Detached Ideas

by W. H. Auden

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

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Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District which includes his home town, Janesville — not far north of the Illinois border. He earned his BA from Miami University of Ohio, in economics and political science, and was elected to Congress in 1998 at the age of 28. Over the past decade, Ryan has gradually emerged as perhaps the most influential voice among congressional conservatives. My impression is that he is thoughtful, articulate, earnest, and less polemical than many politicians.

Last week Ryan released A Deeper Look at Income Inequality, in response to the CBO study of household income dis­tri­bution. His summary makes three main points:

• The question for policymakers is not how best to redistribute a shrinking eco­no­mic pie. The focus ought to be on increasing living standards, expanding econo­mic opportunity, and promoting upward mobility for all.
• Conventional wisdom on government’s role in inequality often has it backwards: tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; govern­ment transfer payments have become less progressive (due in large part to growing entitlement payments to wealthier seniors).
• Rather than further divide Americans, there is growing bipartisan consensus to target corporate welfare, to income-adjust entitlement programs, and to reform the tax code by removing loopholes and lowering barriers to growth.

Here are portraits of Ryan by Paul Gigot and Peggy Noonan.

–Paul

According to an article by Charles Krauthammer, this joke is circulating the internet:

“We don’t allow any faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

The CERN Press Release describes the result as an anomoly – which indeed it is if the neutrinos arrived in Gran Sasso 60 ns. before leaving Geneva. Perhaps the most per­ti­nent observation in the press release is that “the potential impact on science is too large to draw imme­diate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations.”

–Paul

One of my deep satisfactions during the past decade was reading Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War. I realize that not everyone shares my obsession with Greek his­tory, and it would probably make more sense, anyway, to start with Thucydides. But Yale has now done us the service of making available the lecture videos for Donald Kagan’s course: Introduction to Ancient Greek History. There are 24 lectures, ranging from the Dark Ages to the Twilight of the Polis — a breathtaking journey with a great historian.

Donald Kagen is Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University. George Steiner called his volumes on the Peloponnesian War “the foremost works of history pro­duced in North America in this century.” Here is a nice site which celebrates his Jefferson Lecture in 2005. It has a biography, an interview, an appre­cia­tion by Barry Strauss of Cornell, and the text of Kagan’s lecture: In Defense of History.

–Paul

Walter Russell Mead is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Hu­man­i­ties at Bard College, and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest.  Mead, the son of an Episcopal priest, was educated at Groton, which he calls “Pundit High”, and Yale, where he still teaches International Security Studies. From 2003 until 2010 Mead was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. His books include Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (2001), and God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2007).

Mead is also the author of an energetic and well-written blog, Via Meadia, in which he discusses a broad range of foreign and domestic issues. In a recent essay Mead says that his motivation for this blog is “a sense that the world is moving faster than our thought about the world,” a point he also makes in Global Weirding Coming at Us All. Mead describes himself as a Democrat who voted for Obama in 2008. But he often argues against orthodox liberal positions. For instance, he criticizes what he calls “the blue social model” in Beyond the Big City Blues and Why Blue Can’t Save the Inner Cities Part I and Part II. He supports school choice, and he lacerates the green move­ment in such essays as More Green Madness on the Plains. There is a distinctive re­ligious sensibility in his writing, perhaps best illustrated in He Plants His Footsteps on the Sea: Faith Matters.

I find Mead’s blog refreshing and I admire its attempt to move beyond the ideological conformity of the academy. I like his advice to college students in Back to School.

–Paul

by T. S. Eliot

From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, in Collected Poems 1909–1962, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, p. 94.

