09/26/24

More fun with AI, #2 in a series

I fed Book I of Plato’s Republic to the Adobe AI Assistant, and got this:

The text discusses the concept of the end and excellence of organs, such as the eyes and ears. It emphasizes that fulfilling an end requires possessing one’s proper excellence, as seen in the example of sight for the eyes. The text highlights the importance of each organ’s specific excellence in achieving its end.

Next time, I’ll try Joe Sachs instead of Jowett.

08/6/24

Model Collapse

Research into AI model collapse has been around for at least a year. Still, this article in Nature, although slightly daunting to me as a humanist, has now cemented the phenomenon. AI that is trained on texts from AI steadily worsens. It’s a little like having a friend who gradually gets soused as he consumes sequential bottles of beer in the course of an evening.

The difficulty for the AI-mongers is that they have uncritically scraped every English word possible from every Internet source that will let it (and often from sources that don’t want to let it). AI-related companies have persuaded the world that AI can compose and reason in the place of humans, and that no one need know. At the same time, they are desperately trying to figure out how to distinguish AI writing from human writing while constantly scraping more data. They are Nestbeschmutzers, foulers of their own nest.

But this needs an example, and Drs. Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson, and Yarin Gal have provided us with a fine one indeed, worthy of Borges:

Example 1. Example of text outputs of an OPT-125m model affected by model collapse—models degrade over generations, for which each new generation is trained on data produced by the previous generation.

Input: some started before 1360 — was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.

Outputs:

Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches:.

Gen 1: architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St. Peter’s Basilica in Buenos Aires. There is no evidence that any of these buildings were built during the reign of Pope Innocent III, but it is possible that they may have been built during the reign of his successor, Pope Innocent.

Gen 5: ism, which had been translated into more than 100 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.

Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.

Jackrabbits of all colors, we salute you!

08/1/24

Anti-De-Platforming

Donald Trump’s encounter with the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday reminds us of the purpose of debate and dialogue. Mutual back-scratching is all very nice, but what’s valuable about a public forum comes to the fore when liars and bullshitters are put on the spot.

I’m not perfect. I too have joined crowds waving signs in opposition to some malevolent public figure’s visit to campus. I felt disgust at the idea that the institution I serve was lending some of its prestige, and handing a probably not too small honorarium, to somebody whose claims I thought were contradictory to the whole idea of free inquiry and equality of persons. Racists, gerrymanderers, stackers of the deck, that sort of people.

But the offense I took at those invitations would be greatly mitigated if institutions would agree to a set of rules for appearances by Highly Controversial People.

HCPs must know that by entering a public forum, they are agreeing to have their ideas and assumptions questioned. Those who invite them are put on notice that any flattering treatment the HCP receives must be balanced with an equal share of time allotted to an antagonist. Or better yet, as soon as the visit is announced a sign-up sheet must be opened for questioners. Each questioner will have, let’s say, three minutes. Not to scream at the HCP or to grandstand, but to point out contradictions, faulty evidence, a lack of attention to consequences, or other flaws. The HCP’s answers to these questions will go into the public record.

Somebody may anticipate that the sign-up sheet can be stacked with pro-HCP voices, thus nullifying the act of critique. This potential problem can be dealt with to some extent by subjecting the order of appearance of questioners to a lottery. And if there’s a scramble to get on the questioners’ list by voices pro and con, surely this only enhances the value of having the debate, and the public record of the responses will show pretty clearly who’s pitching softballs and who brought their best game.

In his appearance before the NABJ, the large orange man revealed his weaknesses so abjectly that the event even restored my faith in dialogue. Bravo to the uncompromising questioner, Rachel Scott. Let this event be the example in our minds next time the temptation to de-platform arises. Create the conditions for actual questioning and we may all learn something.

07/23/24

Peak Grauniad

A headline in the Guardian, the daily paper that seems to address a fairly well-read, internationalist, and left-leaning public and moreover doesn’t operate behind a paywall, today seemed to encapsulate its style, its readership, and its personality. Until further notice, we have reached peak Grauniad.

I Deeply Regret Riding an Elephant on Holiday” by Chris Packham tells you, first, that he has the sort of money that enables you to go to exotic places where you might ride elephants; and moreover, that he’s the sort of conscientious dude who feels bad about it afterward. The subtitle goes on: “This Year, We Should All Make the Ethical Choice,” elevates his regret into exemplary preaching to “all” of us who might be similarly well-heeled and similarly tempted. You feel better about yourself just reading the headline. Why, I, too, might be in the position of go on the sort of holiday where I might meaningfully refuse to ride an elephant! In fact, I’m refusing to ride an elephant right now, sitting in my back yard in Chicago! What a good person I must be!

The author spares no effort to reassure us of his “ethical” qualities. He was confronted with the dilemma– ride the elephant or not?– because he was taking his “stepdaughter Megan, who was only a child” to see tigers somewhere in Africa or Asia, and elephant-back was the only way to do it. Points for being such an exemplary stepdad! Making a kid happy is generally blameless. Thus the ethically suspect ride was a means to a noble end, forced on them by circumstance. So you should be ok, Chris! Exempt. Nothing to declare. In the category of excusemanship, you rule.

