The return of big history: the long past is the

antidote to short-termism
Historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage have created a powerful, ambitious rebuttal to "the spectre of the short
term".

Photo Op (2006) by Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps

“There never has been a time when . . . except in the most general sense, a study of history
provides so little instruction for our present day,” Prime Minister Tony Blair declared in a
speech to the US Congress in July 2003. Nowadays Blair is not exactly deemed a voice of
authority, but the opinions he expressed are still widely shared. In an era when technology
has revolutionised our daily existence – even the nature of life itself – understanding the past
may seem irrelevant when planning the future. But history does matter. And many academics
are anxious to explain why.

A striking contribution comes from the historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage. At a mere
165 pages, their book The History Manifesto is modest in scale but not in ambition: its first
sentence mimics the opening of the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting our time:
the spectre of the short term.” Guldi, who teaches at Brown, and Armitage, a British-born
professor at Harvard, point to politicians trapped in the electoral cycle, business leaders
fixated on profit returns and bureaucrats obsessed by performance targets. Academics, one
might add, have also been sucked into the vortex, with the rigid six-year cycle of the Research
Excellence Framework deterring big historical projects that take time to mature.
Yet Guldi and Armitage insist that historical writing can provide the answer to short-
termism, if properly conceived and delivered. In the last quarter of the 20th century, they
argue, most historians produced scholarly monographs or doctoral dissertations about
narrow periods and specific topics, or they indulged in microhistories of “exceptionally
normal” episodes from everyday life, such as Robert Darnton’s investigation of a bizarre cat
massacre in 18th-century Paris. There seemed little appetite to explore
the longue durée, a term popularised in the 1950s by Fernand Braudel and other
scholars associated with the French journal Annales.
This obsession with the miniature reflected the increasing professionalisation of historical
writing. In contrast to earlier centuries, when the historian’s craft had been the preserve of
amateurs such as Gibbon and Macaulay, the 20th century was the era when history
professionals emerged – men and women who earned their living from teaching and writing
history as employees of universities. Like other professionals, they sought advancement by
becoming unquestioned masters of a small terrain, fenced off by their command of specialist
archives. The explosion since the 1970s of new subdisciplines – including social history,
women’s history and cultural history – encouraged further balkanisation of the subject.
Academic historians seemed to be saying more and more about less and less.

In consequence, Guldi and Armitage lament, the big debates of our day lack the benefit of
historical perspective. They spotlight a trio of vital contemporary questions – climate change,
international governance and socio-economic inequality – that have been addressed mostly
by economists and other social scientists, often using data and assumptions that are rooted in
the short term. Yet these subjects cry out for a longue durée approach. And Guldi and
Armitage show how historians have started to respond over the past decade, exploiting the
mass of information that can now be marshalled thanks to the digitisation of archives and
other databases, combined with the ubiquity of keyword searching. In the age of IT, social
problems on a scale previously beyond the grasp of a large research group are feasible for a
lone, but digitally smart, scholar. And so, The History Manifesto proclaims, big history is
once again possible, thanks to big data.
Guldi and Armitage write with brio and passion and their ambition should be applauded. Yet
their supposedly universal panacea is in many ways very American. The Manifesto offers a
reworking for historians of a tradition of “big” thinking that has characterised American
intellectual life since the Second World War. “Big science” led the way (in projects such as the
Bomb, mainframe computers and the transistor), followed by big social science (through
foundations such as the Ford and Rockefeller and the RAND Corporation) – all closely
harnessed to the needs of the federal government. Big history, now much in fashion in
leading US history departments such as Harvard’s, is another facet of that academic-
governmental nexus: the cover of the Manifesto proclaims a desire to “speak truth to power”.
And yet, like many programmatic writings, The History Manifesto seems strangely
indifferent to practicalities. It does not make clear how these big historical projects would
grab the attention of people in power. Simply addressing topical issues such as climate
change is not enough: as Guldi and Armitage acknowledge, politicians are creatures of the
short term who prefer to ignore big problems that cannot be solved, or at least visibly
ameliorated, within an electoral cycle. They are also busy people who do not have time for
lengthy reading and reflection. All this shows that big historical truths must be served up in
politically digestible, bite-sized chunks.
A more user-centred approach is exemplified by the work of Richard Neustadt and Ernest
May – Harvard academics, now sadly deceased – who for many years taught a course on the
uses of history to American politicians, officials and senior military. The book that grew out
of it, Thinking in Time, was published way back in 1986, and The History Manifesto makes
no reference to it. Yet Neustadt and May offer an instructive alternative response to the curse
of short-termism in high places.
Their main injunction derives from Avram Goldberg, the chief executive of a New England
grocery chain. Whenever a manager came to him in a flap, he wouldn’t ask, “What’s the
problem?” but say, “Tell me the story.” That way, Goldberg said, “I find out what the problem
really is.” His maxim became the premise of the book by Neustadt and May. Rather than
focus on the crisis at hand (while already straining for a quick-fix solution), one should stand
back and ask, “How did we get into this mess?” That is the first step to seeing a way out.

Telling the story requires identifying critical events and turning points, asking what
happened when. This basic chronology then has to be fleshed out by addressing “who” and
“why” questions about personalities and motivations: what Neustadt and May call
“journalists’ questions”. Digging out this kind of human detail is as much a historical activity
as constructing a chronology. It requires probing into the past of a person or a country, just
the sort of thing that Blair, Bush and their aides did not do properly before the invasion of
Iraq.

Asking “What’s the story?” may seem a strange way to define the practice of history. Our
normal definition is content-based – the names-and-dates regime that destroyed any feel for
the subject among millions of schoolchildren and that still features in the UK citizenship test.
Nor does “What’s the story?” chime with the idea that history provides a stock of useful
analogies, such as the “lessons of appeasement” that have seduced many political leaders,
from Anthony Eden in 1956 to Blair and Bush in 2003. Instead of history as a body of facts
or a toolkit of lessons, Neustadt and May presented it as a way of thinking: thinking in the
stream of time.
Actually, that is not such an alien idea: it’s what we do every evening, constructing a narrative
of what has happened during the day by highlighting some events and downplaying others
within an arc of what seems, with hindsight, to be significant. Thinking in Time essentially
urged policymakers to apply the same narrative mode of thinking more systematically when
making decisions that relate to government.
Neustadt and May’s prescriptions still seem to me apt and perceptive. They are rooted in the
recognition that human beings fundamentally are historical animals and they provide simple,
practical advice about how people in power can be their own historians. But the Achilles heel
of Thinking in Time in 1986 was how would-be practitioners could speedily obtain the
essential historical information to put flesh on the bare bones of their narrative timelines.
Neustadt and May suggested a range of useful books, articles and bibliographies, but it
seemed implausible that most busy policymakers, or even their aides, would have time to do
the necessary research.
Nearly 30 years on, however, the IT-age tools that Guldi and Armitage identify can also help
the policymaker who wants to become historically literate. There is now a profusion of
information out there, available at a few clicks of a mouse. The new problem is quality
control: identifying the information that is reliable and that rises above mere WikiHistory.

One answer comes from History & Policy, a web-based think tank run jointly from
Cambridge and King’s College London. This posts short papers of 2,500 to 3,000 words, each
offering a historically informed view on issues of current concern. To date, nearly 200 papers
have appeared, covering a wide range of issues; recent topics include power-sharing in
Northern Ireland, the London airport debate, treatment of the mentally ill and the Ukraine
crisis. The organisation also runs specialist seminars targeted at specific interests, with the
aim of providing the busy politician, civil servant or business person with a broader
perspective but in succinct, manageable form. Although each paper suggests further reading,
it is assumed that most users won’t have the time for a long academic tutorial. The aim here
is not big history but applied history, useful at the point of decision-making.

For some traditionalist scholars, this search for relevance threatens a core value
of professional history – the recognition of the past as a foreign country. But, as John Tosh
has insisted in his book Why History Matters (2008), what we need is “a critical applied
history”, one that is attentive to both continuity and difference. Neustadt and May developed
the same point: “the future has nowhere to come from but the past”, yet “what matters for the
future in the present is departures from the past” – hence the predictive capacity and also the
potential pitfalls of historical analysis. Those departures may be slight and subtle but
recognising them is essential when trying to anticipate the future.
Public awareness of the interconnection of past, present and future has been particularly
keen at moments of dramatic rupture or transition. The end of the Second World War, with
the total collapse of Hitler’s European empire and the horrific exposure of his “Final
Solution”, constituted one such moment; another was the end of the cold war in 1989-91,
when the “Iron Curtain” disintegrated and the Soviet Union fell apart. Such evidently
“historic” moments have kindled an interest in “contemporary history”, orZeitgeschichte, as
the Germans call it. In this area, too, historical awareness has relevance for political debate,
by helping us to locate our contemporary problems in the longer sweep of events.
Definitions of the appropriate time span for “contemporary history” lack precision: surveying
various writers, Kristina Spohr of the London School of Economics suggests that the term has
generally been employed to signify the history of “one’s own time”. She quotes Geoffrey
Barraclough, an exponent in the 1960s: “Contemporary history begins when the problems
which are actual in the world today first take visible shape.” When exactly that was will vary
from case to case and is a matter of judgement for individual historians, requiring them to
construct narratives on the Neustadt-May model but over the longue durée.
To Eric Hobsbawm, a lifelong Marxist, his own time was naturally defined by the rise and fall
of the Soviet state and he framed his Age of Extremes around the dates 1914 and 1991.
Hobsbawm’s book has become a classic, but in the 20 years since it first appeared our sense
of the “contemporary” has moved on from the cold war. In an era preoccupied by
globalisation, historians, when trying to discern how today’s problems took visible shape,
have looked back to moments and markers that differ from Hobsbawm’s.
One significant trend is the vogue for “transnational” history, transcending the conventional
western focus on the evolution of nation states: what the Harvard scholar Charles Maier calls
the principle of “territoriality”. One of these new frameworks for understanding
contemporary history is the cultural “clash of civilisations”, attractive to many American
conservatives preoccupied with Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of China. Another
framework is the emergence of supranational structures such as the European Union,
intended to break out of the cycle of ruinous nationalist wars between France and Germany
and to escape the perpetual “bloodlands” of eastern Europe. If European integration is
indeed the trajectory of our own time, it implies a very different way of telling modern history
from the conventional narratives about territorial nation states.

This approach is, of course, unlikely to have much appeal in our dis-United Kingdom. A
political class trapped between the erosion of a once-solid state based on shared Britishness
and a Continental behemoth depicted as the embodiment of alien “European” values does not
seem in any mood to venture beyond territoriality. However, for those who are inclined to
escape the bunker of Britishness, asking “What’s the story?” has utility in this larger sense.
It invites us to interrogate the grand narratives we tell ourselves as a country about where we
have come from and where we might be going.

Big history, thinking in time, applied history, alternative narratives: these are just a few ways
that those who study the past are engaging with the present. That pioneer of “contemporary
history”, Thucydides, writing 24 centuries ago, presented his account of the Peloponnesian
wars as a warning for future decision-makers – for those who, as he put it, “want to
understand clearly the events which happened in the past and (human nature being what it
is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways be repeated in the future”.

He described how an ill-conceived foreign adventure – the disastrous attack on Syracuse –

triggered the climactic phase of a long power struggle that not only destroyed Athenian
democracy but also sapped the power of the Greek city states, laying the peninsula open to
foreign domination. In our own day, after a year of national mourning for the men who
marched away in 1914, we might raise our eyes to take in the bigger historical picture and the
haunting parallels with the lost grandeur of Greece: an international conflict that exploded
out of the blue in 37 days, which was sustained for four blood-soaked years by the
intransigence of national leaders and from whose suicidal destruction Europe never
recovered. We may not share Thucydides’s idea of a universal “human nature”, but his
proclamation that history matters still has resonance today.

David Reynolds is Professor of International History at Cambridge. His latest book is

“The Long Shadow: the Great War and the 20th Century” (Simon & Schuster)
Karl Marx: Prometheus
and Lucifer
1
.

From Edmund Wilson’s landmark To the Finland Station (1940). You can download a full-text PDF of the book by clicking on the link above.
.
In the August of 1835, a young German-Jewish boy, a student at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium at Trier on the Moselle, composed a
theme for his final examination. It was calledReflections of a Young Man on Choosing a Profession, and it was radiant with those lofty ideals
which are in order on such occasions and which in the present case have attracted attention only for the reason that the aspiring young man
managed to live up to his aspirations. In choosing a profession, said Karl Marx at seventeen, one must be sure that one will not put oneself in
the position of acting merely as a servile tool of others: in one’s own sphere one must obtain independence; and one must make sure that one
has a field to serve humanity — for though one may otherwise become famous as a scholar or a poet, one can never be a really great man.
We shall never be able to fulfill ourselves truly unless we are working for the welfare of our fellows: then only shall our burdens not break
us, then only shall our satisfactions not be confined to poor egoistic joys. And so we must be on guard against allowing ourselves to fall
victims to that most dangerous of all temptations: the fascination of abstract thought.
One reflection — which the examiner has specially noted — comes to limit the flood of aspiration. “But we cannot always follow the
profession to which we feel ourselves to have been called; our relationships in society have already to some extent been formed before we
are in a position to determine them. Already our physical nature threateningly bars the way, and her claims may be mocked by none.”

So for the mind of the young Marx the bondage of social relationships already appeared as an impediment to individual self-realization. Was
it the conception, now so prevalent since Herder, of the molding of human cultures by physical and geographical conditions? Was it the
consciousness of the disabilities which still obstructed the development of the Jews: the terrible special taxes, the special restrictions on
movement, the prohibitions against holding public office, against engaging in agriculture or crafts?

Both, no doubt. There had been concentrated in Karl Marx the blood of several lines of Jewish rabbis. There had been rabbis in his mother’s
family for at least a century back; and the families of both his father’s parents had produced unbroken successions of rabbis, some of them
distinguished teachers of the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Karl Marx’s paternal grandfather had been a rabbi in Trier; one of his uncles
was a rabbi there. Hirschel Marx, Karl’s father, was evidently the first man of brains in his family decisively to abandon the rabbinate and to
make himself a place in the larger community.

The German Jews of the eighteenth century were breaking away from the world of the ghetto, with its social isolation and its closed system
of religious culture. It was an incident of the liquidation of medieval institutions and ideas. Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher,
through his translation of the Bible into German, had brought his people into contact with the culture of the outside German world, and they
were already by Karl Marx’s generation beginning to play a role of importance in the literature and thought of the day. But Mendelssohn,
who had been the original of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, produced a result far beyond what he had intended: instead of guiding the Jews as
he had hoped to a revivified and purified Judaism, he opened to them the doors of the Enlightenment. For the young Jews, the traditional
body of their culture seemed at once to collapse in dust like a corpse in an unsealed tomb. Mendelssohn’s daughters already belonged to a
group of sophisticated Jewish women with salons and “philosopher” lovers, who were having themselves baptized Protestants and Catholics.
Hirschel Marx was a Kantian free-thinker, who had left Judaism and Jewry behind.
Living in Trier, on the border between Germany and France, he had been nourished on Rousseau and Voltaire as well as on the philosophy of
the Germans. Under the influence of the French Revolution, some of the restrictions on the Jews had been relaxed, and it had been possible
for him to study law and to make himself a successful career. When the Prussians expelled Napoleon and it became illegal again for Jews to
hold office, he changed his name to Heinrich, had his whole family baptized Christians and rose to be Justizrat and head of the Trier bar.

Next door to the Marxes in Trier lived a family named van Westphalen. Baron von Westphalen, though a Prussian official, was also a
product of eighteenth-century civilization: his father had been confidential secretary to the liberal Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, the friend
of Winckelmann and Voltaire, and had been ennobled by him. Ludwig von Westphalen read seven languages, loved Shakespeare and knew
Homer by heart. He used to take young Karl Marx for walks among the vineyard-covered hills of the Moselle and tell him about the
Frenchman, Saint-Simon, who wanted society organized scientifically in the interests of Christian charity: Saint-Simon had made an
impression on Herr von Westphalen. The Marxes had their international background of Holland, Poland and Italy and so back through the
nations and the ages; Ludwig von Westphalen was half-German, half-Scotch; his mother was of the family of the Dukes of Argyle; he spoke
German and English equally well. Both the Westphalens and the Marxes belonged to a small community of Protestant officials — numbering
only a scant three hundred among a population of eleven thousand Catholics, and most of them transferred to Trier from other provinces —
in that old city, once a stronghold of the Romans, then a bishopric of the Middle Ages, which during the lifetimes of the Westphalens and
Marxes had been ruled alternately by the Germans and the French. Their children played together in the Westphalens’ large garden. Karl’s
sister and Jenny von Westphalen became one another’s favorite friends. Then Karl fell in love with Jenny.
In the summer of Karl’s eighteenth year, when he was home on his vacation from college, Jenny von Westphalen promised to marry him.
She was four years older than Karl and was considered one of the belles of Trier, was much courted by the sons of officials and landlords and
army officers; but she waited for Karl seven years. She was intelligent, had character, talked well; had been trained by a remarkable father.
Karl Marx had conceived for her a devotion which lasted through his whole life. He wrote her bad romantic poetry from college.

This early student poetry of Marx, which he himself denounced as rhetorical almost as soon as he had written it, is nevertheless not without
its power, and it is of interest in presenting the whole repertoire of his characteristic impulses and emotions before they are harnessed to the
pistons of his system. The style, already harsh and tight-knotted, which suits his satirical subjects, is usually quite inappropriate to his more
numerous romantic ones; but even the lyrics have something of the hard and dark crystallization which is afterwards to distinguish Marx’s
writing, and they leave in the mind of the reader certain recurrent symbols.

