“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”*…
… and to the extent that we care about our democracy, that’s an issue.
In an article based on his recent Sakurada-Kai Foundation Oxbridge Lecture at Keio University, Tokyo, John Dunn argues that our democracies depend on our picking up the pace of learning. The abstract:
There cannot be a coherent democratic theory because democracy is not a determinate topic. Representative democracy is a relatively modern regime form. It now needs rehabilitation because so many instances have performed poorly for so long. Representative democracy is now also an aging regime. As a type of state, it is subject to the territorial contentiousness and contested legitimacy of any state. It claims its legitimacy from iterative popular choice, but the plausibility of that claim is increasingly strained by the drastic disparities in life chances reproduced through the property systems it protects. The inherent difficulty for citizens to judge how to advance their collective interests is aggravated by the recent transformation of the information economy. In the cumulative damage inflicted by climate change it faces a deadlier peril than any previous regime and one which only a citizenry that can enlighten itself in time can reasonably hope to nerve itself to meet…
There follows a fascinating– and provocative– elaboration of this thesis in which Dunn considers the history of democracy and the alternatives with which it has, since its inception, vied. He concludes in a bracing fashion…
… The varieties of autocracy which will be on offer wherever the rest of the world has the opportunity to take them up will be without exception the reverse of enlightened – instrumentally and compulsively bound to the extremes of obscurantism, Darkness as a full-on fideist commitment, deliberate self-blinding as a navigational strategy. Move fast, break lots, and never pause to inspect the wreckage.
Representative democracy has recently proved itself a poor structure for collective enlightenment, but the case for it depends on its at least not precluding that, its being still open to making the attempt, and responding to what it can contrive to learn. The most optimistic vision of democracy in action has always seen it as an opportunity for collective self-education on the content of shared goods and the means to achieve them. If that is scarcely a realist picture of what it has ever been, at least it is an image of the right shape. It is too late to ask who will educate the educators. At this point we must educate ourselves together and heed the lessons of that education or we must and will die – not just each of us one by one, as we were always fated to do, but soon enough all of us and for ever…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Can Democracy be Rehabilitated?“
Apposite: “How American Democracy Fell So Far Behind,” from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (gift article– and source of the image above)
* Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
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As we devote ourselves to democracy, we might spare a thought for Ludwig van Beethoven; he died on this date in 1827. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 concertos for piano, 32 piano sonatas, and 16 string quartets. He also composed other chamber music, choral works (including the celebrated Missa Solemnis), a single opera (Fidelio), and numerous songs.
Relevantly to the piece above…
Beethoven admired the ideals of the French Revolution, so he dedicated his third symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte… until Napoleon declared himself emperor. Beethoven then sprung into a rage, ripped the front page from his manuscript and scrubbed out Napoleon’s name…
Beethoven’s temper and Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’
“It’s the bell curve again”*…
Joseph Howlett on how the central limit theorem, which started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers, became something on which scientists rely every day…
No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.
Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.
Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?
The answer boils down to the central limit theorem, a mathematical truth so powerful that it often strikes newcomers as impossible, like a magic trick of nature. “The central limit theorem is pretty amazing because it is so unintuitive and surprising,” said Daniela Witten, a biostatistician at the University of Washington. Through it, the most random, unimaginable chaos can lead to striking predictability.
It’s now a pillar on which much of modern empirical science rests. Almost every time a scientist uses measurements to infer something about the world, the central limit theorem is buried somewhere in the methods. Without it, it would be hard for science to say anything, with any confidence, about anything.
“I don’t think the field of statistics would exist without the central limit theorem,” said Larry Wasserman, a statistician at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s everything.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the push to find regularity in randomness came from the study of gambling…
Read on for the fascinating story of: “The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
Howlett concludes by observing that “The central limit theorem is a pillar of modern science, ultimately, because it’s a pillar of the world around us. When we combine lots of independent measurements, we get clusters. And if we’re clever enough, we can use those clusters to find out something interesting about the processes that made them”– which follows from the story he shares.
Still, we’d do well to remember that there are limits to its applicability, both descriptively (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, “because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty”) and prescriptively (as Benjamim Bloom argues, “The bell-shaped curve is not sacred. It describes the outcome of a random process. Since education is a purposeful activity….the achievement distribution should be very different from the normal curve if our instruction is effective).
For (much) more, see Peter Bernstein‘s wonderful Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
* Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
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As we noodle on the normal distribution, we might send curve-shattering birthday greetings to Norman Borlaug; he was born on ths date in 1914. An agronomist, he developed and led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the voluminous increases in agricultural production we call “the Green Revolution.” Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal; he’s one of only seven people to have received all three of those awards.
