Arts & Letters

On MLK Day

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King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948 with a degree in sociology. He was unhappy with his major, however, complaining about the “apathetic fallacy of statistics.” While at Morehouse, King decided to change his field of study. He entered Crozer Theological Seminary, where he absorbed the writings of political philosophers “from Plato and Aristotle,” King wrote, “down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill and Locke.”

In a beautiful tribute to King, delivered at Spellman College in 1986, then secretary of education William Bennett explained why King turned to the liberal arts. In Bennett’s words:

Martin Luther King turned to the greatest philosophers because he needed to know the answers to certain questions. What is justice? What should be loved? What deserves to be defended? What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is man? These questions are not simply intellectual diversions, but have engaged thoughtful human beings in all places and in all ages. As a result of the ways in which these questions have been answered, civilizations have emerged, nations have developed, wars have been fought, and people have lived contentedly or miserably. And as a result of the way in which Martin Luther King eventually answered these questions, Jim Crow was destroyed and American history was transformed.

– Peter Wehner, Commentary

“The apathetic fallacy of statistics.” Sharp phrase. Reminds me of the following article (yes, it’s a bit of a tangent, I admit):

By about a quarter-century ago, however, it had become obvious to sophisticated experimentalists that the idea that we could settle a given policy debate with a sufficiently robust experiment was naive. The reason had to do with generalization, which is the Achilles’ heel of any experiment, whether randomized or not. In medicine, for example, what we really know from a given clinical trial is that this particular list of patients who received this exact treatment delivered in these specific clinics on these dates by these doctors had these outcomes, as compared with a specific control group.

– What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know, Jim Manzi, City Journal

Untangling two words

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

I’d like to take one small data-point and bring it into sharp focus with what lit critics would call a close reading of a two-word phrase from one of Loughner’s videos.

Maybe it’s because in French conscience means both what we’d call conscience and consciousness in English, when I read the weirdly stilted prose of Jared Loughner with its curious insistence on syllogism, the phrase “conscience dreaming” suggested “conscious dreaming” to me — and I wondered whether Loughner wasn’t perhaps thinking of the activity called “lucid dreaming” in which one knows while dreaming that one is dreaming, and begins to “direct” the dream in much the same way in which a film-maker directs a film.

The first quote in this DoubleQuote is from one of Loughner’s videos — the second, which confirms my hypothesis, quotes a friend of his.

I am not suggesting that “lucid dreaming” is responsible for Loughner’s actions — I’m not sure that anything or anyone is, including Loughner himself.

My point is that here as elsewhere, figuring out what the allusions in an unfamiliar rhetoric mean is an important step in understanding the mental processes that produce it.

Lucid dreaming is one clue in the tangled mess that was Loughner’s state of mind that day…

“Cameras,” Matt and Kim

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my water comes straight from the tap
and those bottles are all just for show
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I see that we’re made of
more then blood and bones
see we’re made of
sticks and stones

don’t forget to breathe
need locks for your keys
don’t forget to breathe now
forget to breathe now

The Matt and Kim song “Cameras” is everywhere and good thing, too, because I like it. Definitely dance-around-your-room-or-tap-your-toes-in-line-at-the-store time. Here’s the YouTube “official version” (can’t figure out the embedding url) and here is their fun and vibrant website. Posted on the website is the following observation from the Matt and Kim Twitter feed: “This guy at the pharmacy made it very clear to me that snow is a four letter word.”

Do I have to Twitter now? I generally don’t like it. It makes me feel like a stalker with ADD. (Full disclosure: I used to Twitter. Twitter microfiction I called it. Deleted it. May revive it. Who knows? And, yeah, I know you can’t recover an old account. I saved my microfiction on – wait for it – PAPER….)

Don’t forget to breathe now….no time for cameras we’ll use our eyes instead….

UPDATE: Okay, maybe today isn’t the best day to express my sentiments toward Twitter given Charles Cameron’s post below. It’s definitely a cool technology but I don’t know if it is for me.

An Iridology of the Sciences?

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

I for one am delighted to know that we can now play around with the iridology of the sciences, using the software available on the Science-Metrix Ontology Explorer site to view which fields have journals which cross-link to journals in other fields…

Seriously — that lower image is of the Field Citation Wheel that you can find, suitably enlarged for easy viewing, on that site.

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And it’s heartening for me to know, for instance — taking a closer look at the segment of that image that’s roughly east north-east — that scientific journals do have some links on their pages to works of theology or philosophy:


Engineering, you’ll notice, has more links than history, philosophy, theology, the social sciences (even counting them twice), economics, business, the arts and humanities combined.

My own field, theology, has to share its thin segment with philosophy, and you can guess how small the number of links to articles on Islamic apocalyptic probably are…

Which is, in part, why I wonder whether a project like the ETH’s Living Earth Simulator will really manage to map such things as, well, a possible outbreak of global jihadist Mahdism and its consequences.

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But then I look at another gorgeous graphic from the same source, focusing in on a part of the network of knowledge that interests me, and I can just faintly make out, lower left, entirely isolated, the field of music…

What splendid isolation! That’s all of Bach, mind you and all the Beatles, too.

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Seriously, though:

  • It’s fascinating to be able to see how the various branches of knowledge cross-reference each other.
  • Visual data representation is a gorgeous, fantastic, field.
  • Mapping the all-of-everything is an irresistable lure for keen minds
  • I’m betting the humanities will prove to be at least as good at it as the sciences.
  • And I recall, not without a pang of regret, the time when my beloved Theology was Queen of the Sciences, and one might converse with Abelard on the streets of Paris…

The Encroaching Oligarchy

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A double movement will assure the advancement of human history. The developing world is heading toward democracy — pushed by the movement toward full literacy that tends to create culturally more homogeneous societies. As for the industrialized world, it is being encroached on to varying degrees by a tendency toward oligarchy — a phenomenon that has emerged with the development of educational stratification that has divided societies into layers of “higher,” “lower,” and various kinds of “middle” classes.
 
However, we must not exaggerate the antidemocratic effects of this unegalitarian educational stratification. Developed countries, even if they become more oligarchical, remain literate countries and will have to deal with the contradictions and conflicts that could arise between a democratically leaning literate mass and university-driven stratification that favors oligarchical elites.

Emmanuel Todd,After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2002):

Todd’s book, despite its flaws, is full of good insights. This passage was prescient. The Tea Party (“a democratically leaning literate mass”) and its opponents, the “Ruling Class” described by Angelo Codevilla, (“oligarchical elites”) are well-delineated by Todd, several years before other people were focused on this phenomenon.