In these poems, we find a woeful old man, all bones, lying at the bottom of the water, but the waves make him dance when the moon is out,
for they are cold in heart and mind and feel nothing. There is a man in a yellow house, a little man with a lean horror of a wife; the poet must
pull down the shade so that they may not scare off his fancies. There are doctors, damned Philistines, who think the world is a bag of bones,
whose psychology is confined to the notion that our dreams are due to noodles and dumplings, whose metaphysics consists of the belief that
if it were possible to locate the soul, a pill would quite easily expel it. There are also sentimental souls who weep at the idea of a calf being
slaughtered: yet, after all, are there not asses, like Balaam’s, that are human enough to talk?

In one of Karl Marx’s ballads, a mariner is roused from his bed by the storm: he will go forth, he will leave behind him the warm and quiet
towns; will put to sea, and let his ship’s sail swell, keep his course by the changeless stars, contend with the waves and the wind, feel the joy
of all his forces at full strain, blood pounding in his breast at the danger — he will defy and he will conquer the sea, which is picking the
bones of his brother. In another ballad, a second skipper, assaulted by the songs of the sirens — very different from the sailors of Heine,
whose bones have whitened the rocks — declares to their faces that their charms are specious, that for them in their cold abysses there burns
no eternal God; but that in his breast the gods preside in their might, all the gods, and under their governance no deviation is possible. The
sirens, discouraged, sink. In another, a Promethean hero curses a god who has stripped him of his all; but he swears that he will have his
revenge, though his strength be but a patchwork of weaknesses: out of his pain and horror he will fashion a fortress, iron and cold, which will
strike the beholder livid and against which the thunderbolts will rebound.Prometheus is to be Marx’s favorite myth: he is to prefix to his
doctor’s dissertation the speech of Aeschylus’ Prometheus to Zeus, “Know well I would never be willing to exchange my misfortune for that
bondage of yours. For better do I deem it to be bound to this rock than to spend my life as Father Zeus’ faithful messenger”; and a
contemporary cartoon on the suppression of the paper he is later to edit is to show him chained to his press with the Prussian eagle preying
on his vitals. In yet another of Karl Marx’s poems, he proclaims that the grandeurs and splendors of the pygmy-giants of earth are doomed to
fall to ruins. They do not count beside the soul’s aspiration; even vanquished, shall the soul remain defiant, shall still build itself a throne of
giant scorn: “Jenny! if we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt shall I fling my glove in the world’s face, then shall I stride
through the wreckage a creator!”
Old Heinrich, who said that his parents had given him nothing but his existence and his mother’s love, hoped that Karl, with more
advantages than he had had himself, would take his place at the Trier bar. He recognized that Karl’s abilities were exceptional, but he
disapproved of what seemed to him his uncanalized energies, his all-embracing intellectual ambitions. Though he, too, talks of Karl’s
working for the “welfare of humanity,” he is exceedingly anxious for his son to establish good connections, gives him letters to influential
persons who may be of use to him in making his career. His letters to his son are a mixture of excited admiration and apprehension — lest
Karl’s genius miscarry; and they have the insistence of jealous affection. Old Heinrich reproaches the boy with egoism, with lack of
consideration for his parents — Karl rarely seems to have answered his family’s letters; he cries out continually over Karl’s frequent
demands for money: does the young gentleman think his father is made of gold? Etc. His mother writes him that he must not neglect to keep
his rooms clean, that he must scrub himself every week with sponge and soap, that his Muse must be made to understand that the higher and
better things will be promoted through attention to the more humble.
In the meantime, at the University of Bonn, to which he had gone in the fall of 1835, Karl had joined a convivial tavern club , contracted
considerable debts, got into trouble with the university authorities for “nocturnal drunkenness and riot,” become a member of a Poets’ Club
suspected of subversive ideas and under the surveillance of the political police, taken part in a row which had arisen between the plebeian
tavern clubs and the aristocratic Korps associations, and finally — in the summer of 1836 — fought a duel and got a wound over the eye. In a
lithograph of the members of his tavern club, made this same year, when Karl Marx was eighteen, he is shown in the background, but with
his head held high under its heavy black helmet of hair and thrown back with a look of brooding fierceness from thick and strong black
brows and black eyes. — It was decided, with his father’s emphatic approval, that he should be transferred to the University of Berlin, which
has beep described by a contemporary as a “workhouse” in contrast to the “Bacchanalian” character of the other German universities.

At Berlin, where he remained till March 30, 1841, he studied law in compliance with his father’s wishes, but neglected it in favor of
philosophy, which was at that time in the German universities the great subject of intellectual interest and of which Karl was a born addict
and master. Now he shuts himself up to think and study, “repulses friendships,” as he says, “neglects nature, art and society, sits up through
many nights, fights through many battles, undergoes many agitations both from outward and inward causes,” reads gigantically, plans
immense labors, writes poetry, philosophy, makes translations.

His father’s letters grow continually more troubled. Has Karl more brains and brilliance than heart? Is it a divine or a Faustian daemon that
possesses him? Will he ever be capable of domestic happiness, of making those around him happy? Old Marx is impressive in his letters. His
son, Karl’s daughter tells us, enormously admired his father and was never tired of talking about him; he carried a picture of him about all his
life, and Engels put it in his coffin when he was dead. But much as he got from his father that was valuable, it was vital for the son to reject
much. Heinrich’s correspondence with Karl has a certain dramatic interest. It reaches a climax in a letter of huge length and tragic emotional
force, written (December 9, 1837 ) five months before the old man’s death — a last desperate effort to save his son from turning into
something which the father dreads. He hopes, he tells Karl, that the denying genius may develop into a solid thinker, that he will realize that
art is to be acquired only through intercourse with well-bred people; Karl must learn to present himself to the world in an agreeable and
advantageous light, he must win consideration and affection. Above all, he must be careful of Jenny, who is bringing to him all her devotion
and sacrificing her social position: in return, he must provide her with a place in actual human society, not merely in some smoked-up room
beside a bad-smelling oil-lamp, shut in with a crazy scholar.

The old man, who was fond of Jenny and who had done what he could to promote the match, already foresaw the future and felt himself
helpless against it. For Karl seems already to have shaken from him the barbarian social world of the beer-swilling and saber-brandishing
German students and to have returned to the rabbinical world. He had made his social isolation complete — he was never again to encourage
any friends save those who fed his intellectual interests; and he had worked himself into a decline. Sent away to the country to recover, he
had read through the whole of Hegel and gone on to the works of Hegel’s disciples. He was already on his way to becoming the great secular
rabbi of his century. Salomon Maimon, in the century before, had tried to reconcile rabbinical philosophy with Kant. Karl Marx, also a
teacher in the Jewish tradition but now quite free of the Judaic system and with all the thought of Western Europe at his disposal, was to play
an unprecedented role as a leader in the modern world.
We shall revert to this aspect of Marx later on: but it may be said here that Karl Marx was too profoundly and completely a Jew to worry
much about the Jewish problem in the terms in which it was discussed during his lifetime. The only opinion he would express on this issue
was that the usurious activities of the Jews, which had made them unpopular with their neighbors and which to him were more objectionable
still, were simply a special malignant symptom of capitalism, which would disappear with the capitalist system. In his own case, the pride
and independence, the conviction of moral superiority, which give his life its heroic dignity, seem to go back to the great days of Israel and to
be unconscious of the miseries between.

Yet are they? Two of Marx’s poems he rewrote and finally published in 1841. In one of them a wild violinist appears, in a white gown and
with a saber at his side. Why does he fiddle so madly? asks the speaker. Why does he cause the blood to leap? Why does he lash his bow to
shreds? — Why do the waves roar? the spirit demands in answer. That, thundering, they may crash on the cliff — that the soul may crash on
the floor of Hell. — But, musician, with mockery thou tearest thy heart! That art which a bright god has lent thee thou shouldst send to swell
the music of the spheres. Nay, the apparition replies, with this blood-black saber I pierce the soul. God knows not, nor honors, Art: it rises
from the vapors of Hell — it maddens the brain and it alters the heart. ’Tis the Devil who beats me the time and the Dead March the tune I
must play.
 Lucifer was to hover behind Prometheus through the whole of Karl Marx’s life: he was the malevolent obverse side of the rebel benefactor of
man. In a satirical poem by Engels and Edgar Bauer, written at about this time, Marx is described as the “black fellow from Trier,” a savage
and sinewy monster, who creeps not, but leaps, upon his prey, who stretches his arms toward the heavens as if he would tear down their
canopy, who clenches his fist and raves as if a thousand devils had him by the hair; and through the years of his later life he was to be
familiarly known as “Old Nick.” His little son used to call him “Devil.” True: the devil as well as the rebel was one of the conventional
masks of the romantic; but there is something other than romantic perversity in this assumption of a diabolic role.

The second poem is a dialogue between sweethearts: Beloved, says the lover, thy grief stings thee — thou tremblest beneath my breath. Thou
hast drunken of the soul: shine, my jewel — shine, shine, o blood of youth — Darling, replies the maiden, thou lookest so pale, speakest so
strangely seldom. See with what celestial music the worlds pass across the heavens! — My dear, says the lover, they pass and they shine —
let us, too, flee away, let us merge our souls in one. — Then, whispering, with terrified glance: My dear, thou hast drunk of poison; thou
must needs depart with me now. Night has fallen; I can no longer see the light. — With violence he clasps her to his heart, death in his breast
and breath. She is pierced by a deeper pain; never more will she open her eyes.

Heinrich Marx had died in May of 1838; Karl Marx was married to Jenny von Westphalen in the June of 1843, two years after he had
graduated at Berlin.

Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy

Sandra Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, Daniela Ginsburg (tr.), University of Chicago Press, 2013, 147pp., $35.00

(hbk), ISBN 9780226470542.

Reviewed byJulia Tanney, University of Kent

Originally published by Vrin in 2000 under the title Du réel à l'ordinaire: Quelle philosophie du langage
aujourd'hui?, this timely English translation joins a welcome list of recent attempts to insist that the neglected
insights of Austin, Wittgenstein, and other so-called 'ordinary language philosophers' have a rightful place in the
current debate among philosophers of the 'analytic' or 'Anglo-Saxon' tradition.

Sandra Laugier covers a wealth of authors, focusing in the end on what can be elicited from the practice of ordinary
language philosophy. But what to my mind is particularly special about Laugier's approach (upon which this review
will focus) is that she begins with Quine -- the erstwhile forefather of philosophical naturalism -- and shows that he,
Austin and Wittgenstein share, in their different ways, a criticism of meaning conceived as a 'core common to
different languages' or 'the idea of an intermediary entity that would guarantee equivalence or correspondence
between them' (16). In Quine, this denunciation of 'the myth of meaning' is simultaneously a criticism of referential
or denotational theories as well as of a realism that aspires to a 'shared ontology common to different physical
theories or conceptual schemes' (16).

In postwar England, the criticism of the myth was explicit in Ryle (neglected in this book) as early as 1929 as well as
in Austin and, most famously, the later Wittgenstein. Their work opened up a different way of understanding
meaning, not as Sinn or 'propositional content' construed as an intermediary between expressions that 'mean the
same', which allegedly accompany our utterances -- but instead (in my words) as a shifting series of commitments
that are implicitly undertaken as the target expressions are appropriately or correctly employed from one
circumstance to another. On this view (still in my words) to learn about meaning is to learn about what is meant;
that is, what is said, explained, predicted, argued, promised, threatened, expressed, etc. This involves tracing what
Ryle calls the 'logical powers' of the sentences, and their constituent expressions, as they take on different
'inflections of meaning' or 'elasticities of significance' within the various situations in which they are employed to
perform their multitudinous jobs. But this 'conceptual cartographical' approach (a description I prefer to 'ordinary
language') has all but disappeared in Europe. More alarming, as Laugier points out, it was hardly ever visible in
America. What, she asks, drove this particular schism in the history of analytic philosophy?
As early as 'Two Dogmas', Laugier reminds us, Quine described the conceptual scheme of science as a tool with
which to predict future experience in the light of past. Physical objects, he continued, are useful intermediaries
conceptually imported not from definition in terms of experience, but rather as irreducible posits or constructs
'comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer' (Quine, From a Logical Point of View, quoted in Laugier, 21).
The myth of physical objects is more efficacious than other myths insofar as it provides a structure to the flux of
experience. But is that all? Is there a deep reason this myth is successful? According to Laugier, this starting point of
Quine's work has fuelled subsequent discussions of realism in metaphysics and epistemology: 'The question of
realism -- the question of the reality of the entities postulated by theories to account for experience, and of the
irreducibility of these entities (posits) to sensorial data -- is at the very starting point of Quine's philosophy' (21-22).

For Quine, as for Hume, our experience gives us neither knowledge nor objects. Instead, Laugier says, Quine is
committed to saying that our objects are posits and our ontology is relativized to a choice of background theory.
Indeed, she adds later, Quine's reconstrual of ontology involves a 'triple relativization': one can ask what exists only
in terms of what a theory says exists and what a theory says exists can only be understood against a background
theory. Even so, the translation of the object theory into the background theory will, necessarily, be indeterminate
(including, incidentally, the very notion of 'fact of the matter', which, Laugier points out, is 'internal' to our theory of
nature).

The problem according to Laugier is that, though for Quine, 'the question of realism is in any case immanent' (24),
and though his 'givens' -- 'sensory stimulations' and 'surface irritations' -- are relativized in a way described above,
there is still a tension with his claim to be a 'robust' realist, especially as this has been understood by subsequent
generations of metaphysicians. For 'all of American philosophy of language,' she says (concurring with Putnam) is
based on the idea that 'we have "only" experience, and from it we must produce knowledge, invent language,
construct our theories. What a miracle -- how do we do it?' (25).

Indeed, she continues, this is the third dogma of empiricism that Davidson identified in his criticism of 'the very
idea of a conceptual scheme': the dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to
be organized. But, claims Laugier, in rejecting this dogma and perhaps empiricism tout court, Davidson himself
seems to miss the 'radical' conclusion it suggests: that it is also necessary to give up on what philosophers of
language (including Davidson) understand by their subject: namely, the absurdity or 'spuriousness' of asking about
language's adequacy to the world.

Although Quine's notion of logic-as-regimentation for the language of science is preferable to the logicist's dream of
using formalism to discover the structures of thought and language, it still inherits the problem of realism,
including, Laugier insists, some of the exaggerated reactions against it.

Rorty, for example, goes too far in stating that after Quine's and Davidson's criticisms, there is no point in studying
language in order to discover anything about reality. For even if Quine and Davidson are right (after Wittgenstein
and others) to have renounced representational theories of language, Laugier argues, it does not follow that there is
no project that involves scrutinizing 'what we say' in natural (non-formal) language in order to understand what is
meant, in the ordinary sense(s) of that word. There is no reason, for example, to shy away from examining our uses
of 'true' as Laugier points out that Austin does in order to learn something about truth or, for example of 'about', as
Ryle does, in order, for example, to debunk the idea that there is an'aboutness relation'. We thus learn what is true
or the variety of ways of being 'about' in the senses in which these notions can be reclaimed. Not as notions
immanent to science and conceptual schemes, but rather as 'inherent to our common use of language' (22). With
this reclamation we can agree, with Laugier, that 'the ordinary notion of true . . . seems in spite of everything to
define something about the relation we establish between language and the world, and about the affirmation,
inherent in our use of language, that language does indeed speak about something' (38).
The interest of Laugier's project is, first, to remind her readers that the father of naturalism rejected many of the
presuppositions that fund their own projects. But she also takes her readers through a journey in which they come
to see, as she eventually did, that the irreconcilable demands in Quine -- to affirm realism within an empiricist
framework -- cannot be met. Instead she proposes to move from Quine's rejection of the myth of meaning qua
intermediary (a rejection he has in common with the 'ordinary language' philosophers) and to drop 'once and for all'
the empiricist ideal. In particular, we must renounce the kind of empiricism that 'makes us expect knowledge to
come from our "nerve endings"' (22).
Instead, as Laugier maintains, 'language as it was first put forward to philosophy [was] not as something made, but
as simply "given," already there' (31). Indeed, it derives, as Austin maintains, from 'the inherited experience and
acumen of many generations of men. (Austin, Philosophical Papers; cited in Laugier, 66).'
And it is with this thought, Laugier argues, that we can find a resurrected sort of realism. For as Austin and
Wittgenstein (and Ryle) show in their arguments, though it is often a long and difficult process, we do tend to come
to agreement. Language should be construed, not as a body of statements or words, but as the place of agreement
on what we should say when. Nonetheless, as Austin insists, 'When we examine what we should say when, what
words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or 'meanings' whatever they may
be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about' (Austin, ibid, 182; cited in Laugier, 67). Or, as Laugier
adds on Austin's behalf, 'the examination of language is not "a way to access" phenomena: it is the examination of
facts. . . . Language (our language) is not a reflection or form of experience; it is, for Austin, part of experience' (63).
To put it Wittgenstein's way, 'the speaking of a language is part of an activity or a form of life' (Philosophical
Investigations, §23). Thus to reflect on language is to reflect on what is revealed within and by the multitudinous
activities that constitute it.

Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

By SUSAN PINKERJAN. 30, 2015
Photo
 CreditJosh Freydkis
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 PRESIDENT OBAMA’s domestic agenda, which he announced in his State of the
Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity leave, affordable
college. But there was one thing he got wrong. As part of his promise to educate
American children for an increasingly competitive world, he vowed to “protect a
free and open Internet” and “extend its reach to every classroom and every
community.”

