CHEAP, HARMLESS SNARKING [IS THERE ANY OTHER KIND]

i stumbled on a story on the huffington post to the effect that conservatives in the hierarchy of the roman catholic church who are unhappy with the 'liberalism' of pope francis have started circulating rumors that francis conspired in his own election and hence is not a legitimate pope.  shades of avignon.

i do not have a dog in this hunt, as i understand they say down here outside of the confines of chapel hill, so i feel free simply to sit back and enjoy the fun.  the real point, of course, is that according to the church, when the cardinals meet in a conclave to select a new pope, they are guided incomprehensibly but unerringly by the holy spirit to choose the person whom GOD wants.  this is the foundation of the claim that when the pope speaks from the throne [ex cathedra] on matters of faith and morals, he [or she, by the way] is infallible.  if it takes a little hanky-panky to get them to fix on GOD's choice, well, the LORD moves in mysterious ways.

i have a suspicion that the conservative clerics have been corrupted by modernity.  'legitimate' indeed!  next they will be alleging vote fraud and we will  have the unedifying spectacle of hanging chads rather than hanging heretics as in the good old days.

PEARL HARBOR DAY

today is december 7th, 'a day that will live in infamy' as those of my generation came to know it.  seventy-three years ago, the imperial navy and air force of japan launched an attack on the u.s. naval base at pearl harbor, in hawaii.  the next day, president franklin delano roosevelt asked for, and received from the congress, a declaration of war.  i was seven years old, twenty days from my eighth birthday.

america was transformed by the war.  the armed forces, which had after the end of the first world war dwindled to a slender force, were rapidly expanded by volunteer enlistments and by a draft that remained in effect for forty years.  those who were not then alive will have difficulty imagining the total mobilization of a society and economy.  sugar and meat and gasoline were rationed.  as men went off to war, women were recruited into the factories.  we school children were asked to collect old newspapers and the tin foil from cigarette packs, which we rolled into balls, all to be brought in to our schools 'for the war effort.'  everyone bought savings bonds to finance the military effort.  $18.75 bought a bond which could be redeemed for $25 when it matured.

america entered the war as a regional hegemon.  despite imperial adventures in the south pacific, it held sway only over the new world.  it emerged from the war the heir to the global british, french, and german empires, its war department transmuted into the modern defense department.  possession of the atomic bomb made the united states for a while the unchallenged imperial overlord of the entire world, until the emergence of the soviet union as a nuclear power compelled it to settle for an uneasy balance of power.

at first, america continued to fill its military ranks with conscripts, a fact that indirectly contributed to the expansion of higher education in the 1960's [the availability of student deferments for full time graduate study drew a generation of academically inclined undergraduates into academic careers as a way of avoiding the draft.]  however, the disastrous viet nam war, which came close to destroying the army at the platoon and company level, forced the general staff to switch to a volunteer professional army, which for the past forty years has been available as a well-trained, readily available instrument of imperial policy.

every american president from fdr to barack obama has embraced the post-war imperial project, and the entire american ruling class has been committed to it for more than half a century.  the american economy has been on permanent war footing since the attack on pearl harbor.  december 7th is indeed a day that will live in infamy, though some of us may interpret that eloquent phrase somewhat differently.

 

 

THE DOCTOR IS IN

well, i saw a specialist for my elbow today.  in five weeks i will have an injection.  we shall see.

the entire process was much as you might imagine.  i started at the check-in desk, where a nice lady asked me my name and date of birth [to make sure i was not trying to cadge some free care] and xeroxed my medicare card and my supplementary insurance card.  then i sat down and waited until another young woman came out of a door with a folder in her hand and called my name.  she led me to an examination room where she checked my list of medications  and left.  ten minutes later a very young orthopedic resident came in and went through a long series of little tests to determine exactly what is wrong with me.  she opined that i do NOT have tennis elbow, but might have one of several other problems.  then she left, saying she was sorry for my pain [very nice, i thought], and that THE doctor would be in to see me shortly.  forty minutes later, in he came, marginally older and very cheerful.  after another examination of the offending appendage, he said the next step would be an injection.  it could be done today, he said, but without ultrasound they might not get the right spot.  after a brief meditation, i elected to wait for the super-specialist with the ultrasound, even though that might not be until the new year  [he is very busy].

