this time of the classical variety. A long-time problem in classical music has been the gender disparity. Women simply weren’t getting very many jobs in orchestras. Eventually, someone at the Munich Philharmonic came up with an ingenious solution. People auditioning for the job did so behind a screen. Voila! Women started getting the jobs at far higher rates. Gladwell quotes Julie Landsman from the Metropolitan Opera, “I’ve been in auditions with without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don’t affect your judgment. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.” Gladwell notes of all this that, “When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.”

But then, why didn’t the people in the market research surveys see Kenna for who he truly was? None of the music industry experts were claiming that Kenna is making music for the select few, they were claiming that Kenna has what it takes to be a hit maker. Sure, his music might straddle a few categories but there are plenty of stars and hit makers in the history of popular music who’ve done the same. The whole goddamn point of making pop music is that people listen to the song on the radio or wherever and like it. People listen to Kenna’s music and some like it, but a lot more simply don’t care for it. Why isn’t the market research situation a perfect Blink moment for judging Pop goodness? For some reason, in the case of Kenna, Gladwell thinks that we need more information, more time, a more rounded experience. But with the classical musicians you create the Blink moment by taking information away. Of course, even in the classical music example Gladwell never suggests that the judges are making their decisions in the first two seconds. In fact, they are listening to a whole piece, they’ve simply been prevented from making certain presuppositions by the screen. Really, I’m not at all sure why Gladwell calls this a “perfect Blink moment.” It partially contradicts everything he is trying to say about the first two seconds and it is in complete contrast to the Kenna example, which is itself an utterly muddled attempt to apply the Blink lessons to a real world scenario.

Every story in the book falls apart in these ways when you break them down and ignore all of Gladwell’s bells and whistles. They simply do not go where he is trying to make them go.

Really, Gladwell is simply amazed and flabbergasted by how we manage to make judgments at all. There is no shame in this. Human judgment is a fantastical thing. But for Christ’s sake Malcolm, we’ve all known that for a very long time. In an act of hubris, chutzpah, complete stupidity, or a combination of all three, Gladwell comes out and admits as much in the Afterword to the book. I quote the paragraph in its entirety.

What was that magical thing [the ability to make the right decision]? It’s the same thing that Evelyn Harrison and Tom Hoving had when they looked at the kouros, and that Vic Braden had when he watched someone serving and knew if the ball was going to go out. It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It’s judgment. And what Blink is—what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to—is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.

What? Judgment is an ability to apply a lifetime of learning and watching and doing to particular instances? That’s the great insight of Blink? That’s what all the portentous talk and self-aggrandizing tone was all about? That’s what the guru wants to tell us? The thing that every single fucking human being on planet earth over the age of twelve has already figured out?

The truly maddening aspect to all this hooey is that Gladwell is not that far away from a respectable point. There is a long tradition in Western thought (and other ‘thoughts’ besides) of puncturing the claims of human knowledge and reminding us that most of what we know comes down to a matter of know-how and the ‘knack’.

One of my favorite figures in the history of marginal thinkers is the ancient Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus. Sextus was fed up with the lofty claims of the Platonists and the Aristotelians and wanted to show that human knowledge was a more pedestrian thing. He subjected every philosophical claim to a series of withering cross examinations that inevitably exposed those claims to charges of circularity and begging of the question. It was good stuff. Let us cure ourselves, he suggested, of the will to absolute and objective knowledge and let us admit that we do know some things and that we’re not always so sure exactly how we know them. He was aiming for ataraxia, or an unpurturbedness of mind. His favorite story was of the painter Apelles, who, striving too hard to figure out how to paint the foam coming from a horse’s mouth, threw his painting implement in disgust and, lo and behold, it dashed against the wall in a perfect representation of the foam. The point being, when we go outside of ourselves we forget how to do the very things we have always known how to do all along. This is Gladwell’s point as well. Simply living in the world gives us skills, a set of practical tools by which to continue living in the world. Wittgenstein was wont to make the same observation. He says famously that “judgment comes first.” In short, we already know what we’re doing before we do it and the giving of reasons tends to be an a posteriori affair.

That’s the real and only insight (if we can call it that) to Gladwell’s flimsy book. As human beings we do acquire a capacity to deal with the world and we often tend to make the right decisions without fully knowing why. Experience gets embedded. We act. A kind of learned instinct takes over. In our hubris, we try to codify this ability into doctrines and methodologies and systems of thought. Sometimes there is reason to do so. But in the end we shouldn’t pretend that our vast acquisition of data and knowledge has allowed us to jump outside of ourselves. We don’t have a God’s eye view of things. We’re in the mix, in medias res, and the fact that we even manage to survive from day to day is at least weak proof that we know one or two things about the world.

But for the skeptics and empiricists and nominalists and pragmatists, this realization has a melancholy side as well. Not knowing exactly how we know things is part and parcel, so far, of the essence of the human experience. Only a charlatan pretends that there is magic in it. In fact, the human condition, marvelous as it is, is also a depressing nightmare. The crap-shoot of judgment has us perpetually hanging on the edge of an abyss.

Which brings us back to Gladwell the huckster. Gladwell dresses up all of his “realizations” in fancy clothes and too much make-up. He gives himself powers that he doesn’t have. He pretends to have sorted things out that he hasn’t sorted out. He imagines a possible control, and pretends that he has achieved that control. All the while telling people, whispering into their ears, precisely the kinds of things they would like to believe. And then (it must, I’m sorry, be said) he goes on wildly lucrative corporate speaking engagements spinning out the same titillating stories combined with his shoddy conclusions. I even kind of hate, I must confess, the way he looks. His hair all scruffed up just so. His cute little suits. It makes the skin crawl.

***

Frustratingly, Gladwell ends the book with a reasonable and humane suggestion. It even managed to numb my hate for a short time. He suggests, in reference to the blind auditions that have created gender equality in the classical music world, that the justice system might benefit from the same approach. He asks, “What if we put screens in the courtrooms? … we know that what we see—particularly when it is the color of someone’s skin, or gender, or age—does not always aid understanding.” I don’t think gender or age really has much to do with perverting justice in the American judicial system. But color, unfortunately, still does. Reducing the effect of racial bias would go a long way to balancing the scales. And Gladwell’s suggestion for doing so is simple, practical, and damn well might be effective. But it has nothing to do with what he’s been talking about for the previous 250 pages of the book. His judicial solution isn’t about trusting our snap judgments, but about trying to mute them. It isn’t about training ourselves to be clever about detecting the ‘real criminal’ in less than two seconds. Quite the opposite. Certainly he has left room in the book for the negative lesson, for the sense that we have to know when it makes sense to put the brakes on our adaptive consciousness. But that too is disingenuous. Blink is supposed to be about the power of the snap judgment. It is supposed to be about the wonderful things that happen when we think without thinking. And in the end, he tells us, if you want a little justice, best to give yourself some time to really think it through. The nicest thing that can be said about Malcolm Gladwell is that he doesn’t even really believe his own mental garbage. If he is salvageable as a human being, it might be for the simple reason that he’s a bad fraud.

Monday Poem

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Tabula Rasas
Jim CullenyImage_tabularasa_2

In our town
new mothers spring up like weeds.
They roll fold-up strollers
along Bridge Street or
tote sleeping babes that loll like
tot marsupials in sacks
strapped across breasts:
gene parachutes
trussed over shoulders
and buckled in back.

A moment ago
these moms were tot
marsupials too.

Now, out of nowhere–
ignorant as saints or
immune from despair, or both–
they come toting or pushing
mute futures as if headlines
had no place in their dreams;
as if their children
were joyful counterweights
to the evening news,
brimming with hope as tabula rasas,
promising as a new day.

///

SAFFRON MOTHER, Part III

    786pxadriaen_van_utrecht_001

Elatia Harris

This is the third in an open-ended series of articles about saffron. Part I highlights the culture that produced the renowned saffron-gathering murals dating to the 17th century, B.C.E., on the Aegean island of Santorini. Part II is an examination of saffron in classical mythology, with particular regard to the representation of female Olympian deities.

Today, I’ll be the Saffron Mother. I’ll tell you perilously close to everything you ever wanted to know about sourcing saffron — there’s lots to be wary of — and cooking with it to fantastic effect. If you find you need to know more about saffron than I’ve written here, more even than you can learn from the research materials cited at the end of the post, then you are indeed special.

The image under the title, Still Life, painted by Adriaen van Utrecht in 1644 and now in the Rijksmuseum, depicts not a single thread of saffron unless, as is distinctly possible, saffron is an ingredient in the luxurious game pie spilling its contents onto a tray just below and to the right of the parrot. The brighter tones of the painting, however — from the pale yellow of the tulips to the intense yellow of the lemons to the gold-red of the peaches to the striking orange-red of the outsize boiled lobster — sumptuously evoke the saffron palette. Evoke but do not approach it. If you think a boiled lobster is a vivid orange-red, then you have not made a saffron infusion in a glass pot, and sat spellbound as light passed through it before taking it unto yourself.

Making a Saffron Infusion

An infusion is exactly the place to start a personal investigation of saffron. After all, you might not like the stuff, and if that’s how you are, well…better to know it before you add it to food. A word to the wise — never, never introduce saffron threads into your mouth as you might do a cardamom pod. Oh, no. You won’t know it from crushed Ibuprofen if you take it in that way.

Saffron_inCrocus_3

The red-orange tangle in the photo above left shows dried saffron threads many times magnified, but an actual-size photo would fail to instruct.  Above right is the only flower in the world that saffron comes from, the Crocus sativus L., or saffron crocus. Those shriveled yellow things are its stamens, and no one eats them or uses them for dye, because they release neither flavor nor color, newsy looking though they may be. Those satiny red things are its lady parts, called stigmas. It is this, dried, that you will infuse and taste.

To prepare an infusion, take a pinch of dried saffron threads and fling them into a clear glass vessel that will withstand boiling water. A glass teapot is ideal, especially one with an infuser chamber. Failing that, a Pyrex bowl and a strainer will work — just don’t miss out by infusing in porcelain or some otherwise opaque container. Place your vessel in front of a window during daylight. Pour into it about 8 ounces of boiling water.

Immediately, the water will start to color an opulent yellow, deepening over the next few minutes to a clear thrilling orange. About 50,000 years ago, painters in Iraq applied this color to animals on the walls of a cave.  Much later, in the early Bronze Age, it was daubed onto the sacred stones of hilltop shrines throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  This color, made from this substance, has a long, long history of delighting human beings, and you are about to drink of it.

But not just yet. Let the saffron threads continue to infuse for about 20 minutes; while remaining clear, the liquid will gradually intensify in color. Try to sit at your window and look on as this happens — it’s mood-elevating to do so, deeply enlivening, and will contribute to your anticipatory pleasure. More than all that, you will be keeping faith with those distant humans who first teased out the difference between survival and desire, never a wrong thing to do.

Saffbbcgoodfood The photo at left, courtesy of the BBC, shows an infusion after several minutes. But, honestly, the camera cannot capture it. To heat the infusion back up, pour in about another 8 ounces of boiling water, and strain the liquid into a glass cup — or a jelly jar. While this liquid is cooling to the temperature you think tea should be drunk at, re-infuse the strained threads in a few tablespoons of boiling water, and conserve this for later, when you will cook with it.

Okay, it’s time. The steaming brilliant liquid in the cup before you will have a gorgeous aroma. It is bitter, it is creamy, it is musky, it is luxurious. People have said saffron smells of so many things: wild honey, fresh earth and new-mown hay. You cannot get near another scent that so perfectly expresses the truth of flowers, the fury beneath the sweetness, nor one that speaks so frankly of civilization’s refinements.

If you have eaten the food of the Punjab, or Persian cuisine, or Sephardic cooking, or some of the classical dishes of the northern Mediterranean, or even just bitten into a characteristic yellow bun in Cornwall, then you have tasted saffron — but not like this, in isolation.  And you need to taste it like this, to discern how much saffron is right for you in the dishes you will use it to flavor. Too much can taste overwhelming or even medicinal, too little is kind of pointless.

So, take a sip. It’s an epiphanial taste, no?  It tastes like it smells, and like what it is — the female parts of an autumn-blooming flower coveted since Prehistory for its frighteningly beautiful stain and magically salubrious properties. Xerxes knew this taste, and Alexander and Aurangzeb. Nowhere on earth is it disregarded.  And now you too have had it.

What If…?

I know — what if you don’t like it?  And don’t wish to finish drinking the infusion or use the rest in cooking?  All is not lost. It may just be that your palate is extremely sensitive to anything that tastes at all bitter.  If you don’t like arugala, artichokes, pomegranates, tamarind, wild asparagus, green tea, tobiko, rosewater, cilantro, Seville oranges, dark chocolate or fresh chilis, then the odds are very great you will not like saffron and should not put yourself out to try it, even though saffron tastes like none of those things, exactly. But if you’ve made the infusion anyhow, and are nonplussed, then stir in some sugar or honey.  Still no go?  Then call almost any good cook living nearby, and make their day. Just say you have about 16 ounces of slightly sweetened bright orange saffron water, with a big pinch of semi-infused threads on the side. They’ll be right over. 

If on the other hand you are transported by the infusion, whimpering with lust to wrap your lip around still more saffron, then finding out how to choose and use it is the route to enlightened consumption. We should look more closely at what saffron is and is not, who produces it and how it is graded, the better to fend off all those vendors ready, in their avarice, to sell us what is not quite saffron.

Punishable by Death

Yellowenvyottodix In the Middle Ages in Germany, the crime of adulterating saffron for sale was punishable by death. We know the names of two Nuremberg merchants whose lives ended horribly for that reason. Today, the penalties for the crime are not truly severe, while the motive remains sky-high.  Saffron fraud is lucrative, and widespread. In The Seven Deadly Sins (detail left), painted in 1933, the German expressionist Otto Dix transposes the saffron palette into a sickly key for a political allegory that would have been in large part readable by those nefarious German merchants seven centuries earlier. Avarice is the staring hooded figure at the lower left, Envy with its Hitler mustache rides on her back, and Sloth is the skeleton. If, to plump out their profits several years ago, a few hitherto trustworthy olive oil exporters in Italy adulterated their product with tree nut oil, thus posing fantastic risks to the legions of mainly US schoolchildren who go into anaphylaxis if they ingest tree nuts, then what’s a little saffron fraud? It merely detracts from the splendor of certain rarefied experiences at table, after all — it doesn’t really hurt anybody. It can’t be a deadly sin.

Millennia before saffron was a point of gastronomy, however, it was two conceivably more important things that people were willing to pay a bundle for — a dye for the garments of noble women, garments whose color announced to the world the wearer’s station in it, and a powerful medicine for numerous ailments, kidney disease, difficult labor and melancholy among them. Avarice and saffron are linked, as intimately linked as saffron and luxury, saffron and nobility and even divinity.

It Could Happen to You — and It Probably Has

Cynically benefiting from the general confusion about what saffron is, what its signature taste is, and whatTumeric its true color mustTumeric be, restaurant chefs of a certain type, and even some home cooks, are inclined to adulterate their saffron dishes with turmeric, or simply to substitute turmeric for saffron, a purer deception. Turmeric is a marvelously tasty, health-giving spice which makes a brilliant yellow stain. While it is foundational to many cuisines, it is not saffron. In the spice market stall photo to the right, you can see truth in advertising about turmeric, if also poor spelling. In case that’s the color of the last paella you had in a redoubtable Mediterranean joint, the chef did not use saffron.

Sweet_paprika_2 Paprika, left, the chili-related powder disappointingly sprinkled on the crest of twice-baked potatoes and such, is another popular saffron adulterant, albeit one that backfires on the culpable cook, for saffron and paprika are mutually canceling flavors. This won’t stop anyone hoping to deceive through color alone, however — paprika is a nice red food colorant, both earthy and bright. Delicious, too, as you know if you’ve troubled to make a real Hungarian goulash. But saffron and goulash are two words that don’t belong in the same sentence, and one mustn’t punch up a paella this way.