More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But
mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling
families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If
anything, it will widen it.

In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd
tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school
students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers
assessed the students’ math and reading skills annually for five years, and recorded
how they spent their time. The news was not good.

“Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades
tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” the
economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower
grades in younger children.

In fact, the students’ academic scores dropped and remained depressed for as long
as the researchers kept tabs on them. What’s worse, the weaker students (boys,
African-Americans) were more adversely affected than the rest. When their
computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.

We don’t know why this is, but we can speculate. With no adults to supervise them,
many kids used their networked devices not for schoolwork, but to play games, troll
social media and download entertainment. (And why not? Given their druthers,
most adults would do the same.)

The problem is the differential impact on children from poor families. Babies born
to low-income parents spend at least 40 percent of their waking hours in front of a
screen — more than twice the time spent by middle-class babies. They also get far
less cuddling and bantering over family meals than do more privileged children.
The give-and-take of these interactions is what predicts robust vocabularies and
school success. Apps and videos don’t.

If children who spend more time with electronic devices are also more likely to be
out of sync with their peers’ behavior and learning by the fourth grade, why would
adding more viewing and clicking to their school days be considered a good idea?

An unquestioned belief in the power of gadgetry has already led to educational

snafus. Beginning in 2006, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project envisioned a
digital utopia in which all students over 6 years old, worldwide, would own their
own laptops. Impoverished children would thus have the power to go online and
educate themselves — no school or teacher required. With laptops for poor children
initially priced at $400, donations poured in.

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But the program didn’t live up to the ballyhoo. For one thing, the machines were
buggy and often broke down. And when they did work, the impoverished students
who received free laptops spent more time on games and chat rooms and less time
on their homework than before, according tothe education researchers Mark
Warschauer and Morgan Ames. It’s drive-by education — adults distribute the
laptops and then walk away.
 It’s true that there is often an initial uptick in students’ engagement with their
studies — interactive apps can be fun. But the novelty wears off after a few months,
said Larry Cuban, an emeritus education professor at Stanford.

Technology does have a role in education. But as Randy Yerrick, a professor of

education at the University at Buffalo, told me, it is worth the investment only
when it’s perfectly suited to the task, in science simulations, for example, or to
teach students with learning disabilities.

And, of course, technology can work only when it is deployed as a tool by a terrific,
highly trained teacher. As extensive research shows, just one year with a gifted
teacher in middle school makes it far less likely that a student will get pregnant in
high school, and much more likely that she will go to college, earn a decent salary,
live in a good neighborhood and save for retirement. To the extent that such a
teacher can benefit from classroom technology, he or she should get it. But only
when such teachers are effectively trained to apply a specific application to teaching
a particular topic to a particular set of students — only then does classroom
technology really work.

Even then, we still have no proof that the newly acquired, tech-centric skills that
students learn in the classroom transfer to novel problems that they need to solve
in other areas. While we’re waiting to find out, the public money spent on wiring up
classrooms should be matched by training and mentorship programs for teachers,
so that a free and open Internet, reached through constantly evolving, beautifully
packaged and compelling electronic tools, helps — not hampers — the progress of
children who need help the most.

The philosophy of translation

TIM CRANE

We hope you enjoy this free piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via
the TLS app. This week’s issue also features Thomas Pynchon adapted for the big screen, a necessary
reappraisal of Mo Yan, a new poem by John Ashbery, Lisa Hilton’s Good Queen Bess – and much more.
This extraordinary book, a huge dictionary of philosophical terms from many languages, is a translation of Vocabulaire
européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, originally published in 2004, the brainchild of the French
philosopher Barbara Cassin. If the original project was paradoxical, then the present version is doubly so: not just a
dictionary of untranslatable words, but a translation of that dictionary. Rather than despair at the self-undermining self-
referentiality of the whole idea, the editors rejoice in it. Indeed, moving the word “untranslatable” to the beginning of the
English title proudly asserts the paradox even more forcefully than the original French title does, and forms what the
English-language editor Emily Apter calls “an organising principle of the entire project”.
In her preface, Apter comments (apparently without irony) that “the extent of our translation task became clear only
when we realised that a straightforward conversion of the French edition into English simply would not work”. She is
right, of course: translation is almost never a straightforward conversion. This is why it is such a fertile subject for
philosophy. Like so much in philosophy, theorizing about translation (and, of course, about the related concept of
meaning) lurches between two unappealing extremes. At one extreme, translation is conceived of in terms of literal
identity of meaning; at the other, it is simply impossible. As Jacques Derrida put it: “In a sense, nothing is
untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable . . . it is easy for me always to hold firm between these
two hyperboles which are fundamentally the same, and always translate each other”.
Derrida’s point that the two extremes or hyperboles are “fundamentally the same” amounts to this: the only reason for
thinking that translation is impossible (the second extreme) is that it must require literal identity of meaning (the first
extreme), and this is clearly impossible. One reason why the first extreme (which the editors call the “mapping or
isomorphic” conception of translation) is impossible is that identity is transitive, and translation isn’t. In other words, if
translation requires identity of meaning, then if A translates B and B translates C, then A and C are identical in meaning.
A moment’s reflection shows this cannot be right: “castle” can be translated as Schloss, and “Schloss” as château, but the
Château de Chenonceau is not a castle in anyone’s book. Translation is not identity of meaning. So we do not show that
translation is impossible by showing that there is no identity of meaning. Derrida was right.
However, it is important not to exaggerate when we reject the mapping conception of translation. Google Translate does
work, and it is getting better every day thanks to the strength of its algorithms and the sheer brute force of its data-
mining. It does not provide identities of meaning, but it does give word-by-word translations, and it does this
mechanically. Google Translate will not get very far with translating a poem, of course, or with the untranslatables of this
dictionary. An untranslatable is defined here as either “a term that is left untranslated as it is transferred from language
to language”, or one that is “typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation”. By these criteria, as Rémi Brague
points out in his excellent entry on “Europe”, the word “philosophy” itself is “the untranslatable par excellence . . . .
‘Philosophy’ itself remained transcribed rather than translated into languages other than Greek. Only the Dutch language
coined a word Wijsbegeerte which was a calque of the etymology of philosophia” (actually, Hungarian invented one too –
bölcselet – but the basic point remains).
Many other words in the Dictionary are like this. A famous example is Heidegger’s Dasein, which in ordinary German
means existence, but whose precise philosophical meaning is the subject of endless debate, and so is rarely translated
(except by clunky hyphenated constructions such as “Being-there”). The Danish are proud of the untranslatability of
their word hygge – a word conveying an atmosphere of welcoming cosiness, applied to a place or social event, as when
you spend time with friends and family, eating well in a warm room. There: I’ve told you what it means.
Heidegger’sDasein is like that; it will just take a bit longer to explain.
Translation is almost never a straightforward conversion. This is why it is such a fertile
subject for philosophy
Other philosophical words have gained their meanings through a creative process of neologism, mistranslation and
retranslation. Sometimes considering this process in too much detail can give rise to spurious questions, as far as
philosophy is concerned. “Consciousness” is conscience in French (coscienza in Italian,conciencia in Spanish), and these
French, Spanish and Italian words can also be translated into the English “conscience”. Although “consciousness” and
“conscience” are etymologically related, they have for centuries expressed completely different concepts in English, and
these concepts are expressed by different words in other languages. Étienne Balibar’s entry on “consciousness” struggles
with the conceptual and historical connections between consciousness and conscience; but for the English reader, the
struggle is an unnecessary artefact of the original entry’s being about the French wordconscience.
This example illustrates that the Dictionary cannot really be used as a dictionary of philosophy in the usual way –
something to which you might direct students, for example, to help them get clear accounts of complex concepts. And
some of its content is just inaccurate. In an entry on “Epistemology”, Catherine Chevalley makes the odd comment that
“it remains difficult in French to discuss the import of Bayesianism [a dominant contemporary probability-based theory
of knowledge, deriving from the eighteenth-century English cleric Thomas Bayes], or different interpretations of the
notion of probability”. If Chevalley had consulted Jean-Pierre Cléro’s entry on “Chance/Probability”, she would have
found there an extensive discussion of both Bayes anddifferent interpretations of probability (written originally in
French, of course). One central question in this debate is whether talk about the probability of an event is attributing a
property to the event itself (for example, the probability of a coin landing heads is 50 per cent) or whether it is just an
expression of a degree of subjective certainty or ignorance (I am 50 per cent sure that it will land heads). The first is
probability in the objective sense; the second, the subjective sense. This distinction is not a trivial one: some see it as
connected to the distinction between treating the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics (say) as an irreducible
feature of reality, and treating it as an expression of our ignorance (as in the so-called “hidden variable” theories). Cléro
distinguishes between objective and subjective interpretations, calling the first “probability” and the second “chance”.
Unfortunately, everyone in contemporary anglophone philosophy uses the word “chance” for objective probability, and
the unqualified “probability” for both the subjective and the objective (Cléro does not refer to a single work published
after 1975).
The best articles – among them those by historians of philosophy of the calibre of Brague or Alain de Libera – tease out
the complex relations of meaning and etymology across the languages of Europe. But the choice and relative sizes of
entries are eccentric. We have “demos” but not “democracy”; the very different ideas of “description” and “depiction” get
a shared entry; “idea” gets half a page, “Imagination” the same. “Event” gets a quarter of a page, but “Ereignis” (as used
by Heidegger) gets a page and a half. “Perception” is paired with “Apperception” (Leibniz’s word for self-consciousness),
and the author Michel Fichant takes the history of the subject only as far as Fichte in the mid-nineteenth century. The
historical material is valuable, but the entry should have been called “Perception and Apperception from Leibniz to
Fichte”.

If this is a dictionary, it is closer to those of Pierre Bayle (1697) or Dr Johnson (1755). In 1,300 pages it presents a certain
conception of some central terms from philosophy and their history and etymology. Many of the entries are illuminating,
but what is most fascinating about the book is its partial vision of a fragment of European culture, through the dissection
of its philosophical vocabulary. Brague observes that philosophizing in the vernacular in Europe began with Ramon Llull
writing in Catalan in the thirteenth century. But it took some time for national identities to impose themselves on
philosophical discourse, because of the international intellectual role of Latin, and then of French. Leibniz, one of the
greatest German philosophers, wrote no philosophical works in German. Things had changed by the time Heidegger
pronounced that “only our German language has a deep and creative philosophical character to compare with the
Greek”.

Despite the amount of attention paid to Heidegger in this book, the editors would surely demur. For the Dictionary of
Untranslatables is, more than anything, a loving celebration of philosophy as conceived by French philosophers. The
editors are explicit about this: Apter says that the book is “a direct challenge to the preeminence of Anglo-analytic
philosophical traditions . . . the imperium of English [sic] thought was strategically curtailed”. This “skewed distribution
of emphasis” is described as “clearly an important part of the polemical raison d’être of the French original”.
Certainly, English-language philosophy (not the same as “English thought”!) is conspicuously absent. The so-called
“ordinary language” philosophers are here (J. L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Gilbert Ryle, Wittgenstein) but very little else.
Brague’s long entry on “Europe” devotes only three sentences to English. But like it or not, “Anglo-analytic” philosophy
dominates university departments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia and many parts of Continental
Europe; and like it or not, the French approach embodied in Cassin’s book is on the decline worldwide. One way to see
theDictionary, then, is as an extended lament for the decline of French as a “preeminent language of philosophy”, in an
intellectual context where English has become what Apter calls “the singular language of universal knowledge”.
Anyone familiar with how philosophy in Europe developed in the twentieth century, and with twentieth-century history
more generally, will understand something of how this came about, and also therefore why the original edition of
the Dictionary has been described as “a surprise hit” in France. The worry is not so much that it is Francocentric, but that
its provincialism may mislead those who do not know anything about what the rest of the world thinks.
This Dictionary is, more than anything, a loving celebration of philosophy as conceived
by French philosophers
The Francocentrism is brought to self-parodic heights, though, in Alain Badiou’s entry on “French”, a remarkable paean
to the French language as a language of philosophy. Obviously as frustrated as the editors are by the linguistic
imperialism of English, he remarks plaintively that “the major creative figures in philosophy in French, Descartes,
Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan, all claimed the right to write in their native language, in sum, the right to freedom of
language”. It’s hard to know what claiming this right consisted in, given that no one was stopping any of these people
from writing in their native language. Today, of course, there is pressure on scholars worldwide, in a huge number of
academic fields, to write in English. In the natural sciences, it is simply impossible to succeed without writing in English.
But this fact – regrettable or not, and not explicitly discussed by Badiou – has nothing to do with whether Bergson et al
were claiming a right to freedom of language.
But it gets worse. Badiou claims that philosophical French is “a language of women and the working class rather than of
scientists”. Philosophy in French is “violently polemical . . . ignoring consensus . . . still opposed to the academy it speaks
(politically) to the public and not to colleagues”. The fact that “philosophy in French is political” is supposed to be a fact
about the language itself: “the latent universalism of any use of French, from Descartes to the present, rests entirely on
the belief that theessence of language is syntax”. The essence of language may be syntax, as Chomsky has argued, but this
is not specific to French, and has nothing to do with political freedom. This bizarre association of ideas reaches its climax
in Badiou’s claim that Descartes’s dedication of his Principles of Philosophyto Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia “is in reality
a basic democratic intention that turns philosophical discourse towards discussion and seduction, towards Venus rather
than Minerva, moving it as far as possible away from academic or scientific entrenchment”.
It’s a good question what happened to French philosophical prose between Voltaire and Lacan, but it is not one that is
addressed by Badiou, or by anyone else in this Dictionary of Untranslatables. In her preface, Apter discusses Badiou’s
entry at length, perhaps with a little embarrassment. “National ontology”, she says, is “strictly speaking, anathema to
Badiou”. A lot must be contained in that “strictly speaking”, especially given that French is “close to being an Adamic
language in Badiou’s ascription”. What can this possibly mean? Apter struggles: “it lends itself to logical formalism,
axioms, maxims and universal principles. Above all, for Badiou, the French language is conducive to the politicisation of
expression, unseating predicates through the play of substitutions and the art of the imperious question”.
Certainly, Badiou himself is the master of the imperious question. But his remarks about the French language bring to
mind Wittgenstein’s joke about the French politician who “wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it
words occur in the order in which one thinks them”. In fact, this is all the more odd because Badiou himself has written a
book on Wittgenstein. So perhaps it is deliberate; could Badiou be making fun of those “Anglo-Saxons” who strive for
simplicity and clarity in their philosophical prose and mock the “obscurantism” of the French? Is the joke on the Anglo-
Saxons and the “imperium of English thought”? It’s hard to tell. As Barbara Cassin herself observes, “nothing is harder
than to translate a witticism”.

Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and the Philosophy editor of the TLS.
Five atheists who ruin it for
everyone else
Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff, thereby eroding the credibility of
all atheists
Like a fresh-baked loaf of sanity resting on the window of human possibility, atheism is on the rise in the United
States. Will this growing constituency become a formidable political force before global warming decimates
civilization? I’m skeptical. But according to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 5 of Americans now say they’re
either atheist, agnostic, or that they simply don’t believe in anything in particular. That godless number was a
scant 6 percent in 1990, and this spring roughly 20,000 atheists showed up—rain and all—at the first ever
Reason Rally in DC, so, surely, despite the protestations of Texas Republicans, this newfangled thing called
“critical thinking” is poised to better the national discourse, yes? Well…

The thing about the so-called “rationalist” movement in America is that disbelief in gods seems to be the only
qualification to join the club. Disbelief in a supernatural creator, especially as the movement becomes more
popular or “hep,” as I’m pretending the kids say, in no way guarantees rationality in matters of foreign policy or
economics, for example. Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff—likely owing their
prominence to these same benighted beliefs, lending an air of scientific credibility to the myths corporate media
seeks to highlight, and thereby eroding the credibility of all atheists in the long-term. In other words: The crap
always rises to the top.

So while we wait around to fully succumb to drought, crop failure, and famine, here’s a list of the five most
awful atheists.

Sam Harris
Dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen” of “new atheism,” along with philosopher Daniel Dennett, evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens, Harris’ atheist fame is both wholly undeserved
and utterly embarrassing. Harris represents a disturbing anti-Muslim confluence between atheists and
neoconservatives in this here post-9/11 ‘Murka. While it’s fine to ridicule Islam, for the oppression of women, or
say, the ridiculous story about Muhammad (PB&J) flying to Jerusalem on a Buraq (a winged and inexplicably
shame-ridden horse with a dude’s face), it’s quite another thing to defend torture and racial profiling.

For a guy who purportedly came to be an atheist through his intellect, Harris routinely fails to demonstrate the
faintest capacity to reason. By shamelessly trotting out the same “ticking-nuke” fairy tale as every other Jack and
Jill Bauer on Fox News, he failed to notice that torture rarely produces reliable intelligence, and that it’s a wildly
counterproductive jihadist recruitment tool. And according to security expert Bruce Schneier, profiling on the
basis on ethnicity is useless. But for all Harris’ sometimes lofty rhetoric about science, he’s just not amenable to
evidence.
Most grating, for someone who wrote a book titled The Moral Landscape, Harris’ “War on Islam” zealotry is
numerically unjustifiable. You’re four times as likely to die of a lightning strike than you are from a terrorist
attack, and yet this constitutes the gravest threat to Western civilization, but 100,000 (at least) civilian casualties
in Iraq is mere fodder for thought experiment apologia. Harris is basically a low-rent Hitchens, sans wit or the
wisdom to waterboard himself.
Bill Maher

The “Real Time” host’s thinly veiled misogyny, obtuse notion that fat, poor people just need to, like, shop at
Whole Foods, and self-righteous condescension in all things religious and political might be tolerable were it not
for the fact that he’s on comedic par with cervical cancer. The only difference being: cervical cancer doesn’t
blame its victims for failing to laugh. Compounding the unpleasant nature of Maher’s wheat-grass pomposity is
that, from vaccines to the news items he discusses, he’s just not very well informed.
In ’09, he told America that getting “[a] flu shot is the worst thing you can do.” He then tried to “clarify” his
Luddite remark with a piece on the anti-vax Huffington Post that conflated scientific consensus with…(wait for
it)…religion!

