Falling apples, projecting fire extinguishers

The weekend before last, we were guests of our friend Michael Aizenman at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK. Fortunately, like most very bright people, Michael has many interests besides his specialty, mathematics, so we were able to find things to talk about.

Nevertheless, wandering through the institute and peering at Newton's walking stick and his notebook of living expenses (he'd bought Stilton cheese) got me thinking about math (sort of) as I tried to assemble the bits of Newtoniana scattered through my memory, mainly his three laws of motion (alas, I have yet to master calculus). And the only reason I, science-averse as I was in my student days, have any clear notion of those three laws is the amazing Leonard K. Nash who taught a Natural Science course for nonscientific freshmen at that other Cambridge, the one in Massachusetts. His classes were theatrical performances, with explosions to demonstrate Boyle's Law and, most memorable of all, his lecture on Newton's third law of motion. It came near the end of the hour. An assistant wheeled out a low cart with an upright fire extinguisher mounted behind a padded seat. Without interrupting his talk, Nash sat himself on the cart and pressed the levers of the extinguisher as he declared, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." And propelled himself offstage at precisely the last minute of class.

This was in 1959, and still I remember. And as I looked at the Newton memorabilia, I I began wondering if Newton's Three Laws of Motion might not be applicable to political science. The first one, the law of inertia certainly seems applicable to American politics (and all other social behavior): the parties just continue doing whatever they have been doing forever, unless and until some external force -- riots, a stock market crash, public outrage over the disaster in Iraq -- makes them change course. And once that force is applied, it will keep propelling the pols until friction (there's a lot of that in politics) slows them down (2nd Law). And of course the 3rd Law, which I think of as the fire extinguisher law. We can easily come up with examples of "equal and opposite" political reactions, e.g., to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I was sure that this could not be a new idea, so I looked up "Newtonian political science" on Google. And sure enough, there's a whole book on "Quantum Politics," claiming to go beyond Newton to base political science on quantum mechanics. And I found this very
amusing review by Ingemar Nordin, Linkiping University, Sweden, who finds that although this whole approach is scientifically absurd (social behavior is not like physics), it may still generate valuable insights.

Chile & Venezuela: different Lefts, different paths

Someone just forwarded an anonymous attack --a string of insults, really -- on Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, because he dared to say in an interview that Hugo Chávez's kind of leftism was not replicable in other countries without Venezuela's fat "checkbook". An obvious enough point, one would think, but unacceptable to the anonymous author, who seems to think that boldness and clear revolutionary thinking are all that are needed to bring about revolutions everywhere.

We should be skeptical of all politicians, including Lagos & Chávez. Nevertheless, Lagos appears to me to be one of the most honest and effective of the bunch. He left office even more popular than when he entered, so clearly a lot of Chileans have a high opinion of him. He is of course pragmatic -- like all successful and long-lasting politicians, Left or Right. What the French call a possibiliste. And he is also cautious, as anybody governing Chile (with its terrible recent history) should be. So if his policies were "liberal" or "neoliberal", that was due less to his personal wishes than to his estimate (pretty astute, I think) of what his government could get away with.

Hugo Chávez is less obviously pragmatic, and far less cautious in what he says -- though I think he's very careful about maintaining good relations with his armed forces, which is a kind of pragmatism. He has also discovered that he can get away with, can dare to pursue, much bolder anti-U.S. policies than could Lagos. Not only that he can do it, but that he will be applauded for it. There are at least three immense differences between Venezuela and Chile that make Chávez's defiant rhetoric and aggressive reforms possible, all of them conjunctural (that is, produced by a convergence of historical processes that may not last long): (1) the high price of petroleum, and Venezuela's abundance of it; Chilean copper is selling well, too, but not like oil. So Chávez has the resources to spend on projects both useful and wasteful. (2) The weakening of the U.S. government's interest or capacity to slap down this opponent, because of its contradictory petroleum needs and the calamitous failure of its Iraq war (which was supposed to secure the needs of U.S. petroleum interests forever, but has ended up producing nothing but costs in all areas -- military depletion, diplomatic weakness, spiraling deficit). (3) The utterly different social-political history of the two countries. Just one aspect to note: Chile has a very large, established and monied conservative bloc, nearly as large as its very deeply established left. Votes, when free (before and after Pinochet) have always been close, with either Right or Left's hold on government precarious. Neither Lagos, nor Allende, nor anybody had the kind of support in the polls that Hugo Chávez musters. I think the main reason that the Right is so ineffective as a political force in Venezuela is that it never really had to bother about mobilizing voters, it was enough for them to make money while a whole series of corruptible governments of the white elite kept the darker masses at bay. The Venezuelan Left is also radically different from that in Chile, where both the Socialist and Communist parties became highly institutionalized, with large bases of trade union members, producing a more cautious political culture than in Venezuela where the ideologues of the Left parties, with much smaller and more marginalized rank-and-files, were responsible to no one but their own visions of the truth.