Further points rain on our author for pausing to explain the exploitation of animals to young Megan and taking the elephants’ agency seriously to the extent of “visit[ing] the place they were kept, rather than just jump[ing] on them at the side of the road.” Well yes. One doesn’t just “jump on” an elephant– or anybody else. “The fact of the matter is that those elephants were probably working exclusively for our gratification – and that is not OK.” But do you have proof that they were ill-treated, or does abuse just go with being an elephant in that unnamed country that you chose to visit? Is an elephant working as a tiger observation platform necessarily worse off than an elephant who hauls lumber or builds roads? If the only place for an elephant is a wildlife reserve, did Mr. Packham go round to interview the farmers who live next to wildlife reserves and might have feelings about the role of animal tourism in enabling other kinds of exploitation?

It is terribly hard to be a 100% harmless person in a world of many people and organisms with clashing priorities. But it is awfully easy to brag about being a lucky-yet-virtuous person and to pose as an ethical model and authority, especially before the morally-aspirational clientèle of that paper, whose regular reader I am, but often with a cringe.

07/21/24

Divorcing

I’ve been away for many months. Forgive me. The cascade of things-to-do, plus an incapacitating disgust toward social media and the stuff it vehicles, have kept me off the interwebs. But as always, when “somebody is wrong on the Internet,” I see the Bat-signal in the sky and jump for my cape and tights. Perhaps to regret my precipitousness later.

The stimulus: People harshing on J. D. Vance, the Theocratic Absolutist candidate for Vice President, because he wants to eliminate no-fault divorce (along with a lot of other essential things) though he is a twice-divorced man.

The accusation of hypocrisy lacks subtlety. There is not necessarily an inconsistency between his personal experience and his policy stance, if you stop to think about it from the right angle: Namely, that his prior divorces were quite possibly brought by his former wives. (I don’t know this as a fact, I am just surmising, because I don’t have a strong enough stomach to go digging for the legal paper trails.)

Thus what he is against is not divorce per se, but wives having the power to demand divorce from unendurable husbands. Of which he, in my reconstruction, may have been one. So now that “Gotcha!” would swerve into an “Aha!”

I have a funny tale to tell. A friend who was undergoing a divorce– as plaintiff, not as respondent– was faced with an extremely obnoxious opposing counsel who constantly ran up the bills by making frivolous accusations, demanding irrelevant depositions, not showing up for mediation meetings, and so on. My friend was sitting in his lawyer’s office one day when a call came in. Guess who? The obnoxious opposing lawyer’s wife, who was desperately seeking a capable lawyer to divorce his sorry ass and shake him over the money basket. My friend listened with delight and barely suppressed laughter as the wife described at length the horror of living with that jerk, slob, dimwit, creep (and other salty naval expressions), until his lawyer said, amicably and politely, that it wasn’t a case she could get herself involved in because of current litigation.

The thought of how deeply the jerk lawyer’s wife hated him buoyed up my friend during many hours of painful and unnecessary interrogation.

I can’t help seeing Vance and all his companions in misfortune in the same light. I hope their exes are living their best life, as folks say.

07/4/24

Prayer for Our Country

“Our God and God of our ancestors, we invoke Your blessing upon our country, on the government of this Republic, the President of these United States and all who exercise just and rightful authority. Instruct them out of Your Law, that they may administer all affairs of state in justice and equity, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom, may forever abide among us.

Unite all the inhabitants of our country, whatever their origin and creed, into a bond of true brotherhood to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are our country’s glory.

May this land under Your Providence be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting men in peace and freedom and helping to fulfill the vision of thy Prophets: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more.” “For all men, both great and small shall know the Lord.”

Rabbi Morris Silverman, Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, 1946

This prayer may again, as before, change early next year. The first line will be, “O God and God of our ancestors, we invoke your blessing on all who exercise just and rightful authority.”

05/24/24

Poker Chip

I’ve been off Facebook for almost a month. At the end of the fourth week, I should give myself a poker chip. Escape has never worked before; I ordinarily return after a week. But Facebook does such a poor job of meeting my intellectual and emotional needs these days that it has been really easy this time. It believes I love cute animals, aviation, and the New York subway system, and feeds me a relentless diet of them, interspersed with many, many advertisements; there are almost no posts from friends. It’s reminiscent of old-time UHF television stations, with the ads for the Pocket Fisherman, Magic Chef, and Ginsu Knife. You forget that you’re supposed to be watching the late, late movie, a B-movie with inexpensive rights and low production values.

What am I going to do with my spare time? Work, write, and read. Most of the jobs for people of my dubious and deracinated status are for AI training — in other words, training my replacement. I’m no Madame de Sévigné, but I have several long-lapsed correspondences. At the same time, I have shelves full of books I have never gotten around to reading. I am going to put them off to revisit Metaphysics Γ. Then, I will walk to a bookcase, close my eyes, stick out my finger, and pick a book.

Even if I nap, I will still be better off than on Facebook.

05/7/24

Boo-hoo, Starbucks!

Poor Starbucks!

They missed their earnings call, boo-hoo. Moreover, they are blaming it on the Chinese. (You can’t make this stuff up!)

