Guest Post: Mathematics and Narratives, Take Two

Mathematics and Narratives, Take Two
by Neal Koblitz

The title of your recent posting "Mathematics' need for narratives" resonated with me. I am a research mathematician, and when I write a paper, usually jointly with my collaborator Alfred Menezes, we decide whether it deserves a place on our website (anotherlook.ca) by asking ourselves if it truly "tells a story." In our case the "story" is typically an analysis of mathematical proofs of security of computer protocols that reveals a dark underside --- an overlooked flaw in the proof, a misleading interpretation of the result, reliance on a model that is woefully inadequate for the intended application, a hypothesis to the theorem that is so strong as to render the argument essentially circular.  In our critiques of the paradigm of "provable security" (which in my opinion is an oxymoron), we depict scenarios in which the promised mathematical guarantees lose their validity, if possible with humorous references to popular culture and current events. One of our papers, jointly written with Ann Hibner Koblitz, raises some technical issues involving the math while presenting a historical narrative that draws on research in the social construction of science and technology; the subtitle of this paper is "the serpentine course of a paradigm shift." In this paper we introduce the term "narrative inversion" to refer to narratives of mathematical certainty behind which one finds a reality that is full of doubt and contingency.

However, when I read the introduction and perused the table of contents of Circles Disturbed... by Barry Mazur et al, I saw that the contributors' definition of mathematics and of the narratives that guide mathematicians' thinking is narrow and insular. To them, mathematics means pure theory.  They seem uninterested in the stories that arise from applied branches of mathematics or from misguided and self-serving attempts to apply mathematics to social and economic questions.  If anyone needs to be convinced that the mathematical enterprise encompasses a lot more than pure theory --- and can provide many dramatic narratives about topics other than theorem-proving --- it should suffice to point out that the largest employer of math PhDs in the world is the U.S. National Security Agency.

Moreover, in Circles Disturbed... mathematics is identified with the Eurocentric tradition starting in ancient Greece.  This is not the version of the history of mathematics that I present to my students when I teach a course every year on the subject.  Rather, I expect my students to know about the ancient Chinese and Indian traditions, as well as the criticisms of Eurocentric history of mathematics that have been made by Martin Bernal in the controversial book Black Athena (1987) and by ethnomathematics researchers such as Marcia Ascher.

Here are a few of my favorite examples of mathematical narratives in the broad sense in which I would define the term:

(1) Cathy O'Neil (a former PhD student of Barry Mazur, ironically) has a forthcoming book with the clever title Weapons of Math Destruction.  She was a "quant" during the days of the economic meltdown, and writes entertainingly about the misuse of mathematical models on Wall Street and elsewhere. Her blog address is mathbabe.org.


In 2000 David Li, a quant with a PhD from the University of Waterloo, developed a mathematical formula that purportedly predicted the likelihood that a set of companies would successively default on their debts.  His model was based on an optimistic narrative of economic progress under capitalism --- a narrative that ignored the stories of repeated boom/bust that should have been clear to anyone who studies history --- and was based on data of the most recent years of relative prosperity.  His formula was used on Wall Street to give a mathematical justification for sharply increasing investments in newly-created exotic financial instruments such as mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations.  The failure of Li's mathematical model was a factor in the 2008 economic collapse.

(2) John Ewing (president of Math for America and former executive director of the American Math Society) wrote an article in the AMS Notices titled "Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data" exposing the scam of value-added modeling, a much-hyped pseudo-mathematical approach to evaluating teachers.

(3) The late William Thurston (winner of a Fields Medal, often called the mathematical world's Nobel Prize) led a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful battle to get the AMS to do something about mathematicians' excessive reliance on military and NSA funding.  Thurston was part of a long tradition of mathematicians who rejected the dominant narrative in the profession, which maintained that the profession was at the service of whomever had power and money --- wealthy patrons in medieval and early modern times, the U.S. Department of Defense in our day. (As the prominent computer scientist Phil Rogaway put it, most researchers have never seen a funding source they didn't like.)  Other famous mathematicians of the last century who advocated an alternative humanistic vision included the British pacifist G. H. Hardy (who lauded his field number theory as "gentle and clean" because in his day it was pursued only for aesthetic reasons and had no applications) and Norbert Weiner (see S. J. Heims' 1982 joint biography John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, which contrasts the outlook of Weiner with that of the militarist von Neumann, another leading mathematician of the same time period).