Dried safflower petals, right, are with disarming frankness called “false saffron,” and “the poor man’s saffron.Safflower” Despite their relation to safflower oil, they are not actually a food substance but a dye. In the American South, where I was born and raised, safflower petals find their way into love charm bags, notably for gay men. Also into potpourri. If you are good at blending color with your eyes, you can imagine that a blend of turmeric, paprika and powdered safflower petals would make a highly attractive orange-red that would bleed color on contact with moisture. Alas, others less well-intentioned than you can imagine it quite easily too. For this reason alone — and there are other good ones — it’s prudent to stay mostly away from powdered saffron.

Saffron-on-Saffron Crime — If You Can’t Prevent It, Avoid It

Certain saffron producers have found ways to make saffron threads go further not by adulterating them but by packaging them to masquerade — literally to masquerade — as more valuable and potent parts of themselves.

Bigcrocus_3  Saffgrades_3  Lacha

 
To see how this could — and does — happen, it’s worthwhile to return to the saffron crocus for a closer look at its parts. The graphic in the center above, from the Trade & Environment Database (TED) at American University, schematizes the stalk, called a style, connecting the stigma, the topmost very red part, to the rest of the flower. At its base, the style is white, becoming yellow, then orange, then red, then very red at the stigma. The photo at right, also from TED, shows the actual length of the style. As a cook, you’re interested only in the stigma. But middling saffron — whatever one has been asked to pay for it — may contain much of the rest of the style.  Sometimes, you can see it at a glance, as in the pretty photo, below left, from the Saffron USA site, a gateway to suppliers of Spanish saffron. The ratio of dark red to golden-orange and even pale yellow threads means this is not tip-top quality saffron, as attractive to the eye as the color variations are.

Spanish_saffron_treads Saffron that looks like this, or that has still more yellow threads than this, demonstrates that a product that is pure is not the same thing as one that is potent. If the style is only two inches long, and the dark red half-inch is the business end, then the remaining golden-yellow-orange inch and a half acts mainly to bring up the weight of the product. So while you may have paid less than for stigma-only saffron, you’ve also bought a lot of filler, because the paler three-quarters of the style tastes of nothing, and releases no color.

There’s an invisible and far more villainous condition to be wary of, however.  Some saffron producers — who shall be nameless — have been known to spray the entire style with an emulsion made from the stigma.  I learned of this outrage from my friend, Juan J. San Mames, owner of Saffron, Vanilla Imports in San Francisco, where I lived for many years. He tells me that some of his competitors are using this method of deriving “product x 300%,” and the eye alone cannot detect it.

So, current techniques of saffron fraud are outstripping the ability of even the finest eye to spot them. What does one do? One refuses to buy saffron that lacks the needed science-based criteria in labeling, that lacks a money-back guarantee if it’s not what the vendor says it is. That is, one refuses to buy most saffron.

The Provenance of the Right Stuff

Below left, in the photo by Steve McCurry, is a crocus field in the province of Khorasan in northeastern Iran, where about 55,000 families work in the saffron industry. To the right is a Reuters photo of saffron-gathering in Kashmir. Saffron culture is skilled, intensive labor, driven by crushing deadlines, for the harvest can occur only during a few weeks in the late autumn. The style need to be rapidly separated by hand from the flowers, themselves hand-picked at dawn in a manner that doesn’t disturb their precious cargo. Cropping the stigma from the style is also a job for hands only — sometimes very small hands.  Drying, or curing, happens in special sheds, but it has to start when the style is fresh-plucked from the flower.  There’s not a minute to lose.

Saffronfieldkhorasan     610x

Picture a football field planted entirely with saffron crocuses — that’s about 75,000 flowers, yielding only a pound of saffron. The amount you’ve probably seen in a little glass phial in the international section of the grocery store is one to two grams, with slightly over 28 grams to the ounce.  Iran, where saffron culture goes back 3,000 years, is by far the world’s largest saffron producer. Kashmir produces much less than Iran, but is a more significant producer than any other country. Depending on whose expertise you value most, the wild saffron crocus, Crocus cartwrightianus L., originated either in Western Asia or on the Aegean isle of Crete, but the cultivar, Crocus sativus L., by now belongs as much to Ayurveda and the Mughals as to the Persian Empire and Aegean civilization.

People like those you see in the photos, whole families from children around 10 to grandparents, need to be decently paid for their part in the saffron industry, and that is beginning to happen. That consideration — among others such as hotter, drier summers leading to smaller harvests — must be factored into the decidedly rising price.

For many reasons, I buy only saffron from Iran and Kashmir.  That’s what I recommend you do.  But let’s look briefly at other choices.

The storied Spanish saffron industry is in a precarious state at present, as reflected by the most recent price per unit, a multiple of its former self, and in any case, shippers of Spanish saffron seem to me to be fonder of marketing terms than of science. “Mancha,” the classic descriptor, refers not to a grade or category of Spanish saffron, but to an area where it was traditionally grown.  And even so, it tends to be a real misnomer.  Interestingly, compared to Iran, Spain has all these years been a smallish producer of saffron, but a big shipper — of Iranian saffron, which the law has allowed the Spanish to import, package and market around the world as their own.  A drought last year in Iran is behind the price jump in “Spanish” saffron. Greek saffron is marvelous, but it’s no bargain, and one is forced to buy it in too small quantities when one can find it at all. In many places across the world, there is “boutique saffron,” reflecting minuscule local industry.  I would buy saffron on Santorini, say, from a farmer who grew and processed it right there. 

But I’m here, not there. So I stick with superb product that has made it over all the quality hurdles, and that I can purchase in large enough quantities — by the ounce, a little over 28 grams — to benefit from economy of scale.

Zeroing in on Product

I have professional reasons for buying so much saffron, but if I didn’t, I would buy it by the ounce anyway, asking friends who cook seriously — or just a few voluptuaries — to go in with me on the purchase. Everybody would come out far, far ahead, and it’s the smart thing to do.

Below are two photos from the sites of my favorite — my only — suppliers.

Best_saffron   Kashmir_saffron_large

Above left is saffron from Iran, sold by my afore-mentioned friend, Juan J. San Mames of Saffron, Vanilla Imports in San Francisco, who has been a direct importer for 30 years. (His vanilla can’t be beat either, but that’s another story.Saffron_look_2) The fully saturated uniform deep red-orange color is one of the visual benchmarks of top quality Persian saffron, which must be graded “Sargol” (the absolute best) or “Pushali” (the top tier Pushali is very, very close.) Above right is Kashmiri saffron from Baby Brand Saffron, a company in India that dates to the 1840’s. The darker red with its blue overtones — almost a blood orange color — and the faint glossiness of the threads are typical of the best Kashmiri saffron. Proponents of Persian saffron tend not to be the same people who worship saffron from Kashmir, and that’s an argument I don’t wish to take sides in, for it is as needless as it is ferocious.

What, then, is the difference between them, that they have such partisans? Price is one difference, with Kashmiri saffron about 70% more expensive than Persian. Aroma is another.  If all you wanted was to sniff at an open 1-ounce tin of saffron — sometimes, that’s all I want — Kashmiri saffron would have considerably more depth and complexity. It’s a knockout. Literal potency is a matter for science to decide, for it can be measured — there’s more about those controls below. But to cook with, do I think one is better than the other? No. If I did, I’d buy that one, and not both. While you can hear the difference between a Stradivarius and a Guarneri del Gesu, and the sound of one instrument might speak to you more, you probably do not believe that one wipes the floor with the other. So it is with the best of the best of Persian and Kashmiri saffron.

A story: recently, I and a group I meet with celebrated the birthday of one of our number with a blind tasting of saffron. We infused Persian saffron from Mr. San Mames as well as Baby Brand Kashmiri saffron, and ultimately murmured an opinion. My friend Lakshmi — writer, statistician and all around terrific cook — who grew up in Bangalore, and whose birthday it was, had the last word. “This,” she said of the Persian saffron, without being told which was which, “is Mediterranean high culture. Whereas this” — the saffron from Kashmir — “is Asia.”  That observation is my guide in choosing which one to use when I cook.

Alice Waters once remarked something to the effect that cooking was shopping. She was talking about salad greens, not saffron — but there you have it.

Terms, Touch and Smell

“Sargol” saffron denotes that the stigma has been cut from the style prior to drying. You cannot find any yellow or gold threads in Sargol saffron, and will find almost none in the best Pushali. Importantly, the cutting accelerates drying, because most of the moisture in a saffron thread is concentrated in the style. Moisture not only brings the weight up, but contributes to spoilage.

Thus, Persian saffron that is not Sargol or the best Pushali may become musty, and feel spongy. Familiarity with the literature about saffron will acquaint you with some adjectives that don’t actually belong there. “Musty” as a term of approval is one such, but it’s possible certain writers, sniffing saffron that has not kept well, pick up on the musty aspect as connoting mystery, the quality of being ancient, a precious thing in a chamber long-sealed. There is, too, an earthy note in saffron which some noses cannot tell from damp.

Touch is a great help in evaluating saffron. When you touch Sargol saffron it it is crinkly and dry, and you can easily crumble the threads between your fingers.  In a mortar and pestle, it grinds to a powder very fast. It will keep for several years at room temperature in an airtight, lightproof container.

If we were talking about European saffron, the term to look for would be “coupe” — or, cut. It’s the same thing as Sargol — stigma only, cut prior to drying. If you’re traveling in Sicily or in the South of France or in Greece near Macedonia, you might find some very local saffron, and it would be sad not to buy it — as sad as failing to buy apples in Vermont — if it were dry and smelled right and crumbled easily. Not every honest small farmer can send his stuff to the lab for photospectrometry.

Regarding Kashmiri saffron, the term corresponding to Sargol and Coupe is “Mogra,” with “Lacha” comparing to Pushali, although Pushali, ranging from excellent to middling, is a more varied category than Lacha. Mogra is as dry as Sargol, with a more satiny feel, as you might expect from its faint natural gloss. But opportunities for being a connoisseur of Kashmiri saffron are indeed scant. There’s a long line ahead of you for the product, as the greater part goes first to the Subcontinent, Kashmir having supplied India with top quality saffron since the time of the Mughals.

Saffron and Hard Science

Depending on where the rubber meets the road for you, scientific controls on how good your saffron really is will be either crucial or not so interesting. To me, they’re fascinating, for in saffron you have a substance wherein flavor, color and aroma break down to three chemical compounds whose potency can be tested for. The Chemistry section of the Wikipedia main saffron article is very well done — according to me and to people who would know better than I if it were — and I hope you’ll consult it to go a little deeper. 

For people mainly interested to cook with saffron, I will greatly simplify the riotous activity beneath the features one looks for.  Aroma, flavor and color come from three compounds in saffron — safranal, picocrocin, and crocin, respectively. For the highest category  saffron — the Sargol, Mogra, Coupe, and the best Pushali — the minimum value of safranal is 20, and of picocrocin 70.  Crocin is measured in “coloring units,” the minimum being 200 for the highest category saffron. There are also minimum allowable percentages for foreign matter, floral waste, moisture and volatile material — all these should be very, very low in the saffron you buy.

These values must be established by third-party testing in an ISO-certified photospectrometry lab, using criteria written by the ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, in Basel, Switzerland. Reading a saffron lab report will tell you exactly what you’ve got your hands on, and I only know one vendor who sends you the lab report for the saffron lot your order came from. This is Mr. San Mames of Saffron, Vanilla Imports. Looking at the report on his most recent shipment of Pushali saffron, you will see that its safranal value is 35.14 (minimum for highest category is 20), its picocrocin value is 86.41 (minimum is 70), and its coloring units 238.14 (minimum is 200.) So the information from him is unusually complete, and highly confidence inspiring.  He believes — and I concur with him — that this type of information is what you need to make an informed purchase of the world’s most expensive spice.

Baby Brand Saffron, too, is ISO-certified, with their number on every container, although they do not release a full lab report. Both these vendors give you far more information than any others I know — not to mention a guarantee.

Ready to Cook

The most important thing to know — how to make an infusion — is already in your repertory.

I might be perfectly happy never again to do anything with saffron threads but infuse them and drink the liquid as a tisane. If this is what you want to do too, just think one pinch for every four to six servings. Depending on who’s pinching, a pinch is usually thought of as somewhere between half a gram and a gram. If you want to add sugar, it’s just delightful.  Rosewater too. You can turn this into a cold drink by letting it achieve room temperature, pouring it over ice, adding a lime wedge and a sprig of mint. You will look far before you’ll find a friend who won’t be happy to be offered such a drink. If you’re fond of your own company, make these things for yourself occasionally, too.

Saffron infuses not only in water, but in citrus juice, vegetable, chicken or fish stock, and in alcohol. It all depends on your recipe, but remember it’s water-soluble, so it won’t dissolve in oil. The least effective possible way to use saffron is just to crumble it on top of something you’re cooking, or to add it dry at the last minute. To make your saffron go as far as it can, you want always to start activating the compounds at least half an hour ahead of when you actually cook.  Cooking with an eye to its maximum potency will get you the best results for the least outlay.

If you’re making rice, you will want to infuse the volume of liquid the recipe calls for, but adding saffron to a sauce can be as simple as infusing a small quantity of liquid — 2 tablespoons, perhaps — and adding it in without worrying the tiny amount of liquid will change the chemistry of performing the recipe.

If you would rather not see saffron threads in your dish, you can pulverize them yourself with a mortar and pestle, or just with the back of a spoon, before infusing. Very occasionally, you will see a recipe where powdered saffron is really best — you’re better off if you powder your own.

Even as an enthusiast, I’d never claim a pinch of saffron improves just about any dish. It should be used judiciously, in recipes that are otherwise simple enough to showcase it. It’s a highly complex flavor, and it’s a great pleasure to think about it as you take it in. That said, there are flavor synergies you may want to investigate, discussed below.

Despite its profligate beauty, store saffron away from light.  If it’s visible to you in a glass jar on the kitchen shelf, it’s not going to last as long — but that’s true of any spice.

How_pilau

Saffron and Rice

Cooking with saffron begins — and arguably ends — with learning how to add it to a rice pilaf. The aroma of basmati rice and saffron cooking together is never to be forgotten, and if you made it your signature dish, you could with impunity leave many other cooking lessons unlearned.

You cannot imagine the difficulty of finding photography that does justice to saffron rice. That shows not only the tint a cook needs to look for when she prepares rice with saffron, but that suggests its deep dimensionality, its almost tear-bringing allure. I found the beautiful shot above on the Golden Rice site — not where I would have expected it, since golden rice, thanks to the extra vitamin A in it, is not white but pale, pale gold. (I hope you’ll take the time to read about it, since it’s a route to more complete nutrition for the half of the world for whom rice is the major source of caloric intake.) I would not have imagined that saffron on a pale gold ground could be so vibrant, but this is the most accurate photo of what saffron rice should look like that I’ve ever seen.

The technique for making a rice pilaf in the style of Iran or Central/South Asia is different from what you’d do to produce a risotto, and the rice is different, too. A risotto alla milanese, the saffron rice of northern Italy, is better demonstrated than written about.  For that, you need plump, long grain rice from the Po Valley — look for Arborio. If you simply use whatever white rice you have, you could produce a saffron rice gruel, and that would be keenly disappointing. If you’re going for the Iranian/Asian rice pilaf model, take care to use real basmati rice.  Delving into theory of Persian cooking, I learned that every grain of rice should be separate from every other in a rice dish.  In the photo above, you can count every grain with your eyes — that’s as it should be.

When cooking with basmati rice, remember to rinse it first — just put the measure you intend to cook in a sieve, and run water through it for a few seconds, swishing it with your finger. This rinses off a crucial amount of surface starch. To get a rice pilaf that looks like the one in the photo, I’ve adapted a Goldenrice.org recipe. Executing this recipe with precision and care will give you a heavenly result.  If you’re cooking it for friends, please do it at the last minute rather than ahead — the aroma is too soul-satisfying to deny them.