during the forty minute wait to see THE doctor i got to thinking about how different his professional routine is from the one with which i had become familiar during fifty years of teaching.  i began to day-dream about how it all might have been different....

i arrived at my office for the day, changed in the antechamber into my regulation grey tweed jacket, clipped a red pen and a black pen to my breast pocket, and entered my office.  the first undergraduate had come to her appointment half an hour earlier, presenting her student id at the front desk.  she was there because of a persistent tendency to assume that merely because b comes after a, be is caused by a.  the doctors call it post hoc syndrome, short for post hoc ergo propter hoc.   after a brief wait, a doctoral student came into the waiting room and called the student's name.  he led her into the examination area, paused to measure her skill at syllogistics, and took her into an examination room, where he administered a spot quiz and said someone would be in to see her shortly.  after fifteen minutes, an assistant professor knocked on the door , entered, and introduced herself.  she asked how long the condition had existed.  was the student also inclined to commit the fallacy of the excluded middle.  did she have difficulty distinguishing use and mention.  she made some notes on the student's permanent record and left.

some while later, after reviewing the notes of the graduate student and the assistant professor, i knocked and entered.  the student, to my practiced eye, presented as a fairly typical confused sophomore.  i asked her, on a scale of one to ten, how confused she thought she was.  then i prescribed two chapters of a logic textbook with associated exercises, and told her to return in four weeks.  however, if she noticed herself begging the question, i wanted her to go immediately to the lounge at the philosophy department.

it was a typical day.  i saw eight undergraduates in the morning, and spent the afternoon dissecting a doctoral dissertation.  i had lunch with a traveler for a publisher who was trying to get me to switch to his firm's ethics textbook.  i told him i would consider it if he would give me a regular supply of fresh syllogisms.

 

 

LYNCHING IS NO LONGER ILLEGAL

recently there has been a series of murders of black men by white police officers, none of whom has been in any way punished for the murders.   this is nothing other than legalized lynching.  it is continuous with the treatment of black men and women for the past four hundred years in north america.  commentators have gone beyond excusing the murders to mocking the victims or representing them as threatening merely by virtue of being alive.  this country does not need a dialogue on racism, or a national conversation.  it needs the police to be disarmed, and their comanders convicted of being accessories to murder.  the united states is not a country to which decent persons can in good conscience owe loyalty.

i apologize for breaking the tone of this blog, but i cannot remain silent, however little good it does for me to speak.

SINCE YOU ASKED

i continue to write with the forefinger of my right hand in a desperate effort to allow my left elbow to heal.  perhaps tomorrow the orthopedic specialist will give me a shot of cortisone and put me out of my misery.

my story about nigel called to mind another story which has a happier ending and in addition has the great merit of being true.   in the spring of 1952 i took harry austryn wolfson's great course on the philosophy of spinoza.  wolfson's final exam [closed book] was three hours long and consisted of three essay questions.  i had studied very hard [unlike nigel] and tackled each question with enthusiasm.  i wrote feverishly until i had answered all three questions fully, only to discover that i still had another hour.  i could of course have handed in my blue book and left, but this was the only written work in the course -- no quizzes, hour exams, or papers -- and i did have another hour.  so i settled down and filled another blue book with everything i could recall about the ETHICS, whether it was relevant to the exam questions or not.  i guess the old man appreciated my energy, because he gave me an a  [this was back before you got an a at harvard just for showing up.]

