Rock and Roll

Because I teach, I sometimes dream about teaching. Last night was no exception. In my dream, I was in the middle of explaining to a young Asian woman the vexatious difference between "good" and "well" when she interrupted to ask what Rock'n'Roll was. I wasn't sure what she had said, but she pointed to a page of a book, and there the word was. I tried defining it by metaphor: "It's K-Pop mixed with good scotch," but she reacted to that with an "Ugh." Evidently, she was no fan of scotch. I decided to define it by playing one example, but what one song would serve as the exemplar and paradigm of Rock'n'Roll? What one would you choose? I know that I briefly considered and rejected songs by Slash and The Who before my subconscious mind made its choice. In the end, I feel quite proud of its good taste and perspicacity: it played "I Saw Her Standing There."

Continuing Evolution of the Human Race

For my first year of university, I decided to fulfil my science requirement by taking a first year biology course taught by David Suzuki. My reasoning was simple: I was interested in biology (of the evolutionary persuasion, not so much the details of cell structure or function), and I had listened to Dr. Suzuki almost weekly for almost all of my conscious life, both on the radio (Quirks and Quarks) and on television (The Nature of Things). To listen to him in person would be interesting and fun, I was sure.

And it was. I learned interesting facts about chromosomal abnormalities, gene penetrance, homology and convergence, and so on. And when the time came to choose the topic of my term paper, I decided to throw myself into finding answers to a topic that had always intrigued me: now that we live in cities, what are the evolutionary pressures and trends that are shaping us. In other words, what are we evolving into?

The resulting 36-page magnum opus was a peculiar item. Its sections had epigraphs by Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, and Robert Heinlein, among others. Its scope was broad, including evidence of the genetic component of behaviour, the miscarriage rate among prisoners, and so on. Its major component was that the stresses of city life cause fatalities, miscarriages, poor parenting, and poor survival ability often enough to have an evolutionary effect. My most important conclusions were, first, that the genetic load (roughly speaking, the proportion of genes that are potentially deleterious) will increase in the foreseeable future, due to medical care, and that those who are genetically predisposed to feel less stress in an urban environment will have an evolutionary advantage. Those people's genes will spread through the population, I said. In my conclusion, I used a quotation from Robert Heinlein's book Beyond This Horizon about a person with a mutation that made him "more civilized" than could reasonably be expected. I saw such genes as the present trend and the future reality of human evolution.

The reason that I am recalling that early work is that a recent study published in Current Anthropology is making me feel justified in my conclusions. It purports to show that many of the physical changes that occurred over time in humans correlate to reductions in testosterone levels and, further, that reductions in testosterone levels correlate to advances in human social organization. Many of those changes, which have been collectively termed "juvenalization" or "neoteny," could therefore be called "feminization" instead. There is much to think about here, and I'll have to do a little reading. The main point, though, is I feel my early paper, the work of a very young dilettante in biology, has received some professional support. It may well be that mankind has displayed a long-term trend to becoming more civilized.

A Few Good Pairs for "Compare and Contrast" Essays

Let's begin with noting that the ever-popular "compare and contrast" essays that teachers love to give have a redundant name. "To compare" means to find both similarities and differences, so the "and contrast" is unnecessary.

That being said, some writings are better subjects for comparison than others. A really good pair of writings, to my mind, would have multiple similarities and at least one solid, significant difference. Here are a few that I enjoy assigning.