SAFFRON RICE WITH WHOLE SPICES

Heat 2.5 cups of a rich chicken stock or vegetable stock to a simmer, and infuse in it a big pinch of saffron threads. Set it aside for at least half an hour, or even better, start a day ahead with this element of the recipe.

Chop a white onion, and in a heavy-bottomed, lidded saucepan, sautee the onion over medium heat in a splash of canola or coconut oil, until translucent, golden and slightly browned — about 5 minutes. Stir in 1 clove of garlic, smashed and minced, half a cinnamon stick, 6 green cardamom pods and a bay leaf, and cook over medium heat for 2 more minutes.

Add in a heaping cup of rinsed basmati rice, and cook for 2 more minutes, stirring to evenly distribute the contents of your pan. Pour in the saffron-infused stock, add in a scant handful of sultanas or zante currants, and bring to a boil, stirring. Then, lower the heat and cover tightly, cooking gently for about 15 minutes until the liquid is absorbed. Meanwhile, toast a handful of cashews or almonds until lightly brown, and scatter these over the rice before serving.  Serve immediately!   Serves 4.

Paella2    Fishbouillabaisse2

Saffron and Fish

Above are photos of paella, left, and bouillabaisse, right, from Beatrice Peltre, a food writer and photographer par excellence who has kindly allowed me to raid her fascinating blog, La Tartine Gourmande, for photography showing the right intensity of saffron color in these two legendary Mediterranean dishes.

The affinity of saffron for fish is hardly a well kept secret. Even so, there is little agreement about how much saffron to use in these particular classics.  I say, use your judgment, starting with about a gram — a big pinch — if you’re cooking paella for 4 to 6, half a gram for bouillabaisse.  A paella involves chicken and sausage as well as shellfish — mussels usually, and often shrimp — with most of the saffron flavor concentrated in the rice. Bouillabaisse, like paella, started off as a rather humble dish — a fisherman’s stew. Both were originally cooked out of doors over an open fire. In making a bouillabaisse, one wants only enough saffron to give depth to the tomato-white wine-stock color, not to turn the liquid bright orange. In Bea’s bouillabaisse, you can easily see the threads, and they are a pretty touch in preparing all saffron fish dishes that are not haute cuisine. If you make a paella, remember it’s about the saffron. A bouillabaisse is a marriage of classical Mediterranean flavors, saffron only one of them. 

My own recipes for both are rather too elaborate for anyone who is not paid to cook. They involve making lobster stock and passing it through a drum sieve. (You don’t want to know…)  But for a first foray into the world of fish cookery with saffron, I have a recipe that pairs saffron and chard, a venerable combination in Provence, where, having fed the green bits of chard to hogs, farmers in olden times were looking for a way to dress up the stalks, which they themselves liked to eat.

TILAPIA with CHARD and SAFFRON

Rinse and cut into ribbons 1 bunch of chard per person for the number you intend to serve. Smash as many peeled garlic cloves as you have heads of chard. Thinly slice a big toe-size piece of peeled fresh ginger root. In a heavy-bottomed lidded skillet, sautee all this over medium heat with extra-virgin olive oil (X-V OO), adding vegetable stock or water as needed, and bearing in mind you want cooking liquid at the end. It will take about 15 minutes for the chard to become soft enough, with you stirring 5 or 6 times throughout, and otherwise keeping the lid on. 

When it’s done, fish out the garlic cloves (you’re done with them, but leave in the ginger), remove the chard with a slotted spoon to a serving dish, and cover. Pour the liquid left in the cooking pan into a small bowl and set aside.

In a fresh splash of X-V OO in the same skillet, quickly sautee tilapia filets that have been dredged in cornmeal, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper. They’ll only take about 2.5 minutes — 1.25 minutes per side for smallish filets.

Check to see if you can get any more liquid out of the chard — it’s probably released some. If so, add it to your small bowl of chard-cooking liquid. Arrange the tilapia on the bed of chard and cover to keep warm.

Tip the chard-cooking liquid from its bowl back into the skillet, and increase the heat to high. Pour in cream (half a cup to a cup, depending on number of people, use coconut milk if you don’t like dairy), and an infusion made a day ahead of saffron (about a gram) in one half a cup of good orange juice. Leave the threads in. You’ll have a really beautiful color, and you’ll need to cook this liquid down, stirring, till it can lightly coat a spoon. Taste for salt and pepper, and add a couple drops of orange flower water if you like. Spoon this over the tilapia filets, dust with chopped cilantro, and serve.

Saffron and Sweets

300566saffronsugariran2_2As the smashing photo of sugar crystals coated with saffron in a market in Iran suggests, saffron has unstoppable synergy with sweets. Until about 10 years ago, I questioned the validity of any dessert that was not chocolate, and if you do too, then saffron could be your true alternative. It marries beautifully with other flavorings used in sweets, such as cardamom, rosewater, fresh lime juice, almonds, ginger and cinnamon.

Combining some of these with saffron will tilt your desserts in a Middle Eastern to Central Asian direction — and that’s a good thing if you feel stuck in the European canon. If you want to punch up that European repertory, however, adding saffron to a souffle au Grand Marnier is a revelation. Likewise to a plain vanilla custard or to a lemon or orange mousse. The amount of liquid for an infusion — a tablespoon or so — will not throw off the chemistry of such recipes.

Baking with saffron is a tradition adored by the Swedish and the Germans, especially at Christmastime, and you’ll find lots of saffron in Cornish and Dutch baked goods. I’m not much of a baker, but I did create a saffron shortbread cookie made with cornmeal that I’m very proud of, that I would probably bake even if no one wanted to eat it — the aroma produced by baking with saffron could help you sell your house.

I’m currently developing a recipe for a saffron-lavender panna cotta — it’s almost up there, but not quite. Also, I’m reviving a plan of last summer, to create a sorbet of saffron and white tropical honey from Hawaii, which I intend to garnish with some Sicilian candied rose petals I know about. This week, for someone daring, I’m working up a saffron semifreddo, which I’ll drizzle with a hot sauce made of Valrhona chocolate melted in chai. Yes, it will be too much — but sometimes that’s the point.

Using saffron in ordinary desserts can be a newsy thing to do, too, and you won’t need to worry about learning an unfamiliar recipe or technique. For instance, a saffron infusion in your favorite rice pudding will dial it up many notches. If you’re bringing dessert to a party, you’ll get almost infinite mileage out of showing up with a tapioca pudding (please use large pearls) flavored with saffron, cardamom and rosewater. One of the very most social capital-enhancing things about using saffron when you cook for friends is that they’ll know you’ve done something lavish for them, but in fact you’ll have spent far less to make the dish in question special than if you’d treated them to a slightly better than usual bottle of wine.

So, what’s a ravishing yet easy saffron dessert?  One that’s summery, and doesn’t ask you to hang over it like a lover all during the prep?  Consider the avocado… In Brazil and Sri Lanka, they think the avocado is a dessert animal. Please try this for yourself!  I have never fed it to anyone who didn’t want a subscription to it after the first bite, appalled as they might have been to contemplate it.

AVOCADO SAFFRON MOUSSE

For a mousse for 8, take 3 ripe avocados, peeled and seeded, and blend them in a processor or blender until smooth.  Add in the juice of 4 fresh, fat limes, in which a big pinch of saffron has been infused for 8 hours or overnight. (Strain it!)  Sift in 1.5 cups (taste to see if this is the right amount for you) of confectioner’s sugar.  Because you are not adding heat, confectioner’s sugar is very important, as any other kind would stay grainy.

Puree everything until very smooth — avocado lumps are infelicitous.  With a rubber scraper, remove this mixture to a large mixing bowl — glass or ceramic only.  Fold in 1.5 cups of stiffly whipped cream, and chill for at least several hours. It will be a beautiful chartreuse color.

Serve very cold, with a few spoonfuls of tropical fruit and berries tossed with lime juice and a little sugar, honey or agave nectar.  Garnish with fresh mint.

Saffron and Dollars

Many, many moons from now, readers happening onto this post and seeing its date, or turning it up through a search, will muse how they wish they’d known to buy saffron way back in the summer of 2008, because it has since become so much more expensive. The price of some things has nowhere to go but up. However, saffron has always, in legend and in history, been valued alongside gold, so modern times are not the problem. I would never blame anyone who, for reasons of principle or finance, just wasn’t interested to experience saffron.  But the people who feel like that are probably not the people reading this post in its entirety. So I’m going to assume a certain level of interest in readers who have come this far, and actually set out the saffron math — with the caveat that the numbers at this writing will not for long be accurate. Also, the prices I’m quoting pertain to saffron threads, not powder.

A quick tour of retailers will be instructive. If you don’t live in a metropolitan area with easy access to stores run by Iranians and Indians, then you may already shop online for spices, and if so you know that Kalustyans.com and Penzeys.com are two of the best spice merchants you can find. Let’s see how fair a deal they’re offering on saffron, understanding that their mission is not to under-price other vendors, only to sell you a very high quality product. As it happens, neither Kalustyan’s nor Penzey’s is selling Iranian saffron at this time, only Kashmiri and Spanish.

So, you can buy 1 gram (a big pinch, the stigma from 190 flowers, enough to cook a dish for 4 to 6) of Kashmiri saffron at Kalustyan’s for $14.99, and 1 gram of Spanish saffron (they don’t say what grade) for $12.99. At Penzey’s you can buy 1 gram of Kashmiri saffron for $15.29, 1 gram of Spanish coupe for $10.89. Shoppers feeling more flush, but in fact getting a far better buy, can purchase 1 ounce (28.35 grams) of Spanish coupe from Penzey’s for $169.99, and 15 grams of Kashmiri saffron at Kalustyan’s for $89.99.

Now, here’s the better way. At Saffron, Vanilla Imports (www.saffron.com), you can buy 5 grams of high quality Iranian saffron for $17.95 — enough for five saffron dishes serving four to six people each. Scaling up, you can buy half an ounce — faintly over 14 grams — of high quality Iranian saffron for $38.95, and 1 ounce (28.35 grams) of same for $72.95. To put the priciest purchase in perspective, you could make 28 dinner parties for four to six people really special by spending $72.95. If you did have 28 dinner parties for four to six, that’s between 112 and 168 servings of something you’ve rendered astonishing for between 43 and 65 cents more per serving than you would have spent anyway. I think this is actually pretty good, and it would still be pretty good if you used twice the amount of saffron we’ve been talking about.  You can see why I like shopping at Saffron, Vanilla Imports.

I like buying Baby Brand Kashmiri saffron, too. The math is not as persuasive, however. But the saffron is, and the math will not be a horrible shock now. To get 5 grams of Baby saffron threads is $35, to get 10 grams is $60, and to get 20 grams is $100. For the difference in price, does it go further so that one can use less? I don’t think it goes so much farther that it all evens out, but I believe the aroma is greater, and the taste meets different demands that are made on my kitchen.  Remember, I am cooking, not working at the ISO.

It’s worth repeating that Saffron, Vanilla Imports in San Francisco and Baby Brand Saffron (through their US resellers, Sahar Saffron in Cleveland, OH) guarantee their products.  I don’t know any other vendors who do. I’ve looked everywhere for the best values in saffron world, and I’ve found them.

Back to the Dutch, and Beyond

Skc301 It’s time to take one last look at that lobster bigger than the poodle in the still life by Adriaen van Utrecht that may or may not depict saffron. In The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Simon Schama tells us of the tensions produced in 17th century Amsterdam when nimiety in the way of material goods sat badly with a long-established ethic of thrift and virtue. The Dutch were suddenly so positioned as to have anything they could name from anywhere in the known world. Immediately, they began ascribing sinfulness to certain new substances, candied fruit being high on that list.  Saffron had been known in the days before super-prosperity was achieved, so it did not quite qualify as a gruesome luxury.

Dutch painting of the 17th century illuminates a question as familiar to us as it was then to the newly prosperous Dutch: has superabundance no moral dimension? Paintings such as this still life both celebrate and condemn the expanding sensual world, so full of the transient beauty that distracts without sustaining, but that so delights us. Should all such temptation be resisted? Or can one give in, while retaining moral fiber? If yes, then how? We too know that struggle, that makes it impossible to think of the rarest and most wondrous substances without ambivalence.

But the Dutch, as usual, are far ahead of us in matters saffron, and in such matters of virtue that can ever attach to saffron. According to the Dutch Embassy in Kabul, this autumn farmers in Uruzgan Province should be reaping their first full saffron harvest, thanks to a project set up by the Netherlands to train Afghans in raising a premium crop that will make a real alternative to opium poppies. It’s an initiative to make a Golden Age Calvinist proud.

Skc301

Ska268   Ska138

SELECTED RESOURCES for this Post

Sometimes, you write what you wish you could more simply have read. Time was, I could have used a one-stop resource on the culinary aspect of saffron. If you know anybody who could use the same thing, please send them the link to this post. If you read something here you believe not to be accurate, please write to me with information you think is better.

Recommended Suppliers

Persian Saffron: Saffron, Vanilla Imports, San Francisco, CA  http://www.saffron.com

Kashmiri Saffron: Baby Brand Saffron http://www.babysaffron.com/

Off-line Reading

Unfortunately, there is no well written, accurate, entirely up-to-date book about saffron, with instructive and alluring visuals, superb recipes and a convincing bibliography. Each of the books below, written within the last 20 years, meets some of those criteria, however.

The Essential Saffron Companion, by John Humphries, 1998

Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World’s Most Seductive Spice, by Pat Willard, 2002

Wild About Saffron: A Contemporary Guide to an Ancient Spice, by Ellen Szita, 1987

Good reading about the spice trade

Spice: The History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner, 2005

Stimulating and reliable cookbooks to take you outside the Euro-American box

A Taste of Persia: An Introduction to Persian Cooking, by Najmieh Batmanglij, 1999

Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, by Claudia Roden, 2006

Invitation to Mediterranean Cooking, by Claudia Roden, 2001

The Complete Asian Cookbook, by Charmaine Solomon, 1992 (Has a very good section on Mughlai cuisine.)

Art and excess

The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama, 1987

Online Resources

The Wikipedia saffron page — Teutonically thorough and accurate, but not very foody. Tragic photos of saffron dishes.

Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages — Through the University of Graz, Katzer has put up the most comprehensive spice guide on the Web. It’s more oriented to botany and etymology than to cooking, however.  Still, it’s a staggering resource for cooks, and one wishes his taxonomania extended far across the edible world.

The Cooking Inn — Author and saffron expert Ellen Szita with excellent info and recipes, although the pricing guidelines are out of date.

Amanda Hesser wrote this article about saffron for the New York times almost 10 years ago — it’s still highly pertinent, and explores the then-budding question whether Persian or Kashmiri saffron is best.

Elaine Sciolino wrote in the New York Times Travel Section, last year, about this fascinating new spice emporium in Paris.  More Pushali saffron from Iran than you are otherwise likely to see in one room in the West.

The BBC looks inside the saffron industry in Kashmir — an oldie but a goodie. You’ll learn what they do with the petals.

The Trade & Environment Database (TED) at American University case study on Iranian saffron.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has a beautifully organized and instructive site for anyone who wants to OD on Dutch still life painting, and much else besides.

About 3600 years ago, saffron was a component in perfume. I found out it is once more, in a scent from L’Artisan Parfumeur, Safran Troublant, by Olivia Giacobetti. I wear it to bed, just for myself and my poodle, because it’s voluptuous yet peaceful too. Read about it in a glorious new book, Perfumes: The Guide,(2008), by Luca Turin, a biophysicist, and Tania Sanchez. This book will start you using your olfactory imagination like nothing else you can read. The prodigious Luca Turin writes a column for the Neue Zurcher Zeitung that you can read in English.

Special thanks to Bea of La Tartine Gourmande. For food photography on the Web, nobody can match her precision and naturalism. Visit her blog and her Flickr Photostream for more definitive food and travel photography.

 

Monday, June 23, 2008

Carrots for the General

Edward B. Rackley

Pencils ready? Here’s today’s five-second brain teaser: What incentives succeed in getting autocrats to relinquish power peacefully? The use of sticks and carrots to bring about reform is fertile fodder for political theory, yet in practice the tools of the trade are limited and primitive. Privation of goods or commerce is common in today’s climate; chest-thumping and bellicose posturing, another favorite, is practiced by the entire animal kingdom. Carrots, as opposed to sticks, work wonders with children but see little success between nations. Why is that?