If one side can say anything and its not challenged, then of course dissent becomes heresy in the minds of many.

No, Bill, that’s not how that works. In the same article, Maher commits a classic bandwagon fallacy by claiming
it’s a “conversation worth having” because so many people believe vaccinations are harmful. Color me
disappointed for presuming an American atheist couldn’t possibly be so myopic. But, no worries; I have a “New
Rule” that should fix everything: Bill Maher has to either stop booking half-bright libertarians who rhetorically
roll his uninformed ass, or he needs to start reading books.
Penn Jillette
Like many skeptics, the bloviating, ponytailed half of Penn & Teller arrived at his disbelief via the world of
magic. However, like giant mystified toddlers, the smoke and mirrors of economic libertarianism has the two
performers completely duped. Unable to call bullshit on Ayn Rand, they used to carry a dogeared copy of Atlas
Shrugged around on tour—to give you some idea. For a better glimpse into Jillette’s intellectual
compartmentalization, consider this article he wrote for CNN called “I don’t know, so I’m an atheist libertarian.”
While vast ignorance is a valid reason to be an economic libertarian, not knowing things is not a good reason to
be an atheist. Jillette’s profoundly illogical explanation defies deconstruction:

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist — I don’t know. If I don’t know, I don’t believe…

OK…care to add any Cato Institute canards?

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is
compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give
money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

Translation: If the dern gubmint would just stop overtaxing the rich at gunpoint, which is a super-accurate
description of reality, then they could have enough money left over for charity, you guys! While private charity
is important in America, especially because of our highly regressive gunpoint tax code, it’s demonstrably wrong
to suggest that it’s an apt substitute for a just tax structure. Americans would have to give roughly 10 times what
they do to cover the cost of social welfare programs. But you know how facts can be. They’re not awesome like
Glenn Beck. Facts are all self-righteous and bullying and lazy and objectively accurate and junk. At least Teller
has the decency never to speak.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
While she’s to be commended for her staunch defense of women suffering under Sharia law, the Somali-born
former Dutch politician’s few good deeds shouldn’t absolve her for being to Islam what Ayn Rand was to
Communism. Hirsi Ali notoriously received death threats for writing the screenplay to Submission, the
documentary which inspired the assassination of its director Theo van Gogh, and her ridiculous objectivist
spin on this tragedy was nothing short of shameful:

“[The killer] was on welfare….he had the time to plot a murder, which in the United States he would not be.”

The consummate over-reactionary, what could have been an inspiring career based on reason and social justice
quickly devolved into one of neoconservative lunacy. As a former Muslim and current fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, she lends an illusion of street cred to all manner of egregious “free-market” worship, global
warming denial, and Western aggression. From her call to violently “crush” Islam or convert Muslims to
Christianity to her desire to deny Muslims their First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, Hirsi Ali
consistently demonstrates both galling hypocrisy and a stupefying lack of self-awareness. Like Rand, she’s
traded one form of totalitarian dogma for another—openly contending that reason must be shunted when
confronting an irrational enemy. Mission accomplished.
S.E. Cupp

Pop quiz: Who wrote the book Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity? Although it’s
tempting to presume such dreck must be the work of a religious demagogue like Bryan Fischer or John Hagee,
the answer is obviously one Sarah Elizabeth Cupp. As a devout Randroid and atheist outlier, the co-host of
MSNBC’s newly minted phony-balance-media-abortion “The Cycle” is more at home bashing atheism than she
is defending it—per market demand.

Like Jillette, she’s chummy with Glenn Beck because idiotic atheists and idiotic Mormons have a natural
alliance. Cupp’s self-loathing-token-atheist-in-the-conservative-media routine seems so geared toward
delegitimizing atheism, and selling books to fundie Fox types, that is strains credulity. She recently said, “I
would never vote for an atheist president. Ever,” because she thinks religion serves as a “check” on presidential
power.
When not claiming that imaginary things can affect real things, Cupp’s biggest passion—aside from classical
dance and NASCAR, of course—is to spout moronic Americans for Prosperity talking points about the evils of
“collectivism,” like public roads and bridges and so forth, which are ostensibly destroying the American Dream.
In an atheist integrity contest, she loses to Stalin by a mustache. That’s not hyperbole; she doesn’t have a
mustache.

Where Have All The Philosophers Gone?

Richard Marshall, Philosophy at 3:AM: Questions and Answers

with 25 Top Philosophers
Oxford University Press, 304pp, £20.00, ISBN 9780199969531
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
The day I first looked at 3:AM the latest End Times interview by Richard Marshall shared the
website’s homepage with a review of Russell Brand’s Revolution, a juxtaposition worthy of Marshall’s
concern: ‘where have all the philosophers gone?’ Marshall describes 3:AM as ‘a self-proclaimed
underground mag’, essentially iconoclastic rather than philosophical, often anti-academia, and
generally publishing in areas related to fiction and the arts. His series of interviews began as an
experiment in the effects of introducing philosophers and their ideas and working methods in the
context of 3:AM’s contrastingly broad agenda, ‘Whatever it is, we’re against it’.
Marshall has been prolific – this batch of 25 interviews is from 2011-12 and the series continues (well
over 100 interviews have been published). His guiding idea remains that philosophers – specifically
UK and American philosophers in the analytic tradition – are absent from public debates about issues
in the contemporary world that should concern them, leaving the field to other intellectuals –
historians, economists, political scientists, cultural critics – who aren’t qualified to deal with them
with appropriate philosophical rigour. Within that context Marshall’s interviews tend to focus on
each philosopher’s method and solutions to particular problems, and their relations to other
thinkers, past and present. Each is prefaced with a biographical sketch; they reveal that most
philosophical fields are covered from the inner circle of epistemology, metaphysics and logic, out to,
especially, philosophy of mind and language and to ethics and political philosophy. Marshall’s first
interview, with Timothy Williamson, set the subsequent selection criteria – he thought
hisVagueness (1994) intriguingly ‘odd, perverse, unbelievable’ and Marshall’s interest is in
philosophers who address ‘the big questions that pop up in the dead of night’.

So why aren’t there more publicly well-known philosophers in the UK and US? Are there
methodological reasons perhaps that cut across their varied interests? Williamson holds the
prestigious post of Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford; as such one could say
he’s the personification of British analytic philosophy. But when asked about the possible neglect of
his work in contrast to the supposed high public profiles of Continental philosophers, Williamson is
unconcerned. Marshall’s example, Jean-Paul Sartre, is countered as a special case because of Sartre’s
literary work. And Bertrand Russell’s public fame in his time is explained by Williamson, similarly, by
his general interests in marriage and morals, for example, and nuclear disarmament. So for
Williamson there’s a clear implication that philosophical analysis per se – his work – is simply not a
matter of public interest. This is not to argue that it fails to properly engage matters of fundamental
importance, however. Williamson, along with most contemporary analytic philosophers, distances
himself from any idea that their work merely ‘rephrases philosophical questions as questions about
words and concepts’; that would miss the underlying interests we all have in the ‘big questions’. But
this is not necessarily a turn to the public – it’s more likely, notes Williamson, that philosophers then
turn to psychologists, biologists and physicists to situate and ground their work. Jerry Fodor’s
philosophy of mind works in that vein, especially by drawing on cognitive science; and Marshall’s
interview with him reveals another thematic difference between analytic and Continental philosophy
when Fodor’s response to the latter is: ‘as a matter of principle I refuse to read philosophers who
write that badly.’ Fodor is perhaps Marshall’s most distinguished interviewee – and here too the daily
work of the philosopher is explained as ‘contemplating issues about explanatory adequacy’
(reiterating the seemingly non-public nature of the work of philosophy).

If that’s what philosophers do qua philosophers, what do they know? What Do Philosophers Know? is
the title of a 2009 book by the last interviewee, Gary Gutting. In the course of the interview Gutting
gives the by now standard response about philosophy as ‘intellectual maintenance’, although linking
the work of ‘understanding implications’ and ‘eliminating internal contradictions’ to ‘defending and
modifying fundamental beliefs.’ (His book on what philosophers know is, tellingly, restricted to case
studies in the analytic tradition). Applying technical methods in philosophy to our beliefs is grist to
Marshall’s mill – it marks the point at which philosophers in the analytic tradition can reasonably be
public figures, engaging in debates wherever terms like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’ are used.
The interview doesn’t pursue this, though; instead it returns to the analytic-Continental divide, and
again familiar stories. So Gutting notes his waning interest in Continental philosophy (with Sartre’s
influence noted as an exception) and his barb on Jacques Derrida is typical: ‘I think that his writing
often has far less intellectual density than its difficulty suggests.’ Pushed a little by Marshall, Gutting
sees the lower public profile of analytic philosophers in historical terms, mentioning, but that’s all,
‘tradition and anti-intellectualism in the US.’ Whether that’s also related to the fundamental
differences in philosophical approaches – the analytic tradition’s emphasis on common sense and
logic rather than Continental transcendence and creativity that Gutting observes – is not explored
further. Gutting is keener to end the interview – and the book as it happens – commenting on the
progress that’s being made to get philosophers known more widely through Marshall’s own work
and by various online forums like The New York Times’ The Store.

So where have all the philosophers gone? It’s clear that they’ve not retreated from public arenas, but
rather that they continue to work the way philosophers do. Marshall’s recurring sense of absence is
misplaced then for those working at philosophy’s core and in areas where it works closely with the
sciences – an intersection of substantial coexistence with analytic philosophy. But there are now also
strong analytic traditions in political philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. Where are these philosophers,
who might be expected to be more publicly engaged than say philosophers of mind? The answer
might lie in Marshall’s observation about philosophers in general. He notes how impressed he is with
their rigour, how they welcome interrogation and discussion, how they lack a sense of self-
importance. But these qualities are not necessarily politic. Norman Malcolm was a student of Ludwig
Wittgenstein at Cambridge, before becoming a Professor of Philosophy himself at Cornell University.
In his 1958 memoir of Wittgenstein he recalls his teacher’s manner as often severe, ruthless and
censorious. Perhaps that is the social cost of analytic philosophy; and it also suggests the intellectual
maturity required of any political culture embracing philosophical rigour.

A story from Malcolm’s memoir is illustrative. In 1939 Wittgenstein fell out with his friend as well as
student Malcolm because the latter had remarked that ‘British national characteristics’ made it
impossible for any British government to contemplate assassinating Hitler. Wittgenstein thought the
comment ‘shockingly primitive’ and represented Malcolm’s failure to learn anything from
philosophy. In 1944, still worried by the incident, he writes to Malcolm: ‘what is the use of studying
philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse
questions of logic etc and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of
everyday life?’ But trying to rekindle the friendship he adds: ‘I’d very much like to see you again; but
if we meet it would be wrong to avoid talking about serious non-philosophical issues’. The lesson
seems to be that philosophy teaches rigour and demands that universally, but that politics is still ours
to decide.

Why free speech is fundamental

MORE THAN two centuries after freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment to the
Constitution, that right is very much in the news. Campus speech codes, disinvited commencement
speakers, jailed performance artists, exiled leakers, a blogger condemned to a thousand lashes by one
of our closest allies, and the massacre of French cartoonists have forced the democratic world to
examine the roots of its commitment to free speech.
Is free speech merely a symbolic talisman, like a national flag or motto? Is it just one of many values
that we trade off against each other? Was Pope Francis right when he said that “you cannot make fun
of the faith of others”? May universities muzzle some students to protect the sensibilities of others?
Did the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists “cross a line that separates free speech from toxic talk,” as the dean
of a school of journalism recently opined? Or is free speech fundamental — a right which, if not
absolute, should be abrogated only in carefully circumscribed cases?

The answer is that free speech is indeed fundamental. It’s important to remind ourselves why, and to
have the reasons at our fingertips when that right is called into question.

The first reason is that the very thing we’re doing when we ask whether free speech is fundamental —
exchanging and evaluating ideas — presupposes that we have the right to exchange and evaluate ideas.
In talking about free speech (or anything else) we’re talking. We’re not settling our disagreement by
arm-wrestling or a beauty contest or a pistol duel. Unless you’re willing to discredit yourself by
declaring, in the words of Nat Hentoff, “free speech for me but not for thee,” then as soon as you show
up to a debate to argue against free speech, you’ve lost it.
Those who are unimpressed by this logical argument can turn to one based on human experience. One
can imagine a world in which oracles, soothsayers, prophets, popes, visionaries, imams, or gurus have
been vouchsafed with the truth which only they possess and which the rest of us would be foolish,
indeed, criminal, to question. History tells us that this is not the world we live in. Self-proclaimed
truthers have repeatedly been shown to be mistaken — often comically so — by history, science, and
common sense.

Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history — one that is prior to every other discovery — is that
our traditional sources of belief are in fact generators of error and should be dismissed as grounds for
knowledge. These include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition,
clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty.

How, then, can we know? Other than by proving mathematical theorems, which are not about the
material world, the answer is the process that the philosopher Karl Popper called conjecture and
refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality,
allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course,
depends upon the exercise of free speech. We offer these conjectures without any prior assurance they
are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that
we acquire knowledge.

Once this realization sank in during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the traditional
understanding of the world was upended. Everyone knows that the discovery that the Earth revolves
around the sun rather than vice-versa had to overcome fierce resistance from ecclesiastical authority.
But the Copernican revolution was just the first event in a cataclysm that would make our current
understanding of the world unrecognizable to our ancestors. Everything we know about the world —
the age of our civilization, species, planet, and universe; the stuff we’re made of; the laws that govern
matter and energy; the workings of the body and brain — came as insults to the sacred dogma of the
day. We now know that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified,
doubtless including some we hold today.

A third reason that free speech is foundational to human flourishing is that it is essential to democracy
and a bulwark against tyranny. How did the monstrous regimes of the 20th century gain and hold
power? The answer is that groups of armed fanatics silenced their critics and adversaries. (The 1933
election that gave the Nazis a plurality was preceded by years of intimidation, murder, and violent
mayhem.) And once in power, the totalitarians criminalized any criticism of the regime. This is also
true of the less genocidal but still brutal regimes of today, such as those in China, Russia, African
strongman states, and much of the Islamic world.

Why do dictators brook no dissent? One can imagine autocrats who feathered their nests and jailed or
killed only those who directly attempted to usurp their privileges, while allowing their powerless
subjects to complain all they want. There’s a good reason dictatorships don’t work that way. The
immiserated subjects of a tyrannical regime are not deluded that they are happy, and if tens of millions
of disaffected citizens act together, no regime has the brute force to resist them. The reason that
citizens don’t resist their overlords en masse is that they lackcommon knowledge — the awareness that
everyone shares their knowledge and knows they share it. People will expose themselves to the risk of
reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the
same time.
Common knowledge is created by public information, such as a broadcasted statement. The story of
“The Emperor’s New Clothes’’ illustrates the logic. When the little boy shouted that the emperor was
naked, he was not telling them anything they didn’t already know, anything they couldn’t see with their
own eyes. But he was changing their knowledge nonetheless, because now everyone knew that
everyone else knew that the emperor was naked. And that common knowledge emboldened them to
challenge the emperor’s authority with their laughter.

The story reminds us why humor is no laughing matter — why satire and ridicule, even when puerile
and tasteless, are terrifying to autocrats and protected by democracies. Satire can stealthily challenge
assumptions that are second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that those assumptions lead
to consequences that everyone recognizes are absurd.

That’s why humor so often serves as an accelerant to social progress. Eighteenth-century wiseguys like
Voltaire, Swift, and Johnson ridiculed the wars, oppressions, and cruel practices of their day. In the
1960s, comedians and artists portrayed racists as thick-witted Neanderthals and Vietnam hawks and
nuclear cold warriors as amoral psychopaths. The Soviet Union and its satellites had a rich
underground current of satire, as in the common definition of the two Cold War ideologies:
“Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.”

We use barbed speech to undermine not just political dictators but the petty oppressors of everyday
life: the tyrannical boss, the sanctimonious preacher, the blowhard at the bar, the neighborhood
enforcer of stifling norms.

It’s true that free speech has limits. We carve out exceptions for fraud, libel, extortion, divulging
military secrets, and incitement to imminent lawless action. But these exceptions must be strictly
delineated and individually justified; they are not an excuse to treat speech as one fungible good
among many. Despots in so-called “democratic republics” routinely jail their opponents on charges of
treason, libel, and inciting lawlessness. Britain’s lax libel laws have been used to silence critics of
political figures, business oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, and medical quacks. Even Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s famous exception to free speech — falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater — is easily
abused, not least by Holmes himself. He coined the meme in a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld
the conviction of a man who distributed leaflets encouraging men to resist the draft during World War
I, a clear expression of opinion in a democracy.

And if you object to these arguments — if you want to expose a flaw in my logic or a lapse in my
accuracy — it’s the right of free speech that allows you to do so.

Steven Pinker is professor of psychology at Harvard University, and the author, most recently, of
“The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.’’