1. Roch Carrier's short story "A Secret Lost in Water" and Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging." Both are about the relationships of fathers and sons; both are about the handing-down of some skill from father to son; both feature a skill useful in the countryside that cannot be passed intact to a son who makes his living from a predominantly urban profession, and so they both relate to the loss of tradition and identity during the influx of people to the cities, a fact of life since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The big difference between them is that Carrier's story has the tradition "lost," leading to regret, while Heaney's poem has the tradition adapted, so his emotion towards it (and his forebears) is pride. Both writings are short, so this is a wonderful pair of writings to give students a bit of quick practice.
2. John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row and Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne." Both works try to show that (in the words of Cannery Row) "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches" can be seen as "saints and angels and martyrs and holy men" if you look at them a little differently; "Suzanne" shows that ordinary tea and oranges are anything but ordinary: they come "all the way from China." Cannery Row shows that a tide pool is a marvellous tool for looking at life in general; "Suzanne," when she goes to "her place by the river" also sees "angels in the seaweed" and "children in the morning." To be more specific, Doc sees a dead girl in the seaweed, with a look of peace and relaxation on her face. Both works are full of religious references. The big difference is that Cannery Row is about a community that collectively makes Steinbeck's points for him; Suzanne is just one "half-crazy" woman who happens to be wise. 
3. The play Antigone by Sophocles and the life of Ben Salmon. It was interesting to read Matthew Arnold imply that Antigone is not relevant to modern times: "An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest." Instead, less than one hundred years after Arnold wrote, Antigone's theme that public and private morality, duty and conscience, can conflict, is alive and well and in the daily news. Look at Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor who broke an oath to his country and a duty to his employers to bring to the public matters he felt were wrong. However, the Snowden affair is too recent, and Snowden's fate (through his foresight) has not been Antigone's, so a slightly older example of civil disobedience is a better one to compare with Sophocles' play. Ben Salmon was a Christian conscientious objector in the United States in World War I. He refused to be inducted into the army. Despite the fact that he was not inducted, he was court martialled and sentenced to death, a sentence that was reduced to twenty-five years' hard labour, beginning shortly before the war that he objected to reached its end. He began a hunger strike, which was interpreted as a sign of mental illness, so he was sent to a mental hospital (like Antigone locked up in a cave) where he wrote a 208 page rebuttal of the Catholic Church's doctrine that war can be justified. The Catholic Church, shamefully, refused to administer sacraments to him because it supported the war. His health broke. He died not long after he was released. I think the parallels between Antigone's story and Salmon's are clear. The big difference, to my mind, is that Antigone's religious duty was in the private sphere--she had to bury her brother properly--whereas Salmon objected to the broader actions of his government. (Alternatively, one could compare Antigone to a short poem by E.E. Cummings, "I sing of Olaf glad and big," also about a conscientious objector).

Slavs vs. NATO?

There is an article on the CBC website today about anti-Western feelings in Russia. Someone identifying himself as @FedupRU left this comment under the article:

I see no Slavic people in NATO...Germany, Italy,France, Britain etc....do they really care about Ukraine?.....Russia is a Slavic country and wants the best for the Ukraine...its obvious from the vote in Crimea that Ukraine cannot be trusted anymore to protect slavs...people in Ukraine want security first and then prosperity comes second.....Russia offers that.

It fires me up when someone says something that is, as far as I know, contrary to fact. So, when I saw the words "I see no Slavic people in NATO," I checked and found that the following Slavic countries were members of NATO: Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, and Slovenia. Together, their populations total 67,000,000. Montengro and Ukraine, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina want to join NATO. If they did, then NATO's Slavic population would rise to 115,800,000. For reference, the population of Russia stands at 144,700,000.

The second point is more fundamental. @FedupRU implies that only Slavs could possibly care about Slavs. I think that says more about him than about the world. Human beings, especially those with shared values, care about each other. Any country that wants to join NATO obviously shares values with NATO.

What are those values? NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen said, "In our NATO Alliance, nearly a billion people share not only the same values of freedom, democracy and humanity – they also share the capabilities to safeguard those values."

"Freedom," for many people whose countries were in the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, means making sure that Russian domination does not recur. Obviously, this is an lesson from history that some Russians still reject in favour of either a romantic Pan-Slavism or bitter revanchism.

Russian and Chinese Revanchism and the Risk of General War

We are nowhere near the end of the Ukrainian crisis. The headlines change daily.  What seems clear at this point is that the Russian government is not willing to accept a Ukrainian government that desires closer links to the European Union and, perhaps, eventually NATO. That is unthinkable to Russia, because its major naval base on the Black Sea, since before the days of the Crimean War, is in the Crimea, at Sevastopol. There is simply no good alternative on Russian soil for its naval base in the Ukraine.

