Skip to my loo...

Mary Beard blogs:

March 20, 2007

Where's the loo?

Most Cambridge colleges “went mixed” some twenty years ago. But they still preserve unexpected corners of male power and privilege. None of these corners is more irritating than the location of the female loos.

Imagine it. You’re sitting in the SCR – that’s the fellows’ common room – after dinner. You casually ask for the Ladies. The chances are that there will be a bit of a flap, while the equivalent of an AA route map and a compass is produced. It usually involves going out into the courtyard, through the rain, into the next court, up a staircase three doors on the left – only to discover a set of facilities which you know to be decidedly inferior to whatever is laid on for the men, and much less ‘convenient’ in almost every way.

Some colleges, to be fair, are a bit better organised; and my own, I confess, treats male needs with almost equal disdain. But the general rule seems to be that women’s ablutions are lower down the pecking order than men’s.

I have never really understood why single sex loos are necessary, anyway, in a place like a university (King’s Cross station late at night is probably another matter).

Why can’t we just share?

In my more paranoid moments, I strongly suspect that the answer has to do with men’s urinals being one of the few remaining sites of exclusively male wheeling and dealing. Men will disappear for a pee in the middle of a meeting and come back, after a cosy chat in the loo, with the business fixed.

Women can’t do that. Female toilets are strangely discreet places, for the simple reason that you never know who is locked in the cubicles – invisible, but capable of overhearing every word that’s said. There can hardly be a woman in the land who hasn’t learned her lesson on this one: bitching in colourful terms about a woman who two minutes later emerges to wash her hands.

This was something that repeatedly got Ally McBeal into trouble in that wonderful old television series. As the joke used to go: How do you know if you’re an Ally McBeal fan? Answer: If you look under the toilet stalls to see who’s using them before you start talking.

Surely it would be easier, and an imaginative blow for female power and equality, just to make urinals a thing of the past and put everyone in the same facilities. It’s already common enough in the USA (in fact, Ally’s loo was a ‘unisex’, as I recall). It’s we Brits who have this illogical obsession with urinary segregation – to the extent that we are even known make students use separate toilets from the staff.

. . . So what did the Romans do, you’ll be wondering.

Well domestic loos were something of a rarity. But the evidence from Pompeii suggests that, if they were present at all, the usual location was in the kitchen. There was convenient water supply and Roman assumptions about hygiene were rather different from our own. Better not to think too hard about the consequences.

Outside, and in places such as baths, they had an excellent line in splendid multi-seaters. like this one from North Africa. Though whether these were also mixed sex we don’t, I think, know.

I’d like to imagine that they were.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 20, 2007 at 09:36 PM |Permalink

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Choppa's reply:


Women can pee standing up. All the gen at:
How to pee standing up

And so they can use male urinals doing it, instead of this:
Loo queue

The traditional morning shit was usually taken at the village ditch/latrine communally as I've understood it. Men and women separately.

Sweden/the Nordic countries (open-air life in forests etc) has a tradition of open-air peeing with few constraints that sometimes leads girls in need to do it with minimal cover (behind a hotdog stand, say) on the pavement in town.

Men peeing like horses in the street I've seen in Austria.

Some fashionable eateries here in Sweden now have (unisex) twin toilets, where the frequent habit (of women at least) of sharing a visit to the loo is rendered a bit more civilized.

Most workplaces here now have unisex toilets, although a growing puritanism has been encroaching on the traditionally perhaps less constrained intersex behaviour in other areas.

In Finland the sauna is taken naked, of course - towels are used to sit on not wrap, knickers etc are laughed at - but how the family/friends mix or segregate is an individual matter. A common habit is kids first perhaps with a woman (coolest), then women, then men (hottest). No drink (or sex) in the sauna while it's hot (you'd collapse), but plenty after. Or before if you're trying to cure a hangover.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela "In the sauna"

Now, Mary, how about a blog on classical farting? - I vividly recall Claudius being advised by his medicus to let it all blow free in the TV Claudius. Did they care at all?

Posted by: Xjy | 21 Mar 2007 11:09:24

Must, won't, Kant, will - Means Ends Duties

Response to Kenodoxia

Kenodoxia stirs it up again:

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Get more sleep and be a better person?

You might think that I am a little obsessed with sleeplessness. Most parents of young children, I reckon, don't get enough sleep, so perhaps I have an excuse. But more support comes from an interesting study in the journal Sleep which tried to measure the effects of sleep deprivation on 'moral judgement'. (You can download the .pdf if you're viewing the page from a domain which has access privileges.) I'm interested in the methods used: participants were asked to answer questions as part of a 'Moral Judgement Task', which involved 40 moral questions, further divided into 'Impersonal' and 'Personal' types. 20 other non-moral questions were also asked. This is how the paper characterises the two types of moral question:

In the present study, Moral Impersonal (MI) dilemmas were those that required the volunteers to judge the appropriateness of various non-personal moral violations in scenarios in which the respondent is presented with a solution to the dilemma that would benefit a larger group by merely deflecting an existing threat of serious bodily harm or death onto another individual or smaller group. In this form of dilemma, the individual performing the action does not directly or personally inflict harm on another, but the course of action described will indirectly bring about serious harm to one party through deflection of an existing threat away from another party.

Moral Personal (MP) dilemmas were similar to the MI dilemmas, except that the moral violation was of a more personal nature in that the course of action initiated by the respondent in the MP dilemmas would directly inflict serious bodily harm or death to a specific identifiable individual in order to reduce the impact of an external threat to another party. The key difference between these 2 types of dilemmas is the degree of personal involvement in producing the harmful consequences; in the MP scenarios, the actor is the “author” of the outcome and directly inflicts the harm, whereas in the MI scenarios the actor merely “edits” the inevitable harm by redirecting an already existing source of harm onto a different victim.

You can see examples of the two types, and also the non-moral scenarios also included in the questionnaire here. They are of the kind familiar from lots of ethical philosophy and of the kind which pop up regularly in Cambridge Admissions interviews. For example, this is a Moral-Impersonal scenario:

You are the late-night watchman in a hospital. Due to an accident in the building next door, there are deadly fumes rising up through the hospital's ventilation system. In a certain room of the hospital are three patients. In another room there is a single patient. If you do nothing the fumes will rise up into the room containing the three patients and cause their deaths.

The only way to avoid the deaths of these patients is to hit a certain switch, which will cause the fumes to bypass the room containing the three patients. As a result of doing this the fumes will enter the room containing the single patient, causing his death.

Is it appropriate for you to hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the three patients?

And this is a Moral-Personal scenario:

A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the tracks, in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very large.

The only way to save the lives of the five workmen is to push this stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workmen will be saved.

Is it appropriate for you to push the stranger on to the tracks in order to save the five workmen?