Curvology: the Origins and Power of Female Body Shape by David

Bainbridge, review: 'strange and sometimes worrying'
A study that seeks an evolutionary explanation for the shape of the female body raises as many
questions as it answers
You might think that the mooted abolition of Page 3 – there may soon be no more pictures of bare-chested
women in the print edition of The Sun – marks a real breakthrough in male-female relations. I’m not so sure.
Rarely a day passes without a glamorous female adorning the front pages of all the broadsheet newspapers, let
alone the red tops.
A new book, Curvology, adds to this sense that we’ve gone one step forward and two back in our willingness to
change the way we think about women’s roles, and men’s too. The book sets out to seek “the origins and power
of female body shape”. Inevitably, in such a study there is much discussion of curvaceous bosoms and equally
 alluring bottoms. How else, perhaps, could the human female shape be described? Yet in these supposedly
enlightened times it’s odd to find yourself reading a book that talks about women with such blokeish reductionism.
What are we supposed to make of comments like: “You might expect that a few thousand years of sexual
selection by men would result in every woman having a body like Beyoncé or Bardot”?
The book’s author, David Bainbridge, is a veterinary surgeon who moved from healing animals into a broader
study of animal behaviour and from there into the realms of evolutionary biology. His previous books, which
include Teenagers: a Natural History and Middle Age: a Natural History, have investigated human behaviour from
the perspective of his zoological training, with surprising and often controversial results. Teenage behaviour, for
example, was portrayed not as a social construct, a product of the wealth and leisure of the late 20th century, but
as a consequence of evolution. That long period of rebellion enables brainpower to develop, helping us to
succeed as individuals. Just what the parents of teenagers want to read.
Curvology, in contrast, appears to have been written deliberately to infuriate half its readership. “This is a book
about the female body,” Bainbridge begins, “and why it has turned out to be the strangest thing in existence.”
Strange? To whom? He says that one of the reasons he wanted to write the book was to find out why we were the
only species in existence “with curvy females”. Is that true? Bainbridge’s only justification for saying so is that we
would never think of describing a she-monkey as “curvaceous” or a female pig as “buxom”. But what does this tell
us?
He wonders why women spend so much time thinking about their bodies “and to a level of complexity and
subtlety which amazes most men”. But he then tells us that “a picture is emerging, and perhaps a slightly
disheartening picture, which places visual appearance at the centre of human female life”. Studies, which he does
not identify, have apparently shown that “people are more likely to help, employ, give a reduced prison sentence
to, want to be friends with, or admit to university attractive women with high status”. If you’re one of the nine per
cent of women blessed with an hourglass figure, with a bust and hip size almost the same, complemented by a
tiny waist, then it seems you’re more likely to be successful.
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Is it any wonder, then, that a reported 87 per cent of women attempt to enhance their body shape by dieting?
Bainbridge is a victim of our own confused understanding of the relations between the sexes (in spite of equal pay
and the proposed scrapping of Page 3). He wants to believe that his response to the female shape is part of our
evolutionary heritage, and that “the elements which make the female body look so distinctive are not just
superficial adornments”. Those curvy breasts and bottoms ensure the future health and intelligence of the next
generation. That’s why they’ve become the determinants of attraction. How reassuring for a man. But what about
for a woman? Why are so many women dissatisfied with their body shape if it’s to their evolutionary advantage to
be curvaceous? Bainbridge promises to answer this tricky question by the end of his book, but I’m not sure he
does.
To be fair, his initial discussion of the body and explanation of why we women have curves is illuminating to me, a
non-biologist. He claims that during puberty women lay down between 10 and 20 kilograms of extra adipose
tissue (fat to you and me), most of which goes on to the buttocks and thighs. Much of this is later converted into
breast milk, which in turn is used by the suckling babe to build up brainpower (unusually in nature, the human
brain grows mostly after rather than before birth). As we age and go through the menopause, this fat is lost or
moves into the waist area, which actually makes women more physically efficient. What a female athlete would
make of this I’m not sure, but it’s cheering news to those of us of more mature years who’ve discovered fat
moving into places we’ve never seen it before.
More troubling to me was his chapter on eating disorders, in which it soon becomes obvious that Bainbridge is
uncomfortable with the idea that these might be mental illnesses. At the same time, he has to concede that they
cannot be thought of as a modern condition, a response to the cult of thinness that has beset our contemporary
world. They’ve been around for centuries. Indeed, in his struggle to find an explanation, he suggests that women
who voluntarily denied themselves food, visibly shrinking in size, were at one time “like canaries in a coal mine”,
warning the tribe of impending famine. This could perhaps explain the almost primeval aggression that anorexics
arouse in those who are supposed to be treating them. Yet at the same time he suggests that a genetic basis for
the condition might be found in autism, without providing any research basis for this.
Such confusions beset this strange and, some might say, worrying book. The first section, setting out the
biological arguments for curves, is top-and-tailed with an imagined scene from our evolutionary past: “In the rust-
red light of another dawn the girl gazed down at her thighs. She pinched them… and she felt them sway slightly
whenever she walked… She cupped her breasts in her hands.” There’s no explanation for these passages; they
just appear at the beginning and end of that section. We are presumably meant to take ourselves back into that
past, to recapture a world in which body fascism was yet to emerge. But it sits very oddly within a study that
intends to work out scientifically why women’s bodies are far more shapely than they really need to be and why
women dress to impress other women, rather than the men they hope to attract.

Cloudy Logic
By ROBIN JAMES

Big data doesn’t forecast the future but remakes the present in the image of down-to-earth
stereotypes.
While Theodor Adorno was exiled in Los Angeles, he wroteThe Stars Down to Earth, a short book about the
“pseudo-rationality” of mid-20th century American culture drawing on his study of “Astrological Forecasts,”
the Los Angeles Times’s astrology column. Adorno uses the column to demonstrate how the capitalist culture
industry in 1950s America sold quasi-scientific posturing to help an audience “excluded from educational
privileges” nonetheless feel in the know.
Though the differences between Adorno’s time and ours are vast, his concept of pseudo-rationality still has
something to tell us about the “rationality” of contemporary algorithmic culture, social media, and big data. The
pseudo-rationality Adorno identifies in the astrology column shares key features with the data-driven “science” of
forecasting that Nate Silver describes in his 2012 book The Signal and the Noise. For both Adorno and Silver,
forecasting is a “down to earth” activity, a matter of applied knowledge that helps people figure out what to do in
their daily lives. Both kinds of forecasting use profiles to explain the past and predict the future choices we will
make: Both astrological signs and psychographic categories derived from demographic data (like, say, “college-
educated women who tweet about Scandal and buy shoes online”) similarly forecast individual behavior. Adorno
describes astrology’s capacity to fulfill “the longings of people who are thoroughly convinced that others (or some
unknown agency) ought to know more about themselves and what they should do than they can decide for
themselves.” Data-driven algorithms fulfill a comparable function, but now the secret to our identity and our
future happiness and success lies not in the stars but in the cloud.
When personal identity is experienced and understood as a matter of forecasting, “the adage ‘be yourself’ assumes
an ironical meaning,” Adorno claims. Such forecasting doesn’t predict the future; Adorno argues that it crafts the
future in the image of “the established ways of life,” “the life of those whom it embraces.” The profiles are designed
to produce the identity or frame of mind that they supposedly just describe.
Astrology, in Adorno’s account, maintains its reliability by avoiding easily falsifiable concrete details. Astrologers
rely on their “knowledge of the most frequently recurring problems prescribed by the set-up of modern life and
the characterological patterns [they] had frequent occasion to observe,” figuring out “a number of typical
situations” that many followers might find themselves in. That description is equally applicable to big-data
methods. The big-data algorithm, like the astrologer, observes patterns (of behavior, of interactivity, etc.) across
populations and ties its forecasts to this input. Both kinds of forecasts “modulate” (to use scholar John Cheney--
Lippold’s term) themselves to user behavior.

Whereas mass media tries to mass-produce standardized audiences, algorithmic media adapts to users—music-
streaming services and Facebook’s Timeline algorithm “learn” what content optimizes individual users’
engagement and “tailor results according to user categorizations based on the observed web habits of ‘typical’
women and men,” Cheney-Lippold argues. Through this feedback loop of observation and adjustment, social
media produce the identity categories—like “typical” men and women—it claims to merely observe.

Forecasting itself cannot be an exact science, and it doesn’t even aspire to be. Its goal isn’t accuracy, per se, but the
avoidance of noisy dissonances with real life that call the reliability of the underlying ideological framework into
doubt. What makes forecasting pseudo-rational is its offer of a nominally objective, systematic account of the
“delusions” (in Adorno’s words) necessary to live in a capitalist society. Pseudo-rationality obscures the
irrationality of social norms and makes what ought to feel outrageous seem completely down-to-earth. In its
current big-data form, it rationalizes what Charles W. Mills, in The Racial Contract, calls the “cognitive
dysfunctions” that make white-supremacist society fully functional. As Latanya Sweeny has shown in her
study“Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery,” Google searches for names “racially associated” with black people
return promoted results that imply the person you’re searching has an arrest record. On one website, a “black-
identifying name was 25% more likely to get an ad suggestive of an arrest record.” This both expresses and
reinforces anti-black racism. As Cecilia Esther Rabess argues in “Can Big Data Be Racist?,”Google AdSense
“translates cultural clichés and stereotypes into empirically verifiable data sets.”
Though, as Adorno pointed out, a newspaper column could only “pretend” to tailor the content of each sign’s
horoscope to users’ needs, wants, wishes, and demands, big data and social media overcome the limitations of
mass media and allow forecasting to fully realize its capacity to tailor categories and output to observed user
behavior. Scaled up in size and in processing power, big data could be the realization of what Adorno called “the
potential danger represented by astrology as a mass phenomenon.”

One aspect of that danger is the “abstract authority” of astrologers, now mirrored by the black-box algorithms of
the cloud. The opacity of the analytic method lends forecasts their appearance of authoritative objectivity. In
“Astrological Forecasts”, Adorno notes “the mechanics of the astrological system are never divulged and the
readers are presented only with the alleged results of astrological reasoning.” “Treated as impersonal and thing-
like,” stars appear “entirely abstract, unapproachable, and anonymous” and thus more objective than mere fallible
human reason. Similarly, as Kate Crawford pointed out in an essay about fitness trackers for the Atlantic,
“analytics companies aren’t required to reveal which data sets they are using and how they are being analyzed.”
The inaccessible logic of their proprietary algorithms is imposed on us, and their inscrutability masquerades as
proof of their objectivity. As Crawford argues, “Prioritizing data—irregular, unreliable data—over human
reporting, means putting power in the hands of an algorithm.” As Adorno puts it, “The cult of God has been
replaced by the cult of facts.”
The apparent objectivity of the stars or the data cloud intensifies forecasters’ existing biases, allowing them to be
passed off as neutral and matter-of-fact. Adorno argues that astrology rearticulates unfashionable superstitions in
the occult, in mysticism, and so on, by presenting them in empirical rather than supernatural terms—star charts
and tables, for example. Upgrading the medium in which they are expressed, obsolete social myths gain new life as
apparent fact.

Similarly, big data can rearticulate “unfashionable” beliefs in, say, eugenics, by presenting them in supposedly
more advanced and accurate empirical terms. Crawford points this out: When fitness-tracking devices (like FitBit)
are “used to represent objective truth for insurers or courtrooms,” this treats their inconsistent and unreliable
measurement of both what counts as exercise and what counts as a “‘normal’ healthy body” to pass as hard
evidence. Fitness-tracking systems thereby build dominant ideas of health, embodiment, ability, and activity into
the hardware, the software, and the algorithms embedded within them.

Forecasting repackages old-fashioned ideas as unprecedentedly objective knowledge, in part by sweeping

inconsistencies under the rug of “individual responsibility.” To pass the social system off as an objective artifact
determined by (quasi-)scientific processes, forecasting has to scapegoat “irresponsible” individuals for failing to
live up to the terms of the forecast. Adorno writes that “the constant appeal of the column to find fault with oneself
rather than with given conditions” is evidence of “the implicit but ubiquitous rule that one has to adjust oneself
continuously to commands of the stars at a given time.” When forecasts end up being inaccurate, the fault lies not
in the prediction methodology but the individual’s failure to adjust to the forecaster’s advice.

Big-data-enabled self-tracking foregrounds this same sort of adjustment and tries to make it seem really easy. As
Whitney Erin Boesel argues in “Data Occupations,” self-tracking apps are “a single-serving ‘solution’ to a much
larger collective problem”—they encourage individuals to fix themselves rather than collectively address
problematic social norms.

Adorno explains how this can seem empowering but really isn’t: “The idea that the stars, if only one reads them
correctly, offer some advice mitigates the very same fear of the inexorability of social processes the stargazer
himself creates.” It reinforces the neoliberal myth of individual responsibility for social problems and misdirects
our attention toward dumbed-down superficial solutions to complex social problems. For example, framing
problems of political economy, class, and race as an “obesity epidemic” assumes both that obesity is a problem
and that it is a problem that can be solved by modifying individual behavior (diet, exercise).
Though Adorno wasn’t thinking explicitly in these terms,Stars Down to Earth helps us see that neoliberalism’s
ideal subject, homo economicus, embodies the same pseudo-rationality found in both astrology and big data, and
that this economic pseudo-rationality is itself a trendy, supposedly more objective upgrade to unfashionable
superstitions.
Homo economicus is the name for the view, held by neoliberal economists like Gary Becker, that, as Jason Read
explains in “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus,” “everything for which human beings attempt to realize their
ends, from marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood ‘economically’ according to a
particular calculation of cost for benefit.” Humans are beings who make choices, and every choice is ultimately a
cost-benefit analysis: Everything I might do, from college education to cosmetic surgery, is an investment of time
and resources, so I must decide which investments best serve my interests and give me relatively better choices in
the future. Because, as Read notes, “the operative terms” in this theory of human life “are no longer rights and
laws but interest, investment, and competition,” cost-benefit calculus updates old unfashionable beliefs in things
like human rights with a supposedly much more objective and effective belief in the market.
Adorno finds this sort of economistic rationality throughout “Astrological Forecasts.” First, like neoliberal
economic theory, it stresses the significance and efficacy of individual choice. Astrology’s “basic presumption” is
“that everyone has to make up his mind at every moment.” Through the column’s pseudoscience, “instinctual
needs contrary to the rule of rational interests appear to be commandeered by rational interests.” “The addressee,”
for example, “has to ‘calculate’ very carefully his relationships with his family. He has to pay for the help and
solidarity he expects.” The column advises readers, in line with a familiar stereotype, “to send flowers to one’s wife
not because one feels an urge to do so, but because one is afraid of the scene she makes if one forgets.” In this
example, “‘to be rational’ means not questioning irrational conditions,” like the fetishized commodification of love
or heterosexual marriage, “but to make the best of them from the viewpoint of one’s private interests.”

Adorno echoes political theorist Andrew Dilts’s claim in “From ‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’,” that
this cost-benefit calculus itself has a price—it “sacrifice[s] any possibility of being critical.” Cost-benefit calculus
works because everything is reduced to the common denominator of “private interest,” so the big-picture factors
that would call into question why some choices seem better than others are necessarily factored out of this
equation.
Like neoliberal economic theory, in which, as Read writes, “individualized, market-based solutions appear in lieu
of collective political solutions,” “Astrological Forecasts,” Adorno writes, “implies that all problems due to
objective circumstances … can be solved in terms of private individual behavior or by psychological insight,
particularly into oneself, but also into others.”

And this is where big data comes in. It can provide us with the unprecedented—and supposedly more objective—
insight into ourselves and others that we need to solve life’s problems. It can identify patterns of behavior, in
individuals and across populations, that can then be monitored and managed. If you know enough about
someone’s material, social, and psychological situation, their past habits and choices, you ought to be able to
predict which future choices they will make, which alternatives will seem like the most economically “rational”
ones from their perspective.

As Dilts emphasizes, as long as we can more or less successfully predict homo economicus’s behavior, he doesn’t
have to actually behave rationally—his choices don’t have to be the result of well-reasoned, logical thinking.
“Becker insists that economic analysis does not require ‘actual rationality’ at all, but is perfectly consistent with a
wide array of irrational behavior. All that matters is if firms, households, or individuals act (drawing directly from
Milton Friedman) ‘as if’ they are rational. That is so long as they respond to ‘reality’ and adjust their (even
irrational) behavior, it is ‘as if’ they had in fact made a rational calculation.” Rationality, from the neoliberal point
of view, is simply another word for predictability.
Homo economicus’s cost-benefit analysis is thus a type of pseudo-rational forecasting. Like the forecaster, who
talks “as if he knew and as if the constellations of the stars provided him with satisfactory, sufficient and
unequivocal answers,”homo economicus makes a prediction about the outcome of an investment, and as long as
that choice appears, from the outside, to reflect “an unquestioning common-sense attitude” that pragmatically
weighs costs and benefits in line with “accepted values,” then that choice is, for all and intents and purposes,
rational.
In this way, homo economicus is a microcosm of big data: Both embody the same pseudo-rationality, a type of
calculation that brings even the most irrational choices, behaviors, and patterns “down to earth.” Just as
Astrological Forecasts makes its readers in the image of its own pseudo-rationality, big data makes its prosumers
in the image of itspseudo-rationality.
Down-to-earthness is precisely the problem with forecasting: It only ever reproduces society and its most
conventional norms, values, and practices. All that data up in the cloud opens no new vistas; it just repackages
tired social, political, and economic institutions (white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy) in new, hip abodes on
more seemingly solid ground. Could we use big data and social media to shoot for the stars, to produce knowledge
and types of sociality that transport us from this unjust world to a better one? That’s hard to predict.