I think that Starbucks has owed its success to its pretense that people were drinking coffee when they were actually drinking 30 ounces of condensed sugar syrup. People like sugar syrup more than coffee. Nonetheless, Starbucks is trying to deliver the alleged coffee in ever more perverse ways — adding olive oil? — and failing. They could always try keeping their menu the same for a year at the same prices.

My wife goes to Starbucks for a $5 “trenta” iced tea when I can make her 30 ounces for 70¢ – with much better quality tea. The reason she goes there is the kids. They know her and love her. They tell her about their lives. They know what she orders depending on the kind of day it is. So, customer service wins the day. The difficulty is that Howard Schultz has designed the business so that there is 99% barista turnover every year. Soon, my wife has to make new Starbucks friends who are much like the old Starbucks friends but younger.

This reminds me of the novel “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro, where clones are raised so their organs can be transplanted into the original children. Clones come and disappear based on how many organs they have left. The Starbucks kids are giving away their youth and attention for minimum wage. It’s not such a great bargain for the kids, who gradually find out the realities of their situation over the course of their employment.

I should add that Howard Schultz is terrified of the prospect of a barista union. He and Jeff Bezos are trying to eliminate unions altogether by asking the courts to make the NLRB disappear. So, union deterrents are built into the job itself, like mandatory anti-union lectures and scheduling design that ensures that the workers are compartmentalized and can’t be visited by union representatives. (If you know a barista, and they don’t have a shift that day, ask another employee when the barista will be back. You will not get a straight answer.) My wife made a bûche de Noël last year for the Starbucks crew, and she didn’t know whether they liked it. Because of the scheduling permutations, only 2-3 baristas knew the cake existed on any given day By the end, the ganache must have tasted like modeling clay. She was thanked a week later when the rota had cycled around. I think she will make seven small cakes this year, one for each crew.

05/2/24

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean

In Mark Charedoff’s “Goodbye, Columbia,” he constructs a fantasy in which colleges — ten small and poor enough to be bullied by donors but with respectable names — would be transformed to inculcate right-wing Jewish donors’ political and moral beliefs. It’s a version of Plato’s state in which the philosopher-kings (donors) rule over the “producers” (students) with the aid of the Guardians (faculty). Producers come in, Guardians transform them (via the philosopher-king’s playbook), and graduate them out to impose this arrangement on the rest of the world. Nobody mentions that this arrangement is entirely predicated on a Noble Lie which slots everyone into their social roles and justifies doing so. (If you remember the hypnoaedic recordings respectively played to the sleeping Alphas, Betas, and Gammas in Huxley’s Brave New World, you’ve got the picture.)

The “Noble Liars…” Let’s just say that they are bog-standard AIPAC donors who want all the usual things. They want to eliminate DEI programs and “Critical Legal Studies” and design a curriculum similar to the “Great Books” program, but not containing material to be found in “left-wing” political thought, e.g., Fanon. They speak in the name of “freedom” and “excellence” but in the service of ideological reproduction. You don’t need Plato, weak liberal arts institutions, or that much money. What you really want is someplace like Liberty University or Patrick Henry University, which you can create de novo as institutions “safe for Jews.” Of course, there are many types of Jews, and it remains to be seen what sort would consider applying. My guess is that they want the secular ones who would otherwise go to Ivies, not actual believers. It’s a “intellectual liberty”/”physical safety” tradeoff of the Ben Franklin kind, and those who choose “safety” will find it comes with an entire Hermès store of baggage.

01/20/24

Our Glorious Future, or When Will We Ever Learn?

Polling shows that 30% of both major U.S. political parties believe that members of the other party are “less than human” and not possessed of human morality.

This belief is the precondition for full-on genocide, as in so many countries before us from whom we will probably never learn.

I had a statistic on the number of people convinced that complete liquidation of the other party was required for America to recoup its glory, goodness, and standing as a unipolar hegemony, but I can’t find it now. I will edit this post if/when I find it.

[The closest I have come so far is this recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which shows that 12-15% of both parties think political violence is acceptable to achieve political goals:

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-12/Reuters%20Ipsos%20Large%20Sample%20Survey%20%236%20Topline%2012%2013%202023.pdf

This is still not wholesale liquidation, though. I saw but cannot yet document that some Americans think liquidation of the Other Side is necessary for a good political/social outcome and the number is significant enough to worry about.]

Two sides, the same.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/01/20/polarization-science-evolution-psychology/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/

More hopefully:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/09/05/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-united-states-what-research-says-pub-90457

Most hopeful — perhaps in an ostrich-y way — is this article from the National Academy of Sciences saying that conclusions about partisan violence are the fault of poorly defined survey questions that result in unfair characterization of the respondents’ views as extremist.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116870119

01/5/24

Alex Gelley, z”l

Alex died yesterday at the age of 90 following a long decline. He was one of the professors who recruited me to UCI. He was intensely curious and relentless in inquiry, risking but avoiding pedantry.

As I left the academic world, he suggested that I become a Privatdozent, and so I became, well before the advent of “alt. ac.” We were periodic guests of the Gelleys, and he always had some insight worth hearing as we gathered around his dining room or kitchen table.