In the case of Burma under General Than Shwe and his military junta, no carrots have been tried, to my knowledge. Sticks in many shapes and sizes have been brandished and swung, to little effect. Economic sanctions, asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans are currently in effect by the US and EU. I posed the question to a Burmese dissident last week. He reflected a moment, then smiled and said, ‘A missile launch pad in Thailand, that’s all we need’. No sticks, no carrots, just elimination: everyman’s fantasy. Were regime change so easy!

Unhappythanshwegray_2Western policies designed to weaken the junta have been contradictory, perhaps even self-sabotaging. The State Department claims its trade sanctions have encouraged ASEAN countries to adopt a more critical stance on Burma; this is correlation, not causation. ASEAN countries continue their waffling course of ‘constructive engagement’, meaning: do business and look the other way. The US was alone in pursuing sanctions for over a decade until the ill-fated ‘Saffron Revolution’ last September, at which point the EU implemented similar measures.

Critics of these sanctions, embargoes and other disincentives highlight their feel-good, symbolic character—much like Bush’s declaration of genocide in Darfur being followed by cooperation with Khartoum on terrorist intelligence matters. As with Sudan, sanctions against Burma arguably strengthen the hand of ruling authorities by creating a scapegoat for their own internal policy failures and narrowing the opportunity for Burmese to expand their economic, social, and cultural contacts with reform-minded nations. The conservative CATO institute, for instance, makes a case for re-opening commercial relations with Burma, arguing that investment and trade brings technology, better working conditions, and increased exposure to democratic ideas.

Burmese pressure groups and international human rights agencies have lobbied the UN for Security Council action to target Burma’s gas and oil industries, the junta’s primary source of revenue. Such a vote was never tabled, as China and Russia would surely veto on the grounds of the principle of non-interference, their almighty sacred cow and miracle panacea for any vexing political crisis.

But for those nations who huff and puff and try to blow the junta house down–to what effect? Sanctions that fail to cut off all revenue streams to an offending party are ultimately a non sequitur. And wherever there is oil, there is always political wiggle-room. Extraction rights to Burma’s vast offshore oilfields were accorded to China in 2007, along with contracts to build an overland pipeline leading—where else?—to China.

ThumbThe junta’s economic ties to China, Thailand and India have grown in recent years, meaning a certain Chinese veto of any Security Council Resolution to pressure or punish Burmese leadership. Because Burma is a strategic nexus—it flanks both China and India and provides access to major waterways—China has focused much of its recent regional diplomatic drive on Burma. The result has been growing economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries.

As in other closed countries whose citizens suffer armed conflict (Northern Sudan), political persecution (Zimbabwe), extreme resource scarcity (Zimbabwe, North Korea), populist rhetoric and disastrous governance (Cuba, Venezuela), survival of the ruling regime means trading with countries for which morality, politics and commerce are distinct affairs. Resource-rich Sudan has little business with Western countries now; Khartoum looks like a mini-Beijing with all the cranes and Chinese construction companies everywhere. Even beleaguered old Mugabe asked China to bail him out several months ago.

Me and my money

And so Burma’s military rulers remain solvent despite an array of sanctions and international opprobrium, selling oil and gas to India, Thailand and China, another state willing to kill large numbers of its own people to stay in power. ‘Burma’s generals act as if they are immune from worldwide condemnation because they’re still getting cash from foreign-financed oil and gas projects. It’s time to cut them off’, Human Rights Watch argued in a 2007 report.

Burma’s vast majority lives under great hardship and does not see any tangible benefit from outside investment in the oil and gas industry. Most Burmese homes lack electricity altogether, and urban residents face frequent power outages, even as Burma’s natural gas is used to power Thailand’s cities. ‘Burma’s generals have used the promise of oil and gas supplies to buy the silence of energy-hungry countries, including China and India’ (HRW).

Burma is following the path tread by many African countries run by semi-autocracies or sham democracies. Human rights, democratic reform, and good governance are the sticks that accompany western development aid to developing countries. Tired of being subjected to conditions on foreign aid by moralizing and duplicitous Western countries, many African nations are turning to China, Malaysia, India and Thailand to conduct business. Because if trade and aid are available from partners who claim no moral high ground or pretense of superiority, the door to cooperation and exchange of ideas is wide open.

Severe shortage of carrots

One recent instance of Western contradiction: as the Saffron Revolution unfolded in late September, Gordon Brown effused that ‘The age of impunity is over for anyone who commits crimes against the people of Burma.’ After Cyclone Nargis hit in early May, senior UN relief official John Holmes visited the country’s worst-hit areas. As Kouchner and company weighed in on a possible ‘humanitarian invasion’–airdrops and cross-border smuggling of relief supplies and staff–Holmes defended the UN precedent of working with Burma’s military regime. So on the one hand we hear blustery declarations that ‘the age of impunity is over’, while the usual round of UN Special Envoys continue their humble entreaties at the threshold of the junta’s door. In short: multiple diplomatic strategies, all involving sticks, all perfectly contradictory.

Contradictions that were readily manipulated by the regime. After promises to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to allow more aid workers in, the junta then extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s period of detention. ASEAN country officials offered insight into Burmese perceptions of missteps in the Western diplomatic dance. ‘They are suspicious of humanitarian aid serving as a camouflage for regime change,’ the Singapore Ambassador to the UN explained, ‘a perception that is not entirely unreasonable when some [western] countries have talked about invoking responsibility to protect and mounting relief operations without host government permission’.

One wonders ultimately if sanctions represent the end of influence: so many sticks that a carrot becomes inconceivable. Here in Washington I hear political talk in some circles of ‘going through China or India’ to reach Burma’s junta. Intermediaries become necessary when one’s own efforts fail, do they not, so is it not therefore best to fix what’s broken? Alas, I forget the first rule in politics: save thy face.

Many Burmese dissidents, and its government in exile, are looking to the Olympics as a way to pressure China, as has happened with Darfur. There is the coincidence that the Games start on August 8, 2008, the anniversary of the 1988 uprisings in which at least 3000 demonstrators were killed.

Is Burma on track for a possible implosion? Economic decay is severe following twenty years of gross mismanagement, and oil revenue is not enough to right the junta’s sinking ship. But how long must the Burmese wait and pray? The internal collapse or combustion of autocratic states does occur, as happened in the Soviet Union and its client states, particularly in Africa. Predicting when and how this happens escapes even the best analysts.

For Christ’s Sake, Who’ll Help Me Out of this Skin!?

Justin E. H. Smith

There is a scene from Jean Renoir’s magnificient 1939 film, La regle du jeu, in which the members of a decadent French nobility, looking for ways to pass the time at a country estate, decide to put on a little play.  There is a man in a bear costume played by Jean Renoir himself, the son of the great painter Auguste, and the self-declared enemy of all reigning values and of the class that enforces them. Renoir fils seems like such a good sport: the French communist intellectual, the genius artist, up there on stage, dressed up like a bear. The whimsical scene in which he plays is followed by a skeleton dance, to the tune of Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre. As the music plays Renoir’s character, Octave, rushes through the mansion looking for someone to help him remove his costume. Qui va tirer cette peau d’ours?! he moans. And the English subtitles would have him saying: For Christ’s sake, who’ll help me out of this skin?!

There is a scene from the life of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in which he is encouraged by Princess Sophie Charlotte, of the still-thriving royal house of Prussia, to dress up like a bear for a play she is putting on with her friends in the palace at Charlottenburg. It is the turn of the 18th century, and Leibniz is Sophie Charlotte’s tutor. Their correspondence clearly reveals that she is in love with him, though the court philosopher himself seems not to have noticed. Leibniz’s love life seems to have consisted in two chapters: first, a letter he wrote, at the age of 50, to a man of good standing, inquiring as to whether he might take the man’s daughter’s hand in marriage; second, a note written at the age of 70, the year of his death, in which he recalls the incident, along with the fact that the man never wrote back. Leibniz died a lonely man, with a shrunken reputation. Ossa Leibnitii, his gravestone read matter-of-factly: “Leibniz’s Bones.” In any case, Leibniz refuses to dress up like a bear, and Sophie Charlotte has to ask the Duke of Wittgenstein (not that Wittgenstein), who gamely accepts. Leibniz sits in the audience, and will later claim to have had a great time in that passive role. I’ve long wondered: was he not secretly envious of the duke?  Did he not wish to be more free-spirited, less constrained by his own seriousness? Did he not wish to nail the princess, perhaps even in ursine disguise?

There is a note that Leibniz made to himself in 1675, to which he gave the title, Une drôle de pensée: “a funny thought.”  He had just been to a spectacle in Paris in which an automaton in the form of a man was made to run across the surface of the Seine. The experience filled him with excitement, and with ideas of his own. He rushed home and jotted them down. He imagined “une nouvelle sorte de représentations,” which would involve “Magic Lanterns, kites, artificial meteors, all manner of optical marvels; a representation of the sky and the stars.” There would be “fireworks, jets of water, vessels of strange forms; Mandragores and other rare plants, … [r]are and extraordinary animals,” as well as a “Royal Machine for races with artificial horses,” not to mention “speaking trumpets.” He imagines that “the representation could be combined with some sort of story or comedy,” and that this story might include “extraordinary tightrope dancers. Perilous jumps.” The public could see “a child who raises a great weight with a thread,” and there would be an “anatomical theatre,” as well as a “garden of simple [elements].” There would be “little number machines and other [things]… Instruments that play themselves.” Leibniz imagines that “all honest men would want to have seen these curiosities, so that they would be able to speak about them.” “Even women of quality,” he adds, would wish to be taken there. At this wonderland of “new representations,” “one would always be encouraged to push things further,” though it would also be necessary that in this charmed place “no one ever swears, nor blasphemes God.”

What was Leibniz thinking? Down to the ban on profane language, the institution he envisions would seem to have more in common with Disneyland than with an Academy of Sciences. Both, I want to say, are more or less direct products of the European Enlightenment. But anyway I bring up this drôle de pensée only to give a picture of the mode of Leibniz’s operation. He seems to have written out everything that ever crossed his mind, including the funniest of funny thoughts. The volumes of his writing, the editing of which was begun by the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1923 and is now only about 30% completed, amount literally to the reconstruction of a man’s inner life.

I have set myself up in the world as a “Leibniz scholar,” which means that my salary, my 401k, my health and dental, all get paid in exchange for my willingness to regularly hold forth on the life and work of this man who died 294 years ago. Leibniz wrote about theology, jurisprudence, mathematics, physics, physiology, chemistry, medicine, hospital administration, mineralogy, paleontology, etymology and entomology; I write about Leibniz. Plane tickets are bought, hotel rooms reserved, crates of bottled water lugged about by hotel staff in places like the Lake Superior Conference Room of the Minneapolis Sheraton, all so that Leibniz scholarship can happen. My carbon footprint is Leibniz’s posthumous carbon footprint. Everywhere I go, I go thanks to Leibniz: he has taken me to Norway, Argentina, Israel, the Canary Islands, Australia. (I note in passing that comparable employee benefits have been extracted from the bones of Emily Dickinson, Sergei Eisenstein, Andy Warhol, and even an illiterate 16th-century miller from Friuli.)

Thanks to Leibniz, I have had more surreal conversations with passport control agents around the world than I could possibly recall. Israeli security agents are of course required to engage all who travel into and out of Israel in long, surreal conversations, prying for details about their personal and professional lives in order, I presume, to make sure they really are who they say they are. Twice, on leaving Israel, I’ve found myself delivering from memory the papers I’d just presented at academic conferences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv the days before. I would stop every five minutes or so –after sentences like, “and so we see that in fact Leibniz continues to propose new models of the structure of the organic bodies of corporeal substances right through the 1704 publication of the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain“– to ask: shall I continue? They nodded their heads yes, and so I did… for 40 more minutes. They were doing their job, and I was doing mine.

The second time I was in Israel, in 2005, I had presented a paper on, among other things, Leibniz’s theory of the origins of Chinese, his argument that it was not, as many had thought, a deformation of Hebrew, and his general denial that there ever was such a thing as an “Adamic” language, that is, a prelapsarian way of speaking in which words zapped directly into the essences of things, giving the first man and woman perfect, God-like knowledge of the objects of reference in the world. I spoke for 45 minutes, and one of the agents, a girl, 19 or so, with a blonde ponytail, sat taking notes. What, or who, were these notes for, I wondered. Her rabbi? The file Mossad was keeping on me? Her own interest in the nature of language? 

I recently found myself passing through JFK (the airport, that is). For me, coming home to the US is like entering the Green Zone: a highly protected, highly charged spot where every sign of normalcy seems only to point towards the chaos radiating out of it. What disturbs me most are those damned blue latex gloves that ever more Americans seem to be wearing: toll-booth workers, Rite-Aid employees, DHS agents. The gloves are supposed to signal: This is a sterile operation here, everything’s above-board and impervious to corruption, but they remind me of nothing so much as Abu Ghraib. I want to say: they are what made Abu Ghraib possible. The hygienic separation provided by the gloves in turn enables a sort of moral separation from one’s own shit-dirty deeds. Get a few of the other guy’s germs on you, and you might be reminded he’s your brother.

The agent to whose window I was sent wore the blue latex gloves and a name-tag that identified him as “Ferency.” On the form that asked me which countries I’d visited since last in the United States, I’d listed over a dozen (including Hungary), which was all the allotted space would permit. “What line of work takes you to so many interesting places?” Ferency asked in a sort of bored and laconic mumble.

“I’m a professor of philosophy,” I told him.
“Cool,” he said. “
“Who’s your main guy?”
“Leibniz.”
“Is it true he stole the calculus from Isaac Newton?”
“No, that’s a scurrilous slander,” I replied to the Department of Homeland Security agent.
“OK, just asking,” Ferency said, clearly interested. “But seriously, I don’t think I could spend my life studying Leibniz. He’s too logical. There’s more to life than just logic: premise-conclusion, premise-conclusion. Too dry. I mean, what about, like, poetry?” Without even having opened it to confirm my identity, he handed my passport back with his blue-gloved hand.
“Leibniz wrote poetry, too.” I told him.
“He did?””
“Yes. He once wrote a very whimsical ode to a princess’s parrot.”
“Well, maybe I underestimated the guy,” Ferency said as he waved me along.

There is a scene from the life of Leibniz, in which we find him in Bohemian Karlsbad, taking a hot-spring bath with Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia. It is late in his life, 1714 or so. He is suffering from severe gout, and has taken to trying any and every possible remedy. By now he has constructed a homemade wooden clamp, meant to reduce the circulation of blood to his affected foot, a measure which certainly did not help at all. Leibniz’s first letter on the self-treatment of gout, so far as I’ve been able to find, was written in 1676, decades before he himself would die of over-treatment. Diogenes Laertius, who had believed that a philosopher’s death must reflect the work of his life, would have been impressed by Leibniz.

ImagesSunking3_2

One source of difficulty I’ve often encountered in trying to imagine my way into the world as lived by 17th-century European men of letters is presented by those goddamned wigs they wore. What could they have been thinking? And why do publishers today insist on reproducing images of their wigged heads every time a new book comes out? (I continue the practice here just to drive home my point.) What do these horrid perruques have to do with the theory of monads or the discovery of gravity? Whenever I see that famous portrait of Louis XIV (reproduced here in a slightly blurred form, so as not to blind the reader with his radiance), with his waist-length curls, his furs, his tights decorated with fleurs de lys, I think to myself: that was a world that had to collapse. Hair-wise, there’s no denying that Leibniz’s wig places him much closer to le roi soleil than to, say, Kant, whose dignified ponytail positions him, a century later, in the respectable company of Thomas Jefferson and other good men.