(4) In the 1980s Serge Lang led a successful fight to keep right-wing political scientist Samuel Huntington from being elected to the U.S. National Academy of Science.  (I described this battle in an article in the Mathematical Intelligencer titled "A Tale of Three Equations: Or the Emperor Has No Clothes.")  A small example of Huntington's misuse of quantitative methodology was that he favorably cited a statistical study purporting to show that South Africa (this was during the apartheid period) had a population with a high "satisfaction index." How could Huntington (who, according to wikipedia, was a "valued adviser" to the apartheid regime, advising them to increase the repressive power of the state) seriously expect anyone to believe that?  He, like most capitalist economists and political scientists, was using a narrative of economic progress that attached huge importance to numbers such as gross domestic product per capita, number of telephones per capita (which was one of the ingredients in the "satisfaction index"), and so on --- while ignoring the fundamental issue of how those resources were distributed.  In the case of South Africa, it was certainly true that the whites owned a lot of telephones.

The introduction to Circles Disturbed... says that mathematicians are "delighted" to see the ways that mathematicians have been portrayed in recent works of literature and popular culture.  Undoubtedly many are, but I have a less sanguine view of the direction of popular imagery of science and mathematics.  I believe there is far more superstition, ignorance, and anti-scientific bias among Americans now than there was when I was growing up a half-century ago.  If one compares the portrayals of mathematicians in recent popular works with those of earlier decades, the picture is not one of constant upward progress.  Compare, for example, the 1980 movie It's My Turn (in which Jill Clayburgh plays a mathematician) or the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver (about the high school math teacher Jaime Escalante) --- the latter movie was cited by several of my students as what inspired them to want to become math teachers --- with the more recent movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) and the play Proof (2000, film in 2005), in which all the mathematicians are schizophrenic. The view of the mathematical profession that emerges from the latter portrayals is pretty dismal.  Both works suggest that there is an inevitable connection between mathematical creativity and mental illness. In A Beautiful Mind some of the scenes of John Nash's schizophrenia (e.g., when he almost drowns their baby) are horrific, and the depiction of nerd behavior in the Princeton math department also reinforces some of the worst stereotypes about mathematicians.  From the standpoint of mathematicians who want to improve the popular image of the profession and convince young people that it's a rewarding profession to go into, these portrayals are not helpful.

Or take the 1999 novel Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson.  I am embarrassed to say that this book was highly recommended to me by a mathematical colleague whom I much respected, and so I read it.  The book's portrayal of the great mathematician Alan Turing is full of juvenile and homophobic humor, with the author inventing an imaginary affair with a gay Nazi during World War II (as if to try to justify the later persecution of Turing by the British government that led to his death).  That the novel is full of racism (against Asians and New Guineans) and misogyny did not prevent it from becoming a best-seller among mathematicians and computer scientists.

The mathematical world -- like the world outside -- is full of struggles and full of narratives, but judging by its introduction and table of contents, the book Circles Disturbed... doesn't come close to telling the whole story.

Mathematics' need for narrative

I had lunch today at a (relatively) new local bookstore, Ada's (and yes, that's in Lovelace) just a couple of doors down from the place at which I often meet Eileen Gunn for writing dates. I can recommend the food. But more to the point, because the audience for the books they sell is strictly geeky, their selection is unusual. (One entire room is devoted to computer programming.) Happily, my browsing unearthed a big fat Princeton University Press hardcover with the title of Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. With one look at the table of contents, I knew there was no way I was going to allow that book to languish on the shelf, bereft of my most personal attention, even if an electronic edition would likely be more reasonably priced and take no space on my own bookshelves. The book isn't a monograph, but a collection of articles, edited by Apostolos Doxiadis (a writer) and Barry Mazur (a mathematician). Tom, looking over my shoulder, spotted the name of a geometer in the ToC. ("Just wanted to be sure that geometry got some representation in this book.") The cover image, appropriately enough, is of Archimedes wielding a compass while a Roman soldier has grabbed him by the left arm and has raised his sword, ready to plunge it into the geometer.