Alicia Doudna and Andrew Kratzat are two gifted young classical musicians — Alicia, an outstanding violinist teaching in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Andrew, a talented young bassist who just received a scholarship to Peabody Institute. They were engaged to be married. On July 26, they were on I-94, heading across the state for Andrew’s birthday celebration, when a semi plowed into their car (which was stopped behind traffic). They were rushed to the hospital with severe brain injuries. As of now, neither Alicia nor Andrew has regained consciousness. Here is the report from a local paper. The prognosis is not good but as always in such cases there is a wide range of uncertainty. For the latest updates click on the following logo:

Alicia is my daughter’s close friend. Hannah and Alicia attended Cleveland Institute of Music and New England Conservatory together, and Hannah flew back from Europe to be with the family and friends who are keeping vigil in Ann Arbor. Our thoughts and prayers are with Andrew, Alicia, their families and those who love them.

Donations to help support Alicia and Andrew can be made here.

The internet and social media have greatly extended the range of choices available in modern life. This is usually taken to be a good thing — or at least to be harmless. We can now more easily transcend limitations of physical location and spatial dis­tance, not only to access goods and services, but also to make connections and form rela­tionships with a variety of people of our own choosing. Such an increase in choices is not entirely new. In important respects the rise of internet communities has merely in­ten­sified a process that urbanization began long ago. Cities not only brought a vari­ety of goods and services to their inhabitants, but they also brought together people of diverse reli­gions, classes and ethnicities, and allowed a greater variety of possible associ­ations and self-selected relationships.

In the Discourse on Method, Descartes describes moving to Amsterdam in the seven­teenth century, “where in the midst of a great crowd actively engaged in busi­ness, and more careful of their own affairs than curious about those of others, I have been enabled to live without being deprived of any of the conveniences to be had in the most populous cities, and yet as solitary and as retired as in the midst of the most remote deserts.” What is remarkable and revealing about the account Descartes offers is the ironic way that the increase in choices is directly linked to a detached aloofness, a disen­gaged anonymity. Being submersed in social possibilities coincides with an asocial isolation and solitude. But Descartes is not disturbed, or even con­cerned, by this result. In fact, Descartes describes such asocial detachment as an ideal oppor­tunity for objective reflection: “where, as I found no society to interest me, and was besides fortunately undisturbed by any cares or passions, I remained the whole day in seclusion, with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts.” The absence of family and friends, of meaningful employment, and of emotional ties, seems to open up possibilities, allowing the individual greater freedom of thought, and ultimately, of association and action. This is a deep and seductive idea in modern western societies, going all the way back to the Hebrew prophets, who literally fled to the desert to escape the constraints of family and community and to redefine their personal identity and sense of purpose. Amsterdam allowed Descartes to achieve this result without having to give up the conveniences of civilization.

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Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata was composed in 1803, while he was working on the Eroica Sym­phony, and barely six months after his Heiligenstadt Testament. The Kreutzer revitalized the violin sonata.  Sub­titled molto concertante, it demanded a new kind of virtu­osity from the violin and piano, and anticipated the more ex­pan­sive emotional land­scape of Beethoven’s mid­dle period. The first per­for­mance, at the Vienna Augarten, saw Beethoven him­self at the piano along with the young black violinist, George Bridgetower, for whom the sonata had been written. The story of Bridge­tower, and his collaboration with Beethoven, is told in Rita Dove’s Sonata Mullatica.

The broader perception of Beethoven’s sonata has been significantly influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s powerful The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1889. Tolstoy’s novella is about love, sex, marital discord and jealousy. In the critical scene, Pozdnyshev’s jeal­ousy is fueled by an amateur performance of the Beethoven sonata in which his wife ac­com­panies the violinist Trukhachevsky whom Pozdnyshev despises. Pozdnyshev says:

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I first heard about Jonathan Haidt’s courageous talk to the annual meeting of the So­ci­ety for Personality and Social Psychology from this discussion, by Russell K. Niell on Minding the Campus. Dr. Haidt has now made available the talk itself:

by T. S. Eliot

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years–
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres–
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate–but there is no competition–
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

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Over a year ago I wrote a post on Thorium Reactors, noting the “miniscule” amount of radioactive waste produced by such reactors. A recent article by Robert Hargraves and Ralph Moir, Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactors, in the Physics and Society forum of the American Physical Society, contains an excellent discussion of the safety advantages of this technology. Since I had been thinking about the situation at Fukushima-Daiichi, I was especially struck by their description of the early testing of liquid reactors: “the in­trinsic reac­tivity control was so effective that shutdown was accomplished simply by turning off the steam tur­bine generator.”

Liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTRs) operate at atmospheric pressures, providing immunity against the risks of explosion in pressurized designs (and enabling simpler construction and a smaller foot­print). But the increased margin of safety for LFTRs is primar­ily due to the underlying physics:

A molten salt reactor cannot melt down because the normal operating state of the core is already molten. The salts are solid at room temperature, so if a reactor vessel, pump, or pipe ruptured they would spill out and solidify. If the temperature rises, stability is intrinsic due to salt expansion. In an emergency an actively cooled solid plug of salt in a drain pipe melts and the fuel flows to a critically safe dump tank. The Oak Ridge MSRE researchers turned the reactor off this way on weekends.

Hargraves and Moir also explore the cost advantages of LFTRs and the difficulties that LFTRs would pose to prolifera­tion and weaponization.

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These are Shelley’s photos from our trip to New Mexico in the summer of 2010. We stopped in Ontario and Wisconsin on the way out, and stayed in the beautiful Rociada Valley, at Pendaries, about 25 minutes northwest of Las Vegas, NM. Click the image below to enter the album, and use the arrows on the sides of the photos to navigate:

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I remember the sense of shock that I felt upon hearing of Milton Babbitt’s death last Saturday. He was a very old man, and had been ill for a long time; so why should I have been shocked? Perhaps it is because of my memory of the last time that I saw him, about two years ago. He was frail and in obvious discomfort, but the as­tonishing vitality of his wit, imagination and intellect was undiminished. It is strange now to imagine that it is gone.

I studied with Milton for two years, which were also his last as a teacher. Yet at the end of this time, I was the same overawed young man I had been when I first walked into his office. I admired and liked him, and I think he liked me; but rarely did I ever feel that I had reached beneath that formidable layer of brilliance and erudition that he wore about himself. There is a certain kind of awe that precludes real intimacy.

I write this, therefore, with the acute awareness that there are many who are more qualified than I to commemorate Milton — witness, for example, David Rakowski’s touching appreciation of him here. For the present, I wish simply to offer a few of my recollections from the time that I spent studying with him, and to consider what these reflections might mean for our understanding of him as a composer and public figure. His reputation, after all, has been a contentious one, and I see no way to easily divorce my private memories of the man from a consideration of the complicated role that he has played in our intellectual history. In fact, it is in honoring Milton as an individual that we can best correct the distorted picture that has often been drawn of him.

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We are accustomed to thinking of river drainages, like trees, as having a directional structure — branching as one moves upstream, but converging into larger streams as one moves down­stream. Deltas, like the root systems of trees, are boundary cases.

There is a remarkable exception to this structure, however, that occurs at Two Ocean Pass in northern Wyoming. Two Ocean Creek drains the plateau north­west of the Pass and rushes down the mountain straight into a ridge line that forms part of the conti­nental divide. There the creek splits into two parts: one of which becomes Atlantic Creek and flows north into the Yellowstone, and thence into the Mississippi; while the other be­comes Pacific Creek, flowing southwest into the Snake, and thence into the Pacific. Here is a map:

Cutthroat trout used this route to migrate from the Snake River into Yellowstone Lake which is in the Mississippi drainage. Parting of the Waters describes the hike back to Two Ocean Creek, and has some nice photographs and maps.

–Paul

A previous post on Sherry Turkle discussed her views on the ‘subjective’ aspect of our relation to technology. Her most recent writing expresses misgivings about the health of this relationship. This is noticeable in Programmed for Love, an interview from the Chronicle Review, in which Turkle describes how internet usage and social networks can mask the need to cultivate real human relation­ships and real human com­mun­ity. “Be­cause we grew up with the Net,” she says, “we assume that the Net is grown up.”