Immoral philosophy
When it comes to preventing poverty related deaths, it is almost universally agreed that Peter Singer is one of the
good guys. His landmark 1971 article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (FAM), not only launched a rich new
area of philosophical discussion, but also led to millions in donations to famine relief. In the month after Singer
restated the argument from FAM in a piece in the New York Times, UNICEF and OXFAM claimed to have
received about $660, 000 more than they usually took in from the phone numbers given in the piece. His
organisation, “The Life You Can Save”, used to keep a running estimate of total donations generated. When I
last checked the website on 13th February 2012, this figure stood at $62, 741, 848.

Singer argues that the typical person living in an affluent country is morally required to give most of his or her
money away to prevent poverty related deaths. To fail to give as much as you can to charities that save children
dying of poverty is every bit as bad as walking past a child drowning in a pond because you don’t want to ruin
your new shoes. Singer argues that any difference between the child in the pond and the child dying of poverty is
morally irrelevant, so failure to help must be morally equivalent. For an approachable version of his argument
see Peter Unger, who developed and refined Singer’s arguments in his 1996 book, Living High and Letting Die.

I’ve argued that Singer and Unger are wrong: failing to donate to charity is not equivalent to walking past a
drowning child. Morality does – and must – pay attention to features such as distance, personal connection and
how many other people are in a position to help. I defend what seems to me to be the commonsense position that
while most people are required to give much more than they currently do to charities such as Oxfam, they are not
required to give the extreme proportions suggested by Singer and Unger.

So, Singer and Unger are the good guys when it comes to debates on poverty-related death. I’m arguing that
Singer and Unger are wrong. I’m arguing against the good guys. Does that make me one of the bad guys? It is
true that my own position is that most people are required to give more than they do. But isn’t there still
something morally dubious about arguing for weaker moral requirements to save lives? Singer and Unger’s
position is clear and easy to understand. It offers a strong call to action that seems to actually work – to make
people put their hands in their pockets. Isn’t it wrong to risk jeopardising that given the possibility that people
will focus only on the arguments I give against extreme requirements to aid?

On reflection, I don’t think what I do is immoral philosophy. The job of moral philosophers is to help people to
decide what to believe about moral issues on the basis of reasoned reflection. Moral philosophers provide
arguments and critique the arguments of others. We won’t be able to do this properly if we shy away from
attacking some arguments because it is good for people to believe them.
In addition, the Singer/Unger position doesn’t really offer a clear, simple conclusion about what to do. For
Singer and Unger, there is a nice simple answer about what morality requires us to do: keep giving until giving
more would cost us something more morally significant than the harm we could prevent; in other words, keep
giving till you have given most of your money away. However, this doesn’t translate into a simple answer about
what we should do, overall. For, on Singer’s view, we might not be rationally required or overall required to do
what we are morally required to.

This need to separate moral requirements from overall requirements is a result of the extreme, impersonal view
of morality espoused by Singer. The demands of Singer’s morality are so extreme it must sometimes be
reasonable to ignore them. A more modest understanding of morality, which takes into account the agent’s
special concern with what is near and dear to her, avoids this problem. Its demands are reasonable so cannot be
reasonably ignored. Looked at in this way, my position gives a clearer and simpler answer to the question of
what we should do in response to global poverty. It tells us both what is morally and rationally required.
Providing such an answer surely can’t be immoral philosophy.

The rise of the medical humanities

22 JANUARY 2015

Belinda Jack examines the growing field and considers the therapeutic effects of poetry

I sense quite a lot of hostility to the medical humanities among the still-dominant genes and molecules
approach to medicine

The cynical account for the rise of the medical humanities – a newish interdisciplinary area that explores the
social, historical and cultural dimensions of medicine – would be an economic one. At a time of retrenchment in
some subjects at some universities, disciplines are under pressure to demonstrate their practical value. Recent
research that claims to show that reading novels promotes empathy would be an example of literature’s utility,
particularly for medical students. There’s money in medicine and not so much in the humanities.

But how new is this field or set of fields? The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed that “wherever the art
of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity”, suggesting both that medicine is an “art” and that there is a
crucial association between medicine and the “human” dimension of the humanities.

In terms of literature, as soon as the novel rose to prominence in the 18th century a good many doctors more than
dabbled in writing, often fiction. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) trained as a doctor and wrote the best-selling
novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and Keats (1795-1821) turned to poetry in part because of the trauma he
suffered by the experience of physically restraining fully conscious patients in order to perform surgery without
anaesthesia. Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German writer, poet, essayist, dramatist and friend of Goethe,
was an army surgeon before achieving fame as a writer. The Scottish writer Tobias Smollett (1721-71) graduated
from the University of Glasgow’s School of Medicine but his passion was for writing. His picaresque novels,
including The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), were immensely successful, as was his best-known
work, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). By the time we get to the 19th century the number of authors
combining writing and medical practice further increases. And there is no let-up in the 20th century, nor indeed
the 21st.

There are also some important examples of psychiatrists drawing heavily on literature in the construction of their
theories. R. D. Laing was profoundly influenced by Blake, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Sartre and others. All this
goes to show that interest in a reciprocity between medical practice and creative writing is not a new phenomenon.
Nevertheless, C. P. Snow, scientist and novelist, in his famous Rede lecture of 1959, claimed that “two cultures”
had developed and that the chasm between the arts and the sciences was deleterious to our civilisation.

What is new is the bringing of writing and the arts more broadly into a formal, institutional relationship with
medicine. So what does mainstream medicine think about this? I asked Colin Blakemore, former chief executive of
the Medical Research Council, how the medical humanities were generally regarded, and his response was: “I
sense quite a lot of hostility among the still-dominant genes and molecules approach to medicine.” It’s a pity that
the adjectives “hard” and “soft” have accrued certain connotations. There is a danger that they prejudice things.
The medical humanities are instantly deemed to be at the “soft” end of medicine. Conventional approaches to
medicine, “drugs and knives remain the dominant modes of tackling resistant medical problems, however slow
progress is”, Blakemore says. Drugs, knives, genes and molecules dominate the medical world. This is the “hard”
end, the end that is assumed to make the big difference. Blakemore is now, among numerous other affiliations,
professor of neuroscience and philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is “certainly
keen to encourage interaction between science and the humanities”, as his latest area of research interest testifies:
the crossover points between philosophy and neuroscience.

Blakemore’s vision is shared by the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest non-governmental source of funds for
biomedical research, which now takes the medical humanities very seriously. In 2013, the grant funding and direct
charitable expenditure of the trust was more than £700 million, and the Wellcome Foundation Strategic Plan
2010-20 “supports medical humanities research”. The journal Medical Humanities is well established and Niall
Boyce’s The Lancet Psychiatry has recently been launched. Boyce, himself a novelist, sees the journal in part as a
point of focus for debate about the relationship between psychiatry and the humanities. These are only two of a
large number of journals involved in the medical humanities.

Over the same period, courses have appeared in universities both in the UK and abroad. More than a dozen
universities in the UK embrace the field and most undergraduate medical programmes offer either mandatory or
optional courses in one or more humanities subjects at some point in the degree. A number of master’s courses are
also coming on stream. An initiative at the University of Oxford that aims to produce the world’s largest forum for
medical humanities and to provide an unparalleled resource for public and professional engagement describes the
area as “a richly diverse field of scholarship which draws on disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and the
arts. As well as providing insights into one of the most basic and universal of human concerns, these disciplines
can inform the science and practice of medicine.” In November 2013, St Anne’s College, Oxford, in conjunction
with the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, launched its Centre for Personalised Medicine, which will
embrace medicine, genomics, law, economics and ethics.

It is the stories of private lives offered up to doctors, often at times of crisis and vulnerability, that explain
why so many doctors are also novelists

Reviewing its first seven issues, Medical Humanities identified various categories into which articles might be
grouped. The largest included pieces on medicine and the arts, concepts of disease, illness and healing, medicine
as an art and as a science, aesthetic and ethical considerations in surgery, medical classifications and diagnoses
and their relationship to technology, the existential focus of clinical medicine, and the extent of chaos theory’s
relevance to medicine. Next came a set of articles variously concerned with literary readings and exploration, and
any lessons they may provide for clinical medicine. These included papers on short stories by Kafka and Chekhov,
a play by Jules Romain, the Sherlock Holmes tales,Hamlet and depressive illness, medical syndromes in French
19th-century fiction, and television drama’s potential lessons for clinical craft. The next category comprised
essentially educational enquiries into the medical humanities themselves. Can poetry, for example, help young
doctors? A further set of articles was made up of historical overviews, for example of dissection, and the medical
ethics of Erasmus. The last category of any size was in essence cultural studies – drawing on fine art, literature,
history and philosophy to discuss a range of conditions and topics: anorexia nervosa, ageing, body image and
distinguishing patients as persons.

My discipline is in essence a literary one, and I’ve been struck by a good deal of fascinating work on the
importance of narrative in medicine. Physicians’ notes are in some sense biographies of their patients. Those that
are unwell have to be encouraged to find a narrative and the clinician has to tease out the significant lines in their
story. It is the stories of private lives offered up to doctors, often at times of crisis and vulnerability, that explain,
at least in part, why so many doctors are also novelists. A combination of a move to electronic patient records and
the Freedom of Information Act have militated against doctors’ patient narratives, with their nuances and insights
into the complexities of human illness – and life.

I’d like to consider poetry and its less obvious role within the medical humanities. Like the novel, poetry can tell
us about human experience, but it does this in its own language and not the more straightforward language of
prose. It works by suggestion, but this doesn’t mean that it cannot console, teach, amuse, enlighten, mimic,
disconcert and so much more. It can capture – or cause us to reconstruct – experiences and feelings that we might
otherwise not be conscious of. Poetry’s use of language is at the furthest extreme from the self-help book, which is
often dogmatic, insistent, reductive, bullying even. Philip Davis, in his excellent 2013 studyReading and the
Reader, describes Wordsworth’s poetry not as providing “ideas”, but rather as providing places from which our
own ideas – which were Wordsworth’s too, no doubt – may come into being. These “places” may be real, physical
places, or imagined. This is poetry at its most magical and mysterious. Poetry offers its language up to us and if we
recognise it as true, we engage; if it fails to convince us of its truth, we let it go. And it allows for an individual
engagement with the poem. This explains why funeral services so often include poems, rather than extracts from
novels. Each of us can ponder what the poem conjures for us, bringing something felt into clearer and thus more
comforting focus. Often the poem will be one that allows us to reconsider the absolute nature of death.

But poetry can help us to make sense of more mundane experiences too, and these are sometimes equally charged
with challenging emotions. Here is an example from Cecil Day Lewis’ poem Walking Away: “I can see/You
walking away from me towards the school/With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free/Into a wilderness, the
gait of one/Who finds no path where the path should be.”
We have all been the “you”, embarking on school, and many of us have been the parent, the “I”, watching our child
“walking away” and have experienced the pain of separation, the pain associated with knowing the vulnerability of
a child starting school – and our no longer being at the child’s side to moderate life. To fully paraphrase these lines
would take pages. But the “truth” I fully recognise strikes still more forcibly at the close of the poem: “How
selfhood begins with a walking away,/And love is proved in the letting go.”

The pain – there are other emotions too, such as pride – that we experience as our children gain independence is
inextricably bound up in our love for them. If we didn’t love them, we wouldn’t feel the pain. And we would never
wish not to love them. A good deal of child development psychology is contained in these few lines. “Selfhood
begins with a walking away”; in other words, to become an individual the child has to establish growing physical
independence from first its mother, then its family. “Love is proved in the letting go” – as responsible parents we
have to let our children distance themselves from us in order to develop into independent adults, but it sometimes
hurts.

The poem can also be read as an allegory of other kinds of separation or loss that are part of life. Seeing the coffin
disappear is analogous. Or hearing that a diagnosis of an illness is terminal. And our feelings of ultimate physical
separation from one whom we’ve loved, the pain and rage at death, are part and parcel of that love. The “truth” of
the poem extends to the psychology of bereavement too. The poem is not so much “about” separation anxiety; it
enacts separation anxiety. Yet reading the poem we are no longer alone, rather we are in touch with the poet’s
humanity. And the space the loss has left has been filled – by the poem. The act of recognition of truth fills the
space, in some small but fundamentally important way. Faced with some of life’s most painful moments poetry
can reassure us that we are not alone – other have suffered too. But a great poem also allows us to make sense of
feelings that might otherwise be a searing amorphous mass somewhere deep inside us. Great poetry makes us
understand the only half-understood; in that understanding comes relief, and it can feel very physical. This is art
acting as a medicine.

Great poetry makes us understand the only half-understood and in that understanding comes relief and it
can feel very physical

There is a growing body of research that suggests that regular exercise, long walks for example, can be more
therapeutic for those suffering from depression than other therapies. At some point after 1798, feeling
discouraged after a difficult time in London, Wordsworth had returned to the Lake District with his sister. In The
Prelude, the mood at the outset reflects a low mood: “The sun was set, or setting when I left/Our cottage door, and
evening soon brought on/A sober hour, not winning or serene,/For cool and raw the air was, and unturned.”

The poet does not describe himself as unhappy or depressed. It is the time of day and weather that imply
inhospitality. But then Wordsworth manages an extraordinary feat of linguistic conjuring: “While on I walked, a
comfort seemed to touch/A heart that had not been disconsolate:/Strength came where weakness was not known
to be,/At least not felt…”

One of the problems in the diagnosis of depression can be the individual’s lack of awareness of low mood. In The
Prelude the truth of sudden changes of mood is brilliantly suggested. Often we are not fully in touch with our
melancholy, or at least not until after it has lifted, and a wonderful lightness replaces the heart that we did not
know was heavy. The experience can be sharply retrospective. The poem reminds us of the undertow of mood, our
only partial control of it – and that a brisk walk may be a useful medicine.

These two examples are about poetry and its relationships with psychology. My final example is somewhat
different. (All three poems are discussed by Davis in Reading and the Reader.) These are lines from Philip
Sidney’s Certain Sonnet 19, probably written in the 1580s: “If I could think how these my thoughts to leave,/Or
thinking still my thoughts might have good end:/If rebel sense would reason’s law receive/Or reason foil’d would
not in vain contend…”

This is the mind thinking about itself and the degree of control – or lack of control – that it has over its conflicting
voices. The mind contemplating a mental dialogue – which is a three-way thing. How do we stop thinking
thoughts that are uncomfortable (line 1)? Or accept the thoughts but steer them in a better direction (line 2)? If
only the “rebel” part of the brain would submit to the “reasonable” part (line 3); or if reason has lost out to “rebel
sense”, it would accept defeat and bring the mental battle to an end. Doesn’t this give us insights into the mind
contemplating the workings of the mind that might even be compared to brain “imaging”? The images of the poem
allude to conflict – “rebel” and “foil”, where the stability of “reason” and “law” should bring steadiness and what
we call “peace of mind”. So much of life – and our responses to death – is in language.

One of the undersold features of poetry is its remarkable succinctness. The same is not always true of textbooks.
And a corollary of this is that it doesn’t take much time to read a poem. But it does have to be read with a
particular attention to detail, and that could be a useful training for medical students. You can’t race through a
poem – as you might a textbook – looking for what you want to find. So I see the benefits of marrying poetry
reading to various aspects of medicine. This is essentially what the National Association for Poetry Therapy has
been doing for the past 30 years. It describes itself as “a community of healers and lovers of words”.
At the same time, there are various ways in which the humanities are enriched by disciplines within the medical
sciences. Psychology can certainly play a part in both biography and biographical readings of literary texts, for
example. Pharmacology can enlighten us in relation to drug-induced creative states of mind. More importantly,
thinking about literature from the point of view of readers who may not be as set in their ways encourages the
literary reader to read differently. Reading Dostoevsky under the umbrella of the “medical humanities” we are
forcibly struck by the author’s preoccupation with God and madness, for example, a conjunction that is very real
in psychiatric patients.

But I’d like to end on a lighter note and propose that humour, in literature as well as in life, has a powerful
therapeutic effect too. Laughing has been demonstrated to have healing powers. Byron knew this: “Always laugh
when you can, it is cheap medicine.” Humour can also allow a review of self-perspective. The American comedian
George Carlin asked, “Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do ‘practice’?”

