Archive for October 2017
“This need for excitement of the will manifests itself very specially in the discovery and support of card-playing, which is quite peculiarly the expression of the miserable side of humanity”*…
The con game and the theatre seem to have so much in common that it is tempting to mistake one for the other; in fact the long anti-theatrical prejudice against actors has much to do with the perception that actors and conmen both disguise their “true” characters and attempt to fool their audiences. Because both the actor and the conman present “lies like truth,” it is not that easy to distinguish between theatre and monte. Some might say the distinction lies in the convention that the theatre audience knows that they are seeing a performance. But if we want to continue to categorize as theatre such enterprises as Augosto Boal’s Invisible Theatre, where the audience never knows that they’ve been part of a theatre experience, then we must abandon that distinction. The con game is different from true theatre in that the con game always sells the promise of profit for the spectator, with no intention of fulfilling that promise. The theatre on the other hand, sells the spectator the promise of entertainment and/or enlightenment, which promise may or may not be fulfilled. Though the con game draws many techniques and structures from the theatre, the con game remains an essentially criminal enterprise. The performance of monte demands of the spectator not willing suspension of disbelief, but unwilling suspension of cash.
Jack Shalom recaps the 1200-year history of Three-Card Monte, and explores the con’s resonance with theater at: “Finding The Red Card: The Performance Of Three-Card Monte.”
(See also “School for Scoundrels ‘Notes on Three-Card Monte’,” from whence the photo above.)
* Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
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As we prepare for a different kind of trick (or treat), we might pause to remember that today is All Saints Eve, or All Hallows Eve… or, as we more commonly know it, Halloween. Many Halloween traditions originated from ancient pagan Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival of Samhain, which was Christianized as Halloween in the eighth century, by Pope Gregory III.
The original reason for disguise on Samhain was to prevent lonely spirits recognizing and snatching one away to their between-the-worlds home; it was an additional bonus that the costumes allowed you to lead a mini-riot without being recognized. The custom of trick-or-treating seems to date to the 19th century in England, when people went house-to-house in costume at Halloween, reciting verses in exchange for food, and sometimes warning of misfortune if they were not welcomed. It seems to have taken off in the U.S in the 1920s. The custom of making jack-o’-lanterns began in Ireland in the 19th century; “turnips or mangel wurzels, hollowed out to act as lanterns and often carved with grotesque faces,” were used at Halloween in parts of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.
Special Halloween bonus: Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success; but it was the fabulously-illustrated final edition of 1863 that secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Read “Defining the Demonic,” then page through the 1863 edition at The Internet Archive.
“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know”*…
A small section of the interactive Philosopher’s Web
When data scientist Grant Louis Oliveira decided he wanted to undertake a self-guided course of study to “more rigorously explore my ideas,” he began with the honest admission, “I find the world of philosophy a bit impenetrable.”
Where some of us might make an outline, a spreadsheet, or a humble reading list, Oliveira created a complex “social network visualization” of “a history of philosophy” to act as his guide.
“What I imagined,” he writes, “is something like a tree arranged down a timeline. More influential philosophers would be bigger nodes, and the size of the lines between the nodes would perhaps be variable by strength of influence.”
The project, called “Philosopher’s Web,” shows us an impressively dense collection of names—hundreds of names—held together by what look like the bendy filaments in a fiber-optic cable. Each blue dot represents a philosopher, the thin gray lines between the dots represent lines of influence…
More on Oliveira’s opus at “‘The Philosopher’s Web,’ an Interactive Data Visualization Shows the Web of Influences Connecting Ancient & Modern Philosophers“; poke around in it here.
See also:
The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams
The History of Philosophy Visualized
* Bertrand Russell
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As we realize that it’s all about the questions, we might send sensuously-written birthday greetings to Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry; he was born on this date in 1871. An educator, essayist, and philosopher, he is best remembered as a poet– the last of the great French Symbolists. His best-known work is probably la Jeune Parque.
A member of the Académie Française, Valéry was stripped of his academic positions and distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with Vichy and the German occupation during World War II. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.
“if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing”*…
Money and markets have been around for thousands of years. Yet as central as currency has been to so many civilizations, people in societies as different as ancient Greece, imperial China, medieval Europe, and colonial America did not measure residents’ well-being in terms of monetary earnings or economic output.
In the mid-19th century, the United States—and to a lesser extent other industrializing nations such as England and Germany—departed from this historical pattern. It was then that American businesspeople and policymakers started to measure progress in dollar amounts, tabulating social welfare based on people’s capacity to generate income. This fundamental shift, in time, transformed the way Americans appraised not only investments and businesses but also their communities, their environment, and even themselves.
Today, well-being may seem hard to quantify in a nonmonetary way, but indeed other metrics—from incarceration rates to life expectancy—have held sway in the course of the country’s history. The turn away from these statistics, and toward financial ones, means that rather than considering how economic developments could meet Americans’ needs, the default stance—in policy, business, and everyday life—is to assess whether individuals are meeting the exigencies of the economy…
Eli Cook explains how America pioneered a way of thinking that puts human well-being in economic terms: “How Money Became the Measure of Everything.”
* “GDP is not a good measure of economic performance; it’s not a good measure of well-being. What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.” – Joseph Stiglitz
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As we muse on metrics, we might spare a thought for Henry George; he died on this date in 1897. A writer, politician and political economist, George is best remembered for Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, which treats inequality and the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and proposes the use of a land value tax (AKA a “single tax” on real estate) as a remedy– an economic philosophy known as Georgism, the main tenet of which is that, while individuals should own what they create, everything found in nature, most importantly the value of land, belongs equally to all mankind.