It is a good question whether there is a morally significant difference between these two kinds of cases. It is nevertheless plausible that there is a significant psychological difference between reactions to the two kinds of scenarios, precisely because of the differing degree of direct personal involvement involved, particularly regarding the causing of a harm -- albeit one which might prevent another, greater, harm.

So what effects does sleep deprivation have on the way you answer this sort of question? It's complicated, as you might expect. The headline results are:

1. Sleep deprivation increases the decision-making time for Moral-Personal scenarios relative to Moral-Impersonal and Non-moral scenarios.

2. In general terms, sleep-deprivation tends to increase the likelihood of a participant answering that a proposed course of action (in both types of case) is appropriate.

The researchers, probably rightly, avoid making claims about which course of action for a given scenario is 'correct', so there is no sense in asking whether these results suggest that there is a 'moral decline' associated with the absence of sleep. But, regardless of which course of action is right, it seems to me that since the action suggested, both in the Moral-Impersonal and Moral-Personal cases, tends to be one which is likely either (i) to foster the agent's own interests at the expense of someone else or (ii) to foster the interests of a larger group at the cost of a smaller group or an individual, it does seem that lack of sleep tends to promote an acceptance of broadly consequentialist reasoning (of either egoist or a more agent-neutral kind).

Which raises a further good question: did Bentham and Mill just not get enough sleep?

Also, as Sara reminds me, didn't Margaret Thatcher famously get by as Prime Minister on only four hours of sleep per night? (She certainly claimed to: see this interview from 1989.)

Posted by JIW at 11:59 AM

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Choppa's response:

For a quick introduction to the basics here Wikipedia's entry seems OK, and the links from the following will get you away and into further reading easily enough. It's about duty vs consequences in relation to how we understand ourselves and what we do. The "duty" line (means) is represented by deontology (with Kant in the blue corner) and "consequences" (ends) by consequentialism, (with Bentham in the waxy yellow corner).

Criticism of deontology

Many Act or Case utilitarians offer critiques of deontology as well as Rule Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham, an early utilitarian philosopher, criticized deontology on the grounds that it was essentially a dressed-up version of popular morality, and that the unchanging principles that deontologists attribute to natural law or universal reason are really a matter of subjective opinion. John Stuart Mill, who lived in 19th century Britain, argued that deontologists usually fail to specify which principles should take priority when rights and duties conflict, so that deontology cannot offer complete moral guidance.

Shelly Kagan, a current professor of philosophy at Yale University, notes in support of Mill and Bentham that under deontology, individuals are bound by constraints (such as the requirement not to murder), but are also given options (such as the right not to give money to charity, if they do not wish to). His line of attack on deontology is first to show that constraints are invariably immoral, and then to show that options are immoral without constraints.

Another, unrelated critique of deontological ethics comes from aretaic theories, which often maintain that neither consequences nor duties but "character" should be the focal point of ethical theory. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, sought to describe what characteristics a virtuous person would have, and then argued that people should act in accordance with these characteristics.

I'll get back to Aristotle and his virtue (Gk. "arete") later.

Duties and constraints always make me ask "who decided this?" and "who stands to gain by it? (cui bono?)" A less ironic and indirect way of asking "who guards the guardians?". And my next questions are: "have I got to obey you?" and "what will happen to me if I don't?"

The train examples are typically mindless examples of individual ethical guilt-prods, designed to paralyse the unprepared in the same way as military tribunals try and paralyse potential conscientious objectors. "If a Hun was about to slit your mother's throat, what would you do? Hand him a flower?"

I think I would refuse to answer questions like this without a social hat on. Commander-in-Chief, Prime Minister, schoolchild, drunk, local vicar, undertaker, Pope... whatever. It's like the old chestnuts from primary school about being stuck in a sinking balloon and having to jettison a cook, a bus driver, a hunter or a Senior Lecturer. Who are you prepared to kill, you murderer!!?

Nuremburg tried to make this type of decision imperative (a duty) for everyone in war too. No more hiding behind "Befehl ist Befehl" (orders is orders). The UN tried something similar with its conventions. But the optimistic ideals of postwar humbug and dogoodery have since been trampled down by decades of violent violation. Individuals can rarely stand up en masse (so to speak) against the holders of collective power. And there is no constituted single holder of power (or body) in human society today to give even the illusion of potential consensus.

The abstract ideals of various competing factions of humanity (the working class national and international, the bourgeoisie national and international, ethnic groups, states, groups of states, genders of various nationalities, classes and gradations, etc) might have some superficial resemblance, or not, but the concrete aims of these factions are mutually contradictory and often lead to injury or death for the antagonists, especially the weaker party. Like industrial accidents (the massively fatal leaks in Bhopal, for instance, with the owners of Union Carbide pitted against the workers and local residents there). Like the wars directly engendered by the dismantling of the USSR by its bureaucracy (Armenia-Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya etc etc) and less directly too (the Balkanization of Yugoslavia, Iraq etc, Africa). Like the rollback of the welfare state's priorities of a high general level of education, health and social security, which has translated into increased ignorance, disease and social precariousness for millions of unpropertied families throughout Europe, and into increased profits and wealth for thousands of propertied families.

So basically, the effect of your decisions on the lives and welfare of others depends on who you're fighting with, and what position you hold in the your group (faction of humanity). And the "intrinsic" moral value of your decisions depends on the formal or informal moral code that holds in your group, and how this compares with the code(s) of other groups, and the group to which the evaluator belongs and its relationship with your own group.

And the more antagonistic the relationships between the group of the evaluator and the evaluated, the more likely the clash of values is to lead to death and destruction, given the empirical propensity of human groups to organize themselves into armed and combative entities.

Imagine for instance that two people were in a position to affect the outcome of the train incidents exemplified above in K's blog. One with a close relative or friend in one of the threatened groups, the other with an enemy (creditor or boss, say) in the same group. It's easy to imagine the "demons of private interest" that Marx refers to propelling their interventions into violent conflict.

Now what effect might lack of sleep have on any of this? For an individual perhaps just to strip away a veneer of conventional (lip-serving?) respectability? Neutralize the dickering of a confused ego and let the super-ego and the id hammer at each other for the right to decide?

Or maybe group decision-making is a kind of enforced collective insomnia by which deep collective needs are connected up with powerful collective desires, with the kaleidoscopic variety of individual differences cancelled out.

It's worth bearing in mind too, that the things you can do without thinking, automatically, are often referred to in terms like "I could do that in my sleep". In other words, behaviours that we have acquired so well, so thoroughly, that they become second nature. We do them without conscious thought. Tying a shoelace, putting on a coat, opening a familiar kind of packaging, negotiating an initially confusing route. So an insomnia test would reveal how deeply a particular set of behaviours, in the present case "moral" responses, have penetrated our being. I know from personal experience how important this depth of knowledge can be from teaching, where the pressures of a classroom full of frustrated and unmotivated teenagers can strip away superficially acquired skills and attitudes and only the "instinctive" gut response is left.