He was one of the faculty who split the Comparative Literature department from the English department. Faculty meetings, as I understand, improved on both sides of the split. I hear as I write this the range of his voice making a distinction or observation.

Who among us did not take Walter Benjamin as a touchstone? There was enough in him for everyone, and plenty for Alex. His final book was on Benjamin, deliberate and without headiness or messianism of the kind to which his students came.

He occasionally hit a strange note. He did not understand why my wife belonged in graduate school or how she could have  earned her Ph.D., and said so on several public occasions, including the celebration of her receiving her doctorate. In the end, he was a theorist and she was an empiricist, and the two minds could not appreciate each other.

Aside from his family, there was the old humanities crew, from my era and before. My cohort was the last where a graduate student had a 2/3 chance of getting a job at the annual MLA meeting. Now, they have a 1/10 chance for a job, and end up as adjuncts or in other toil “to bring forth sustenance from the earth.” Alex did not really understand what had happened, and perhaps it is better that he didn’t. He was from a time when a department chair could call up another department chair, talk favorably about a graduate student, and the student would be hired.

Perhaps in the seventh sphere, he will be able to see this crumbling little planet for what it is. Perhaps he will meet Walter Benjamin and ask after the mysterious suitcase Benjamin lost at Port-Bou. He may find that many academics have come there and edited the contents already, as the Nach-Nachlass. But as befits Alex, he will be given a chance. 

12/19/23

Erravi

If errare humanum est, then I must be human. A few weeks ago I was pulling together a public lecture out of class notes and scattered photocopies, thinking mostly about how to translate a marvelous descriptive passage about dragging boats upstream and through brush in eighth-century Hunan, and credited the poem to the wrong guy. It was by Shen Quanqi 沈全期 (656-729), not Song Zhiwen 宋之問 (656-710), as I realized today when I looked the poem up again in a proper book. I hope nobody else is misled by my goof. I rather doubt anybody will notice. The poem is “Traveling from Changle Commandery Upstream to White Peak, Then Descending to Chenzhou” 自昌樂郡泝流至白石嶺下行入郴州 and reads in part:

茲山界夷夏,天險橫寥廓。

太史漏登探,文命限開鑿。

北流自南瀉,羣峯迴眾壑。

馳波如電騰,激石似雷落。

崖留盤古樹,澗蓄神農藥。。。。

匍匐緣修坂,穹窿曳長索。

礙林阻往來,遇堰每前卻。

救艱不遑飯,畢昏無暇泊。

濯溪寧足懼,磴道誰云惡。

我行山水間,湍險皆不若。

安能獨見聞,書此貽京洛。

This mountain lies on the border of China and alien parts,

Steep as the sky and boundless in its breadth.  

The Grand Historian missed it in his survey of the realm.

The Great Yu neglected to pierce it in his labors.

A current from the north trickles out at the south,

Crowded peaks yield to huddled ravines.

Speeding waves leap up like lightning-flashes,

Crashing stones land like thunderclaps. 

On the banks subsist trees of Pan Gu’s age,

In the cracks grow herbs for Shen Nong’s use….

Dangling creepers border the smooth slope,

The vault of heaven is hung with long ropes.

Blocking thickets impede all movement:

Encountering a weir, each struggles forward.

Our difficulty is such that no time is left to eat,

Till day’s end brings darkness no leisure to moor the boats.

Poling through the rapids is cause enough for fear,

Stone stairways no reason for displeasure.

We travel between mountain and water, 

The rapids perilous like nothing seen before. 

How can all this be left up to seeing and hearing?

I write it down for conveyance to the capital.

12/5/23

Chapter and Universe

If I were to tell you that Western civilization was transmitted straight down from Greece and Rome to Victorian and Edwardian Britain, you might think I was pushing an impossibly old-fashioned line (and you might have plenty of choice epithets for it). It’s not the kind of thing that people would say out loud, outside of certain very reactionary milieux. But people go on writing books as if such were, in fact, the unquestionable pattern of history. The other day I learned about a book– quite possibly a good book, on its own terms and given its limited perspective– about the history of the chapter as textual and cognitive unit. After pointing out another scholar’s docta ignorantia about the origin of page numbers, today let me introduce Nicholas Dames, The Chapter. Take a look at the table of contents. One would never know from it that chapter divisions are found in Chinese books from a very early date (or why). Doesn’t the Chinese chapter have a history worth telling that is also part of the history of humanity?

Not only the Chinese chapter, of course– but it puzzles me that smart people can fall over themselves praising a book that didn’t ask some obvious questions — questions that were off the narrow and obligatory track that runs from Homer to Joyce.

11/29/23

The Educated people are coming, there goes the Neighborhood

A recent survey tells us that in California, “white families drift away from public schools as more Asian students enroll in them — and fears over academic competition, rather than outright racism, may play the biggest role in driving the departures.” More detail: “With each arrival of an Asian American student in a high-income suburban district, .6 white students left … After adjusting their observations for moving patterns … the effect was even greater, such that each Asian student was associated with the departure of 1.5 white students.”