The occasion for the Chronicle interview is Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, which remarks that “we talk about ‘spending’ hours on e-mail, but we too are being spent.” I also enjoyed the observation by Turkle’s daughter, that instead of a robot caretaker the professor “would rather have the com­plete works of Jane Austen played continu­ously.”  Me too.

–Paul

White to move and draw

Problem from Claus Jensen

Position (html) exported from SigmaChess
For interesting board and piece designs, see Victor Carbajo

Denis Dutton is dead. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and founder/editor of the web aggregator Arts & Letters Daily. Dutton also founded the site Climate Debate Daily, and was the author of The Art In­stinct: Beauty, Plea­sure, and Human Evolution. His personal website is here.

Our underestimation of Africa’s size probably derives from the common Mercator map projection which displays equatorial regions as smaller than high latitude regions. The mistake is perpetuated, though, by inattention and by the immappancy mentioned by Kal Kraus in “The true size of Africa”.

From The Economist, Nov. 20 2010.

I first read George Steiner in my twenties, and he made a lasting impression. He was a remarkable critic; his writing was transparent and his learning prodigious. Recently, after many years, I reread In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefi­ni­tion of Culture, and can report that it still has the elo­quence and power that I remem­bered. One of my favorite Steiner books, his controversial novella The Voyage to San Cristobal of A.H., forms the backdrop for the best discus­sion of Steiner that I know: “Interrogation at the Borders: George Steiner and the Trope of Translation” by Ronald Sharp, for­mer Dean at Vassar. Other works by Steiner that I recom­mend are After Babel: Aspects of Language and Trans­la­tion and Real Presences.

So, why didn’t the music say no?

–Paul

In a letter to William James on November 25, 1902, Peirce spoke of “the completely developed system, which all hangs together and cannot receive any proper presen­tation in fragments,” and he went on to describe synechism as: “the keystone of the arch.” Now synechism, according to Peirce, is just “that tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of continuity.” Hence, in order to make sense of Peirce’s synechism, and its role in his “completely developed system”, it would seem essential first to understand what Peirce meant by the idea of continuity.

Peirce was far from reticent on the topic:

If I were to attempt to describe to you in full all the scientific beauty and truth that I find in the principle of continuity, I might say in the simple language of Matilda the Engaged, “the tomb would close over me e’er the entrancing topic were exhausted” . . .

Yet, even though much of Peirce’s writing was devoted to this idea, there is not much in the secondary literature on his technical definitions of continuity. In this paper we will show how these definitions changed as Peirce’s thinking on con­ti­nu­ity evolved. This should be valuable not only to scholars expressly concerned with Peirce’s work in the foundations of mathematics, but also to those mainly interested in other aspects of his thought.

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Photograph by Steven Pinker

I very much enjoyed Rebecca Goldstein’s  36 Argu­ments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. It is a novel of ideas — one that explores the intersec­tion between in­tel­lec­tual and spiritual life. The protagonist, Cass Seltzer, is an academic, a psychologist of religion whose sur­prise best-seller, Varieties of Religious Illusion, has led to his acclaim as “America’s favorite atheist.” More­over, Cass has just been offered a job by Harvard — the pinnacle of aca­demic success. In contrast to this professional tra­jec­tory, however, Cass’s private life reveals a preoccu­pation with issues of mean­ing and trans­cen­dence. One notices in Cass those “obstinate question­ings of sense and out­ward things” characteristic of the religious percipient. So if this is athe­ism, one wonders, how does it essentially differ from theism?