Both Kant and Hegel claimed that there was a single universal moral good that could guide people in their moral decisions. Kant the categorical imperative for all humanity (rigid but optimistic pre-French revolutionary stance), and Hegel the will of the Spirit so fortuitously embodied in the bureaucracy of the Prussian state (dynamic but less optimistic post-revolutionary stance). All other motivations for decisions were demonstrated to be philosophically inadequate. Kierkegaard individualized the Spirit to hold up the ideal of Faith (credo quia absurdum) against Duty (Kant) and Aesthetics (art, the Greeks, Catholicism, god only knows what!). Marx saw the Spirit embodied if you like disparately in the collective decisions and actions of the antagonistic classes into which humanity is divided, and realized that its full flowering (as the active creative potential of a united humanity freed from the fetters and filth of permanent war and want) would only come when the class struggle had resolved itself in accord with the material preconditions laid down by historical development so far and the intellectual and artistic capacity of the materially productive class -- these preconditions and this capacity requiring a cooperative government/management of the whole of humanity in the interests of itself without antagonistic internal divisions. That is, the removal of class divisions in the world consequent on the seizure of power by the working class in more and more states over time. The victory of the bourgeoisie is unthinkable, in that we have seen a world ruled by a victorious bourgeoisie for the past couple of centuries at least, and it is getting progressively more and more feverishly destructive. It's already eaten its own tail, and is on the way to devouring its own belly. A final victory for the bourgeoisie would only lead to the destruction of all humanity as we know it, before any such final victory - which is why it's "unthinkable".

And how does this lead us back to Aristotle?

If we see the "virtuous man" as a collective being, a collective decision-maker, then it's possible to draw up a reasonable list of "good" qualities, get a consensus on them in the collective/group concerned and commit them to general awareness in the form of statutes or a constitution, complete with sanctions for violation. This can be seen in action in revolutionary wars for instance, in such cases as the New Model Army (in England) and the Red Army in 30s China, in which strict orders were issued for the magnanimous treatment of civilians and enemy combatants. As against the atrocities done to these by reactionary armies (such as, for instance, the Swedes in Germany in the 30 Years War).

In this way a reasonable mix of individual and collective behaviours (deontological and consequential) can be codified, subjected to the purifying flame of experience, and refined further until eventually there remains one relatively stable code to which all people are able to relate individually and collectively and by which they feel adequately guided in the decisions and choices they need to make, and which is transparent and instrumental enough to be accessible to necessary modification as circumstances and the development of consensus demand.

And it's nice to think that if we interpret Aristotle in this way, we're corroborating Marx's view of the Greek civilization as the "childhood of mankind".

On change, growth, Swiss rolls, men and feet

Response to Kenodoxia, who writes:

Friday, March 16, 2007

Dion's foot, again

Nick (see comments to the last post [Dion's foot, Thurs March 15]) is surely right that something important is being done in this example by the usual conception we have of the relationship between a person and his foot. Is this a problem for the Stoics? It may increase the plausibility of their analysis of this example, but does it thereby make it less likely that we will draw a general metaphysical lesson on the basis of a particular case of a man and his foot?

Consider an alternative version of Chrysippus’ story. Imagine Dion as before, but rather than imagining Theon to be that part of Dion which omits only Dion's foot, now assume Theon to be only Dion's foot. Again, Theon is a part of Dion. (True, Theon cannot – in this example – be easily thought of a potential persisting individual in his own right, but this is itself an interesting point to bear in mind for later.) Now, rather than considering what will happen if the foot is removed, we might ask what would remain if everything other than the foot is removed. That is to say, let us remove all that constitutes Dion but which is not also part of Theon. Is what is left Dion or Theon? (It cannot be both.) Now, if we have any intuitive response to this admittedly peculiar position, I think that the more likely answer is that the single disembodied foot before us is more likely to be considered to be Theon than Dion. Now this thought experiment was just like that provided by Chrysippus, but it produces quite the opposite result. In both cases the part discarded is the 'overlap', the portions of Dion which are not shared by Theon, and in both cases what is left was at one time both part of Dion and part of Theon. Indeed, in both cases what is left was once part of Dion and is the whole of Theon.

So if these two examples are relevantly similar, how can we explain the different reactions to them? Chrysippus' original example offers us a picture of two conceivable and viable individuals and focuses on one small part which one has and the other has not: a part which is, we would agree, inessential to the larger individual. (But: Polly Low once pointed out to me that for some people it may be the case that their feet are so essential to their persona (if not their identity as a persisting individual) that for them the removal of a foot may be a more telling loss. What if David Beckham’s right foot were removed?)

It may be suggested that Chrysippus' example is not unfair, indeed that it is perfectly suited to his purposes, since – remember – it appears in the context of a counter to the 'Growing argument'. This argument proceeds precisely by asking if small and apparently minor alterations in material constitution, namely the gradual process of growth or diminution, should in truth be thought to be cases of coming to be or passing away of whole individuals. Chrysippus counters this by generating the conclusion that Dion persists throughout the process of losing a foot, even though there is another candidate for what remains once the foot has been removed – namely Theon. On this account, there is no need for Chrysippus to consider such radical cases as that of my alternative formulation of the story of Dion and Theon. He is not concerned with such radical cases as this, and might well agree that is all that is left at the end of the process is a single foot, then it is in fact reasonable to conclude that Dion has passed away! All that remains is a foot, strangely designated by the name Theon.

But if Chrysippus were to agree to this account, and were therefore to accept that this particular radical case of diminution will count as the passing away of Dion, then a further obvious question arises. Just how much of Dion can we take away without concluding that what is left is not Dion? It may be easy to think that a foot is a non-essential part of a person, but how much could we shave off and still have Dion at the end? If the Academics were to press this point then it is a perfect context for the application of a sorites argument. Now it is possible to ask whether the answer to this question is a matter of specifying in quantitative terms how much could be lost (49%?), or is it better to think about the particular parts which can be lost? (For example: perhaps feet, hands, even limbs are eliminable, but what about heads, hearts, brains and so on?)

Indeed, the Stoics themselves may have produced difficulties for Chrysippus' favoured account. In Sextus Empiricus' discussion of the theories offered by dogmatic philosophers about parts and wholes, he gives us this piece of Stoic theory:

But the Stoics assert that the part is neither other than (ἕτερον) the whole nor the same; for the hand is neither the same as the man (for it is not a man) nor other than the man for it is included in the conception of the man as man (σὺν αὐτῇ γὰρ ὁ ἄνθρωπος νοεῖται ἄνθρωπος).