By the way, here's what Lagos really had to say about Chávez, in an interview in El País (26/03/2007). It sounds very sensible.

¿Considera válidos los análisis que dividen a América Latina entre los países en favor y en contra del presidente venezolano, Hugo Chávez?
Las políticas de Chávez se sustentan en la capacidad financiera que le da el petróleo y no son reproducibles en otros países que no tienen petróleo, donde no tienen esa solvencia. A lo mejor, a muchos jefes de Estado les gustaría tener la chequera abundante; otra cosa es saber darle el mejor uso a esa chequera. En condiciones mucho más modestas, Chile ha experimentado una holgura financiera producto del precio del cobre y ha hecho un uso cuidadoso de esos fondos, destinando parte de esos recursos al desarrollo en ciencia y tecnología y guardando otra parte... El tema de los pros y los anti Chávez es maniqueo.

Photo of Lagos from Chilean newspaper Clarín

Hometown Baghdad » Blog Archive » Episode 37 0f 38 - “One of Thousands”

I just watched episode 37, on the death of a beloved uncle at a U.S. Army roadblock. I don't know if I'm ready to suffer the pain of watching the whole series, on the impossible lives of a middle-class Baghdadi family -- several of whose members are fluent in English -- just trying to go about their business and studies in their U.S.-occupied, multiterrorized city. Hometown Baghdad » Blog Archive » Episode 37 0f 38 - “One of Thousands”

Frustrating development

I just read an essay that helps put into perspective the failure of Ghana and other countries to fulfill the great promises that independence seemed to open up (see my note below on Ghana). The articulate Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it this way:

The decolonization that occurred at the end of World War II, often hailed as 'setting the colonial world free', was in fact marked by three broad stages redefining relations between the developed West and the rest. In the first phase, fundamental relations of neocolonial dependency were established between the developed and underdeveloped worlds in the context of the Cold War. ...the Cold War was fought out largely by proxy on post-colonial terrain. In the second phase, 'structural adjustment' regimes were imposed by the West on the developing world, via international organizations coupled with massive indebtedness through the banking system. More recently, with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the rise of the US to single super-power hegemony, an unholy alliance of global corporate forces, collusive indigenous elites, and legal and illegal armies on the loose has been able to treat the world's poor and the societies of the South as open marketplaces, repositories of scarce resources, and reservoirs of cheap labour.

(Pp. 27-28 in Hall, Stuart. "Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities." Divided Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003. Ed. Richard Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 20-51.)

Photo of Hall from The Chronicle - Stuart Hall

Ghana and Guinea (Conakry) were among the countries that resisted being sucked into the Cold War, but Ghanaian cocoa farmers and others, backed by the C.I.A., readily enlisted and overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Sékou Touré, who had led the République de Guinée to independence (and became the exiled Nkrumah's host) hung on to power until his death in 1984, but the international agencies mentioned by Hall (initially, the aggressive economic and diplomatic actions of France) made serious economic development impossible.

"Untill is over": Ghana at last

After more than 40 years of waiting like a hunter in the bush for an opportunity to see West Africa, "Untill is over" -- as a sign painted on a fish-market kiosque in Elmina told me.

Elmina, on Ghana's coast on the Gulf of Guinea, started out as a 17th century Portuguese trading post for gold from the rich mines to the north (the name is a corruption of Sao Jorge da Mina, or "of the Mine"). Later, under Dutch control, it became a major shipping center for slaves bound for the New World. Touring its castle (combination fort and dungeon) is chilling, as is the former British counterpart, Cape Coast Castle, just across the river and almost within cannon-range. But outside, at the base of the castle walls, is a bustling fishing port, full of life, recently dead fish and mysterious slogans, including "Untill is over."

I don't know what it meant to the person who painted it, but to me the "untill" that was over was my long wait to know this part of the world. When I was a college student in the early 60s, West Africa seemed to me the most exciting place on earth. The whole "Third World" was in turmoil then -- Southeast Asia, Latin America, Indonesia. But it was Africa that was making the most direct challenge to the structures and the ideology of global system of spoliation for the enrichment of a few. The continent appeared to be on the verge of a transformation that would liberate us all from our sad history of racism and colonial oppression.