The Limits of Satire

Tim Parks

What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Recent events in Paris inevitably prompt
these questions. In particular, is the kind of satire that Charlie Hebdo has made its
trademark—explicit, sometimes obscene images of religious figures (God the father, Son, and
Holy Spirit sodomizing each other; Muhammad with a yellow star in his ass)—essentially
different from mainstream satire? Is it crucial to Western culture that we be free to produce
such images? Do they actually work as satire?
Neither straight journalism nor disengaged art, satire alludes to recognizable contemporary
circumstances in a skewed and comic way so as to draw attention to their absurdity. There is
mockery but with a noble motive: the desire to bring shame on some person or party behaving
wrongly or ignorantly. Its raison d’ȇtre over the long term is to bring about change through
ridicule; or if change is too grand an aspiration, we might say that it seeks to give us a fresh
perspective on the absurdities and evils we live among, such that we are eager for change.
Since satire has this practical and pragmatic purpose, the criteria for assessing it are fairly
simple: if it doesn’t point toward positive change, or encourage people to think in a more
enlightened way, it has failed. That doesn’t mean it’s not amusing and well-observed, or even,
for some, hilarious, in the way, say, witty mockery of a political enemy can be hilarious and
gratifying and can intensify our sense of being morally superior. But as satire it has failed.
The worst case is when satire reinforces the state of mind it purports to undercut, polarizes
prejudices, and provokes the very behavior it condemns. This appears to be what happened
with Charlie Hebdo’s images of Muhammad.
Why so? Crucial to satire is the appeal to supposed “common sense” and a shared moral code.
The satirist presents a situation in such a way that it appears grotesque and the reader who,
whatever his or her private interests, shares the same cultural background and moral education
agrees that it is so. The classic example, perhaps, is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal of
1729. Swift’s target was Protestant England’s economic policy in Catholic Ireland and the
disastrous poverty this had created. After paragraphs of statistics on population and nutrition,
we arrive at the grotesque:
I have been assured … that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most
delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I
make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.
By selling their children for food, the pamphlet claims, the poor can save themselves an
expense and guarantee themselves an income. Disoriented, every reader is made aware of a
simple principle we all share: you don’t eat children, even Irish children, even Catholic
children. So, if those children are not to be left to starve, something else in Ireland will have
to give.
This appeal to what we all know and share becomes more difficult when satire addresses itself
to people from different cultures with different traditions. In this regard, the history ofCharlie
Hebdo is worth noting. It grew out of a left-wing magazine, Hara Kiri, later Hebdo Hara
Kiri (where Hebdo is simply short forhebdomadaire—weekly), which was formed in 1960 to
address national political issues and subsequently banned on a number of occasions. When it
was banned in 1970 over a mocking headline about Charles de Gaulle’s death its editors
reopened it under a different name to avoid the ban, calling it Charlie Hebdo to distinguish it
from a monthly magazine,Charlie, that some of the same cartoonists were already running.
Charlie was Charlie Brown, but also now, comically, Charles de Gaulle. Its focus was on
French politics and when it was felt to have overstepped the mark the democratically elected
French government was in a position to impose a temporary closure. It was a French affair.
Wound down for lack of funds in 1981, Charlie Hebdo was resurrected in 1991 when
cartoonists wanted to create a platform for political satire about the first Gulf War. With this
explicitly international agenda the relationship between satirists, readers, and targets became
more complex. The readers were the same left-wing French public, used to seeing fierce
attacks on all things sacred, but the targets sometimes lay outside France or at least outside
mainstream French culture. In 2002 the magazine hosted an article supporting controversial
Italian author Oriana Fallaci and her claims that Islam in general, not just the extremists, was
on the march against the West. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of Muhammad and reprint
of the Danish cartoonist Jyllands-Posten’s controversial Muhammad cartoons led to the
paper’s selling 400,000 copies, rather than the normal 60,000 to 100,000. Popularity and
notoriety had arrived through mockery of a target outside French culture but with which an
aggrieved minority in France now identified.
Sued by the Grand Mosque, the Muslim World League, and the Union of French Islamic
Organizations, the paper’s editors defended themselves, insisting that their humor was aimed
at violent extremists, not at Islam itself. Islamic organizations didn’t see it that way. While
President Chirac criticized satire that inflamed divisions between cultures, various politicians,
Hollande and Sarkozy included, wrote to the court to defend the cartoonists, Sarkozy in
particular referring to the ancient French tradition of satire. Eventually the court acquitted the
paper and freedom of speech was upheld. But the effect of the cartoons had been to inflame
moderate areas of Islam. The ancient French tradition of satire was creating more heat than
light. It was also uniting French politicians usually opposed to each other against a perceived
threat from without.
It is said, by contrast, that Christian leaders have now grown used to their religion being
desecrated and pilloried in every way. This is not entirely the case. In 2011Charlie
Hebdo noted that while Muslims had sued the paper only once, the Catholic Church had
launched thirteen cases against it. In the 1990s, writing satirical pieces for the Italian
magazine Comix, I had my own experience of the difficulties of attacking the church through
satire. In this case too an issue of cultural blindness was involved. Reacting to yet another
Vatican condemnation of abortion, even in cases of rape, I suggested that if the Catholic
Church really cared about abortion it might perhaps change its position on contraception and
actually manufacture condoms with images of the saints, or perhaps even prickly hair-shirt
condoms, or San Sebastian condoms, so that lovemaking would be simultaneously an
indulgence and a penitence, and people would be mindful of their Lord even between the
sheets. Comix refused to publish.
This was not, I believe, a question of self-censorship or lack of courage on the magazine’s
part. The editors of Comix were perfectly ready to attack the Church on issues of abortion and
birth control. They just didn’t think that the idea of people having sex with condoms showing
their favorite saint was the right way to go about it. Too many of their readers—mostly
Catholic by culture if not practice—would be offended; it would not help them to get distance
and perspective on the debate. Knowing Italy and Italians better now, I reckon they were
right. It was my Protestant background and complete carelessness about images of saints and
virgins that made me unaware of the kind of response the piece would have stirred up.
Most likely, however, that same Italian public would have had no problem with the drawings
of Muhammad that provoked the massacre at Charlie Hebdo last week; because they, like me,
but unlike the vast majority of Muslims, set no value on the image Muhammad. When I
see Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon entitled “Muhammad overcome by fundamentalists,” showing a
weeping Muhammad saying, “It’s tough being loved by assholes,” I smile and take the point.
For a Muslim reader perhaps the point is lost in the offense of a belittling representation of a
figure they hold sacred.
Where we’re coming from and who we’re writing to is important. Not all readers are the
same. In The Satanic Verses (1988), Salman Rushdie includes a dream sequence where the
prostitutes have the names of Muhammad’s wives. There are also various provocative
reinterpretations of Islam, but certainly nothing that would disturb a Western reader, and in
fact the novel was on the shortlist for Britain’s Booker Prize for fiction without even a smell
of scandal in the air. Only as publication was approaching in India and the paper India
Today ran an interview with Rushdie did the controversy begin in earnest, with riots, deaths,
and eventually the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwacalling for Muslims to kill Rushdie.
It is, in short, this mixing of cultures and immediate globalization of so many publications
through the Internet that makes satire more problematic as the Swiftian appeal to the values
we share becomes more elusive. In the Inferno Dante could imagine Muhammad in hell, his
body obscenely split open—“from the chin right down to where men fart”—as fit punishment
for his crime of religious schism. The Divine Comedy was not intended for publication in
India. Needless to say any such representation of Christ would have been unthinkable.
An anti-Charlie Hebdo cartoon in Echorouk, an Algerian newspaper, playing on char, French for
“tank”: a tank with the sign “I am tank” is shown crushing “Gaza,” “Mali,” “Syria,” and “Iraq,” January
14, 2015.

The following questions arise: Now that the whole world is my neighbor, my immediate
Internet neighbor, do I make any concessions at all, or do I uphold the ancient tradition of
satire at all costs? And again, is a culture that takes mortal offense when an image it holds
sacred is mocked a second-rate culture that needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into
the twenty-first century, my twenty-first-century that is? Do I have the moral authority to
decide this?
In his response to the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the cartoonist Joe Sacco makes the
distinction between the right to free expression and the sensible use of it. One might be free,
he says, to draw—as he does to illustrate—a black man falling out of a tree with a banana in
his hand, or a Jew counting money over the entrails of the working class, but of what possible
use are these images? And actually of course we’re not free. In Italy and Germany it is illegal
to display certain images that recall Fascism and Nazism. Denial of the Holocaust is a crime
in France. In the United States and Britain, our freedom—in practice—to indulge in racist,
anti-Semitic, misogynist, and homophobic insults has been notably limited, at least since the
late 1980s when notions of “political correctness” became increasingly pervasive.
Even Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist for anti-Semitism. None of these restrictions have
proved a great loss, at least for me.
Joe Sacco’s take on the tragedy in Paris is smart. In raising the question of the usefulness or
otherwise of a cartoon, rather than remaining fixated on the question of freedom of speech, he
reminds us of the essentially pragmatic nature of satire. However grotesque and provocative
its comedy, its aim is to produce an enlightened perspective on events, not to start riots. At
this point, and notwithstanding a profound sense of horror for the evil and stupidity of the
terrorist attack on the magazine’s offices, one has to wonder about Charlie Hebdo’s pride in
constantly dubbing themselves a “Journal Irresponsable.” The current edition of the paper
shows Muhammad in such a way that his white turban looks like two balls and his long pink
face a penis. The Prophet is being dubbed a prick. He holds a Je suis Charlie placard and
announces that all is forgiven. The print run was extended to five million copies after a first
run of three million sold out; this up from a standard run of 60,000. Is it likely this approach
will help to isolate violent extremists from mainstream Muslim sentiment?

The Charlie Hebdo Attack And What It

Reveals About Society
by Zygmunt Bauman on 13 January 2015

Zygmunt Bauman

You went through the tragedies of the 20th century – two wars, Shoah, Stalinism. What’s the
specificity of the islamic extremist threat we’re facing today, in your view?

Political assassination is as old as humanity and the chances that it will be dead before humanity dies
are dim. Violence is an un-detachable companion of inter-human antagonisms and conflicts – and
those in turn are part and parcel of the human condition. In various times, however, political murders
tended to be aimed at different kinds of victims.

A hundred years or so ago it was targeted mostly against politicians – personalities like Jean Jaures,
Aristide Briand, Abraham Lincoln, Archduke Ferdinand and countless others; ideologically varied,
located at different points of the political spectrum yet all belonging to the category of current or future
power holders. It was widely believed at that time that with their death the world (or the country) will
turn away from what was viewed as the cause of grievance, and toward something better – a more
friendly and comfortable condition.

On 11 September 2001 political assassinations were directed not against specific, identifiable and
named political “personalities” in the political limelight, or for that matter against people held personally
responsible for the wrongdoings the assassins pretended to punish, but against institutions
symbolising the economic (in the case of the World Trade Centre) and military (in the case of the
Pentagon) power. Notably, a centre of spiritual power was still missing in the combined political
operation.

There were two aspects of the Charlie Hebdo murders that set them apart from the two previous
cases:

First: on 7th January 2015 political assassins fixed a highly media-visible specimen of mass media.
Knowingly or not, by design or by default, the murderers endorsed – whether explicitly or obliquely –
the widespread and fast gathering public sense of effective power moving away from political rulers
and towards the centres viewed as responsible for public mind-setting and opinion-making. It was the
people engaged in such activities that the assault was meant to point out as culprits to be punished for
causing the assassins’ bitterness, rancour and urge of vengeance.

And second: alongside shifting the target to another institutional realm, that of public opinion, the
armed assault against Charlie Hebdo was also an act of personalized vendetta (going back to the
pattern set by Ayatollah Khomeini in his 1989 Fatva imposed on Salman Rushdie). If the 11
September atrocity chimed in with the then tendency to “depersonalise” political violence (following
the pour ainsi dire“democratisation” of violence by mass-media publicity that divided its attention
according to the quantity of its – mostly anonymous and incidental – victims, and the volume of spilt
blood), the 7th January barbarity crowns the lengthy process of deregulation – indeed the “de-
institutionalisation”, individualization and privatisation of the human condition, as well as the
perception of public affairs shifting away from the management of established aggregated bodies to
the sphere of individual “life politics”. And away from social to individual responsibility.

In our media-dominated information society people employed in constructing and distributing

information moved or have been moved to the centre of the scene on which the drama of human
coexistence is staged and seen to be played.

A lot has been said about this attack: a prosecution of the holy wars between christians and
muslims, an assault on freedom of expression, a symbolic challenge to Paris as the cradle of
Western values. What do you think?

Each of the causes suggested to have their part in inflaming the christian – muslim antagonism
contains a grain of truth but none offers the whole truth. Many factors contribute to this profoundly
complex phenomenon. One of them, perhaps the most decisive, is the ongoing diasporisation of the
world, which results in transforming the distant stranger, or briefly visiting stranger, or passing-by
stranger, into a next-door neighbour – sharing the street, public facilities, workplace and school. The
close proximity of the stranger always tends to be somewhat unnerving. One doesn’t know what to
expect from a stranger, what his or her intentions are, how would s/he responds to one’s gambit. More
importantly yet, one cannot – unlike when moving around the securely “online only” world – skip over
the all-too-real differences, often jarring and repellent, manifesting at close quarters their
incompatibility with one’s habitual, and thus feeling homely, cozy and secure, mode of being.
How do we react to that situation? The snag is, that we’ve failed thus far to develop, let alone to
entrench, a satisfactory response. The strategy widely seen as progressive is a policy known under
the name of “multiculturalism”. In his Trouble with Principle (Harvard University Press 1999) Stanley
Fish distinguished two varieties of that strategy: a “boutique” and the “strong”
multiculturalism. Boutique multiculturalism, as Fish defines it, is a superficial fascination with the Other:
ethnic food, weekend festivals, and high-profile flirtations with the Other. Boutique multiculturalism is
exactly what all this global consumerism nonsense in the Facebook status message means.
Purveyors of this superficial brand of multiculturalism appreciate, enjoy, sympathise with, and
“recognise the legitimacy” of cultures other than their own. But they always stop short of approving
these radically. “A boutique multiculturalist”, Fish suggests, “does not and cannot take seriously the
core values of the culture he tolerates.” By the same token, I’d say, s/he adds offence to the injury: a
humiliation to the wound, the offence of disregarding or flatly rejecting what the “stranger” next door
holds sacrosanct; humiliation of a jovial and benevolent dismissal of a “you can’t be serious, you can’t
mean it” kind. Fish wrote:

The trouble with stipulating tolerance as your first principle (…) is that you cannot possibly be faithful
to it because sooner or later the culture whose core values you are tolerating will reveal itself to be
intolerant at that same core. The distinctiveness that marks it as unique and self-defining will resist the
appeal of moderation or incorporation into a larger scale. Confronted with a demand that it surrender
its viewpoint or enlarge it to include the practices of its natural enemies – other religions, other races,
other genders, other classes – a beleaguered culture will fight back with everything from discriminatory
legislation to violence.

It is in the nature of offence and humiliation to seek an outlet through which it can be discharged and
a target. And when it so happens, as it does all around increasingly diasporised Europe that the
boundaries between humiliating and the humiliated overlap with the boundaries between socially
privileged and socially deprived, it would be naïve not to expect that both the outlets and the targets
are avidly sought and keenly pinpointed. We presently live on a minefield of which we know (or at least
we should) that it is spattered with explosives. Explosions occur, though there is no way to predict
when and where.

Radical islamic ideology or economic “structural” inequalities: what component plays a major
role in determining this phenomenon of radicalization and terrorism in Europe and the world?

Why do you reduce the issue of “radicalization and terrorism in Europe” to the phenomenon of “radical
islamic ideology”? In Soumission, Michel Houllebecq’s second grand dystopia sketching an alternative
(to the triumph of individualized consumer) path to disaster, the 2022 French elections are won by
Mohammed Ben Abbes following a neck and neck race with Marine Le Pen. The tandem is anything
but accidental. Prophetic? It could happen like this, in case we are unable or unwilling to change
course.

Hopes for freedom of self-assertion and for arresting the rise of social inequality, invested in
democracy, blatantly failed to realize. Democratic politics, and yet more the trust in democracy as the
best road to the solution of the most haunting social problems, are in crisis. As Pierre Rosanvallon
argues,

Those in power no longer enjoy the confidence of the voters; they merely reap the benefits of distrust
of their opponents and predecessors.

All around Europe we witness a rising tide of anti-democratic sentiment – and a massive “secession of
plebeians” (in their current reincarnation as precarians) to the camps located on the opposite extremes
of the political spectrum though promising in unison to replace the already discredited high-
mindedness with yet to be tried high-handedness of autocracy. Spectacular acts of violence may be
seen as reconnaissance sallies into that. The word of the Prophet, the spokesman of Allah, is just one
of the banners deployed to rally the humiliated and deprived, left behind and abandoned, cast-out and
excluded, frightened, angry and vengeance-seething desperadoes.

You asserted ethics always needs an “I”, not a “We”. That’s the opposite of fundamentalism. Is
the “I”, the affirmation of individual identity, the way for ethics to defeat fundamentalism?

In his first Esortazione Apostolica, Pope Francis restored the lost-from view moral dimension to our
soumission – surrender – to the licentious, unbridled, left of social leash capitalism, dazzled by its lust
for gain and blind to human misery. You won’t find a more profound and comprehensive answer to
your question:

In our time humanity is experiencing a turning-point in its history, as we can see from the advances
being made in so many fields. We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people’s welfare in
areas such as health care, education and communications. At the same time we have to remember
that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences. A
number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation,
even in the so-called rich countries. The joy of living frequently fades, lack of respect for others and
violence are on the rise, and inequality is increasingly evident. It is a struggle to live and, often, to live
with precious little dignity. (…)

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of
human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such
an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of
exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we
continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality.
Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the
powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded
and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. (…)

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have
created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and
oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the
society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its
disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the
outcast, the “leftovers”.

Nothing to add, nothing to detract.

The power of story

Across time and culture, stories have been agents of personal
transformation – in part because they change our brains
by Elizabeth Svoboda 2,800

The inspirational power of narrative: American writer Ernest Hemingway in Idaho,

October 1939. Hemingway disapproved of the photo saying 'I don't work like this'. Photo
by Lloyd Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty

Back in the fall of 1999, Norman Conard, a history teacher at the Uniontown High School
in Kansas, asked his students to come up with a project for National History Day. While
brainstorming ideas, ninth-grader Elizabeth Cambers stumbled on an old clipping from US
News and World Report. The story included the line, ‘Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children
from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43.’