Leibniz and Peter were in Karlsbad to discuss the establishment of an Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, after the model of the one Leibniz had already helped to found in Berlin. There is no record of their meeting, but I have often attempted to reconstruct how it might have unrolled. The bare physical details take precedence in exercises of the imagination such as this. Did they get fully naked before entering the baths? Did they have towels? What did Leibniz look like, stripped down, without his wig? A colleague insists that without his wig Leibniz looks like no one so much as Ben Kingsley, and that this wide-ranging actor, who has already played Gandhi, should also play the philosopher in any future movie about his life. But there will never be a movie about the life of Leibniz, and if there is it will be a disappointing wigs-and-tights period piece with an invented and implausible romantic twist.

Ferency may very well have been itching to tear that damned glove off, like Octave with his peau d’ours. The Israeli girl no doubt wanted to strip off that uniform, which she would do soon enough, once her obligatory period of service had ended, to go off and dance on a beach somewhere to Goa trance, or Balearic house, or God knows what. Often I would like to tear off the skin under cover of which I move across frontiers, to be waved through by the border guards not in view of what I have to say about Leibniz, but in virtue of everything I have ever thought or felt, my own infinite repository of drôles de pensées. But a job’s a job, and it pays to be a good sport.

By the time he hot-tubbed with Leibniz, Peter the Great had much experience tearing beards right off the faces of men in the streets of St. Petersburg; it was to be a Western city, with an Academy of Sciences and all, and the Tsar could not stand to have his subjects looking like backward Orthodox monks. In France, when the Revolution that relegated the wigs and tights of absolute monarchy to the realm of nostalgia finally came, its heroes were not content to yank off the coiffures of the ancien régime and start fresh from there, but instead removed entire heads. Leibniz for his part believed that when a worm is cut in half, a previously subordinate soul in the weaker half rises up and becomes the dominating soul in the newly independent body. He thought human souls have an even brighter destiny, no matter what their gravestones might read, but I hope to be reborn a few more times before it comes to that.

21 June, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit http://www.jehsmith.com .

For the original French text of the “Drôle de pensée,” go here. .

Dispatches: A Wimbledon Dialogue

Perhaps you’re aware that the Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, better known by the name of the London suburb in which it’s played–Wimbledon–begins today.  In case you’d like to catch up, here’s a discussion of the major storylines with my friend and fellow tennis fan, Sydneysider Lucy Perkins.

Asad Raza: Hi there Luce, thanks for taking the time to do this!  So I suppose we’d better tackle the question everyone asks first, first: What the heck is going on with Roger Federer?  He’s won only two tournaments this year, both minor tuneups, and suffered perhaps his worst Grand Slam loss ever at the hands of smiling assassin Rafael Nadal in the final of Roland Garros.  Is Federer, as your Sydney papers have it, ready to be put “out to pasture,” or have reports of his demise as the world’s dominant player been premature?

Lucy Perkins: Hi Asad! No problem: I feel more famous for talking to you. Re: Roger, I wish I knew. I think OUT TO PASTURE is, to put it mildly, a little harsh. There is no need to reel off his list of accomplishments, and anyway we don’t have time, but he’s been winning Wimbledon every year since Mark Philippoussis was a credible opponent. (Fans of the reality TV series The Age of Love will recognise the import of this statement.) He also has an unbroken grass streak of fifty-nine matches – and counting! – and he won Halle just last week without dropping serve. Fed has a knack of picking himself up after the ritual devastation of the French Open final and refusing to look back.

On the other hand, Federer’s performance in the Roland Garros final really was dismal, and his attitude surprisingly blase. And Rafa just keeps getting better; he seemed to reach his first Wimbledon final through sheer enthusiasm, but beating Djokovic and Roddick to win Queens looks awfully like accomplishment. As a Federer fan, my concern isn’t so much over Federer’s form as Rafa’s. He’s getting closer all the time to beating Roger on grass, as anyone who saw last year’s epic Wimbledon final could attest. Could this be the year?

Asad Raza: I think it could–not only did Nadal devastate Federer in Paris, but he handled Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic with such intimidating form at Queen’s, the most competitive Wimbledon tuneup tournament.  I think Rafa’s grass-court credentials are very real–after all, he made the last two Wimbledon finals–and I think there is no player who does not fear him right now.

If Nadal does win Wimbledon, it will be tough for anyone to dislodge him as the best player this year.  So for Federer, his two stated priorities, the Wimby crown and his number one ranking, are at stake.  Is he fully recovered from mono?  I think he is, since his clay court season was exactly as accomplished as his usually are–i.e. making the big finals and losing to Nadal.  Nothing new there.  On the other hand, he hasn’t looked as imperious as usual, but I thought that last year, too.  In the words of the pirate Mallorcan, we gonna see.

Who else do you think has a chance?

Lucy Perkins: Well, naturally, Novak Djokovic has to be part of this conversation. After winning his first Grand Slam in Australia this year, Djokovic has gone from up-and-comer to serious contender. He’s intensely talented and hypercompetitive, and he seems to manage the surface transition with ease. He’s also oddly brittle for such a brash young thing. I sincerely hope Djokovic doesn’t intend to repeat last year’s performance, in which he fought his way to a semi against Rafa only to retire. (Admittedly, the fortnight had been tough on Djokovic, with long rain delays interspersed with manic stretches of playing. But still.)

As far as form goes, Djokovic appears to have stepped down a notch since the Australian Open, and his loss to Nadal at Queens seemed to confirm his spot just below Nadal in the pecking order. But the greats always peak at the big tournaments, and they come no bigger than Wimbledon, so this could serve as an intriguing test of Djoko’s mettle. Especially since he is in Federer’s half of the draw. Apart from those three, the list of contenders is surprisingly short. Most years, I would also include Andy Roddick as a contender. But watching Roddick nowadays, it’s sometimes difficult to recall that only a few years ago he came within spitting distance of beating King Federer himself at Wimbledon. Last year, against the talented, flaky Richard Gasquet, Roddick was up two sets and a break before losing it, quite inexplicably. It was a measure of how far he’d fallen, and it was sad to behold. Can you be twenty-five years old and belong to a bygone era? It seems you can, in tennis at least.

Meanwhile, my favourite hobby horse, David Nalbandian, appears to have reverted to form after a phenomenal end to 2007. Nalbandian is no stranger to grass, having made the Wimbledon final in 2002, but he has a habit of turning in a string of desultory performances just as you’re starting to warm to him. He’s hardly a form player, having taken precisely one game off Novak Djokovic in the Queens semi. But I feel the need to mention him anyway.

Asad Raza: All true, although I rate Andy Roddick’s chances a little higher than you–my patriotic bias.  I note neither of us mentioned the Great Scottish Hope, Andy Murray, who is really talented but who I think we probably agree seems way too mercurial to win seven straight five-set matches.  Djokovic has chances, but he’s on Federer’s side of the draw and he might be too high-strung to beat both the top guys for the title.

Some other men I think bear watching: Robin Soderling (who may meet Fed in round two) and the always lovably irritating Radek Stepanek.  Then there’s the boy wonder, Ernests Gulbis (round two with Rafa, if he gets past Isner), the only Latvian player ever to be a factor on tour.  Gulbis is charming, confident, and the ball comes off his racquet like a cannon fired it.  And, my major upset guy this time out is Gael Monfils, the French player who came out of a long slump to reach the French semis, where he pushed Federer pretty hard.  He has incredible power and incredible movement, but likes to play a passive style and then counterpunch after baiting his opponent into leaving a side of the court open.  That might be impossible to pull off on grass, because the ball skips through the court faster, but Monfils is always exciting to watch.  Might pull off some huge wins, but also might flame out in the first round.

Okay, in general the men’s tour is pretty much sewn up by the top three. The women’s, meanwhile, is wide open–no one seems to be able to establish lasting supremacy these days, leading many to claim disinterest in it.  But have you noticed that when the women’s tour was dominated by Steffi Graf and Monica Seles, people would complain that the women’s field had no depth?  Now that it has depth, apparently the players are insufficiently dominant.  Any thoughts on this strange double standard?  Are there real problems with the women’s tour right now?

For this decade, it’s really been an inconsistent struggle between Serena Williams and the just-retired Justine Henin, with lesser challenges from Maria Sharapova and others.  Now a new number one, Ana Ivanovic, has emerged with a title at the French and an intensity that others on the women’s tour don’t seem to match these days.  For that reason, I have Ivanovic as my favorite to win the title–I just don’t see the other top seeds as serious enough about it.  Sharapova was in L.A. while the Wimbledon tuneups were being played, and the Williams sisters almost never play them anyway.  That said, Venus is the defending champion and it’s hard to bet against her if she gets through the first week.

Lucy Perkins: I’m glad you brought up the double standard before I did. Nobody is ever happy when it comes to the state of the women’s game: if someone’s dominant, there’s no depth. If nobody’s dominant, it’s boring. And even during the Hingis/Williams/Davenport era, when the women’s game was both genuinely competitive and about a billion times as interesting as the men’s, there were all these gendered stories about how the competition just doesn’t seem as fair or as clean as the men’s.

But at the moment, I tend to agree with you about the state of the game, and I will even point to one problem with the women’s game that does seem systematic: it loses its champions at an alarming rate. I wasn’t particularly surprised when Kim Clijsters retired so that she could wash her husband’s dishes – she was nobody’s feminist poster child. But Justine Henin always struck me as the consummate career girl. I mean, when it was literally tennis or her marriage, tennis won. And now she ups and quits, aged 25? Something really must be amiss.

Anyway, back to Wimbledon. This is, as you point out, clearly a golden opportunity for Ivanovic, and I bet more than one WTA exec is hoping she takes it. Before this year, I wasn’t convinced that Ivanovic had it. Her fitness was always suspect, and off-court she seems bubbly and laid-back. But the steel she showed at Roland Garros was a real surprise.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t dismiss Sharapova’s ability to get serious when the moment requires it. And the Williamses are anyone’s guess. They seem to be able to decide to win and then do it, with minimal preparation. It’s infuriating, but captivating at the same time, as if the rest of the tour is just at the mercy of Williams-family whims. I don’t know about this year, though. Another out-of-nowhere title for Venus just seems a bridge too far, even for her.

I’ll also use this opportunity to plug my sentimental favourite for the women’s title, Elena Dementieva, who is lovely, talented, charming, thoughtful, and a choker extraordinaire. She will probably lose, and it will probably be a heartbreaker, and she will probably be charmingly sincere in her press-conference. But I wish it weren’t so.

Asad Raza: Excellent points all–I’m with you in admiring Dementieva, in my case also because she is the fiancée of one of my beloved Buffalo Sabres, Maxim Afinogenov.  I’m looking forward to running into the two of them eating chicken wings at the Anchor Bar someday.

So that seems to be about the size of it.  Shall we go out on limbs, and offer our predictions for the semifinals onwards?

Read more »

Monday Poem

by Jim Culleny

in a blink

the sun comes up
over mountains sublime
and the sea laps its brim like a pupImage_blink

regal elms come and go
splayed trunks broken by blight
limbs corrupt

future and past collide
winds whistle side by side
bodies touch and often burn up

wars rage
scriptures are taught
good and bad divide
killers are caught
doors open doors shut

in a blink they say
never the twain shall meet
but twains meet
beast and beauty wed,
but news of a split soon spreads:
Truth Divorced From Politician Such & Such
the tabloids eat it up

notions of right and wrong are cinched
in tiny minds that grasp and clinch
and root and rut

love is made
bodies entwine
hate’s kicked on its ass so hard
it can’t get up

mountains move
the earth erupts
promises are kept
and given up
and odes and fugues
make offers
we shouldn’t refuse,
they demand
we not interrupt

in a blink
all of us know
but no one agrees
if mountains are mountains
and trees are trees
if sky is sky
if mud is mud
if wine’s just wine
if blood’s just blood

either way
in a blink

in a blink

we drink
it up

Monday, June 16, 2008

Confessions of an Illegible Woman

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

I’ll admit it: my writing sucks.

This may seem a surprising confession for a newly-published novelist. And, thankfully, it is not the conclusion most reviewers of my book seem to have reached. (I’ve counted, and the words most often used seem to be luminous and vivid—and who am I to argue?)

My handwriting, however, is another story entirely. On a one-to-ten neatless scale it falls somewhere at negative six; a mix between Sanskrit and toddler scribble. Actually, probably more on the Sanskrit side; the last time I wrote an “a” for my literacy-aspiring toddler to copy she wrinkled her brow and scowled: “What is that, Mommy?”

It hasn’t always been this way. Throughout gradeschool and junior high my penmanship was never stellar, but it was at least as recognizable as English. American, even—particularly during that phase when I, like every other self-respecting female preteen, dotted her i’s with little hearts. When I passed notes my friends understood my comparisons between Mr. Muldoon and a tree frog. And when I wrote out papers, they were legible enough to be graded–unfortunately, not always to my benefit.

Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, though, it all fell apart. My letters began to slant and slide and collide. They obeyed no perceivable rule or ruler in size, angle or slope; they refused to stay between prescribed lines. Cursive was even worse; my script simply refused to loop and lace in the prescribed manner. Eventually, print and cursive simply merged, producing the bastard offspring that is my present script. Foreign languages fared no better; Italian, Latin and Spanish all came out equally atrociously. Even foreign writing systems didn’t help; after 10+ years studying Japanese my tree characters still look like people, or sometimes rice.

In the golden age of the computer, thank goodness, illegibility has become less of a debilitating condition. Keyboards are, after all, the cosmetic surgeons of scrawl; they take even the most misformed of b’s, d’s and (my worst infringement) f’s, and re-shape them into perfect specimens. When I do fall back on longhand it’s generally for people too polite to admit they can’t read it–or else already well-acquainted with it’s indecipherability: my mother-in-law routinely calls (albeit in gales of laughter) to request translations of my thank-you notes. Beyond that, however, few have needed to know the truth: that I’m a writer who can’t write worth a damn.

Somewhat unexpectedly, though, becoming a published author has changed all that. It entails doing something I’d never thought about before: signing books. Lots of books. Often for total strangers, who have invested 26 whole dollars in them. Sometimes, as gifts.

I had my first inkling (pun intended) of trouble shortly before the official release date: my publisher called me in to sign some sixty editions of The Painter from Shanghai. A first-editions book club had requested them—presumably on the (mistaken) assumption that my signature would add some sort of value. I opened the first with trepidation.

“Where do I sign?”

“Oh—uh, here, I guess,” replied the assistant, pointing to a small (actually, quite small for a scrawler) space between title and byline.

“Do I use all three names?”

“Whatever you feel comfortable with.” He gave me a strange look. “Sometimes authors cross out the byline, too.”

I pondered this a moment. Crossing out the byline seemed just setting myself up for failure, implying (as it did) that I could write my own name better than Norton. Which, of course, I could not. In fact, the more I studied the lovely Fairfield font they’d chosen, the more inadequate I began to feel.

“Do you need another pen?” the assistant prompted.

“Uh, no. That’s ok.” Taking a deep breath, I put pen to page. “Shit.” My first signature now started with a smudge. I held it up apologetically, like a customer in a store who had just ruined something that they hadn’t paid for (which, in a sense, I guess I had). “I’ll pay for this one.”

“No, no,” he protested. “It’s unique. I’m sure they’ll love it.”

I squinted at the blot, trying to decide whether I should avoid it, write over it or try to integrate it into my scrawl. In the end I opted for the latter, semi-attaching it to the j that more or less looks like a bent, upside-down fishhook. Now one with kelp, or perhaps an unfortunate jellyfish, on its point. The assistant, clearly wearying of my neediness, began busying himself with the other books. I forced myself to finish the job: Jennifer Cody Epstein. I did stay between the lines. But as I’d expected, it looked nothing like the byline. I immediately imagined a first-edition clubbie opening up to it and exclaiming, in fury, “What the hell is this?”