The article is careful to wash the white families clean of any anti-Asian prejudice. According to survey data, they do not feel repulsion or distrust toward Asians. They just don’t want their kids to be outclassed by them! That in itself is a bit racist, as if seeing members of a group not your own do better in school were some kind of injustice. The unwillingness to compete means an unwillingness to give up one’s unearned benefits. It may not be the kind of racism that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld as legal but it’s still apartheid, the refusal to be together with certain types of people– the sort of thing that inspired the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).

And the notion of education that formats the whole thought process here, a notion seemingly shared by the fleeing families, the journalist, and the specialists being interviewed, is that the goal for which you send your kids to a certain district is to have them score a high class ranking and get into “good” colleges. To that way of thinking, the best investment in education would be to move to a district where the kids are not more capable than your own kids, but where the schooling is not catastrophically terrible or encased in physical danger. You could even forego the teaching and the homework and just generate a class ranking based on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms in the student’s house; that would save a bunch of teacher salaries and get right to the point.

Another case, I’d say, of the structural craziness of American society. In most parts of the world, if you learn that a certain school or district is where the smart kids are to be found, you do your best to get close to them. It’s worth it even if you end up being the poorest and strangest-looking family in the neighborhood. We educate each other. An education is not a commodity that you own or carry around on your keychain, it’s something we create in common. And being challenged is the central experience in that joint creation. Diamonds sharpen diamonds. If you spend your time with dullards you will lose your own edge. Just ask Mencius’s mother, whose readiness to move house for her little boy Ke’s sake is legendary.

People who move to get away from people belonging to a group deemed to be smart and hard-working aren’t just racists (whatever they may say on surveys), but self-designated mediocrities. Can a state or two be designated Non-Compete Zones for their peace of mind? And some Potemkin Harvards built on a vacant lot to make them happy?

I guess that is what politics in Florida and Texas are really about these days.


Some notes to avoid confusion.

I don’t think of Asians as a “race,” that is, as a bunch of people sharing some genetic material that automatically gives them some characteristics. Rather, in my view they are people who share some historical experiences that may suggest their adopting certain behaviors. One of those experiences, for Asian folks who show up in the United States, is being categorized as “Asian” and having certain capacities or tendencies attributed to them. Whether or not you actually exhibit the corresponding behaviors, the fact of attribution has its quantum of influence. I’ve known Asian high-schoolers, gifted for language and literary interpretation, turned away from AP programs in literature because, of course, the high school counselors looked at an Asian face and thought “computer science.”

Oh, is that a soapbox? For me? Thank you. Well, ok. Fellow White Folks from Suburbia! I speak as a former one of you who discovered that hanging out with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian people* was not a mode of self-punishment, but the path to some of the most rewarding experiences of my life, a path I never tire of! I think you would do well to imagine learning as a genuinely lifelong activity (I learned stuff from my students in Tuesday’s class, and am grateful), not a thing you do just to get that admissions letter that will allow you to coast for the rest of your days. You may think cosmopolitanism is a boring ideal suited to the kind of kids who join the Model U.N., but it is actually a moral task that is never defined and never completed. So get your heads out of the bucket and start looking around.

Let’s think about education not as a pie that is finite and has to be fought over, but as a chorus that gets louder and richer with more voices. My desideratum is for there to be enough different and equally honorable paths for all talents to flourish, during the time we have left on this planet’s damaged surface. It would be helpful if the Ivy League were not the reward of study (because, in actuality, I’ve been there, it’s not); it would be even more helpful if the good things that the Ivy League confers upon its students and graduates were more widely distributed; even better would be an idea of education that starts early and isn’t based on a ranking but on an agenda to discover and elevate abilities. Folks from Asia also have access to a cultural memory of an examination system that ruthlessly pruned the nation’s intellectual flowering trees for short-term rewards and long-term stultification. Let’s remember that too when we ask what education is for.

*(obviously not a comprehensive listing)

11/14/23

Paul in Haiti, Haiti in Paul

I first met Paul at Duke in 1979. We were both undergrads of a somewhat nerdy cast, and therefore odd ducks in a school where sports and fraternities set the tone. I was fresh from a high school year abroad in France and had been reading all the structuralist anthropology and linguistics I could get my hands on—Lévi-Strauss, Benveniste, Jakobson, Barthes, Kristeva, and also Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida. Paul knew this stuff too, but he wasn’t as impressed by the elegant ballet of signifiers as I was. 

Our teacher Weston LaBarre was an eclectic structuralist, adept at handling networks of meaning and also warmly curious about the lives of the people he studied. Through Weston, Paul got to know the ethno-psychiatrist Georges Devereux, a builder of theories with an astonishing range of on-the-ground experience, having lived and worked as a therapist among Native Americans and mountain peoples of Southeast Asia, as well as practicing and teaching in US hospitals. Devereux’s work made a deep impression on us because of its respect for the dynamic of transference and counter-transference—in other words, the ways that the person being observed influences the observer, and the observer influences the observed. 