SE M 9.336, trans. R.G. Bury

The first part of this is straightforward. A hand is not the same as a man (presumably the man whose hand it is) since one is a hand and the other is a man. But there is of course a link between hands and men, and this is what the Stoics try to characterise in the second half of this text. A hand is not 'different from' a man, since when you think of a man you think of a man with hands. Hands are not, in other words, merely optional accessories for humans.

But the Stoics do not make so clear exactly what this last claim amounts to. Does it, for example, make 'handed-ness' an essential property of a human, so that anything which does not have hands cannot be a human? I assume that the Stoics would have known of cases of people losing their hands in accidents or in battle, and if so then they would have to give an account which allows these too to count as humans. Perhaps 'having at some point had hands' is an essential characteristic of a human.

In any case, what does this mean for Dion and his foot? It might explain why it is a foot which is removed rather than a hand, since the footless Dion is not on anyone's account in danger of failing to be a human. And a foot on its own is on no-one’s account likely to be thought of as an individual. Having feet, after all, is not a peculiar characteristic of humans as having hands might perhaps be thought to be; lots of creatures have feet, but not many have hands.

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Choppa's response:

First, a thank you for getting me to look up "sorites" in "sorites argument", which led me to the wonderful entry on teuэ- at Bartleby:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE531.html

relating thigh, thousand, thumb, butter, tumescent, quark, and creosote.

So, when is pile not a pile, a beard not a beard, a man not a man?

It's interesting to me that the practical engineer and mathematician Archimedes had a description of this kind of movement - growth and negative growth - in his pre-calculus. "The greatest mathematician of antiquity, Archimedes of Syracuse, displayed two natures, for he tempered the strong transcendental imagination of Plato with the meticulously correct procedure of Euclid." (C.Boyer, History of the Calculus, Dover 1959:48) Further: "In the seventeenth century, however, the infinitesimal and kinetic methods of Archimedes were made the basis of the differential and fluxionary forms of the calculus." (ibid:59) To calculate changing surfaces and volumes he imagined them as made up of "mathematical atoms" or thin sheets and pursued their interaction to exhaustion, so to say. BUT Boyer explains, in relation to A's work on the parabolic segment that: "In order to define 4/3 A as the sum of the infinite series, it would have been necessary to develop the general concept of real number. Greek mathematicians did not possess this, so that for them there was always a gap between the real (finite) and the ideal (infinite).
"It is not strictly correct therefore to speak of Archimedes' geometrical procedure as a passage to the limit, for the essential part of the definition of the limit is the infinite sequence." (ibid:53)
So not even Archimedes was able to give a clear and explicit answer to the problems raised by Zeno's paradoxes.
"The notion of the limit of an infinite series is essential for the clarification of the paradoxes; but Greek mathematicians (including Archimedes) excluded the infinite from their reasoning. The reasons for this ban are obvious: intuition could at the time afford no clear picture of it, and it had as yet no logical basis. The latter difficulty having been removed in the nineteenth century and the former now being considered irrelevant, the concept of infinity has been admitted freely into mathematics." (ibid)

Boyer emphasizes that in his "Method" Archimedes "realized that it is advantageous to have a preliminary notion of the result before carrying through a deductive geometrical demonstration..." (ibid:49)

And this is where Hegel's disembowelling of Kant's antinomical dragons starts. A notion of the Whole, that works (eppur si muove), of movement, change, growth, in a word of the interaction of Being and Nothing generating Becoming, the full understanding of which is an understanding of the Whole and all its parts.

If we take a subsidiary Whole (one considered as such just for the illustration) and instead of calling it Dion or Swiss Roll or Capital we call it A, then we should perhaps not exclude from our intuitive consideration of it the existence of other similar As, as this helps us get a "preliminary notion of the result" before our analysis.

Then we add or subtract a bit to A, leading to positive or negative growth of some kind. So we can call the result A', with the addition of an absolute bit (plus or minus) to the original entity.

Boyer mentions Democritus and the Platonic school "groping" towards "infinitesimal considerations", and this is what happens here - a series of A', A'', A'' etc arises, and regardless of the size of the [increment] sooner or later the quantitative change turns qualitative, and A becomes different from the other As not merely in degree but in kind.

And here the collective judgment of those considering the matter comes in. Consensus in human communities rules, and is codified sooner or later into habits, concepts, laws, and given linguistic expression, and proceeds dialectically in conflict or harmony with the consensus results of other communities to generalize itself or shrivel.

The Greeks reached no consensus about the growth problem, and the gap between the real and the ideal remained unbridgeable. The potential solution of fusing "Archimedes" with "Democritus" never happened. Even Descartes insisted on having an unbridgeable. And Kant.

And even today most maths teachers go by rote and flog the algorithm rather than visualize the result and give the maths its head.

Perhaps our philosophical unbridgeable today has moved on to the gap between our behaviour as humanity and our behaviour as human individuals or limited collectives (states, say).

The foot of a man is a more drastic example than a slice of Swiss Roll. Perhaps the more drastic the better and we should present Dion with his balls chopped off. Popular culture grapples with these problems asking when is a man not a man in terms of man-like creatures - replicants, zombies, vampires, aliens... Political culture grapples with them by adding or subtracting various defining bits (veils, hair, sex organs, skin colour, ethnic or geographical origin, missing or damaged chromosomes or genes) and sanctioning perceived non-As. History grapples with them by making certain As work side-by-side with "their" non-As for common goals and discover their original definitions were wrong.

For me now, the question of What bit of Which (Foot of Dion, Slice of Swiss Roll, Surplus Value of Capital) takes on a new relevance. Because what's at issue is understanding ourselves and what we become and how.

The rhetoric of climate change

From Scientific American - sciam.com

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=note_to_inhofe_and_morano_climate_change&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
March 16, 2007

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11:14:19 am, Categories: Environment, Global Warming and Climate Change, Politics and Science, Public Policy, Education, 203 words

Note to Inhofe and Morano: Climate Change is No Hoax

I should have known it would happen. I have now been quoted in a press release from the inimitable Marc Morano (of Swift Boat and Limbaugh fame) on behalf of the deluded senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, thanks to my post on climate contrarians winning the day in a debate to be broadcast shortly. (Note: all adjectives are mine.)

However, the core point of my post--not surprisingly--seems to have eluded them: the contrarians won through charm, picking on amusing soft targets like private jets, and not any perceivable scientific grounding.

They also largely agreed with their "alarmist" foes. This can't be emphasized enough. In point of fact, the debate over climate change seems to have moved--even on the contrarian side--from whether it is happening to what should be done about it. Crichton made his position clear: we should all stop flying on private jets and work to get our homes off the grid. Or would that be selective quotation?