The next 59 signatures were only marginally better (though thankfully there were no further blots). Still, I couldn’t help but feel, as I scrawled determinedly on (some left-slanting signatures, some right, a few undecidedly going in both directions), that same, vague unease I usually feel signing legal documents, hoping that no one notices I have no real grip on my own name. (This has actually happened to me in Hong Kong; the bank I used while living there would frequently call me in to verify that I wasn’t committing bank fraud on myself.) That same fear also had a lasting impact on my wedding; I was so worried about scrawling outside the prescribed lines on my Ketubah that my signature came out roughly three millimeters in height, four in length. (“What the hell is this?” my husband of five minutes exclaimed.)

Still, there’s nothing illegal about a sloppy signature—at least, not that I’m aware of. So what, exactly, am I so worried about? That if people see my dreadful script on this luminous book, it will somehow belie my luminosity? That my signature will, Toto-like, tear back the curtain on my talents and reveal the bald, fat little reality that, well, I suck? And—hold on! If our writing really tells us about ourselves, what exactly does mine say about me, anyway?

To find the answer, I went to Lifelong Learning Excellence Inc. and took their handwriting analysis test. Online; so you know it’s accurate (here’s the link: http://WWW.HWA.ORG/SelfEval.shtml). Using their criteria, I deduced the following: The sharpness of my hand is quite sharp, the general slant tends to vary a bit, and slope is (sic) slightly upwards slope to it.

And here, apparently, is what that tells people: You have some hesitance to accept your power, and sometimes vacillate between “I’m great.” and “I’m not okay.” All in all, It’s perhaps confusing to be Jennifer Epstein, huh? (Well, yes. Yes, it is.)

Furthermore: You probably have some questions about who you are and have some trouble being stably consistently YOU. And lastly: You probably have quite a bit of difficulty letting go of things and could be prone to digestive disorders due to your unwillingness to seek peace and quiet.

Excellent. So according to Lifelong Learning Excellence, my writing broadcasts to the world—or at least, to my readers–the fact that I have chronic indigestion.

Somewhat more enlightening was the fact that—at least, according to certain studies—there is a genetic component to handwriting; that as with so much else (humor, shopping habits, annoying laughs) hard-wiring predetermines our behavior in ways both macro and micro. As an adoptee (yes, I am illegitimate as well as illegible—but that is an entirely different blog) questions about nature versus nurture have always fascinated me. Handwriting in particular—at least, since the day ten years ago that I received a registered mail tag back from a letter I’d sent to my biological father. To date, the letter remains unanswered. But that signature spoke volumes to me: it scrawled, sprawled, sloped and collided. In fact, it looked just like mine.

In retrospect, I suppose that that sprawling half-line of longhand is as reassuring as it is disconcerting. It seems to say that, neat or sucky, my writing is what it is—and whatever it says about me will have to stand. In any event, it seems unlikely to change; despite my best efforts my inscriptions and John Hancock continue to confound those around me. One friend did, indeed, reject a signed copy she’d been planning on gifting on the grounds that the signature simply sucked. (“What the hell is that?”) Another reader, buying the book for his wife, looked over my note with obvious puzzlement. “Uh—her name is Christine,” he said. “And the book club I asked you to note is actually called the ‘Best Ever Book-Club.’”

“I know,” I said, apologetically. “That’s what I wrote.”

We looked at each other a moment, and I held my breath, half-expecting him to demand another copy, another try. In the end, though, he just shrugged.

“Ok,” he said. “I’ll pass along the message.”

Utopia on the sidewalk

P D Smith

For a time, in the summer of 1933, the scientist who invented the first weapon of mass destruction – poison gas – was staying in the same genteel Georgian square in London’s Bloomsbury as the man who would play a key role in the creation of the atomic bomb.

Russell_square_london_2008Fritz Haber was a broken man. He was suffering from chronic angina and had been forced out of the research institute to which he had devoted his entire life. For a proud man, it was a deeply humiliating experience. To friends, the 64-year-old German chemist admitted feeling profoundly bitter. Einstein, who had just renounced his German citizenship, wrote him a pointed letter saying he was pleased to hear that “your former love for the blond beast has cooled off a bit”. Haber had only months to live. Exiled by the country he had tried to save during World War I with his chemical superweapon, he spent his last days wandering through Europe.

In July 1933 he visited London, staying at a hotel on Russell Square in Bloomsbury while he explored the possibility of working in England. He met Frederick G. Donnan, a tall and rather dashing professor of chemistry at nearby University College London, who sported a black eyepatch. During World War I, Donnan had worked on the production of mustard gas. Now he was attempting to arrange a fellowship for Germany’s leading chemical warfare expert.

That summer, another scientist who had fled Hitler’s Germany was also living in Russell Square. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had been working in Berlin for the past decade, had brought his two suitcases to the Imperial Hotel in April. It was less costly than Haber’s hotel, the Russell, but for the scientist who had once declared that “there is no place as good to think as a bathtub”, what made the hotel irresistible were its famous Turkish baths.

Both hotels overlooked the elegant gardens of Russell Square, designed in the previous century by Britain’s foremost landscape designer, Humphry Repton. The British Museum and Library, University College London, and the London School of Economics were all within a fifteen-minute walk. T. S. Eliot (the “Pope of Russell Square”) worked in his garret office at number 24 for the publisher Faber & Faber, and in nearby Gordon Square was the fine Georgian townhouse where Virginia Woolf had once lived.

Szilard was essentially running the Academic Assistance Council (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning), an organisation he had helped found which dedicated itself to helping academics fleeing from the Nazis. His work for the AAC was unpaid. Szilard was living off earnings from patents which he held jointly with his close friend Albert Einstein. At the end of the 1920s, two of the greatest minds on the planet had applied their combined brain power to the problem of designing a safe refrigerator. Unfortunately, no one ever kept their groceries cool in an Einstein-Szilard fridge. But their invention of a liquid metal refrigeration system was later used to cool nuclear reactors.

Politically, the nationalist Haber and the socialist Szilard had little in common. However, unlike scientific purists such as Ernest Rutherford, for whom knowledge was its own reward, both men were enthralled by the idea of science as power. Neither Szilard nor Haber had set out in their careers intending to create new weapons. But both scientists played key roles in developing a new generation of scientific superweapons. Haber thought that chemical weapons would make him the saviour of his country. Szilard, an internationalist fired by an idealistic vision of how science should transform human life and society for the better, wanted to save the world with atomic energy and create Utopia.

Cans_festival_leake_street_2008_1 What might these two refugee scientists have said to each other if they had met while walking through the neatly manicured gardens of Russell Square, just outside their hotels? Fritz Haber was at the end of his career, disowned by his country and thrown out of the institute he had founded by the Nazis. He was at the end of his life. Haber was a shadow of the dynamic man he had once been. Every few steps, he had to pause and catch his breath. By contrast, Leo Szilard, the budding nuclear physicist, was 35 years old, his figure still slim and youthful. He would have been striding past through the square, perhaps on his way to see his and Haber’s mutual friend, Professor Donnan at UCL.

Throughout 1933, Szilard worked tirelessly and selflessly on behalf of his fellow refugee academics. His daily routine at the Imperial Hotel began with breakfast in the plush restaurant, followed by a leisurely and extended soak in a bath – the only luxury the decidedly non-materialistic Szilard permitted himself. It was not uncommon for him to spend three hours in a tub, awaiting Archimedean inspiration. However, it was not in the bath that Leo Szilard had his Eureka! moment in 1933, but on Southampton Row, one of the main roads running into Russell Square.

Late on the morning of September 12, 1933, Szilard was reading The Times in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel. An article reported Ernest Rutherford’s speech on how subatomic particles might be used to transmute atoms. Rutherford was quoted as saying “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine”. Leo Szilard frowned as he read these words. Moonshine! If there was one thing in science that made Szilard really angry, it was experts who said that something was impossible.

Szilard always thought best on his feet. So he went for a walk. Many years later in America, Szilard would recall this moment, as he walked through Bloomsbury, pondering subatomic physics and Rutherford’s comments. “I remember,” said Szilard, “that I stopped for a red light at the intersection of Southampton Row.” The London traffic streamed by, but he scarcely noticed the vehicles. Instead, in his mind he saw streams of subatomic particles bombarding atoms.

As the traffic lights changed and the cars stopped, the physicist stepped out in front of the impatient traffic. A keen-eyed London cabby, watching Szilard cross, might have noticed him pause for a moment in the middle of the road. Szilard may even have briefly raised his hand to his forehead, as if to catch hold of the beautiful but terrible thought that had just crossed his mind. For at that moment Leo Szilard saw how to release the energy locked up in the heart of every atom, a self-sustaining chain reaction created by neutrons:

“As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction… In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might be in fact possible became a sort of obsession with me.”

I know Russell Square well. It’s one of my favourite parts of London. I often walked through it on my way to classes, first as a graduate student, then while lecturing at UCL. Two hundred years after its paths were first laid and its trees planted, the gardens have now been restored to their former glory. It is a leafy haven of peace amidst the noise of the metropolis.

While researching Doomsday Men, which tells the story of Szilard and Haber, I often worked at the University of London Library in the impressive art deco Senate House which overlooks Russell Square. Its foundation stone was laid in June 1933 and during the war George Orwell worked here in the Ministry of Information, an experience that provided the model for his fictional “Ministry of Truth” in 1984. On the way to the library each morning, I walked through the square and was often struck by the thought that Szilard and Haber had passed under these very trees seventy years earlier. Indeed, a stone’s throw from here Szilard realised how to release the energy of the atom. In a sense, the road to Hiroshima’s destruction begins here in this elegant Georgian square.

Sketches_of_hg_wells_from_1912 Strangely enough, a literary scientist also discovered the secret of releasing the atom’s energy while working in this part of London. In H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), the scientist Holsten succeeds in “tapping the internal energy of atoms” by setting up “atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth”. This explosive reaction, in which the scientist is slightly injured, produces radioactive gas and gold as a by-product. The quest of the alchemists is over – gold can now be created on demand. But Holsten has also discovered something far more valuable than even gold: “from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power”. When Holsten realises the implications of what he has found, his mind is thrown into turmoil. Like Szilard, he goes for a walk to think things through.

What is astonishing is that Holsten makes his discovery in Bloomsbury in 1933, the very year in which Szilard walked down Southampton Row and had his Eureka moment. The significance of this coincidence in time and space was not lost on Leo Szilard. Indeed, the similarities between the two scientists are striking. Both the fictional and the real scientist were born at the beginning of the atomic age, Holsten in the year X-rays were discovered, 1895, and Szilard in the year radium was discovered, 1898. Szilard had read Wells’s novel in 1932. It is clear that he regarded it as prophetic, and frequently referred to it in relation to key moments in both his life and the discovery of atomic energy. He shared Holsten’s dreams and his nightmares.

My knowledge of these historical moments has given this genteel London square a special resonance for me. I’ve often sat on the grass while taking time out from research and wondered what other meetings or Eureka moments have occurred in this green urban space. The square has gained a whole new dimension for me. It is not just a few trees and flower beds surrounded by some over-priced townhouses. It has a history, its own unique time-scape, one charged with global significance. A scene in a great scientific tragedy unfolded on this urban stage. And who knows how many minor domestic dramas have also been acted out in the shade of its trees. I became so fascinated by the secret histories of urban spaces like Russell Square that I even wrote a book proposal on the subject.

I was powerfully reminded of these themes recently when reading The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruse (Princeton 2008). This is an excellent collection of essays by scholars who are united in the view that cities are not inert containers for social, political and economic processes, but historically produced spaces that shape, and are shaped by, power, economy, culture, and society. They want to replace Rem Koolhaas’s post-modern notion of a Generic City “free from history”, by investing urban spaces with a new sense of place and history, within a context of global change.

Cans_festival_leake_street_2008_3 As Gyan Prakash rightly says, cities “are the principal landscapes of modernity”. Streets and sidewalks, parks and squares, tube trains and buses – these are the everyday settings for “dynamic encounters and experiences”. Despite globalization, our urban experiences still depend on “local lifeworlds”, rich with memories and imagination. The Spaces of the Modern City is a fascinating attempt to map the poetics of the urban everyday – from the liminal spaces of racially mixed neighbourhoods in London of the 1950s, the Situationists in West Berlin during the 60s, to Tokyo’s extraordinary Street Science Observation Society in the 1980s.

In 2008, Homo sapiens became an urban species. This year, for the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population – 3.3 billion people – are city dwellers. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for the last thousand years.

The experience of living in cities is universal. It crosses continents, cultures and even time. Urbanism is not a western phenomenon. The ideal of the global village was first glimpsed in cities seven thousand years ago, in today’s Iraq. As one historian has written: “A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space.”

I believe cities are our greatest creation as a species. They embody our unique ability to imagine how the world might be, and to realise those dreams in brick, steel, concrete and glass. For our species has never been satisfied with what Nature gave us. We are the ape that builds, that shapes our environment. We are the city builders – Homo urbanus.

Shanghai Undoubtedly, urban planners face some daunting challenges in the coming years. About a billion city dwellers are homeless or living in squatter towns without adequate access to clean water. That’s a sixth of the planet’s entire population. Indeed, until recently more people died in cities than were born in them. Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1803), said that half of all children born in Manchester and Birmingham died before the age of three.

Problems remain, but cities are more popular than ever. By 2030, sixty percent of people will be urbanites. Across the world from Shanghai to São Paulo, people are flocking to the cities – to buy and sell, to find work, to meet lovers and like-minded people, to be where it’s all happening. For like magnets, cities have always attracted creative people from both the arts and the sciences.

So next time you’re strolling down the street and you notice some guy who is lost in thought, don’t forget – he could be the next Leo Szilard, chasing visions of scientific Utopia on a dusty urban sidewalk.

Monday Poem

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Blue under Blue
Jim Culleny

We were sitting on a bench under blue
under the bush of a willow admiring her garden when
I saw an Indigo Bunting but didn’t know it when I did.

Look, I said,
a bluebird on the wall!

No, the fabulous near-turquoise of it,
its deep and tiny beyond-blueness makes it
an Indigo Bunting,
she said, if it’s
anything at all.

It hopped, mysterious as one of the angels some say exist
and took off fluttering more beautifully than
the idea of fluttering

fluttering for real

took off into wisteria
like the idea of flying
(cubed at least).

Who thought that up, the flying?
-not to mention the wisteria,

I said. Truth is

that’s what we were both feeling
just then, seeing an Indigo Bunting
so blue under blue under willow
from our bench.

//

Monday, June 9, 2008

Lunar Refractions: Leaves That are Green

There is nothing new under the sun.  —Ecclesiastes

Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. (God created, Linnaeus organized.)  —Linnaeus

ArmerinabikiniIt is ninety-nine degrees in New York today—welcome back to yet another summer. This means, dear reader, that unless you are reading this in the southern hemisphere’s fine winter, or from the lofty alpine altitude of a mountaintop, or from some summery yet climatically kinder seaside, your sweat glands are working as hard as mine. The ninety-nine is, of course, Fahrenheit; although the city’s balmy streets feel as though they’re boiling, we have about 113 degrees to go for that to actually happen. In any case, this tropical weather has me operating on tropical time—that is, a bit more s l  o   w    l     y. Yet time and the measure of its passage, much like the Fahrenheit scale, often seem to follow some arbitrary measure—sure, sexagesimal for minutes and anything larger, decimal for anything under a second, now that’s consistent—so we go on as we always do, perhaps in slightly skimpier clothing.

It is in weather like this that I become aware of Mother Nature asserting herself. We can hide in the cool breeze of air conditioners, but they only spew more hot air onto the streets. Also, it’s never very cool to see the electric bill jump a decimal point or so in the sunny season, unless our excesses lead to a 2003blackout_before blackout—an unbelievably cool reminder of what luxury we normally live in, and how divorced we are from the world around us. But getting back to heat and the arbitrary nature of its measurement, there is a more ordered system (found, naturally, outside U.S. borders): ninety-nine Fahrenheit is equivalent to thirty-seven centigrade or Celsius. These two systems are generally considered interchangeable, but in their difference lies my interest: both have a tidy base unit of ten,2003blackout_after but whereas the former name hinges upon its two fixed points (0 and 100, hence centigrade), the latter is named for an individual. Eighteenth-century Swedish scientist Anders Celsius left his name to the system he’d created for use in his own laboratory and observations, with boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. Yet another eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, Celsius’s colleague Carl Linnaeus, switched that system on its head, creating the system we now use. It may be sheer coincidence that one man helped give us both the world’s most widely used thermometer and the highly elegant system of binomial nomenclature; coincidence or not, it’s certainly convenient for me, because the heat that so upsets my own physiology proves a boon to that of my plants, bringing us back to these cyclical seasons, degrees of coolness and warmth, states of decay and growth.