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”
See how the amount donated by Americans to charity per year compares to the size of outstanding student debt. Or how Walmart’s revenue measures up against Elon Musk’s wealth. Or how the U.S. military budget stacks up against China’s… and so much more.
From the estimable David McCandless and his wonderful site Information is Beautiful, an illustration of how expenses and wealth that run to over a billion dollars compare.
Then peruse “$Trillions.”
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As we ponder the pecuniary, we might recall that on this date in 1989, Exxon Valdez, an oil supertanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company, bound for Long Beach, California, struck Prince William Sound‘s Bligh Reef, 6 mi west of Tatitlek, Alaska. The tanker spilled more than 10 million US gallons of crude oil over the next few days.
The Exxon Valdez spill is the second largest in U.S. waters, after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume of oil released. It is the costliest disaster ever with no direct human fatalities. The oil, extracted from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, eventually affected 1,300 miles of coastline, of which 200 miles were heavily or moderately oiled; and it wreaked havoc with the habitats salmon, sea otters, seals, and seabirds in its path.
Exxon spent an estimated $2 billion cleaning up the spill and a further $1 billion to settle related civil and criminal charges. Exxon was also assessed another $2.5 billion in punitive damages in a suit (Exxon v. Baker)… but that was reduced by the Supreme Court to roughly $500 million. Exxon remained hugely profitable– the process of payment was drawn out over decades and long term damage continues and is not funded by Exxon. Hence, the Exxon spill is often cited as shorthand in conversations about corporate responsibility as a case of accountability for societal damage inadequately enforced.
“In comics at their best, words and pictures are like partners in a dance, and each one takes turns leading”*…
In his new book, Lost Literacies: Experiments in the 19th Century US Comic Strip, literary historian Alex Beringer demonstrates how the birth of the genre of printed comic long preceded the Sunday Funny Pages. He elaborates in conversation with Tim Brinkhof, who introduces the colloquy…
Most people consider the introduction of the Funny Pages in the late nineteenth century as the birthday of the “modern” American comic strip. Alex Beringer is not most people.
A literary historian and professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Beringer dates the history of comics earlier, to roughly the mid-1800s, a period of prolific and uninhibited experimentation. He came to this understanding by piecing together the medium’s fractured archaeological record, diving through myriad online resources and archives. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New York-based artists followed the lead of their French and Swiss colleagues, particularly Rodolphe Töpffer, the “Father of the Comic Strip,” exchanging single-image political cartoons and caricatures for multi-panel sequences that, many believe, for the first time enabled them to play around with characterization, worldbuilding, and—well—storytelling.
Coming decades before the standardization of speech bubbles and panel borders, these early American comics seem to have little in common with their modern, more streamlined counterparts; they featured sudden and purposefully jarring jump cuts reminiscent of the yet-to-be-invented film montage or musical notes instead of text. One comic artist tells a story through shadows behind the curtains of a window; another, with hieroglyphs the reader must decipher with the help of a legend.
“The audience for this first wave of US comic strips was strikingly sophisticated in its reception of this material,” Beringer writes in Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip, which chronicles this oft-forgotten renaissance. Out from the Ohio State University Press, the book is one of hundreds of titles included in JSTOR’s Path to Open program, making scholarly books accessible online to wide audiences (read chapter four here, free of charge).
“The sense of flux—the idea that the visual language could turn on a dime—was often precisely the appeal,” Beringer observes in his chronicle of this oft-forgotten renaissance.
Foretelling the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s assertion that drawing is in itself a “form of knowing,” early comic strip artists and their consumers treated the medium as a philosophical exercise; Beringer quotes the observation by media scholars Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda that comics “enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader…to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form.”
While some early American artists blatantly plagiarized illustrations and formats that originated in France and Switzerland, others used them as a springboard, giving European drawings a decidedly American twist. For example, where Töpffer’s character Monsieur Vieux Bois (“Mr. Oldbuck”) satirized the European bourgeoisie, comics featuring his Yankee doppelganger, Jeremiah Oldpot (artist unknown), a New York tin merchant who leaves his family to prospect gold in California, often hinge on what Beringer defines as the contradiction between his “romantic view of himself as a rugged frontiersman and his attachment to consumer goods.”
Beringer discusses this and other critical facets of this period in comics history…
Read on for their fascinating exchange: “Lost Literacies Strips Down the Dawn of Comics,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Scott McCloud, in his wonderful Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
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As we tell and show, we might ponder where all of this has led, recalling that it was on this date in 2007 that the then-latest entry in a comic-born franchise dropped: TMNT, the first animated entry in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film series, was released. The film (which was entirely computer animated), is set after the final defeat of their arch-enemy, the Shredder; the four Turtles — Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo (voiced respectively by James Arnold Taylor, Nolan North, Mitchell Whitfield, and Mikey Kelley) — having grown apart, reunite and overcome their faults to save the world from evil ancient creatures. It also features the voices of Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mako, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart, and Ziyi Zhang, with narration by Laurence Fishburne.