one more story with a less up-beat ending.  that same year, i took a year-long humanities general education course, my section of which was taught by an inoffensive little man with the curiously appropriate name mr. brown.  one of the readings, which we actually were expected to complete the first weekend, was a penguin paperback prose translation of the ODYSSEY.  i was also taking willard van orman quine's graduate course on mathematical logic and hao wang's graduate seminar on set theory, and as you can imagine, i considered myself rather too good for a survey humanities course [i was all of seventeen at the time.]  i whipped through the ODYSSEY and did not give it another thought.  the first quiz in the course included ten spot identifications, one of which was 'nausicaa,'  by then, we had also read thucydides on the peloponnesian war.  i figured nausicaa was a city state, but i could not recall whether it was allied with athens or sparta, so i tossed a mental coin and wrote 'city-state allied with sparta in the peloponnesian war.'  mr. brown had the good grace not to mark it wrong.  he simply put a series of exclamation points next to it.

MAKING DO WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT

jerry fresia's comment about physics as opposed to molecular biology brings to mind an old story  about nigel ffyfe-wittington, a little boy at a posh english private school.  world history was required of all the boys, and it had been taught for as long as anyone could recall by an old duffer who, somewhat absent-mindedly, set the same question on his final examination each year -- list the kings of england in chronological order, starting with william the conqueror.   this quirk was well known and was passed on from generation to generation of the students, who would ignore everything in the course but make sure to memorize the kings of england.  well, as luck would have it, the year nigel took the course, word somehow filtered back to the history master that the students were on to him,  and he decided to change the question.   When the boys opened the exam, they were stunned to find a new question:  differentiate between the major and minor prophets of the old testament.  The boys fiddled with the exam and twiddled their pencils, unable to recall a single prophet.  nigel stared off into the distance for a bit and then, to the astonishment of his classmates, began to write furiously, covering several sheets of the exam booklet.  the history master sadly graded each exam zero, saving for last nigel's exam, for which he had great hopes.  When he opened it, he found that nigel had written:  far be it from me to make invidious distinctions among these learned and saintly gentlemen, but if you would be interested in a chronological list of the kings of england ...

 
well, far be it from me to attempt to judge the relative merits of physics and molecular biology, but ...

WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING

in the fall of 1954, i had tea with bertrand russell.  in a television interview, he had said that were he to do it over again, he would not have gone into philosophy.  i took the occasion to ask him what he would have chosen.  physics, he said [and somehow i think he was confident that he would have won a nobel prize in that field rather than in literature.]  were he alive today, i suspect he would say molecular biology, for that is where the most exciting scientific work is being done these days.

once again, my big sister, barbara, has put me onto a splendid book, which i have now begun to read.  it is called ARRIVAL OF THE FITTEST, by andreas wagner.  here is what barbara had to say.

'I know that (quite appropriately) your focus these days is on MARX, MARX, MARX...but I throw this out because it's what I'm thinking about these days!

I've been (sort of) following your blog -- it's pretty much of a slog for me. But my attention was caught by your reference to the BLS data sets. I have just read a remarkable book that I think could change the face of evolutionary biology forever, if taken seriously. It is called The Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner.

Wagner points out (correctly) that for all the progress in molecular biology etc, biologists still have no conceptual framework within which to try to understand the link between genotype and phenotype. [As you are probably aware, geneticists for the past half century since the modern synthesis have relegated what connects the two -- genotype and phenotype -- to a black box. Now that I think of it, it is rather like the invisible hand. ]

Wagner says that with the amount of data that has become available, and the computer power we now have, it is possible to begin to explore the links, and what he's done (in the popular book noted above, but also in a much more technical one that I am trying to read) is to start building the appropriate conceptual framework.

It occurs to me that any serious attempt to build the kind of socialist economic structure that you are talking about would have to go down the same path, finding a way to use the mountain of data available from sources like the BLS to create a conceptual framework that would make possible actually making the decisions that would have to be made.'

you can see why i always take her suggestions seriously.  wagner's book, by the way, is charmingly written, a delight to read.  i recommend it.