Last summer I was surprised to learn that Linnaeus himself had laid the groundwork for the botanic gardens in Palermo, which were quite dusty on the dry July day I visited. Today, I just returned from my third visit to a much greener earthly paradise, a rural garden created by some delightfullImg_0185y eccentric family members of mine. Begun just over a year ago, this work-in-progress is now well underway, and the tree-room they’ve built is not only visually striking, but is also much cooler than any of my rooms at the moment. Right before leaving I made sure to water my own little urban garden, spread across several sills in my apartment, and crossed my fingers that it would survive my short absence (so as not to disturb friends or neighbors with the hassles of tending to my precious potted pets, a ritual that includes the arts of song and conversation). As I walked in this morning, everyone seemed to have flourished despite, or perhaps because of the neglect—parsley, sage, rosemary, two types of thyme, a mixture of various mints, an azalea, and a veteran jasmine who’s seen tough times yet still sends out flowering shoots of delightfully white, perfumed blossoms. My humble apartment garden is almost the antithesis of the one I enjoyed this weekend, and the backyard gardens my grandparents and parents cultivated falls somewhere in between, though decidedly on the more utilitarian end of the spectrum. Seeing both the growth spurt in my city garden and the remarkable transformations in the country garden since my last visit, the hot spell became instantly more tolerable. Picking up the sweet jasmine blossoms that had casImg_0196caded to the floor while I was out, and seeing how their snowy white had turned to a less lively yet more stable brown, I realized that color was one of the many characteristic browns I’d seen between the pages of botanist Ulisse Aldovrandi’s herbarium a couple of years ago when doing some research at the University of Bologna. Perhaps it was the humid heat having its way with me, but I began to think—what if one were to gather all the world’s herbaria; could its countless browns be categorized by area or period, or would there be a family of browns common to them all? Would the resplendent greens of a boxwood in Michigan collected in 2008 dry to the same browns of a boxwood in Milan collected at the height of its verdant life in 1608? Scientifically speaking, these are frivolous questions, as I’m sure that each naturalist collecting plants along her travels, looking back over the accumulations after time has sapped each specimen’s color, naturally sees them in their original splendor. Aesthetically speaking, however, the answers could be quite curious. And we’re back to Linnaeus, whose herbarium, much more recent than Aldovrandi’s, gives us a glimpse into the mind and eye of one of botany’s greats.

Theleafnyt I’ll save my musings on the history of ecology for a later column, and will briefly focus instead on these potentially tenuous aesthetic connections. In their early twenties, Simon and Garfunkel were already wise enough to note that all “leaves that are green turn to brown.” Indeed. Earlier this spring, in mid-April and just before the major art auctions, I caught a striking, deep brown image of a single leaf in a New York Times article; it was a “photogenic drawing,” a proto-photogram about to go to auction. The image was believed to have been produced around 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot, and had been brought to an expert in the history of photography for confirmation and a potential poetic blurb in the auction catalogue. The expert’s reply that it was certainly no Talbot, but may date back to the 1790s, making it one of the oldest photographic images in existence, caused quite a stir and may eventually lead to research that remaps the history of photography. All that, from someone’s simple impulse to make a sunprint with what was probably the closest and most obvious object close at hand: a leaf.
    So the outline of a leaf that lived over two centuries ago was captured in a brownish light-sensitive emulsion quite close to the tone of its predecessors, actual leaves pressed between the paper leaves of volumes upon volumes of botanical matter now housed in archives throughout the new- and old world. Both have survived the heat of hundreds of summers, and float into our air-conditioned, digital-driven, image-laden times like deciduous gems falling to a cool forest floor to nurture the next wave of life.

Lavaver1Mentvir1 Ocimbas1

Monday Poems

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Backyard Haiku
Jim Culleny

Damn!
under a flat rock
the chipmunk, scooting, is gone
the cat’s tail twitches.

Politics
before time runs out
it’s important to breathe free
at least once, no less.

Suddeness
A cat waits under
the wisteria, so cool.
A bird flies too low.

Chiminea
here’s the fire, red in
the chiminea, flaming
in fall before snow.

Emissions
it’s snowblower time
yellow overalls appear
exhaust and white plumes

Sleepwalking
Sleep is hard to find
when, looking back, you see you’ve
never been awake.

///

Monday, June 2, 2008

Whose Incentives , Whose Rights?: ‘Incentivizing’ the Poor

Michael Blim

America can’t be all one thing. Or rather it is a contradictory thing, swerving almost every two generations – and sometimes within generations – between expanding equal opportunity and equal protections under the law to punishing people who are failing a course in the American Dream. The rights of those who are failing become fungible: they are transmuted into cudgels with which we punish them for precisely their inability to exercise their rights to self-determination, personhood and the pathways to their own destinies.

We still live in the punishment age. Since how the poor, a social description that connotes failure from the start, live is the cause of their downfall, they must be re-directed. So, for instance, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act, the new welfare system that took effect in 1997, eliminated subsistence support for the poor by virtue of their poverty and replaced it with a law that limited benefits by time and effort. No adults are eligible for welfare payments for more than 5 years during the course of their lifetime, nor will they receive further benefits if they did not seek a job and/or were not job ready within two years of assistance. After the two years, they must be employed for at least 30 hours a week or lose benefits.

Some would say that since rights imply duties It is also true that the failure to fulfill duties annuls or diminishes people’s rights. If the poor don’t live up to their duties as American citizens, then they forfeit some measure of their rights. Or at least those rights can be held in abeyance until they successfully exercise their duties.

There is an apparent paradox here. If people lack resources, then they can neither fulfill their duties nor exercise their rights. Thus, the first problem we have discovered is that both rights and duties depend upon resources. You need them to achieve both rights and duties. Though I will not prove it here today, the resources provided to the poor, for instance, seldom reach the level that average Americans use to procure a modest living, and to fulfill the contract of rights for duties fulfilled. This is intentional, as promoters of orthodox economics tell us that the rest of society’s workers will not work, or their efforts will slack off because they have no monetary incentive to work harder.

I am going to set aside what I think is another telling criticism of our welfare policy that absent full funding of what persons in America normally need to succeed, poor people will never fulfill their duties, and thus their rights will likely remained highly conditional, and in significant ways diminished.

Another approach is on the rise. Providing the poor with incentives to change, it is proposed, could work better than punishment. Financial incentives are being proposed as the carrots whereby we can get the poor to fulfill their duties and help them earn back their rights. It works like this, for example: if we provide a poor mother with money for keeping her child in school, then the child is likely to stay in school. This way we can achieve two things: first, more schooling should improve a child’s life chances; and two, the mother receives additional monies to improve the life circumstances of her family.

Christopher Grimes in a recent Financial Times article (May 24-25, 2008) reports on an experimental program begun in New York City by the Michael Bloomberg administration to try out this approach with 2500 poor families in six poor neighborhoods of the city. The city will provide money incentives for 60 behaviors that it believes might bring positive changes in behavioral patterns of the poor families. The behaviors to be rewarded, according to the website of agency administering the project Opportunity NYC include:

·         $25 when parents attend teacher conferences

·         $600 for students who perform well on important exams, and smaller amounts for improving grades

·         $200 for getting a medical check-up

·         A financial reward for enrolling in health insurance

·         $100 for preventive medicinal and dental check-ups

·         A financial reward for improving credit scores

·         $150 a month for full-time employment

The short-term goals are to alleviate poverty, improve the health and education status of children, as well as improve “workforce outcomes” for adults. The long-term goal is to reduce intergenerational poverty.

These are indisputably noble goals. Through incentives, social planners hope to achieve what compulsion apparently is not. According to Christopher Grimes’ report, Mayor Bloomberg uses the analogy that Wall Street bankers work harder because they get a year-end bonus for success, rather than simply an their ample salaries. “That’s capitalism, and it shouldn’t be a foreign concept to government.” Grimes also notes that American policy planners learned from the social welfare policies of countries such as Mexico, which I have noted in other columns include micro-lending to support business development by the poor.

This approach is an important step toward eliminating in part through incentives the compulsory punishments now installed in our national welfare system. The rewards may be varied and complex but the principle is simple. It is behaviorist: behavioral patterns are achieved and maintained by the consequences that befall actors performing the desired behaviors.

But the incentive approach raises an important moral question. Whose rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being rewarded? Are they those of the poor, the actors in this social experiment? It may not be theirs. What moral choices can they exercise? They are those of America’s apparent majority, assuming that the political apparatus fairly represents majority opinion.

Another moral choice returns us again to the dilemma between rights and punishments for economic and social failure. In exchange for some social attention to their needs – in no way satisfied by programs of this sort as people do not achieve with inadequate incomes that support the standard of living of the average American that seem to go some way to satisfying their needs – have incentives become another means to compulsion?

If so, we are still failing to help people exercise their rights and punishing them when the lack of resources prevents them from their enjoyment. Policies imply moral decisions no less than pragmatic policy concerns. Above all, this American failing is what continues to stand in the way of our pursuit of happiness.

Militarization of Space: Czech Hunger Strike Encompasses more than Radar

773pxis_anti_satellite_weaponThe U.S. government, in collaboration with the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic, is very close to sealing a deal for a “defensive missile shield.” According to the plan initiated by the U.S., ten GMD-variant interceptor missiles will be located in Poland, and an X-band radar will be located in the Czech Republic, 55 miles southwest of the capital of Prague. But there is a catch.

In April, an opinion poll showed that two-thirds of Czechs were against the U.S. missile shield plans. Two Czech protesters, Jan Tamas and Jan Bednar, have gone on a hunger strike that has now entered the fourth week. Bednar has been hospitalized once and diagnosed with liver failure. Still, both activists continue the nonviolent protest demanding that the voices of Czech citizens be heard. (June 2 they are expected to announce a chain hunger strike following negotiations with a supporting politician, Head of the Social Democrat senators Alena Gajduskova, who has volunteered to participate.)

Tamas and Bednar occupy a storefront operation in the center of Prague where e-mails and visitations continue on a daily basis. An online petition has garnered over 107,554 signatures from around the globe.1 They will stop the hunger strike when four simple requests have been met: 1) radar base negotiations with the U.S. should be interrupted for one year; 2) the E.U. should issue an official stance on the proposed missile shield; 3) a Czech parliament session should convene around this issue; and 4) a televized discussion of the radar base with four opponents and four supporters of the plan should be organized.

On May 21, the government approved the plans though the basic document has yet to be ratified by parliament and signed by President Vaclav Klaus; the Czech-U.S. treaties are to be signed by July. At this crucial junction, Tamas and Bednar hold out for democracy. They are not alone.

On May 5, an estimated gathering of 1,500 protesters assembled in Prague, marching to the Government Office. Some participants carried banners that read “No to American radar colonization,” and “Say No to radar.”

In April, Greenpeace protesters set up a tent city, referred to as “Spot Height 718,” at the exact location of the proposed radar site in the Brdy forest. They have erected an overhead banner with an image of a large target.

Tamas and his group, the No to Bases initiative, proceeds simplistically and with straight forward demands. Yet what this protest represents is very complex. It is a situation has been upon the human race since the the dropping of the first atomic bomb. We have returned to the scene in history in 1983 where President Ronald Reagan first uttered the words, “Star Wars,” in the world arena.
According to a recent report in Ethics & International Affairs written by Philip Coyle and Victoria Samson, there is one glaring problem, among many, with the proposed missile defense systems: “tests have failed roughly half the time.” 2

Coyle and Samson’s report, “Missile Defense Malfunction: Why the Proposed U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe Will Not Work,” is both a explanation of technical and diplomatic failures. One can extrapolate from its contents that the urgency on the part of the U.S. to establish a missile defense in Europe before the current administration is out of office is predicated on political posturing–with a big emphasis on Iran. The report is clear in enumerating what has been lost so far in the arms race and the militarization of space and why the world has been placed on a precipice of untold consequences by virtue of this unilateral push to locate missiles in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic.

In summary:

Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Signed by Presidents Bush and Putin on May 2002. The present proposal is in direct violation of the treaty which calls for joint research and development between the U.S. and Russia on missile defense for Europe.

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. U.S. unilaterally withdrew from treaty in 2002. The treaty had been signed in 1972 by U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. Russia is no longer abiding by the treaty as of December 2007, citing as partial reasons, the U.S. missile defense plans for Europe.3

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Russia’s threat to pull out of the 1997 INF Treaty is exacerbated by the proposed U.S. missile defense. (The treaty bans a wide range of ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles.)

The tenuous relationship between the U.S. and Russia over the proposed European missile shield, located in Poland and the Czech Republic, stands to jeopardize a whole host of established treaties as well as block much needed future treaties in regard to the militarization/weaponization of space.
If this plan is a U.S.-centric geopolitical strategy aimed at threatening Iran (with a system that does not work consistently against intercontinental ballistic missiles that Iran doesn’t have), what is possibly gained? At this point in time, it is perhaps more worthwhile contemplating what could be lost.

The foremost treaty among all, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is put in considerable risk by tensions between the U.S. and Russia. It is possible that Russia would be the strongest negotiator in regard to Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. 4

Tamas and Bednar are making simple requests that may seem unachievable but there is recent precedent. In 2004, the Canadian government declared it would not join the Pentagon’s missile defense program though it continues in its capacity as a partner in the the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

According to Coyle and Samson: “Canada understood correctly that U.S. missile defenses represent the first wave in which the United States could introduce attack weapons into space—that is, weapons with strike capability. While the militarization of space is already a fact of life—the U.S. military relies on space satellites for military communications, for reconnaissance and sensing, for weather, and for targeting—the weaponization of space has not happened: there are no strike weapons deployed in space.”

While it would be irrational to think that the geopolitical strategizing of superpowers will diminish in favor of the greater good any time soon, citizens compelled to take nonviolent action wherever they may be and in whatever ways they can, offers hope on incalculable levels.

Notes:

1. No Star Wars online petition
2. Philip Coyle and Victoria Samson, “Missile Defense Malfunction: Why the Proposed U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe Will Not Work,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 22.1, 23 April 2008, http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/22_1/special_report/001.html
3. see international appeal to “Bring the CFE Treaty into Force,” under “Appeals on Preserving the CFE Treaty,” Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, http://www.pugwash.org/
4. “Russia ships nuclear fuel to Iran,” BBC, 17 December 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7147463.stm
; see also George Monbiot, “The Treaty Wreckers,” The Guardian, 2 August 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/aug/02/foreignpolicy.politicalcolumnists

Laray Polk lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at [email protected]

Monday Poem

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Everybody Loves Their Tool
Jim Culleny

Word has it that
in the beginning was the wordImage_unniverse_wrench
and that may be true but
(just as a matter of shameless self-promotion),
it’s clear that opener was written by a bard

If the same thought had sprung from a painter
it would have read:
In the beginning was the line or stroke,
or the brush tool of Photoshop

A mechanic would have said
the first efflorescence was a wrench.
And no doubt, a politician would have sworn
the universe had flowered from a lie

Everybody loves their tool

In any case that phrase was not written by God
for whom beginnings are practical figments of our imaginations
along with their anticipated ends

So, Death, be not smug

///

Monday, May 26, 2008

The Invention of Race

Justin E. H. Smith

White2 *

Works consulted for this essay:

Robert Bernasconi (Ed.), Race (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

Emmanuel Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).

Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729 (Austin, Texas, 1967).

Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

William Poole, “Seventeenth-century Preadamism, and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” The Seventeenth Century 19 (2004), pp. 1-35.

Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987).