Goldstein describes her point of departure for the novel as follows:

Dinner party hostesses used to be warned to steer the conversation away from politics and religion. I used to wonder why, but I don’t anymore. There are some differences that reveal rifts so deep that dialogue breaks down. Among these are the current debates that have been raging between God-believers and the so-called new atheists. It often seems that people on one side can’t begin to grasp what the world is like, what it feels like, for those on the other side. When the person with whom one is conversing appears utterly opaque, then mistrust and contempt are easily aroused: How can he be saying that when the opposite seems so obvious to me? Is he stupid, dishonest, maybe just a touch evil? These are not the sort of suspicions that the gracious hostess wants intruding at her candle-lit dinner table.

But for me, as a novelist, it’s differences like these, indicating entirely different orien­tations toward the world, which are the most tantalizing to explore. Arguments alone can’t capture all that is at stake for people when they argue about issues of reason and faith. In the end, I place my faith in fiction, in its power to make vividly present how dif­fer­ent the world feels to each of us and how these differences are sometimes what is really being expressed in the great debates of our day on the existence of God.

[from amazon.com]

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by Alexander Pope

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

‘Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
In Poets as true Genius is but rare,
True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light,
These born to Judge, as well as those to Write.
Let such teach others who themselves excell,
And censure freely who have written well.
Authors are partial to their Wit, ’tis true,
But are not Criticks to their Judgment too?

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The world premiere of Nathan’s Tenebrae, for harp and string quartet, will be March 31, 2011, at Lincoln Center. It is sponsored by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and will be performed by Bridget Kibby and the Jupiter String Quartet. Tickets go on sale August 2 here.

–Paul

This post is about a remarkable man who I have been fortunate to have as my friend. Philip Barlow is a Mormon and a scholar of American religion; he earned his B.A. in History from Weber State College in 1975, his M.T.S. from Harvard in 1980, and his Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School in 1988. He taught Religion at Hanover College — a Presbyterian School — until 2007, when he was appointed the Leonard J. Arring­ton Professor of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University.

Last summer I reread Phil’s book, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion, pub­lished in 1991, by Oxford University Press. This is a book that deserves the many accolades it has received; it is an honest and thoughtful dis­cussion of scriptural inter­pretation and religious belief in Mormonism. One reason that this dis­cussion is important for non-Mormons is that it con­cerns the early stages — more accessible than in main­stream Christianity or Judaism — in the development of a religious tradition. The recent appearance of Mormonism, and its extensive docu­men­ta­tion, comprise a valuable resource for understanding how religions in general evolve. Especially interesting to me is the unique relation of Mormon scriptural exe­gesis to secular philosophy and changing standards in textual criticism.

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It is a recurrent trope in writing about Thucydides to place him in opposition to Plato. I would like to consider some of the ramifications that this opposition may have for our understanding of Thucydides, and to evaluate its limitations. But first we must try to disentangle the various guises that it assumes.

At the most specific level, the contrast between Plato and Thucydides may be broken down into various small polarities, in each of which the two thinkers do indeed seem to hold irreconcilable views. Thus the Socratic maxim that no one does evil knowingly seems to directly contradict Thucydides’ tragic vision of human nature, as the Platonic search for universals stands in opposition to the Thucydidean concern with the con­crete particular. None of the individual contrasts between Plato and Thucydides, how­ever, adequately capture the opposition that historians and philosophers have argued exists between them. This opposition is taken, rather, to arise from a funda­mental difference in one’s way of seeing, which subsumes all of these smaller dis­tinctions, and which leads the two thinkers to systemically different conclusions.

This opposition dates back at least to Nietzsche’s vision of Thucydides as a “cure for Platonism,” which is discussed at length in Darien Shanske’s Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History, and, following Nietzsche, is generally formulated in antagonistic terms. There are notable exceptions to this, such as David Grene’s Greek Political Theory, in which Plato and Thucydides are regarded as complementary oppo­sites.  But most writers who have made the comparison, including Heidegger and Shanske himself, have done so in Nietzsche’s terms. I will return to Grene’s com­par­ison of Plato and Thucydides, in order to consider the ways in which it complicates the picture presented by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Shanske. But first I would like to look more closely at Nietzsche’s description of Thucydides. This passage, despite its length, is worth quoting in full:

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