At that moment in his life I think Paul was expecting to train as a psychiatrist and work with indigenous populations somewhere in the world. But Devereux was too ill and frail to take Paul on as a student. That turned out to be a providential dead end. For another part of Paul’s omnivorous reading in French anthropology had led him to Haiti. In ethnopsychiatry there was the great book on Haitian vaudou by Alfred Métraux. Métraux had been close to Parisian surrealists I was reading: André Breton, Michel Leiris, Léopold Sédar Senghor. And from that group it was a short step for me, under Paul’s tutelage, to begin reading Haitian authors like Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, René Depestre, Jean Métellus, René Bélance, just to cite those who wrote in French. He met Depestre, Bélance, and Métellus and interviewed them for a book we were going to write together, Three Haitian Poets, Selected Translations and an Introduction. That book never happened as such, for reasons having to do with the timidity of American publishers and our being total unknowns, but parts of it eventually leaked into print.

Paul went to Haiti after graduating from college. The year was 1982-1983, coincidentally the year that a mysterious and fatal auto-immune syndrome began to be reported among gay men, blood transfusion recipients, and Haitians (a collection of categories that was random but somehow not random, if you thought less about causality than about stigma). There he came straight up against the limits of what was known (charitably) as charitable healthcare in a profoundly impoverished country: patients were turned away from the hospital’s door for no reason but lack of funds, and other patients were given useless diagnoses—prescribed treatments they could never access. Tracy Kidder has written memorably about one night of desperate frustration in a hospital that was poorly set up to do its job. So Haiti announced to Paul, in the starkest possible terms, what the problem was. It was what he would later call “medical nihilism.”

And Haiti also brought Paul the vision of a solution. When I went to visit Paul in the spring of 1983, he had just moved from a room in Port-au-Prince to the town of Mirebalais, where he was living with the Lafontant family. Father Fritz Lafontant incarnated the “preferential option for the poor.” Père Fritz and his wife, Yolande, whom we called Mamito, chose to live among the squatters in the mountain village of Cange, people who were badly-off even by Haitian standards. He leveraged ecclesiastical connections with the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina to bring doctors and dentists in for short clinical visits. Built like a football tackle, a theologian of great insight, Father Fritz saw no reason central Haiti should not have its own well-equipped, well-staffed, and free hospital, ringed round with outreach services and social benefits. Nobody in Cange or Mirebalais disagreed or called him unrealistic, at least not in my hearing. His utter conviction inspired and guided Zanmi Lasante, the original core of Partners In Health. HIV, hurricanes, earthquakes, coups, murders, kidnappings, and other heartbreaks—nothing could divert the ékip solid of Zanmi Lasante from their path.             

The successive challenges and, let’s put aside modesty, victories of PIH, which I trust will go on until there is no more need for them, all grew out of that encounter. Paul’s passion for Haiti was infectious and his engagement was total. I don’t know what would have happened if Paul had gone somewhere else after college. By now it is impossible to imagine Paul without Haiti or, I think, Haiti without Paul.

(Read at the 2023 Paul Farmer Symposium on Global Health, Harvard Medical School.)

11/12/23

Voltaire, inventor of the middle ages

It’s obvious that Dante and Chaucer didn’t think of themselves as living in the Middle Ages. They looked back at history and saw the creation of a great empire that then decayed and was replaced by what they would have thought of as modern times. The creation of a bookend at the right-hand end of those times was the work of mostly French antiquarians of the 17th century (Du Cange, Mabillon) but publicized most successfully by Voltaire, whose popularity inserted the term “middle ages” into our common consciousness.

L’histoire de l’empire romain est ce qui mérite le plus notre attention, parce que les Romains ont été nos maitres & nos législateurs. Leurs loix sont encore en vigueur dans la plûpart de nos provinces: leur langue se parle encore, & longtems après leur chûte, elle a été la seule langue dans laquelle on rédigeât les actes publics en Italie, en Allemagne, en Espagne, en France, en Angleterre, en Pologne.

Au démembrement de l’empire romain en Occident, commence un nouvel ordre de choses, & c’est ce qu’on appelle l’histoire du moyen âge; histoire barbare de peuples barbares, qui devenus chrétiens, n’en deviennent pas meilleurs.

Pendant que l’Europe est ainsi boulversée on voit paroître au vii. siecle les Arabes, jusque-là renfermés dans leurs deserts. Ils étendent leur puissance & leur domination dans la haute Asie, dans l’Afrique, & envahissent l’Espagne; les Turcs leur succedent, & établissent le siége de leur empire à Constantinople, au milieu du xv. siecle.

C’est sur la fin de ce siecle qu’un nouveau monde est découvert; & bientôt après la politique de l’Europe & les arts prennent une forme nouvelle. 

Voltaire, article “Histoire” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Arts et Métiers… (1765), preceded by many other instances in his corpus of writing

To put it another way, the Middle Ages– a term that many like to bemoan as Eurocentric– stands for the period when Western Europe was generally out of things and unimportant. The action was elsewhere. Voltaire’s bare historical narration might serve as a prompt to dissuade Europeans from their “main character syndrome.”

11/12/23

Remember the Gruffalo!

I was on a flight yesterday and a mother across the aisle from me was distracting her child with that excellent illustrated book, The Gruffalo. And as one does, I thought back to the Stratagems of the Warring States, another good book for distracting children (and adults).