Elizabeth asked her fellow ninth-grader Megan Stewart to help her with her project, and
during her free time, Megan pored over the story of Irena Sendler. She learned about how
this unassuming young Polish nurse had created thousands of false identity papers to
smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto. To sneak the children past Nazi guards,
Sendler hid them under piles of potatoes and loaded them into gunny sacks. She also
wrote out lists of the children’s names and buried them in jars, intending to dig them up
again after the war so she could tell them their real identities.

Imagining herself in the young nurse’s position, Megan could appreciate just how difficult
her life-threatening choices must have been. She was so moved by Sendler’s gumption
and selflessness that she, Elizabeth, and two other friends wrote a play about Sendler.
They called itLife in a Jar and performed it at schools and theatres. As word got out, the
students’ quest to share what Sendler had done appeared on CNN, NPR, and the Today
Show. The power of Sendler’s story had turned the project into something much bigger
than the girls expected.
Today, Megan Stewart – now Megan Felt – is programme director for the Lowell Milken
Center for Unsung Heroes, a non-profit organisation that teaches students about the lives
of past luminaries such as Sendler. ‘I continue to be inspired by Irena Sendler daily,’ says
Felt, who still marvels at the way a single story cracked her own life wide open,
completely altering its course. ‘We want young people to be inspired by the stories they
hear and realise that they also can change the world.’

The careers of many great novelists and filmmakers are built on the assumption, conscious
or not, that stories can motivate us to re-evaluate the world and our place in it. New
research is lending texture and credence to what generations of storytellers have known in
their bones – that books, poems, movies, and real-life stories can affect the way we think
and even, by extension, the way we act. As the late US poet laureate Stanley Kunitz put it
in ‘The Layers’, ‘I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not
who I was.’

Our storytelling ability, a uniquely human trait, has been with us nearly as long as we’ve
been able to speak. Whether it evolved for a particular purpose or was simply an
outgrowth of our explosion in cognitive development, story is an inextricable part of our
DNA. Across time and across cultures, stories have proved their worth not just as works
of art or entertaining asides, but as agents of personal transformation.

O ne of the earliest narratives to wield such influence was the Old Testament,

written down starting in the seventh century BCE and then revised over the course of
hundreds of years. When we think of this first section of the Bible, we tend to recall its
long sequences of ‘thou shalt nots’, but many of the most gripping Old Testament stories
do not contain an overtly stated moral. While the Old Testament certainly reflected the
values and priorities of the culture from which it emerged, those values came embedded in
powerful tales that invited readers and listeners to draw their own conclusions. When Eve
ate the fruit from the Garden of Eden’s tree of knowledge, bringing God’s punishment
upon herself and Adam, the image powerfully illustrated the fate that may await anyone
who ignores a divine order. Noah, who carried out God’s cryptic command to build an
ark, survived the great deluge that followed – and personified the rewards in store for one
willing to conform to God’s will. It was no coincidence that, steeped in stories like these,
the ancient Hebrews emerged as a unified society of people devoted to God and his
commands.
Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, a formidable oral storytelling tradition was taking hold –
one in which epic stories such as Homer’s Iliad andOdyssey were passed from generation
to generation, each storyteller adding tweaks as he saw fit. Though the characters in these
epics were larger-than-life figures, often possessed of superhuman abilities, it was still
natural for people to identify with them. Epic heroes rarely conquered their foes with ease.
Like Homer’s Odysseus, who endured a painful and protracted journey to return to his
homeland, they faced hardship head-on and persevered against great odds.

One reason the epics had such staying power was that they instilled values like grit,
sacrifice, and selflessness, especially when young people were exposed to them as a
matter of course. ‘The later Greeks used Homer as an early reading text, not just because
it was old and reverenced, but because it outlined with astonishing clarity a way of life; a
way of thinking under stress,’ wrote William Harris, the late classics professor emeritus at
Middlebury College, Vermont. ‘They knew that it would generate a sense of
independence and character, but only if it were read carefully, over and over again.’

In their quest to lead a good life, generations of Greeks looked to the epics for inspiration,
giving rise to ancient hero cults that worshipped the exploits of characters like Achilles
and Odysseus. The historian J E Lendon points out that the Homeric emphasis on
conquering cities by trickery is mirrored in later Greek battle strategy, underscoring the
tales’ impact not just on minds, but on cultural norms and behaviours.

F or thousands of years, we’ve known intuitively that stories alter our thinking

and, in turn, the way we engage with the world. But only recently has research begun to
shed light on how this transformation takes place from inside. Using modern technology
like functional MRI (fMRI) scanning, scientists are tackling age-old questions: What kind
of effect do powerful narratives really have on our brains? And how might a story-
inspired perspective translate into behavioural change?
Our mental response to story begins, as many learning processes do, with mimicry. In a
2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesstudy, the psychologist Uri Hasson
and his Princeton University colleagues had a graduate student tell an unrehearsed story
while her brain was being scanned in an fMRI machine. Then they scanned the brains of
11 volunteers listening to a recording of the story. As the researchers analysed the data,
they found some striking similarities. Just when the speaker’s brain lit up in the area of the
insula – a region that governs empathy and moral sensibilities – the listeners’ insulae lit
up, too. Listeners and speakers also showed parallel activation of the temporoparietal
junction, which helps us imagine other people’s thoughts and emotions. In certain
essential ways, then, stories help our brains map that of the storyteller.

What’s more, the stories we absorb seem to shape our thought processes in much the same
way lived experience does. When the University of Southern California neuroscientist
Mary Immordino-Yang told subjects a series of moving true stories, their brains revealed
that they identified with the stories and characters on a visceral level. People reported
strong waves of emotion as they listened – one story, for instance, was about a woman
who invented a system of Tibetan Braille and taught it to blind children in Tibet. The
fMRI data showed that emotion-driven responses to stories like these started in the brain
stem, which governs basic physical functions, such as digestion and heartbeat. So when
we read about a character facing a heart-wrenching situation, it’s perfectly natural for our
own hearts to pound. ‘I can almost feel the physical sensations,’ one of Immordino-
Yang’s subjects remarked after hearing one of the stories. ‘This one is like there’s a
balloon under my sternum inflating and moving up and out. Which is my sign of
something really touching.’ Immordino-Yang reported her findings in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences in 2009 and in Emotion Review in 2011.

As they reacted to the stories, subjects also reported strong feelings of moral motivation.
When one participant listened to a story about a Chinese boy giving a warm cake to his
mother, even though he was quite hungry, he talked about how it had made him reflect on
his relationship with his parents and what they’d given up for him. People identified
similarly with story characters in a 2013 study at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, where
fiction readers who felt emotionally transported into a story scored higher on a scale of
empathic concern one week after their reading experience.

It’s this kind of gut-level empathetic story response that can inspire people to behave
differently in the real world. The Ohio State University psychologist Lisa Libby studied a
group of people who engaged in ‘experience-taking’, or putting themselves in a
character’s place while reading. High levels of experience-taking predicted observable
changes in behaviour, Libby and her colleagues found in 2012. When people identified
with a protagonist who voted in the face of challenges, for instance, they were more likely
themselves to vote later on.
Of course, many story messages don’t translate into action as neatly as controlled studies
might suggest. We respond to The Diary of Anne Frank differently at age 42 than we do at
12, in part because of all theother stories that have changed our perception in the interim.
We argue with stories, internally or out loud. We talk back. We praise. We denounce.
Every story is the beginning of a conversation, with ourselves as well as with others.

Those kinds of conversations, internal and external, are exactly what educators are
counting on to unleash story’s change-creating potential. The non-profit Facing History
and Ourselves, active in school districts around the US, brings students lessons that
feature true stories from historical conflicts. The biggest transformations, says Facing
History executive Marty Sleeper, happen when children actively engage – even empathise
– with a particular narrative, recognising how it matters to them. ‘We teach specific pieces
in history that have a connection to the present,’ Sleeper says. ‘We’re looking for ways in
which kids see that history is connected to their own lives.’

One lesson about the 1938 Kristallnacht attacks delves into the historical narrative,
describing how Nazis burned synagogues, smashed windows and looted Jewish shops
while most ordinary Germans just watched. This real-life story prompts class discussion
that touches on what it means to be a bystander; someone who does nothing while
someone else gets hurt. Kids consider how they might have reacted when Jewish people
were persecuted under Nazi rule, but they’re also thinking about similar matters closer to
home, such as whether they should stand up for a friend who’s being badmouthed. When
students explore the significance of stories in this way, their thoughts and choices shift
measurably. Children who complete the Facing History curriculum show more empathy
and concern for others, and they are more likely than controls to intervene when other
students are bullied.

T he alternative sentencing programme Changing Lives Through Literature

(CLTL) is proving that well-told stories can also re-orient the lives of adult offenders.
CLTL began in the early 1990s with a pilot programme that included eight men, some
with several convictions to their names. The men would sit around a table with the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor Robert Waxler and talk about a variety
of different books – from Jack London’s Sea-Wolf to James Dickey’sDeliverance.
As they read and discussed the stories, the students came away with new, surprising
perspectives. One man talked about his identification with Santiago, the beleaguered
fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The man said he sometimes
felt an inner pull to go back to his drug habit, but that Santiago’s will to persevere
motivated him to stay a sober course. ‘The fictional character was alive for the student at
that crucial moment, an inspiration, a stranger become a friend,’ Waxler writes. ‘It was
not an exaggeration to say that a story had caught this student’s attention and perhaps
saved his life that day.’ In a study of 600 participants, rates of criminal activity declined
by 60 per cent compared to only 16 per cent in a control group.

The stories we tell ourselves are integral to our wellbeing, too. Depressed people often
cling to long-established internal narratives with refrains like ‘I’m not good enough to
achieve much,’ or ‘My mother dashes all my most important dreams.’ Counsellors who
practice psychodynamic therapy help clients discard these stagnant inner monologues and
substitute fresh ones. In a 2005 case study, Rutgers University psychologist Karen Riggs
Skean describes one of her patients, a graduate student in his late twenties called CG who
was the child of abusive, neglectful parents. CG believed close relationships with others
could only hurt him. Living out this narrative had made him lonely, withdrawn, and
convinced others were out to get him. At the beginning of treatment, he often told Skean,
‘I’m not sure how helpful today’s session has been.’ But little by little, CG began to let
Skean in, telling her stories from his difficult past. In return, Skean helped him see how
his early struggles had led him to tell himself certain stories – the world was hostile and
cold, people would always reject him – that were not necessarily true.

One day, CG reported that he had actually asked a woman on a date and that he’d enjoyed
himself the whole time. When Skean expressed happiness, she recalls, CG ‘began to cry
and said that he just realised there had never been anyone in his life who gave him a
feeling that he should be happy, should do things that brought him pleasure’. It was a
watershed moment, a glimpse at the evolution of CG’s internal narrative. No longer the
abused, forgotten child who saw so many forces arrayed against him, he was beginning to
see himself as capable, valuable, and worthy of the good things in life. After his therapy
concluded, CG went on to thrive and to take high-ranking positions in his academic field.

Of course, some enthralling inner narratives can damage mental horizons. The success of
Adolf Hitler’s oratory bid to dominate 1930s Germany should convince us that a
narrative’s surface persuasiveness is not, in itself, a virtue. And sensibly enough, many
artists bristle at the idea that they tell stories to get people to think or act in any particular
way. ‘I’m often asked, “What do you hope readers take from your books?” ’ Newbery
Award winner Shannon Hale wrote on her blog. ‘I have a hard time answering that
question, because I never write toward a purpose or moral. I just hope that a reader takes
whatever she needs.’

When story is at its best – as yarn-spinners like Hale can testify – its effect is expansive
rather than nakedly persuasive. Narratives that tell us point-blank who we should be, how
we should behave, are better described as dictates or propaganda. The most enduring
stories, by contrast, broaden our mental and moral outlook without demanding that we
hew to a certain standard. Whether they describe a young nurse risking her life to smuggle
children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, a meek older woman who shows grit and selflessness
after a surprising tragedy (Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs), or a hotel manager who
shelters refugees marked out for death (Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda), they present us
with an arresting alternative to the way we see the world.

It’s always up to us whether to turn our backs on a story’s landscape or to step into the
fresh possibilities it offers. But when we do decide to venture into an unfamiliar story – as
did Megan Felt, Waxler’s students, and CG – we emerge as revised, perhaps unexpected,
versions of ourselves. Stories allow us to travel, time and again, outside the circumscribed
spaces of what we believe and what we think possible. It is these journeys – sometimes
tenuous, sometimes exhilarating – that inspire and steel us to navigate uncharted
territories in real life.

Is Solidarity without Identity Possible?

On the Charlie Hebdo attack
January 10th, 2015 | 14 responses

A vigil in Luxembourg for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack, featuring one of its controversial covers © Valentina Calà | Flickr

The time I saw Charb in Paris was January 24, 2010, the day of the crowded commemoration of the French philosopher and
activist Daniel Bensaïd at La Mutualité. During the speeches, Charb kept drawing and projecting vignettes about his comrade
Daniel, whose book, Marx: Mode d’Emploi, he had illustrated a year earlier. In the deep sadness that filled the big room his
vignettes constantly reminded us of Bensaïd’s subtle humor, of his little malicious smile with which he used to charm us all,
slowly helping us to heal the loss. Director of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Charb was one of the ten cartoonists and
journalists killed, together with two policemen, in the ferocious attack of January 7, 2015.
Since then messages of solidarity stating “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie — have been flooding the web and other media, a
massive manhunt to capture the killers is taking place, shotguns have been fired against two mosques, a kebab shop has been
bombed, and all French political leaders have appealed to national unity in defense of the République. Sadly enough, this means
that the attack might have been a successful one. Of all the targets the attackers could choose, they deliberately chose a
magazine that, in spite of the controversies about the quite Islamophobic vignettes it published, still had credibility among the
French Left. A magazine, moreover, that embodied a distinctively French tradition of secularist irreverence, the distinctively
French pride of being free to satirize both God and the King, enjoying dwelling in the trivial obscenities of the genre. The target
was politically and carefully chosen. The narrative about the direct correspondence between the publication of irreverent
vignettes of Muhammad and the attack, as in some sort of mechanical cause-and-effect connection, is over-simplistic. Nor is the
narrative about attacks on freedom of speech and of press sufficient to understand what is really happening. The strategy behind
the attack aims at a polarization of French society, at an escalation of the conflict, and above all at the resuscitation of the
mantra of “the clash of civilizations.” It further isolates the Muslim population in France (around five million people) and
exposes it to a further escalation of the already worrying and rampant Islamophobia. It is pushing the white population to gather
behind the banners of the national republican unity and identity perceived as under attack from the new French, that is, the
Muslim French. And, in order not to leave any option of resistance other than radical Islamism to the Muslim population, it is
hitting the French Left, the only barrier against an uncontrolled proliferation of Islamophobia in the country, where it hurts the
most: in its troubles in dealing with France’s colonial past and legacy and in reformulating universalism in such a way as to give
full inclusion to Arab and Muslim people.

In contrast to Charlie Hebdo’s self-description as an “irresponsible journal,” this image features a “responsible journal” that is empty of content © Emiline
Broussard | Flickr

Charlie Hebdo is an extreme symptom of the troubles of the French Left. Its covers alternate denouncing and criticizing French
policies against immigrants and Houellebecq’s Islamophobic paranoia with an endless series of vignettes targeting “les
islamistes.” Following the killing of a thousand Muslim Brothers in the 2013 Rabaa massacre in Egypt, CHpublished a cover
with a vignette saying: “Le Coran, c’est de la merde, ça n’arrête pas les balles” (The Quran is a piece of shit: it doesn’t stop
bullets). Its defenders, in the wake of the criticisms and accusations of Islamophobia Charlie Hebdo started to receive, kept
pointing out that its satire was addressed to all religions indiscriminately. Whether this is true or not (and I think it is not entirely
true), this answer shows a fundamental misunderstanding about context — that same misunderstanding that led part of the
French left to capitulate in favor of an abstract republican secularism on the occasion of the discussions regarding the scarf law.
Muslims are not only a largely oppressed and exploited minority in France, they are increasingly becoming the scapegoat of the
economic crisis, the mirror upon which white Europeans project their deepest nightmares and fears. Every single week in
Germany several thousands of people gather in various cities under the organizational denomination of PEGIDA for
demonstrations against the “Islamization des Abendlandes” (PEGIDA stands for “Patrotic Europeans against the Islamization
of the West”). An Italian rightwing newspaper published the photo of the attack on Charlie Hebdo under the title “This is
Islam,” and a large part of the Italian population would be perfectly happy to let Muslim immigrants sink without help in the
Mediterranean. In this worrying, and honestly scary, context, the repeated publication of vignettes caricaturizing Islamists by
adopting religious symbols and stereotypical representations that by the same token identify five million oppressed people living
in France was not an act of courage.
In spite of my very dear memory of Charb’s sweet, humorous, and moving vignettes about Daniel Bensaïd, I cannot bring
myself to participate in the choir and say that “I am Charlie.” But here is the problem. This attack and these murders push
people like me into a corner, as they make it extremely difficult for us to say that we find this act of violence disgusting and
unacceptable, that we deeply loathe the politics, strategy, and means of radical Islamists, that we are in pain for the people who
have been murdered, but that yet we cannot identify ourselves with Charlie Hebdo. And we cannot deploy the expected slogan
of “We are all French” in this moment in which a specific version of French national identity was mobilized to oppress those
French citizens who cannot possibly identify with it.
This tiny space, the space for a solidarity capable of challenging identities, rather than reinforcing or restating them, for a
solidarity that does not need the affirmation of a common identity to express itself, is the space that the attack against Charlie
Hebdo risks closing, forcing all of us to participate, willingly or unwillingly, directly or indirectly, in the renewed farce of the
clash of civilizations.