Read the post for yourself, fully, if you don't believe me. Read the transcript (pdf). Or listen to the debate when it's broadcast on March 23. In the interim, I feel like some kind of third-rate superhero whose identity has been stolen by his nemesis.

Posted by David Biello 26 comments

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Choppa's response (after reading the comments):

The problem here is in getting people to line up their desires with their needs. It's a very general thing, and in the US it's a very difficult matter since most needs are kept invisible these days, dealt with by faceless institutions and carefully screened from public view - like the sewers and the food supply. Also, the intrusive rhetoric of marketing has leeched on basic needs (love and security and beauty and fun) to create desires warped for commercial exploitation. It's intrusive cos it's everywhere - it occupies our public spaces with billboards and our private spaces with branded personal items and ubiquitous TV outpourings. It's all around us, wraps our bodies, and fills our heads.

So serious needs, like the survival of humanity and the generalization of civilization and culture to every human being, find it hard to force themselves into public consciousness as realities on a par with zits and bad hair. And since most of the faceless (but branded and logoed) institutions that run our lives are private corporations, their vested interest in continued secret private decision-making militates against open and public policy debate and decision-making. Which is why the US political system looks the way it does.

However, the remaining democratic and public elements of our political setup have allowed the investigation of world climate behaviour and the scientific and popular presentation of its results. These have been so startling that influential opinion leaders have reacted and not only opened up a breach in the mindlessness of consumer hedonism but actually succeeded in creating a bridgehead and fortifying it into a stronghold. Add to this the recognition by certain of the corporations that they stand to profit from investment in renewable energy production and equipment, because of the Good Energy pulsing out of this stronghold and persuading millions of ordinary citizens, and you get today's situation.

What we're seeing is a move towards the rhetoric of action. The rhetoric of factual and logical foundations for the case ("recognize climate change and try to make it pro-human") is in place and has been for a long time. The rhetoric of persuasion has more or less done its job - some last-ditch troglodytes are squealing very loud but not frightening many people away from alternative sources of energy any more. So much so that corporations are jumping on the bandwagon hoping for emerging market profits. What remains is the organization and assimilation of low-carbon energy into our everyday lives, individually but more importantly collectively, until it too melts into the background, and can be taken for granted like the sewers. And the awareness that free, informed public debate and action has taken us there.

I remember reading that in the old days, when sewers were being planned and threatening to encroach on private property interests, some scum opposed them claiming that infected water tastes sweeter. But the real issue was whose lives would the sweet water destroy, and whose lives would clean water make sweeter?

Iraq 2007 = Siege of Leningrad 1941-44

This report is horrifying.

From today's Guardian/Observer: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329749166-102280,00.html

How the good land turned bad
Peter Beaumont
Sunday March 18, 2007

[...]

The rehearsal space of Baghdad's Symphony Orchestra is in the capital's largely Shia Shaab district. Hassam al-Din al-Ansari, aged 64, the orchestra's composer and principal violinist, is in his office tuning his violin and improvising little arpeggios as he does. Like most in the orchestra before the invasion, he sustained his poorly paid musical career with another job, in al-Ansari's case as a deputy manager in the Ministry of Industry.

It is an oppressive day late in September 2006. The electricity, inevitably, is down. It has been out for 40 hours, one of the musicians complains. Without a generator to light and cool the theatre, the musicians arriving to warm up before rehearsing find themselves on a stage playing in a stifling gloom peering at scores lit only by a distant skylight. In the heat, the stage smells of sweat and dust and resin.

When it becomes too dark, the musicians abandon their efforts to use the stage and cram into the kitchen, which has windows on two sides. It is instantly a pick-a-stick of competing elbows, bows, flutes, music stands, cellos and French horns.

'We are challenging the situation,' al-Ansari says with a sigh, 'by trying to not be too far from the public. We are trying to put on a concert every month, but circumstances are very difficult.' So the performances that the orchestra do put on are private and rarefied, little events for a small audience who do not have to travel very far or have their own security, and put on mainly at the city's two subscription-only 'country clubs'. Other events are by invitation only, for government officials and diplomats from the Green Zone. Even Iraq's music has become gated.

The difficulties in assembling the musicians for rehearsal have led to another kind of fragmentation: of the very music itself. Complicated symphonies, al-Ansari admits, are too difficult to prepare, especially with no certainty that all the musicians will be able to appear. Instead, their performances are dominated by overtures, fragments of larger works and short pieces - Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. The war, too, has forced the orchestra to break into smaller units, ad hoc chamber ensembles more easy to assemble and to perform around the city when they can.

'We could just stop work. We could submit,' says al-Ansari, 'but we are determined to challenge the times we live in and to do our best. In the 1950s, we used to get a lot of Russian films in Iraq. We were just talking about this a quarter of an hour ago ... there was a film from the Second World War, from the battle of Leningrad, about the orchestra there that continued broadcasting on the radio through the German attack. The film showed different players and how they came to the concert and the difficulties they had because of the fighting. I feel,' he says with a sad resignation, 'we are living that old film.'

[...]

(My emphasis)

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A story from the siege of Leningrad (8 Sep 1941 - 27 Jan 1944)

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/leningrad.htm

"The Neva will start flowing upstream sooner than this city surrenders to the Nazis."

[...]

The peaceful life of Leningrad was interrupted by the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Germans had failed to capture the city in the first months of the war, therefore they imposed a siege on Leningrad. ‘Wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the Earth,’ was the directive of Hitler. ‘The defeat of the Soviet Union leaves no room for the continued existence of that large urban area. Finland, too, sees no point in the continued existence of that city so close to its new border... A tight siege should be imposed on the city and fire from all calibres of guns and incessant bombing raids should reduce the city to ashes...’

[...]

Besides their daily toil of defending the city, keeping its plants and factories rolling and tending to the wounded, the Leningraders were also writing poems and music. It was then and there that the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his famous Seventh Symphony that immediately became a stirring anthem to the unvanquished city on the Neva.