Here's the description of the book on the publisher's page:

Circles Disturbed brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier--"Don't disturb my circles"--words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds--stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities.

A book unlike any other, Circles Disturbed delves into topics such as the way in which historical and biographical narratives shape our understanding of mathematics and mathematicians, the development of "myths of origins" in mathematics, the structure and importance of mathematical dreams, the role of storytelling in the formation of mathematical intuitions, the ways mathematics helps us organize the way we think about narrative structure, and much more.


"Circles Disturbed offers a range of possibilities for how narrative can function in mathematics and how narratives themselves show signs of a mathematical structure. An intelligent, exploratory collection of writings by a distinguished group of contributors."--Theodore Porter, University of California, Los Angeles
"This collection is a pioneering effort to trace the hidden connections between mathematics and narrative. It succeeds magnificently, and represents a very significant contribution that will appeal to the professional mathematician as well as the general educated reader. The articles are written by top authorities in their fields."--Doron Zeilberger, Rutgers University

The publisher is offering a pdf of the introduction: here. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9764.pdf.


And here's the Table of Contents:

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction vii
Chapter 1: From Voyagers to Martyrs: Toward a Storied History of Mathematics 1
By AMIR ALEXANDER
Chapter 2 Structure of Crystal, Bucket of Dust 52
By PETER GALISON
Chapter 3: Deductive Narrative and the Epistemological Function of Belief in Mathematics: On Bombelli and Imaginary Numbers 79
By FEDERICA LANAVE
Chapater 4: Hilbert on Theology and Its Discontents: The Origin Myth of Modern Mathematics 105
By COLIN MCLARTY
Chapter 5: Do Androids Prove Theorems in Their Sleep? 130
By MICHAEL HARRIS
Chapter 6: Visions, Dreams, and Mathematics 183
By BARRY MAZUR
Chapter 7: Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative 211
By TIMOTHY GOWERS
Chapter 8: Mathematics and Narrative: Why Are Stories and Proofs Interesting? 232
By BERNARD TEISSIER
Chapter 9: Narrative and the Rationality of Mathematical Practice 244
By DAVID CORFIELD
Chapter 10: A Streetcar Named (among Other Things) Proof: From Storytelling to Geometry, via Poetry and Rhetoric 281
By APOSTOLOS DOXIADIS
Chapter 11: Mathematics and Narrative: An Aristotelian Perspective 389
By G .E .R . LLOYD
Chapter 12: Adventures of the Diagonal: Non-Euclidean Mathematics and Narrative 407
By ARADY PLOTNITSKY
Chapter 13: Formal Models in Narrative Analysis 447
By DAVID HERMAN
Chapter 14: Mathematics and Narrative: A Narratological Perspective 481
By URI MARGOL N
Chapter 15: Tales of Contingency, Contingencies of Telling: Toward an Algorithm of Narrative Subjectivity 508
By JAN CHRISTOPH MEISTER

Anyway, I suspect some readers of this blog will find this as promising and interesting as I do.

SF tropes and the ever-shifting edge of reality

Once in a blue moon I wake up from a dream so soaked with a sense of reality that it feels less like a dream I've just had then a memory of something I've recently done. Oddly enough such dreams tend to be sfnal in character. While I'm in them, I have no perception of their being sfnal-- that only comes after I've woken up.