Russia's recent annexation of Crimea bears some obvious similarities to Germany's 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland. These are, a country with one ethnic identity (Ukrainian or Czechoslovak) with a disaffected region (Crimea, Sudetenland) in which another ethnic identity predominates (Russian, German). An external power claims that the ethnic minority is being persecuted and claims the right to speak and act in its defence. Finally, it incorporates the disputed land, "reuniting" it to the motherland (or fatherland) of the minority.

The less obvious similarities are more disturbing for what they promise in the future. Like Germany in 1938, Russia has a government that is bitter about its nation's territorial and strategic losses and and is determined to rectify them. The term for such governments, generously provided by the French, is revanchist, which comes from the word revancher,  to avenge. The specific forms of revenge that are sought are the restoration of the nation's prestige and status, the imposition of the government's foreign policy goals on nations that would otherwise oppose them, and the reincorporation of lost territory. The word that expresses this last goal, irredentism, comes from the Italian phrase Italia irredenta meaning "the unredeemed (portions of) Italy."

Germany's losses after World War I were designed to cripple the country through economic ruin, territorial loss, and military weakness. Arguably, looking at events since 1989, a Russian could perceive the same principles at work. The defensive ring of buffer states that insulated the Soviet Union from the West, the Warsaw Pact, collapsed. Contrary to assurances made to the Soviet Union, NATO militarized the former East German territory after Germany was unified. Many Warsaw Pact members joined Western economic and military institutions--the European Union and NATO--explicitly to prevent Russia from re-establishing its sphere of influence. Parts of the Soviet Union broke away, forming new, independent countries. As the Soviet Union ended, along with its economic system and its system of government, its successor nation entered a long and severe economic depression that dragged the Russian military down with it. The Russian Federation's humiliating loss against a guerilla army in the First Chechen War of 1994-1996 was proof enough of this.

Vladimir Putin, during his fourteen years in power, has tried to restore Russia to its former status as a great power, as significant as the United States. The economy is growing, largely through gas sales to Europe. The military is re-equipping. The Chechen state was reincorporated into Russia in the Second Chechen War. A Russian-speaking enclave has been torn off Moldova. Two more were ripped out of Georgia. A Russian-speaking segment of the Ukraine has been reincorporated into Russia. Western inaction on Syria has been maintained, partly through Russian statecraft. A "Eurasian" economic union under Russian control has been set up as a counterweight to the European Union. A sphere of influence has been defined by Russia in which it would use all its tools, economic and military, to keep the EU and NATO out. Russia clearly sees both Georgia and the Ukraine within the Russian sphere.

In a sense, Russia is killing a dream the West has nurtured since the fall of the Soviet Union, in which Europe was at peace, its nations' borders were secure, and Russia was a partner to Western nations. Following that dream, Germany set up pipelines to import Russian gas as the majority of its imported energy. Following that dream, the European Space Agency started launching Russian Soyuz rockets from its Guiana Space Centre. Following that dream, Western European nations have reduced their military spending year after year.

A similar dream is equally under threat in Asia from Chinese revanchism and irridentism. The Chinese government likes to tout that it is reversing "a hundred years of humiliation." It is considering the institution of two new public holidays, both of which are intended to worsen relations with Japan: one commemorating the Rape of Nanjing and the other, Japan's defeat in World War II. China is claiming sovereignty over the South China Sea, including islands that, according to UN rules, belong to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei. Its ships and planes are jousting with Japanese ones over another set of islands. It is refusing to participate in multi-party discussions to resolve these disputes. It refuses to participate in a UN deliberation to resolve the contested claims between it and the Philippines. Perhaps most disturbingly, one of its warships almost rammed an American warship.

Chinese irredentism is nothing new. It was behind the 1952 invasion of Tibet and the negotiated acquisistions of Hong Kong and Macao. It is behind China's long-standing claim to Taiwan, which it would prefer to acquire peacefully but is willing, according to government pronouncements, to take by force. What is new is that China is under new leadership that no longer follows Deng Xiaoping's idea of "peaceful rise" with anything like clarity or whole-heartedness. As a result, the world is at a greater risk of widespread war between near-peer powers than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union.