TMNT ranked number one at the box office on its opening weekend, beating 300 (the top film of the previous two weeks), The Last Mimzy, Shooter, Pride, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and Reign Over Me, grossing $25.45 million over the weekend of March 23–25, 2007. That said, the film grossed (only) $95.8 million million worldwide, including $54 million domestically during its 91-day run in the 3,120 North American theaters… as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus read: “TMNT’s art direction is splendid, but the plot is non-existent and the dialogue lacks the irony and goofy wit of the earlier Ninja Turtles movies.”
“What matters to you defines your mattering”*…
Further in a fashion to yesterday’s post, and via the always illuminating Delanceyplace.com, an explication of one of the most fundamental of all human needs: an excerpt from Rebecca Goldstein‘s The Mattering Instinct, in which she draws on one of the fathers of both pragmatism and psychology, William James…
We speak both of what matters and of who matters. In fact, we speak a great deal about both.
Consider what matters. In recent decades, the phrase why X matters has become a template for dozens of book titles, including Why Beauty Matters, Why Emotions Matter, Why Family Matters, Why Genealogy Matters, Why Good Sex Matters, Why Jesus Matters, Why Knowledge Matters, Why Liberalism Matters, Why Money Matters, and Why Stories Matter. The profusion of titles, many of them mutually exclusive–after all, if Jesus matters, then how, too, can money?–testifies to our preoccupation with what matters.
And it’s not only the question of what matters but also of who matters that’s urgent. Consider: In 2013, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black American, was visiting, together with his father, his father’s fiance at her townhouse in a gated community in Florida. While the grownups were out, Trayvon went to a nearby convenience store to get himself some snacks and, on his way back, was shot by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, himself a member of a minority as a Hispanic American. Zimmerman found Trayvon suspicious looking–the boy’s hoodie was prominently mentioned in news stories–and called the police, while he continued to trail the teenager, a course of action ultimately ending in the boy’s death. Trayvon hadn’t been armed. All that was found on him was a bag of Skittles and an iced tea.
After the acquittal of the shooter, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter exploded onto social media. The three-word slogan soon went beyond mere hashtags and placards, following the deaths of two more unarmed Black Americans, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, to become a political movement. Those who opposed Black Lives Matter sometimes offered as rejoinders their own three-word slogans: ‘All Lives Matter,’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ this last referring to police officers. Of course, ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t inconsistent with either ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ since ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t synonymous with ‘Only Black Lives Matter.’ The power and the poignancy of the original slogan lay in its minimalism. But what the battle of the slogans made clear is the potency of the verb to matter, in this instance applied not to the question of what matters but rather who matters.
So what exactly does the verb to matter mean? Here is a quick working definition: To matter is to be deserving of attention. It’s the same whether we are speaking of what matters or who matters. The thing or the person that matters makes a claim on us; at the very least, a claim is made on our attention.
The claim of being deserving of attention may be based on consequences that would ensue from paying attention or not paying attention–as when we ask, say, does voting really matter? We’re asking whether voting makes a difference; and so whether it’s worth our while to pay the attention called for in voting. It’s still the question of being deserving of attention, but what decides the issue is the consequences. In other circumstances, claims of mattering–of being deserving of attention–are independent of considerations of consequences, as when we assert that Black lives matter or that all lives matter. Here it’s intrinsic mattering, having nothing to do with consequences. And what intrinsic mattering comes down to is being deserving of attention. To claim that Black lives matter, as all lives matter, is to make claims regarding the deservingness of attention.
This leaves us with two more terms to explicate: attention and deservingness.
Attention is a mental phenomenon studied by contemporary psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists–in other words, it is a subject for the empirical sciences.
The best definition I know of the phenomenon was given by the philosopher and psychologist William James. Attention, he wrote, is ‘the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts.’ Focalization, concentration of consciousness, are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James implies that attention is something we do. ‘It is the taking possession by the mind.’ The world’s languages agree. In English we pay attention, while in other languages we give, lend, gift, dedicate, sacrifice, prepare, turn, attach, apply, infuse, and arouse our attention. The linguistic formations all imply that there is activity and agency in attention. His definition also makes clear how attention, as an activity, is to be distinguished from the broader notion of consciousness. After all, that confused, dazed, scatterbrained state is a state of consciousness, though the ‘real opposite’ of paying attention.