Refusing to leave the city with the rest of the Philharmonic Society early in the war, Shostakovich was bombarding the local recruitment centres with demands to send him out to the frontlines. All his pleas turned down, he then joined his friends digging trenches outside the city. After his attempt to join the militia also fell flat, Shostakovich signed with the local firefighters squad and, during his duty hours on the Conservatory roof, was putting out incendiary bombs the Nazis dropped on the city. It was during those trying days that he actually decided to write his larger-than-life Seventh Symphony…

In a radio message broadcast on September 20th, 1941 Dmitri Shostakovich said: ‘An hour ago I finished writing the second part of my big new symphony… Why am I telling you this? Because I want all the Leningraders who are listening to me to know that life goes on and we are all doing our duty…’

The Leningrad radio orchestra was now too small to play the Seventh Symphony though. The score called for 80 musicians and there were only a handful of them spared by famine and the enemy bullets at the frontlines... Then they made a radio announcement inviting the musicians who were still alive to join in. Unit commanders were instructed to dispatch their musicians with special passes, which said that they had been relieved from combat duty to perform the Seventh Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Finally, they all got together for the first rehearsal, their hands roughened from combat duty, trembling from malnutrition but everybody still clinging to their instruments as if for their own life… That was the shortest rehearsal ever, lasting for just 15 minutes because that was all the emaciated players could afford… And play they did and conductor Karl Eliasberg who was trying his best not to go down himself now knew that the orchestra would play the symphony…

August 9th, 1942 was just another day in the Nazi-besieged city. But not for the musicians, though, who, visibly uplifted, were busily preparing for the first ever public performance of the Seventh Symphony. Karl Eliasberg later wrote recalling that memorable day: ‘The chandeliers were all aglow in the Philharmonic Hall jam packed by writers, artists and academics. Military men were also very much in presence, most of them right from the battlefront…’

The conductor, his tuxedo dangling freely from his emaciated body, stepped to the pulpit, his baton trembling in his hand. The next moment it went up and the hall filled with the stirringly beautiful chords of one of the best music works Shostakovich had ever written in his whole life…

When the last chord trailed off there was a momentary silence. Then the whole place literally exploded with thunderous applause. Everybody rose to their feet, tears rolling down their faces, tears of joy and pride…

Buoyed by the deafening success of their performance and visibly proud of themselves, the musicians were happily hugging each other like soldiers after winning a major battle…

A German soldier who picked up the radio broadcast of that memorable concert was stunned by what he heard: ‘When I heard Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony being broadcast from the famine-stricken Leningrad I realised that we would never be able to take it. Realising that, I surrendered…’

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What can I add?

The most prolonged combat horror of World War 2 (not the most intense, perhaps, bearing in mind Dresden and the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki) is what comes to the mind of a musically cultured, westernized Iraqi trying to keep his international music and culture alive in wartime. This is an Iraqi musician playing western music for a westernized elite and the western invaders in a city and country undermined and infected by the Gulf War and Clinton's blockade ("500,000 kids dead, sure", said Fair-Price Albright), then smashed to pieces and turned into a constantly stirred toxic cesspool by the US and UK invasion and occupation under operation Enduring Imperialism. A man who would surely be among the first to welcome the western intervention against an oriental despot? An easy heart and mind to win. And yet...

He doesn't think of science fiction horrors, or Middle Eastern horrors, or ancient history horrors, or the Huns (the real ones), or Stalinist horrors. He thinks of the Nazi war machine attempting to reduce a great city to ashes.

Go Bush!

Go Blair!

Go hang.

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Ленинград - город герой

Leningrad - Gorod Geroy (Hero City)

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Some photos I took in St Pete a couple of years ago

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xjy/sets/72157594556340036/

Access to higher education and privilege

Mary Beard's blog:

March 16, 2007

Is university entrance squeezing the middle class?

Reinventing the wheel often causes a flurry of headlines. This time (once again) it is about university entrance and the decision to have information about parents included on the University (UCAS) application form. The idea is that it will help to “widen access” if admissions’ tutors know what the potential student’s Mum and Dad do, and whether have been to university themselves.

Squeals of horror from the usual (middle class) suspects.

There is in fact nothing new at all here.

For a long time parental occupation was a question on the special Cambridge application form. Some years ago (I can’t remember exactly when) that question was abolished. The idea was, I think, that this information was encouraging us to discriminate AGAINST the under-privileged – as if we were sorting through the forms and picking out the ambassador’s daughter and chucking the postman’s daughter into the “reject” pile. Socially elite dons looking for students in their own image -- or so the paranoid fantasy went.

I always thought that it was actually working the other way round. Knowing more about where the kids were “coming from” really did help to judge their potential and make a more level playing field.

To put it another way, when I am interviewing a student who wants to come and read Classics, one thing I want to know is whether they have made the most of their opportunities to find out about the ancient world. And it all depends what those opportunities are. If, for example, a girl who has had several long Greek holidays has never once taken the trouble to visit an archaeological site or museum, I will have some qualms. If someone who has never left the country, but lives within a mile of Hadrian’s Wall and has never visited it – well, similar qualms are raised (but I wouldn't hold against them the fact that they had never seen the Parthenon).

The point is that we are looking for those, from whatever background, who have potential – and the capacity to benefit from the course. More information helps (particularly now that the school’s reference is open to the candidate and can be almost useless).

The middle classes really don’t need to worry. I am not looking to favour the stupid daughter of the postman over the clever daughter of the ambassador. I am looking for intellectual potential wherever it is found. Exactly as I have always done.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 16, 2007 at 08:16 AM | Permalink

(There are some good comments, too.)

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Choppa's response:

Marx's reflections on The Jewish Question in 1844 might help us clear this contradiction up a bit.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

In a crucial passage he writes:

"The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers."

Thus he distinguishes between the human being as citizen (member of the state), with equal rights etc, and as "bourgeois" (member of civil society) with unequal possessions, wealth, clout, etc.

If we substitute "class" for "religion" in the first sentence of the next paragraph, we read: "Man, as the adherent of a particular *class*, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community."

So basically what academics and universities are doing in their selection process is resolving this conflict between abstract equality and concrete privilege - a conflict that will last as long as the capitalist state itself - as best they can given the built-in contradictions of the task and the varying wiggle-room for different (often mutually exclusive) criteria given by the rules at any particular time.

In my day (the postwar retreat by the capitalist class known as the welfare state) working class students were sucked into higher education with grants that actually enabled them to live and study, and the glorious false flag of "academic freedom" flew over spires and lecture rooms.

Nowadays, with the resurgence of the capitalist class and the rolling back of the welfare state, this is no longer the case.

The solution is not to change the rules of admission or even the grants system (though this might help temper the glaring inequalities a bit) but to change society so the interests of the penurious human majority can no longer be steamrollered by the interests of the inhuman moneybags minority.

Carpet-slipper sadism, Imperial Rome, the Stasi, and now

Mary Beard reports on a visit to the Stasi Museum in Leipzig:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/03/the_stasi_and_e.html#comments

She finishes off:

But what was odd was that most of the objects on show didn’t obviously match up to the image of terror that I had been given. In one room there was a vast Heath Robinson machine – driven by a series of wheels, spun by a big metal handle. It was the mail scanner, which was supposed to have processed tons of suspicious mail, mechanically opening the letters, delivering them to the view of Stasi operator one by one, then resealing them. It took only a glance to see that this great lumbering machine could not possibly have worked as claimed – even if it did produce some annoyingly mangled letters.