荊宣王問群臣曰:「吾聞北方之畏昭奚恤也,果誠何如?」群臣莫對。江一對曰:「虎求百 獸而食之,得狐。狐曰:『子無敢食我也。天帝使我長百獸,今子食我,是逆天帝命也。子 以我為不信,吾為子先行,子隨我後,觀百獸之見我而敢不走乎?』虎以為然,故遂與之 行。獸見之皆走。虎不知獸畏己而走也,以為畏狐也。今王之地方五千里,帶甲百萬,而 專屬之昭奚恤;故北方之畏奚恤也,其實畏王之甲兵也,猶百獸之畏虎也。」

《戰國策 · 楚一》

Xuan, king of Jing, said to his ministers: “I’ve heard that the Northerners fear my minister Zhao Xixie. Can this be true?” All were silent. Only Jiang Yi replied: “A tiger went out in search of animals to eat. He caught a fox, and the fox said, ‘Don’t even think about eating me! The Emperor of Heaven has named me chief of all the animals, so if you eat me, you will be violating the orders of the Emperor of Heaven. In case you don’t believe me, just walk behind me and watch to see if the other animals don’t flee at my approach. ‘ The tiger agreed and followed the fox, who started walking. And sure enough, all the other animals fled before him. The tiger didn’t understand that the fleeing animals were afraid of himself, he thought they were fleeing on account of the fox. Your majesty’s domain is five thousand miles square, with a million troops, and Zhao Xixie is its commander-in-chief; it is not Zhao Xixie that those Northerners fear, but your Majesty’s men in arms, just as the animals feared the tiger.”

Zhanguo ce, Chu, book 1

11/11/23

Doing (and) Time

Set the Wayback Machine to the year 1100. The poet Su Dongpo, passing by the Jinshan Monastery in what is now Zhenjiang, in Jiangsu Province, sits for his portrait, or maybe encounters a previous likeness of himself hanging on the temple wall. It’s painted by Li Longmian 李龍眠, a painter known for his ability to catch the spirit and movement of his subjects with a few outlined traces. After examining the portrait, Su picks up a brush and inscribes it with a few lines of verse. His handwriting is famous throughout the empire, as is his mercurial, humorous, bon vivant, caustic personality. A little self-portrait in words begins to unfold on the margins of the painted image:

心似已灰之木,身如不繫之舟。問汝平生功業,黃州、惠州、儋州。
A mind like wood already turned to ash, a body like an unmoored boat.
If anyone asks you, what have you achieved in this life? “Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou.”

If the painted image, now lost, is the text, this little poem is the commentary. The first two lines tell us what we can’t directly see from looking, but can only surmise: what’s the inside story, what’s it like to be Su Dongpo? He tells us with two quotations from the magnificent, fanciful, joking-serious Daoist collection of parables known as the Zhuangzi: he has put aside all hope and desire, even the hope of self-improvement, and is like dead wood and ashes. “What is this? Can the body really be transformed into the likeness of dry wood, and can the mind really become as if dead ashes?” says a startled observer of deep meditation in that work.  何居乎?形固可使如槁木,而心固可使如死灰乎?Another dialogue in the same book includes the retort, “Those who are without ability have nothing to seek; they eat their fill and roam far and wide… Floating like an unmoored boat, they are empty and masterless.” 無能者無所求,飽食而敖遊,汎若不繫之舟,虛而敖遊者也. So in the first two lines, Su Dongpo is filling in whatever of his personality the painter had missed. He tells us that he is resigned but not disappointed, a lucid dreamer without aims, someone with no worldly ambition, both cast-off and free. These much-loved passages from Zhuangzi are exactly the right ones for expressing, with some modesty, the reclusive ideal as it must have appeared to thousands of retired scholars and officials. Then Su shifts to an external perspective in the third line, imagining that he is being asked by a stranger or a judging authority how to sum up his lifetime accomplishments. The answer comes in three place names: Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou.            

Su Dongpo was poet, calligrapher, painter, essayist, historian, but for most of his maturity he was gainfully employed as an official, and in that capacity he had more than the usual allowance of upsets. He could be sharp-tongued and impatient, and he was allied with one policy faction that was often aggressively suppressed by a rival faction. Because of his allegiances, he was demoted and banished from the capital on three main occasions, first to Huangzhou in present-day Hubei, then to Huizhou near Guangzhou, and finally to the remote island of Hainan, where he fully expected to fall victim to the tropical diseases that were endemic there. Fifteen or so years in all, out of his seventy-three years of life. A map of the Northern Song state’s territory gives us a graphic means of assessing Su Shi’s progress in offending his enemies: he was first exiled to a small town in the middle of the country, perhaps as a warning, on the next occasion to the very edge of the empire, a place that denizens of the capital would have considered uncouth and barbarous, and when that warning was insufficient he was sent to an island where the Chinese language was practically unknown, the risk of malaria was high, vermin were apt to eat one’s books during the endless rainy season, and the inhabitants were in the habit of slaughtering great numbers of cattle to propitiate the gods every time sickness or poverty threatened. Indeed, on this map drawn to illustrate the history of the Song Dynasty, Hainan Island is not even visible—although the source is of course nowhere near contemporary, we can take the absence of Hainan from it as an indirect witness to how eager the Wang Anshi faction was to remove Su Shi from every means of recovering his prior status and power. How easy to forget Hainan, and how desirable to forget Su Shi. By naming his three places of exile as his greatest achievements, Su Shi seems to be offering a bitter assessment of his years in government, as if to say, that’s what it all came to. Or—and this is not the exclusive “or,” rather the “or” that means “you have this choice as well”—he is permitting himself to glory in the extremity of his punishments. As if to say: you asked for my CV, here it is: Leavenworth, Sing Sing, Alcatraz. I am the guy they had to send all the way to Hainan: deal with it. When everyone aspires to a CV that reads, instead, “Harvard, Yale, Cornell,” you have to be pretty bold to reference the most exclusive penitentiaries. And that is particularly the case when you are by profession and identity usually classed in the company of people who can look back with pride on a set of life stages labeled with glorious and prestigious names. In truth, Su could have named the high points of his career instead. But he didn’t. And it is clear from the metrics that the quatrain was intended from the start to lead to that itinerary of hellholes. Six-syllable verse is not that common in Chinese poetry. Five-syllable or seven-syllable lines give a sharp caesura after the second or third syllable, imparting shape and tension to the verse. Six syllables sound flat, centerless, and prosy. But if what you really want to say consists of three two-syllable place names, there’s no other way. 