The Gold Coast was the first African colony to become independent, in 1957 shedding its slave-name to take that of a West African empire of centuries earlier, Ghana. I was 16 then. As a college student, a followed developments there and in the neighboring countries as closely as I could from the distance of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was especially enthusiastic about the movements -- intellectual and political -- in the French-speaking areas, and wrote my senior thesis on Sékou Touré's Parti démocratique de Guinée. But I wasn't able at that time to find a way to actually go to the region and work there (I didn't want merely to visit, but to do something).

So instead I went to Latin America, a decision I don't regret, because I was able to do there what I had imagined doing in Africa: to make myself part of a larger struggle. I never ceased day-dreaming of being in Africa, and finally got there for the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence.

Susana, ever alert, learned of a conference titled African Architecture Today to be held in Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city, June 5-8. Our work (a book she and I are writing together) is a history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America, an ocean away from Africa. But when she read the call for papers, she saw that the conference was to debate the same kinds of issues that have deeply engaged Latin American architects for over 20 years, basically, regional identity (Is there one, for a large and diverse area such as Latin America or Africa?) and how best to express it (or "them," the identities of the various subregions) in architecture. And so we got ourselves invited to Kumasi (where Susana's powerpoint presentation and talk was a big hit -- the African architects were eager to know more about this other "Third World"). And of course we took advantage of this, our first visit to equatorial Africa, to see as much of the country as we could in a few days on a modest budget.

Highlights included the conference itself, at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; markets, villages and shrines in Ashanti country; the hard, cruel slave castles on the coast; a canopy-walk on suspended bridges through the rainforest at Kakum National Park; the filthy but friendly chaos of Accra; fufu, banku, kenkey and pepper sauce, and especially the gentle grace and courtesy of almost everyone we met.

Map from Lonely Planet & from announcement of the tour Susana & I took with three other conference participants whom I remember fondly. Thanks very much for your company, Felicia, David and Dumisani! Also thanks to Charles, our guide, and Samson, the driver -- excellent tour.

Spell-breaker

A friend lent me the latest book by Daniel Dennett, knowing that I was a fan of some of his previous work. In particular, his Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) struck me as brilliant, with the clearest and most memorable explanation I'd ever read of "the self" (or "ego" or, as some prefer, the "soul"), how it is produced and where it resides. It is produced in the brain but it doesn't really reside in any particular place there, according to Dennett, but is "the center of narrative gravity," shifting with our focus or excitement about whatever it is we are contemplating at the moment. Dennett himself so liked his phrase that he used it as the title of a later essay.

And that's the annoying tic of Dennett: he falls in love with his own formulations and repeats them endlessly, infested by his own memes. In fact, "memes" is one of those formulations (originated by Richard Dawkins but appropriated enthusiastically by Dennett) that he can't let go of, even when "memes" are not the most convincing explanation of, in the case of his newer book, religious belief.

Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. London: Allen Lane (Penguin), 2006. By "natural phenomenon" he means one that can be investigated (researched) by natural (as opposed to supernatural) scientific methods, such as surveys, brain-scans, rigorously controlled tests with control groups (for example, of claims of the "efficacy of prayer"). And he makes several proposals of specific research topics. That's fine.

Another good thing is that he states very clearly some things that you surely already know but may have had trouble explaining. Here's one remark I especially liked:

There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth than somebody who believes in "the spirit." (p. 305)

However, his jokey tone and his manifest incredulity at any religious claims (Max Weber described himself as "religiously unmusical," but Dennett is tone deaf) make it unlikely that reading this book will release any true believer from the "spell" of belief. He's smart and good company, and I agree with most of what he says, but I didn't learn anything I didn't know or think anything I hadn't thought. Most of what he has put together here was better said long ago in the book he quotes in almost every chapter, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). (Click on keyword "religion" to find other comments on the topic.)

Intro to the near future

This flash presentation by the Museum of Media History takes from about 1989 to 2015. Heads up, news junkies! Flash » Epic 2015

Dan Perjovschi, WHAT HAPPENED TO US?, at MoMA

Happening now, at MoMA. He's asking a good question! YouTube - Projects 85: Dan Perjovschi, WHAT HAPPENED TO US?, at MoMA

Cheney Is Wrong About Me, Wrong About War

Speaks for itself, and for many of us. Cheney Is Wrong About Me, Wrong About War - CommonDreams.org - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

The Rights and Wrongs of Owning Guns

Next to our terrible folly of the occupation of Iraq, this -- the prevalence of guns in private hands -- is the most embarrassing thing to explain for an American abroad. Fortunately there are a few sensible voices coming out of the United States, like that of César Chelala. The Rights and Wrongs of Owning Guns - CommonDreams.org - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community