The most extraordinary room, though, was the “disguise room”, where old Stasi camouflages were hung. It was indistinguishable from an amateur dramatic costume store. Cheap and ill-sewn outfits stuffed on bent hangers, each with a label pinned on. My favourite was “the Arab” (with the predictable towel for a headdress, a bit like this picture), but “the photographer” was a close second. Again they couldn’t possibly have worked in the way you would have imagined. Any Stasi agent sloping through the streets of Leipzig in “the Arab” get-up could hardly have gone unnoticed. They might just as well have carried a large placard saying “Stasi agent”.

So how do you account for the image of terror that my hosts conveyed? The only explanation was that terror doesn’t necessarily depend on efficiency, still less on subtlety. Menace can equally well be delivered by ridiculous half-disguises and bathetic contrivances. The sheer, almost comic, hopelessness of the Stasi’s repertoire was itself part of the weapon of fear -- a taunt to the people.

There is a nice Roman parallel in the reign of the emperor Commodus (AD 180-92). On one occasion, as I remember the story, the historian Dio Cassius was sitting with the other senators on the front row of the amphitheatre. The emperor had himself been taking pot-shots at animals in the arena and wandered over to them waving the head of an ostrich, and gesturing with it to the seated aristocracy that decapitation might always be their fate too. Dio – a rare eyewitness to such imperial displays – explains that he could hardly stop himself giggling and so plucked a laurel leaf from his wreath and stuffed it in his mouth. Funny it may have been. But Dio makes it absolutely clear that the emperor was simultaneously just as terrifying as a Stasi man with a towel on his head.

State terror can work in surprising ways.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 15, 2007 at 12:02 AM

****************************************************
Choppa's response:

FUD - "fear, uncertainty, doubt"
Always works - with kids ("what's daddy going to do now?"), spouses ("lovely dress", "where'd the money come from?"), employees ("good work", "afraid you're just not a team player") etc etc.

The smiling, reptilian, unpredictably violent mafia boss (Little Napoleon in Some Like It Hot).

RD Laing describes the pathology well in "The Divided Self". Mixed messages, double binds and so on.

More relevant to political thuggery is Trotsky's analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, for instance in The Revolution Betrayed:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/index.htm

Here it becomes clear what the mass social base for the political regime of Stalinism was - a broad and diffuse crowd of privileged union and party bureaucrats. The minimal cultural level and maximal insecurity of these people defies belief, of course. Similar traits characterized the social base of imperial thuggery, except that that comprised a broad and diffuse crowd of slave-owning landowners, top military brass and moneylenders.

Of course, the Roman thugs already had slaves and rule by clout, although they had to disembowel the old body of the republic to achieve completely arbitrary rule by force. The Stalinist gangs had real trouble creating slavery and arbitrary rule. The emperors had the wind of history in their sails, the Stalinists didn't - just the putrescent gases of a much more powerful capitalist world market.

Orwell caught the gloomy atmosphere of oppression very well in 1984, as did Huxley the showbiz aspects of it in Brave New World. What the German and perhaps the Russian postmortems on Stalinism will produce will hopefully take us a bit nearer the limits of dystopia. A pre-post-mortem so to speak was Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (useful brief intro on Wikipedia). Farewell to Lenin, the Stasi Museum(s) and so on, like a French novel I recently read about Brecht and the Stasi (La Maîtresse de Brecht. (Brecht’s Mistress) by Jacques-Pierre Amette), highlight the BANALITY of what was going on. Suburban totalitarianism. The Nazi ethos without Ragnarök/Götterdämmerung. Carpet-slipper sadism at the dawn of a new day instead of the fiery end of a dying epoch.

Plenty of contradictions of the most titanic kind. Plenty to hate and spew bile over - and... yet...

Almost twenty years on the ordinary people of the old Eastern Bloc are still not at ease with their new system, and don't feel at home in it. And the shreds of the old Doris Day/Bing Crosby optimism of the Free World are lying in stinking piles around our ankles like the melted rubber of overinflated balloons.

Eppur si muove, I think Galileo would mutter about world history today. No stasis, despite the best efforts of the Stasi and the States.

Trajan's column, Death and accessing art

Mary Beard's blog - A Don's Life:

Over at the Guardian Jonathan Jones is blogging about Beard and Smith on the column:
blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/03/trajans_column_row_spirals_off.html
And I confess that (breaking my rule again) I posted a comment. It was when I saw myself being accused of pedantry that I tipped over the line. Why go on about these trifling details when the real point about the column is is massive dominance of the Roman skyline etc? Answer, Jonathan, is that I was reviewing a book that was ABOUT such trifling details!
Posted by: Mary | 13 Mar 2007 08:36:12

timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/02/is_zadie_smith_.html#comment-63083388

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Choppa's response

All this ties in with how we see, understand and respect or not DEATH. Another Cantab blogger does the honours at "Digging up the dead":

http://kenodoxia.blogspot.com/

and asks "How should an archaeologist treat the dead?"

Given the artistic perfection often seen in funerary monuments (the insides of mummy cases, of pyramid tombs) or otherwise only partially or wholly inaccessible works (cave paintings, the parthenon friezes) it's pretty clear that the audience for the work as such in all its detail was not the real living people in the community that threw it up. One or two maybe, at the most, singled out by privilege, but perhaps none at all. The imagined spirit world provided a satisfactory motivation for the effort involved, combined with reward to the artists and the usual oppressive assertion of power and ideology against potential doubters (or reluctant artists).

Our own day is slowly replacing the spirit audience with democratically and ideally equal human beings of flesh and blood. Zadie S and other novelists have all their artistic detail slapped on the marble slab of public access for appraisal and dissection like a haddock at the fishmongers.

Some artists and craftsmen still produce for minimal audiences (jewellers, commissioned portrait painters to the ultra-rich, architects to the same, etc), and a war is still being fought (as it has been for centuries now) for everyman's right to access and to appreciate and judge the best of contemporary and past art. Sometimes the public wins (free entry to the BM, virtually free access to old books on the web, the good side of Google), sometimes the obscurantist privateers, elitists and gougers win (the sacred eternal copywrong crowd). When it comes to public spaces, the obscurantist moneybag advertisers have it all their own way, sickeningly.

JJ got hold of the wrong end of the stick here by branding Mary B with pedantry and the inability to appreciate a damn fine phallus :-) Let him go to St Petersburg (Leningrad) and do a couple of weeks' penance before the most phallic column of them all.

http://www.tcaup.umich.edu/stpetersburg/alexander.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xjy/403309501/

Learning languages at school

Reply to Kenodoxia

Monday, March 12, 2007

Languages

Some promising signs from the new Dearing report on language learning in schools. There will be recommendations for foreign language teaching in primary schools at least at Key Stage 2 (that's from 7 years old). However, the messages are mixed: there is no sign of a recommendation to reinstate compulsory language learning up to the age of 16. (The report is now available as a .pdf here; for some early reaction see here and here.)