His definition also entails that attention is limited and selective: withdrawal from some things. Every act of attention is an act of exclusion. In paying attention to something, we are forced to ignore a multitude of other things. And he ties this limitedness and selectivity with attention’s usefulness: in order to deal effectively. Contemporary psychology agrees. Attention’s limitedness and selectivity is crucial to its usefulness and linked to the reason why organisms evolved attention in the first place: to pay attention to changeable things in the organism’s immediate environment that can help or hinder it, nourish or annihilate it. That unpleasant smell, for example, may very well signal toxicity. Note the presence of the word changeable. The function of attention is tied to what is variable, not just to what is relevant to fitness. Oxygen, our heartbeat, gravity, and many other things are vital to our survival, and our unconscious mental processes must take them into account. But they tend to be constant, so there is no need to allocate our limited window of attention to them, unless circumstances alarmingly change.
The agency entailed in the act of paying attention means that we have some control over what we do and don’t pay attention to. You may be unable to remain oblivious to the bad music blasting in your gym or the rank smell seeping into your kitchen–stimuli that are intense or that pop out of your surroundings. But you can decide to pay no attention to, say, gossip or popular culture, social media or your weight. You can decide that they simply don’t matter, which is to say that they’re not deserving of your attention. And this brings us to the second component of the English verb to matter–namely deservingness.
Deservingness introduces an entirely different level of consideration into our preoccupations with mattering. It’s a level that goes beyond the psychological, beyond the empirical altogether. Deservingness draws us into the nonempirical sphere of values and justifications, of oughts and ought-nots. This is the sphere that philosophers call normative, because it invokes norms of justification. The mattering instinct means that we are normative creatures down to our core. We think and act and shape our lives within the sphere of justifications. Instead of calling ourselves Homo sapiens, we might better have christened ourselves Homo justificans.
It’s the presence of deservingness in the concept of mattering that raises us up into an entirely different order of both complexity and perplexedness. The mattering instinct has us straining beyond the empirical for the normative knowledge that eludes us. We are carried over into the sphere of values and justifications without being equipped to see our way through. Here is the epistemic elusiveness that injects the unsubdued doubt–and hence unease–into the heart of what it is to pursue a human life.
We speak both of what matters and of who matters. And behind our preoccupations with both is the most urgent of all our mattering questions, which is voiced in the first person: Do I matter? This is the mother of our mattering questions. Ultimately, we want to know what matters because we desperately want our own lives to be driven by what matters. We want to know who matters because we desperately want to be numbered among the ones who matter.
Self-mattering–feeling ourselves overwhelmingly deserving of our own attention–is baked into our identity. The usefulness of attention, to which William James alluded, is its usefulness to ourselves. So it’s no wonder that the greater part of our attention is given over to ourselves, whether overtly or tacitly. Throughout the enormous complexity of how the mind works, our self-mattering is presumed. And yet, astonishing creatures that we are, we are able, by way of the capacity for self-reflection with which our brains come equipped, to step outside of our self-mattering, which is to step outside ourselves, to pose the mother of all mattering questions…
It’s the deservingness component that separates the mattering for which we long from such empirical psychological states as having confidence or self-esteem. You can go online right now, or schedule a visit to a psychologist, and take a test that measures your confidence or self-esteem. There will be a series of statements to which you respond with the degree of your agreement, such as: I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others. I feel that I have a number of good qualities. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I’m a failure. The test may even provide a numerical score, similar to an IQ test. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, for example, which is one of the most widely used measures of self-esteem and from which I’ve taken the above statements, provides a numerical value from 1 to 30, with any score under 15 indicating low self-esteem. It was none other than William James who first formulated the concept of self-esteem, offering an equation as its definition.
But these assessments of how good you feel about yourself, often in relation to others, aren’t tests of whether you truly, objectively, existentially matter. To figure out that question, the mother of all mattering questions, you can’t take an empirical test. Your self-esteem score, whether high or low, may be grounded in self-delusion, and the mother question is a demand for the answer that lies on the other side of self-delusion. Do I truly and objectively matter? I know that I can’t help feeling that I do, but do I really?
When it comes to our own mattering, we are staunch realists. We don’t want feelings. We want the facts.”…
See also “Why We Need to Feel Like We Matter” (source of the image above)
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As we wonder about worth, we might spare a thought for a man who unquestionably mattered, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; he died on this date in 1832. A poet, playwright, artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and philosopher, he is probably best remembered these days for Faust. But by virtue of the breadth and depth of his work, he is considered “the master spirit of the German people,” and, after Napoleon, the leading figure of his age.
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