*

We tend to imagine that our racial classifications map onto natural kinds in the world, that in carving humanity up into ‘Caucasoid’, ‘Negroid’, etc., we are, so to speak, carving nature at its joints. In fact, these categories are recent inventions.

In an important sense it is the 17th-century French writer François Bernier who may be considered the founder of the modern science of race.  He is the first to use the term ‘race’ to designate different groups of humans with shared, distinguishing traits.  He describes his innovation in the Journal des Sçavans of 1684 as follows: “So far, Geographers did not use any other criterion when mapping out the earth but that of the different countries or regions to be found on it.  What I noticed in men in the course of my long and frequent travels gave me the idea to divide the Earth otherwise.” 

Bernier identifies “four or five Species or Races of men.”  The first, he says, “includes France and generally all of Europe, except a part of Russia.  A small part of Africa, from the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, to the Nile; as well as an important part of Asia, namely the Empire of the ‘Grand Turk’ with the three Arabias, all of Persia, the States of the Great Mogul… may be included in the first Species.”  In contrast, Bernier identifies sub-Saharan Africa as inhabited by a different race or species: “I regard the whole African continent except the North African coast as previously described as the second Species.”  Significantly, he does not see Native Americans, in contrast with Africans, as sufficiently different to warrant placing them in a distinct race: “As for Americans, in fact most of them have an olive complexion and their features differ from ours, but not enough to justify their belonging in a different species.”

The third ‘species’ for Bernier are ‘Asians’, which includes for him the inhabitants of “part of the kingdoms of Aracan and Siam, Sumatra and Borneo, the Philippines, Japan, China, Georgia and Muscovy, the Usbek, Turkistan, Zaquetay, a small part of Muscovy”; and finally the fourth species are the Saami or Lapps, about whom he writes they are “very ugly and partaking much of the bear.”  He acknowledges: “I have only seen two of them at Dantzic; but, judging from the pictures I have seen, and the account which I have received of them from many persons who have been in the country, they are wretched animals.”  The ranking of Lapps at the bottom of the scale of humanity would remain a commonplace throughout the 18th century, in Buffon, Maupertuis, Kant, and others. 

What, though, did Bernier mean by ‘species’?  Surely he could not have intended the meaning commonly attached to this term today, namely, that each race is an isolated reproductive group, for he was as aware of the possibility of ‘miscegenation’ as his contemporaries.  Though Bernier himself was not a defender of the doctrine, some of his contemporaries would come to hold the view that different races constitute different ‘species’ in the sense that, while capable of yielding offspring, they nonetheless had separate creations and, therefore, arose from separate lines of descent. 

While it was, for theological reasons, imperative to deny that there could be shared lineage between humans and apes, it was equally imperative for the same reasons to insist upon the shared lineage of all humans.  But just as new evidence, resulting from increased exposure to the world beyond Europe forced European science to contend with the possibility that humans are in fact but another species of primate, it also inspired many thinkers to reconsider the biblical account of all humanity as traceable back to the same shared ancestors.  Both the global extremities at which human beings were found, as well, likely, as the immense cultural and physical difference between the various groups, stimulated a reconsideration of the old Augustinian commitment to a monogenetic account of human ancestry.

If one is an evolutionist, and accepts that there have been hundreds of thousands of years for different ethnic groups to emerge and to spread about the globe, the monogenetic hypothesis is not hard to maintain.  The same is true if, conversely, one believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, but is operating with a geographical scope that does not extend much beyond one’s own region.  But for creationists in the 17th century, monogenesis effectively required that the new anthropological data from around the globe be somehow rendered compatible with the view that all human beings are descended from two ancestors, presumed to have lived somewhere in the Near East roughly six thousand years before the era of the scientific revolution.

Fortunately, there were rich conceptual resources that far predated the modern period available to those who sought to argue that all humans descend from the ancestors identified in the Hebrew bible.  Some in the 17th century continued to be influenced by the tradition of prisca theologia, a vestige of Renaissance humanism according to which all wisdom must flow from the same source, namely, the prophets of the Old Testament, who eventually passed it on to the Greek philosophers.  Because the events of the Gospels were prefigured or intimated by way of typologies in the Old Testament, moreover, it was often thought that the Hebrew prophets were able to share in the good news of the New Testament, and in this way Judaism was effectively elided with Christianity.  As an apologetic project, this tradition effectively baptized any would-be pagan or infidel one might wish to admire or emulate by positing a hidden connection to revealed truth. Many in the 17th century who did not subscribe explicitly to this doctrine nonetheless believed that in some way or other different intellectual traditions are all, in the end, informed by the same truth.

Separate origins for different human groups, in contrast, would threaten both the moral and the intellectual status of the group that is presumed to have a separate creation.  Because it is the man of the bible who is created in the image of God, if men on the other side of the world had a separate creation, then they could not but be seen as unequal, in terms of relative likeness to God, to those in the Christian world.  And thus monogenesis ensures both the appropriateness of missionary work at all corners of the globe, as well, at least from the point of view of the missionaries, as the full equality –again, in terms of relative proximity to God– of all ethnic groups.  In the 17th century, to deny the shared origins of all ethnic groups was to deny the universality of scripture, and was thus heretical.  Thus, for example, in 1616 Lucilio Vanini denounces the “atheists” who believe that Ethiopians, unlike other ethnic groups, are descended from monkeys.

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White2a If there were some suggestions of separate origins for human beings, this is not necessarily because Native Americans or Africans were perceived to be sub-human (which, for the most part, in the 17th century they were not, in so far as they were all seen as equally worthy of salvation), but also because accumulating evidence made it increasingly difficult to account for (i) the dispersion of people so far from the Near Eastern region presumed to have hosted the original Garden of Eden; (ii) the evident fact that a number of pagan civilizations –notably, the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, and now the Aztecs– had records extending back well before the 6000 years presumed to have elapsed since the creation; and (iii) finally, the tremendous differences in physical traits of human beings from different parts of the world.  If one did not believe—as many did not—that environments could transform organisms, then it was difficult to see why people in all parts of the world did not look like those in the Near East.  And if one did believe that environments could transform organisms, then it still seemed implausible that the tremendous diversity of human types could have emerged so quickly following the dispersion of people to different parts of the globe– a dispersion that would have come some time after the original creation. 

The evident difficulty of accounting for the emergence of such tremendous differences between various human groups in the very short amount of time thought to have elapsed since Adam and Eve caused some to argue that human beings had in fact existed before the first parents, and that some current humans are descended from these ‘pre-Adamites’.  Isaac La Peyrère argued for this position in his Prae-Adamitae of 1655, though within a year of publication he was forced to recant.  In this work, La Peyrère cites Romans (5:12-14) as support for the Pre-Adamite hypothesis, which holds that until “the time of Law sin was in the world,” i.e., that there were sinful people until, with Adam, law came into the world.  The author was pressured into retracting the views exposited in this work, but not soon enough to prevent his argument from making a profound impact.  William Poole notes that there were at least a dozen important treatises in the latter half of the 17th century seeking to refute La Peyrère’s thesis.   Matthew Hale, in his 1677 work The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature, treats La Peyrère’s hypothesis critically, yet far from dismissively.  Still another important refutation is Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae of 1661.

Richard Popkin writes that “[p]ractically nobody in the seventeenth century was willing, publicly, to accept the pre-Adamite theory or any form of polygenesis.  The irreligious implications were too great for the theory to be given much credence prior to the Enlightenment… The explanatory value of a polygenetic theory was great, but the danger of holding to it was, perhaps, greater.”   The circles in which the theory came up in the 17th century indicate just how marginal it remained: either it was picked up by a very radical religious sect, such as the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Diggers; or it was propagated in anonymous, semi-anonymous, or pseudonymous literature. Poole, in contrast with Popkin, identifies a number of different sources of 17th-century pre-Adamism, not all of which were anonymous.  Paracelsus is sometimes cited as the first to propose that Native Americans could not have descended from Adam.  He observes that “we are all descended from Adam.  And I cannot refrain from making a brief mention of those who have been found in hidden Islands and are still little known.  To believe they have descended from Adam is difficult to conceive– that Adam’s children have gone to the hidden islands.  But one should well consider, that these people are from a different Adam.  It will be difficult to maintain, that they are related on the basis of flesh and blood.”   It is thus credible that they “were born there after the Deluge,” and also that “they have no souls.”  Giordano Bruno too suggests that denying that Native Americans have souls would be one way of accommodating new evidence (e.g., from the Aztec calendar, from Chaldaean and Egyptian astrology) for the great length of time people had been in the New World, while at the same time adhering to the biblical chronology of descent from Adam. 

Thomas Herbert writes in 1638 of the problematic antiquity of Chinese history: “They say the World is aboue a hundred thousand yeares old after their Chronologies, and accordingly deriue a Pedigree and tell of wonders done ninetie thousand yeares before Adams creation.”  As Poole notes, it was the Jesuit Martino Martini’s Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima of 1658 that called attention to Chinese chronology’s incompatibility with that of the Old Testament,  and on this basis explicitly to question Biblical universality.  Martini asserts: “I hold it as certain that the extremity of Asia was populated before the flood.”  Francis Lodwick, to cite just one more example, in his essay on the “Originall of Mankind,” also provides reasons for the pre-Adamite thesis based in anthropological and linguistic, as opposed to historical and scriptural evidence: namely, what he takes to be the fundamental difference between Africans and Europeans, and the improbability of migration of one ethnic group into a habitat to which it is not suited.  He also speculates that if all groups were descended from the same two parents, their languages would have some common features, which he does not take to be the case.

What has not been emphasized in most discussions of pre-Adamism is evidence of the sort that Lodwick adduces– from the observation of different human groups, rather than the much more common evidence from biblical hermeneutics and from the encounter with non-European chronologies.   But the more evidence that was adduced that would seem to militate in favor of it, the more environmental adaptation, and rapid adaptation at that, needed to be adduced in order to account for the emergence of human variety within the short period of time that had elapsed since Adam.  In order for the case for separate creations to be effectively laid to rest, the possibility of rapid mutation as a result of migration into new environments had to be defended.

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Of course, environmental influence on moral and physical character is not entirely new in the modern period.  As early as Hippocrates ideas about the environment’s role in human variation. He gives, for example, a lengthy account of differences in skin pigmentation and moral temperament in different parts of the world, describing the differences between Asians and Europeans in a manner favorable to the former.  Asians are gentle, Europeans bellicose (the exact opposite of the early modern stereotype), and this because of the way each group is influenced by climate and wind. 

Nicolas Malebranche, writing in the 1670s, thinks that the different qualities of air in different places bring about differences in natural character.  He notes that “it is certain that the most refined air particles we breathe enter our hearts,” and believes that this process is corroborated empirically from our daily observation of the “various humors and mental characteristics of persons of different countries.  The Gascons, for example, have a much more lively imagination than the Normans.  The people of Rouen, Dieppe, and Picardy, are all different from each other: and they all differ even more from the Low Normans, although they are all quite similar to one another.  But if we consider the people of more remote lands, we shall encounter even stranger differences, as between an Italian and a Fleming or a Dutchman.” 

But what happens when human beings begin, in massive numbers, to abandon the places to which they are ‘assigned’ for other climes?  In ancient accounts of racial difference, when this difference is conceived as having a history it is generally one of mythological character, involving a curse or a cataclysm that brought about the difference. Thus the scorching of Africans –a one-time event, generally associated with a curse or misfortune, as in the Old Testament myth of the curse of Ham,  or the Greek myth of Phaeton, who rode his burning chariot too close to the surface of the earth– is communicated to future generations, perhaps by some physically comprehensible channel, but what is emphasized is the miasmic and dynastic character of the differentiating traits.  If similitude for the ancients is accounted for in terms of intelligent design, difference within a species is generally written off to cataclysm or curse. This view, we should note, is very different from full-fledged modern scientific racism, which takes it that differences between ethnic groups are, somehow, rooted in essential differences that are not susceptible to environmental influence. Joseph Chamberlain gives a very pure statement of the view in the 19th century: “I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, so tenacious, self-confident and determined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilisation.”

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While this short outline of some of the developments in early modern ethnography is too preliminary to draw any general conclusions about intellectual trends in thinking about human difference in the period, we may nonetheless draw some tentative conclusions.  The reflections of thinkers as diverse as Edward Tyson, John Wallis, John Locke, and Malebranche suggest that a view of the relationship of the influence of the environment on human variation is beginning to emerge in the late 17th century that emphasizes: (i) The demise of cataclysmic accounts of diversification.  Environmental influence would begin to be seen as ongoing; it would be widely believed that human beings –and, most relevantly, Europeans– could be transformed through transplantation into new environments.  In the 17th century, the cataclysmic account begins to give way to a more naturalized picture of similitude and variation within a species. With the shift from a conception of cataclysmic change to one of ongoing change, we also observe a shift, broadly speaking, from a mythical conception of origins to a truly historical one.  (ii) A conception of the different traits of different ethnic groups as truly adaptive rather than degenerative, that is, as serving some genuine purpose under particular environmental circumstances, rather than resulting from the harmful effects of a ‘savage’ lifestyle, e.g., exposing one’s flesh to the elements rather than wearing clothes.   

At the same time, of course, there was the trend in thinking about human variation that may be seen as extending from Bernier through Chamberlain that emphasizes the fundamental or essential difference between different human groups and that, while certainly not denying the possibility of cross-group reproduction (and thus not denying that Europeans and Africans belong to the same ‘species’ in today’s sense), nonetheless would see this as somehow against nature’s grain, since nature has humanity carved up into real and neatly bounded races.  One of the great ironies of early modern ethnography is that it was the religious and creationist world-view that spoke in favor of common origins for all humanity, while the abandonment of the need to interpret human diversity in scriptural terms easily led to polygenesis. 

Polygenesis, and the corollary belief in the essential difference between different groups, would enjoy its most widespread success in the context of 19th century slavery and the hardening of a global institution that relied on racism for its legitimacy, and would present itself as the account of human origins most in keeping with the best scientific evidence.  The fact that this account of human diversity remains controversial in the 17th century may be traced in part to the enduring imperative in the period to stay faithful in speaking of origins to the inherited scriptural account.

There has likely always been some conception of the way in which organisms fit their environment, whether this fit is seen as one fixed from time immemorial by God for each organism in the place ‘appropriate’ to it, or whether this is conceived as a gradual change in the organism to better accommodate the vicissitudes of its habitat.  For the most part, the latter view prevails prior to the early modern period.  Nowhere does Hippocrates say that the people who are now Europeans arrived in Europe and became bellicose as a result of environmental conditions; he only says that Europeans are bellicose.  It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the new concern with change over time as a result of change of habitat, whether this is conceived as adaptation or as generation, was a response to the increasing dispersion of Europeans throughout the globe in the early modern period, and to the increasing concern about the long term effects on European populations of this dispersion.  Racial essentialism may, in turn, be seen as a way of securing the stability of the population through change in habitat by positing traits that are, somehow, resistant to any environmental influence.   

The claim that there are separate lines of descent for different human groups was perceived as heretical and atheistic in the 17th century, while a shared line of descent for different but related species was likewise perceived as heretical and atheistic.  In both cases, moreover, the denunciation of these views serves as a clear indication of their growing importance in the 17th century.  As with atheism itself, there are vastly more denouncers than defenders, and we have to wait until the following century to find the ideas being defended for the first time as serious hypotheses.  One might almost conclude that denunciations of ideas function in history as anticipations of these ideas’ ascendancy.

The view the denouncers were looking to secure was precisely that all and only human beings are related to other human beings.  Corollaries of this view are that all and only human beings are the earthly likeness of God, are capable of salvation and damnation, and are capable of higher cognition and moral agency.  But scientific evidence appeared to be mounting against this exclusive position of human beings in nature.  By the 18th century, ironically, at the same time as species boundaries were becoming more fluid with the rise of pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought, ‘racial’ boundaries were becoming more rigid.  Mainstream 17th-century thought, while largely failing or refusing to acknowledge the kinship of humans and apes, was certainly more clear-sighted about the kinship of humans to one another than much purportedly scientific thought of the following two and a half centuries would be. 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.