10/22/23

The Red and the Blue

I was listening to a talk (a brilliant talk, by the way) by an anthropologist who was describing how men and women of different ages and statuses move in and across inhabited spaces (houses, porches, and courtyards) in a particular society of the Arabian Peninsula that both values hospitality to strangers and observes a high degree of gender segregation. These two cultural values collide in many everyday situations where unfamiliar men occupy public areas of the houses and women skitter about on more or less sheltered paths, participating in the life of the household but avoiding prolonged or direct social contact with the male visitors. In the sketches the anthropologist showed in her slides, the assembly of men on the public-facing porch was represented by a clump of red shapes, and the paths taken by the women between the protected areas, steering clear of main entrances and public spaces, were sketched in pale blue.

Like us all, anthropologists live in the universe of signs, so while listening to the talk I couldn’t help asking myself, “Why red and blue? Why did she choose red for male and blue for female?”

The choice made sense in terms of the differences written into that society’s norms of decorum. Grown men were expected to be gregarious and to have an outside social life. Senior women might attend gatherings on the porch but often took a functional hospitality-providing role. Junior women had their own gatherings in secluded areas where no men were present, and though they might greet a male visitor, they disappeared as soon as possible.

So red, as a hot color, went with dominance and attention-claiming, and blue, as a cool color, went with recessive and attention-avoiding behaviors. The coding was intuitive enough. But what if the colors were reversed? Might the suggestion then be that the women’s paths were somehow risky, like a stone patio a barefoot person would cross quickly on a hot day, and the men’s occupation of the central area was calm and self-assured? Worth a try.

I then went woolgathering (during one of those long expository questions academic audience members like to ask) and thought of our shorthand division into “red” and “blue” states, with some “purple” ones hesitating on the line. I seem to remember that the association red = Republican and blue = Democratic goes back to the 1968 election broadcasts, the first to be widely viewed in color, and that the choice of color polarities was supposedly an arbitrary choice that has stayed with us (classic path-dependency).

But surely it wasn’t really arbitrary. Put yourself in the designers’ shoes. If the choice had been made to paint Democratic states in red, that would have implied a partisan view on the part of the network: red as in Red China, Red Communism, the red flag, red-diaper babies and all the things that red-blooded (oops) Americans were supposed to be against. Thus the correlation of Democrats with blue must have been a forced choice, an avoidance of possibly libelous connotations. Not “blue” so much as “not-red.”

Someone coming onto the scene today and looking at the red/blue political map might give it a different interpretation, according to which Republicans are the hot, angry, energetic ones eager to tear things up, pack heat, use immigrants, minorities and liberals for target practice, and bomb the hell out of any podunk stan that dares to disagree with America; and the Democrats are the cool-headed ones trying to preserve what’s left of the status quo, the rule of law, diplomacy, civil rights, equality, and progress in the acceptance of difference. Redskins vs. blue bloods: a different story from 1968’s pattern but equally motivated by affect and association.

That reading of red/blue has the unfortunate effect of making the Republicans the exciting ones, the impatient ones, the explosive forces of change, and the Democrats the recalcitrant élite. And thus of miming Republican propaganda. It’s not so, of course: where it’s not just destructive and lawless, Republican policy is entirely aimed at keeping money and power in the same hands as in previous decades and creating more punitive means of enforcement of the standards of an imaginary “normal America.” (The brew is served at full strength in the Supreme Court.)

An America, that is, where the Red Clump lolls on the porch and the rest of us skitter in the shadows, trying not to be seen.

10/20/23

Another Way the devaluation of words facilitates the devaluation of human lives

People write “By Any Means Necessary” on their signboards and social posts more or less as they might use italics, exclamation points or emoji. They don’t seem to be noticing that by using the phrase, they are endorsing the destruction of a potentially infinite number of human lives. It would be nicer, I think, if you would provide floor and ceiling values for the number of beheaded babies you consider a tolerable contribution to the realization of your political ideal.