George’s ideas were widely-discussed in his time and into the early 20th century, and admired by thinkers like Alfred Russel Wallace, Jose Marti, and William Jennings Bryan; Franklin D. Roosevelt sang his praises, as did George Bernard Shaw. But with the rise of neoclassical economics, George’s star began to recede. Still, more modern thinkers like Albert Einstein and martin Luther King were fans.
In a sequence that mimicked George’s arc of influence, it was George’s work that inspired Elizabeth Magie to create The Landlord’s Game in 1904 to demonstrate his theories; ironically, it was Magie’s board game that became in the 1930s (as recently noted here and here) the basis for Monopoly.
In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, spending by the government on public goods will increase aggregate land rents/returns by the same amount. Stiglitz’s findings were dubbed “the Henry George Theorem,” as they illustrate a situation in which Henry George’s “single tax” is not only efficient, it is the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures.
Henry George
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself”*…
A recent query to the always-illuminating Language Log:
I’m reading my new copy of Soonish and came across a reference to air quotes and I got to wondering about the meme. I remember using them at least 30 years or more ago, entirely un-ironically. How does one go about looking up the history of such a thing? How would you reconcile the discoverable print references to its presumably earlier emergence as a metalinguistic thing in itself? At what point do the words, “air quotes” show up to stand for actual physically-performed “Air Quotes”?
Find the answers at: “Air Quotes.”
* Michel de Montaigne
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As we admit that there’s probably no pithier way to be ironic, mocking, or disingenuous, we might recall that it was on this date in 1726 that Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships— much better known as Gulliver’s Travels— was first published. A satire both of human nature and of the “travelers’ tales” literary subgenre popular at the time, it was an immediate hit (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery”). It has, of course, become a classic.
From the first edition
“But I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something.”*…
A French print, published in the New York Sun newspaper, in 1835, purported to show all manner of plants and life on the moon’s surface.
… Most subsequent accounts of the Moon hoax fail to mention the Vale dwellers, that superior, lighter race—perhaps because those beings make clear that race and racialism have plenty to do with the hoax and its success. Whether [New York Sun editor Richard Adams] Locke meant to have these creatures taken as symbolic whites, or just as remarkable discoveries—or as things barely to be believed at all—the Moon Hoax’s popularity certainly owed much to its re-creating on the moon what many white readers believed could be found at home: there, on the other end of a telescope, wasn’t just life but order, not just extinct craters but vibrant temples, not just sustenance but subordination, not just humanoids but hierarchies.
Even many white abolitionists didn’t seek to eliminate racial hierarchy altogether, just slavery. In the Moon Hoax, Locke had married the fanciful travelogue to the outright travel lie, but also to the issues of the day. Not bound by facts, the hoax is free to fabricate feelings, and it is this artfulness and ambiguity that help explain the Moon Hoax’s popularity.
That popularity cannot be overstated. The Sun’s circulation soared to almost twenty thousand—a remarkable leap for the young paper, and for the new penny-press model it exemplified. Before the eighteen-thirties, newspapers cost six cents and were chiefly sponsored by political parties. By relying on advertising and circulation, the Sun and other penny papers helped invent a new reading public.
Within months, Locke’s Moon Hoax not only created the most popular newspaper in the world, and practically the very industry of the modern press itself, it also helped galvanize a new, national popular culture. “Moonshine,” a play inspired by the hoax, was performed mere weeks after the articles appeared, at the renowned, newly rebuilt Bowery Theatre, a venue known for doing topical plays and satires. Elsewhere, a life-size cyclorama of the moonscape drew many New Yorkers, including Locke himself.
The Moon Hoax also provided an outlet for the era’s shifting sense of truth. As Ormond Seavey puts it, in an introduction to the hoax’s nineteen-seventies reprint, with the Moon Hoax the Sun “had stumbled across an unexpected fact about American society. The New Yorkers of Andrew Jackson’s second term did not especially care to read the news. Political life bubbled and fizzed around them constantly anyhow; they had no need of being further informed.” And when they did read the paper, Seavey writes, “people did not expect to believe everything they read.” He goes on: “It is impossible to say how widely or how much they did believe the supposed Supplement. When one examines the contemporary newspaper reaction, one can never separate clearly the believers in the hoax from those who knowingly joined in the deception. . . . Both the deadpan teller of the tale and his impassive listeners were conspirators against reality.” Readers and newspapermen found in even the Moon Hoax’s falseness a metaphor for the times—one that echoes our own…
Read the full excerpt from Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News: “Moon Shot: race, a hoax, and the birth of fake news.”
* Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
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As we affirm that there is no alternative (to) fact, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that CBS first broadcast CBS Reports.
CBS Reports was a documentary program series inaugurated on October 27, 1959, in the aftermath of the quiz show scandals. Executive producer Fred Friendly (Edward R. Murrow’s colleague on the ‘See It Now’ series) once suggested that the program was an attempt by CBS to undo the damage caused by the quiz show scandals and the resulting investigations. Friendly, who was executive producer for the new program later became the president of CBS News.
“’CBS Reports’ continued as a regular series for seven years, producing 146 hour-long investigative documentaries….Some shows caused controversy; many achieved critical acclaim.”
While many of the series’ entries were impactful, probably none were more so than “Harvest of Shame,” a 1960 entry in which Edward R. Murrow exposed the plight of America’s farm workers.
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