Younger children love learning languages, as far as I can see. And there are some good (if expensive) courses for them. Try the BBC's Muzzy course, for example.

The report also makes some interesting comments about Higher Education, and in particular about the influence that universities can have on the uptake of languages in schools (p.21):

The influence of Higher Education

3.72 Although beyond the remit and competence of the review, the recent decision by one major University (UCL) to include languages as a criterion for selection of undergraduates has already attracted comment. Several Head Teachers have observed that if such a view was more widespread it would have a significant impact on the take-up of languages post 14. We therefore urge universities to consider whether, and in what ways, they can show that they value languages, albeit in ways that do not impact adversely on the widening participation agenda. We are aware, for example, of a recent proposal that where a candidate for entry does not have a language at GCSE level they might be required to continue their studies at university, or show evidence of studying a language, or a proven interest in languages.

This sounds very sensible and also rang a bell with another recent report into the general level of knowledge of science in the UK. It seems that since in the US, for example, most undergraduates are required to take at least some science-based courses at university, there is a higher general level of scientific understanding there than in the UK. Of course, university courses are crowded and busy as it is, and it would be a terrible task to add in additional language and science course, but I do wonder whether some of our undergraduates could benefit from a broader range of teaching than they receive at present.

Posted by JIW at 10:14 AM

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Choppa's reply:

There's a problem with starting too soon on a foreign language that's not part of your everyday life, and that's the confusion it can cause in concept formation at a very basic level. It's not a problem for kids surrounded by articulate and concept-grounded adults who talk to them a lot of the time. But it's a *huge* problem for kids without that background - especially for kids who need to learn the language of their wider community as a second language. Immigrant kids or kids with a minority language or an "impenetrable" dialect of the standard.

The problem is compounded by disadvantaged kids sometimes wanting a different second language from the one offered. As in Sweden, where a lot of immigrant kids and parents fight like tigers to have their kids learn English while their Swedish is still very poor (and this can be at the age of 12+ still, despite a childhood spent in Sweden).

I've seen and suffered from this at first hand as a teacher of English at a secondary school with 100% immigrant kids, most of them at a conceptual level in Swedish in the seventh year (12-13) corresponding to second to fifth year pupils. Many of them have no chance of learning English. The language just refuses to stick. And they lose 3 periods a week which could go to learning their own mother tongue or Swedish. So they end up even more disadvantaged, having tried to learn more subjects than a Swedish kid of the same age with infinitely less social and conceptual preparation for it.

The studies I've read also indicate that the age of commencing a second language (if it's not part of the everyday life of the kids) makes little difference. In other words, no real advantage is bestowed by early learning, except perhaps for the pleasure of it in a good class in a good school with a good teacher.

I think the wiser thing is probably to rethink conceptual and social/human preparation for youngsters generally and take a leaf out of Comenius's book. Make sure kids up to the age of 12 get a thorough grounding in movement, rhythm, mother tongue, music, art,crafts, etc so they can communicate physically, orally and in writing and other forms of representation. So they can tell and present and absorb all kinds of human stories. And as much basic maths as they can take so they can have fun making things that are stable and have interesting forms etc.

If kids can be kept fresh and curious and creative till they're 12 or so, then they can get stuck into any number of demanding subjects in a more methodical and abstract fashion. And they will have a huge advantage when it comes to learning languages, because their imagination will not have been stultified, and they will know about other countries and people through stories of various kinds (history, discovery, animals, travel).

And today, with the internet it won't be long before they're snogging virtually with teenagers in other cultures using other languages ;-)

So I think the report may be good in its attitude to the benefits brought by language, but it's arsy-versy when it comes to the context of language learning in present-day Britain, with its "real-existierend" community, culture and schools. Given a human, creative and optimistic Britain, with meaningful jobs and a day full of self-discovery and self-expression, there won't be any problem with learning anything.

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(Additional - misguided - comment now at Kenodoxia)

Chomsky interview on C-Punch about war and empire

There's a good interview by Sameer Dossani with Noam Chomsky on CounterPunch about war, neo-liberalism and empire now:

http://www.counterpunch.org/dossani03092007.html

It makes good points about the differences between Asia, Latin America and Africa.

I felt a couple of things could have been brought out more clearly, though.

What Chomsky doesn't mention is the political power reason WHY the Asian countries could ignore IMF and US pressures and industrialize. Particularly Japan (the big one), Korea, and the other "tigers". It was a clear policy choice by the States to give them their head after the war, and let the local capitalists thrive. It was the only way to avoid a devastating series of social struggles encouraged by the defiant existence and growth of China and Vietnam that could have thrown imperialism out of the region. Not the same history of imperialist/colonialist domination as in Latin America and Africa (which Chomsky does point out, to great effect).

He also remains silent on the strategic revolutionary/socialist aspects of Cuba's international intervention(s). Its subordination to Moscow's Socialism in One Country nationalism etc.

He doesn't mention the changing class structure in India, with the wholesale extinction of the old mainly rural caste system and the creation of a modern urban working class. He describes impoverishment, but not proletarianization as a process. He describes the flight of millions whose land has been stolen from them into the cities to unemployment, but doesn't mention the class dynamic involved in this.

And he doesn't go into where Lula comes from and why he might be a good leftie (class betrayal running the errands of foreign capital and big local capital, instead of the working class that nurtured him), or where Chavez comes from and why he's a leftie at all (same kind of petty-bourgeois military base as Castro in the 50s, and same reliance as Castro on the support of the poor masses to withstand the attacks of imperialism). Of course, Castro had Moscow, but on the other hand, Chavez is deeply rooted in Venezuela itself, and in the military, and he now has control of oil rather than sugar. Serious democratic nationalism today is forced to head for socialism and internationalism if it wants to survive, it has no other choice except capitulation to imperialism. So in a way, Chavez is a throwback to the anti-colonial struggle in the age of imperialism :-) Not much of a model for other countries to follow in other words - but quite possibly an enabler of more working-class and contemporary socialist movements in other countries (maybe Bolivia, Ecuador, even Argentina) to seize the reins of power and move forward.

Interesting that he mentions Clinton but doesn't generalize on the strategic importance of his Latin American initiatives more. Clinton's policies re Mexico, re Colombia, and re Iraq all contributed more than anything the more aggressive Bush has done to undermine those countries and weaken them strategically. And we can expect a repeat performance if another soft-cop Clinton gets into the White House.