A Short Intro to Shakespeare (though not to his work)

William Shakespeare

He came from Warwickshire (in the middle of England, not the South East, where London is). Most of the county was covered with the Forest of Arden. His birthplace was Stratford-on-Avon. And, lest you should wonder, the name means that this place was a “straight ford” on the Avon River. “Avon” originally meant just “river,” so there are a few Avon rivers in England. In fact, the Welsh word for “river” (afon) is pronounced the same way.

His birthplace, as far as Londoners were concerned, meant that he spoke with a strong country accent. That would not have been a big problem, socially, at the time. The famous Sir Francis Drake, for example, was a Devon boy, and would have talked like one of the Pirates of the Caribbean. (grin).

Shakespeare’s father was, at first, quite prominent in this little place. He was in the town government, for example. He was able to ensure that young Shakespeare could get an education in the Stratford Grammar School, which was about 200 years old at the time and still stands. Shakespeare entered the school at about age six or seven and may have had to leave, due to his father’s financial and social problems, about age thirteen. He would have learned his letters, numbers, a little Greek, and (more importantly) the Latin language, as well as Classics and composition. (One of Shakespeare’s friends later wrote that Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek.” His English was pretty good, though).

What he did after he left school, we don’t know. One story is that he put in time as a butcher. That would have added subjects to his education that he never would have learned in school.

At the age of eighteen married a twenty-six-year-old woman named Anne Hathaway. She gave birth to Susanna about six months later. Then came the twins, Hamnet and Judith, two years later. Hamnet died of plague at the age of eleven. Susanna married a prominent doctor and did well. Judith, sadly, had troubles including, for a while, excommunication by the church.

Young Master William eventually went to London between 1585 and 1592, and started a career on the stage as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” which became the “King’s Men” after James I succeeded Elizabeth I. His early plays were mostly comedies and histories; his later ones were tragedies. His last works were “tragicomedies” or “romances,” a more complex kind of comedy. This group includes The Tempest. Finally, a small group of his plays are called “problem plays” because there is no way to place them into any of those categories. Computer analysis has shown that some of his plays were collaborations with other playwrights, so we can now say which parts of them were his and which ones weren’t.

He was a successful businessman. He eventually built a new theatre (The Globe). He made money from a grain handling business in Stratford. Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage in about 1613 at the age of 49. This would make him an old man for the time. The average life span, including the very common infant deaths, was probably around 30. So, not surprisingly, he died in Stratford just three years later.

Shakespeare made sure that both girls inherited money from him directly, although Susanna got the majority of it. And speaking of his will, there is some controversy that it gave to his wife so little: furniture and his “second best bed.” Apparently, though, the custom was that the widow inherited a third of the estate anyway, and the second best bed is the one that the man and wife customarily slept in. The best bed was for guests. So he wasn’t as hard-hearted as one would think.

Shakespeare’s Portraits

Two portraits of Shakespeare were traditionally accepted as genuine, although both were created after his death. The first is an engraving on the title page of The First Folio, a large collection of his plays that was put together and published by Shakepeare’s friends after his death. The other is a statue in the Stratford church, part of a memorial put up for him soon after his death.

Recently, several other portraits of Shakespeare have been found: The Cobbe Portrait and the Chandos Portrait among them. Those, plus the First Folio portrait by Droeshout are below.

The Sanders Portrait has also been identified as a painting of Shakespeare, and was recently proven to have been painted during his lifetime.

"Atlas Shrugged" vs "The Lord of the Rings" Quotation

I found this and loved it. Source is John Rogers.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings  and Atlas Shrugged were the first two hardcover books that I special-ordered from a bookstore. I have pretty much outgrown my interest in Atlas Shrugged...I have not, for example, bothered to watch the movie. On the other hand, my interest in The Lord of the Rings remains high.

On the third hand, if there is one, Ayn Rand deserves respect as one of a small number of authors who have made a living and a reputation by writing in the English language, although it was not their first language. I call them "ESL Authors," and they are an oddly assorted lot. Ayn Rand, of course, but also Joseph Conrad, Kahlil Gibran, and even Helen Keller. I may do a post on them some day.