Such was the case this the morning. In my dream, I was writing an article on a trip I'd just to the moon for a magazine' the article would be comprised of an text, photos, and video clips. I'd decided that the article would focus on a researcher who'd been there for 23 years-- since the beginning of the settlement-- studying kinetics. In my dream, I kept reviewing the video clip of my conversation with her, in which she spoke of her distress at being dumped by her HMO-- which had been covering her for all the 23 years she'd been working on the moon-- because her health problems were different to those of women her age on earth. The image of this woman speaking is the most vivid image of my dream: she is wearing a white lab coat of course, over silk the color of autumn leaves, and small dangling earrings, and has enough ray in her hair and lines and wear in her face to be in her 50s or 60s were she to have been living all that time on earth, though I acknowledged that living in lunar gravity she might well be a good deal older. Thinking about her face, which seemed oddly familiar, after waking, it occurred to me that she might be modeled on Susan S, a dancer I'd know in the early 1970s, suitably aged. (With a personality considerably toned down.) She was someone I hadn't seen or even thought of for years and years. I'd already written the part of my article about how pedestrian travel to the moon actually was, and how surprisingly populous the place seemed, and how though the hotel accommodations were a bit cramped, weren't that much more expensive than hotels in major cities in the US. Etc. All very ordinary, even pedestrian. Which was why my article was focusing on this woman and her difficulties, partially a consequence of her never having budged from the moon for 23 years.

Mulling over the peculiar realization that my most real-seeming dreams tend to be sfnal, it struck me that coherence combined with strongly delineated detail is what makes such dreams feel real. And of course the realization that one is dreaming can occur in any kind of dream-- for me, most often in unpleasant dreams that up until that point feel very real but that I'd like not to be real. The realization is never reasoned (as in: oh, this doesn't make sense, so it can't be true-- not making sense is perfectly normal in dreams). It's when I wake up that I marvel at how coherent and real-seeming the sfnal dream had been-- after that moment of disjunction when I grasp that no, this was a dream, and not something in my actual memory. (Sometimes in fact I am imbued with a partial belief in it as memory for a long time after the dream-- as in dreams about a story I once wrote that I somehow lost and forgot about until I came upon it in a box of old papers-- a part of me somehow feels that that story must be around somewhere, and longs to see it, read it, remember it. I don't feel that way about sfnal dreams, of course, because my mind has identified them as sfnal and thus impossible as memory.)

The thinness of the membrane distinguishing the sfnal from reality has become something of a preoccupation with me lately. I know I've often said over the last ten years that I often have trouble distinguishing reports of real-life behavior and speech from satire, but it occurs to me that despite being accustomed to technological innovations that were once purely sfnal now being materially incarnate in our lives, I still find myself astonished at the thinness of the line between fiction and reality. Consider these three items appearing in the Seattle Times over the last few days:

--State's first case of 'zombie bees' reported in Kent. Honeybees, previously immune to parasitic flies called Apocephalus borealis or scuttle flies-- native to the US and apparently common-- have lately begun to be infected by them. Here's the article's description of the infection:

The fly's life cycle is gruesomely reminiscent of the movie "Alien" — though they don't pose a risk to people. Adult females, smaller than a fruit fly, land on the backs of foraging honeybees and use their needle-sharp ovipositors to inject eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. "They basically eat the insides out of the bee," [biologist John] Hafernik said.

Previously, these flies had only been known to infect wasps and bumblebees. They've now infected 80% of the hives in the Bay Area, and have made an appearance in South Dakota. This is particularly alarming, given the recent plummeting of honeybee populations all over the United States. The irony, of course, is that the scuttle flies are native to North American, while the honeybees are imported (or "invasive"), while the sharp point of relevance is that most pollination of fruit and vegetables is performed by honeybees. Why, you may wonder, are infected honeybees called "zombie bees"? "Unlike healthy bees, which spend the night tucked up in their hive, infected bees fly after dark and tend to congregate at lights. Hohn noticed bees buzzing around the light in his shop, flying in jerky patterns and finally flopping on the floor." (There's a video available with the Seattle Times article.) If you're interested in the knowing more about "zombie bees," check out Hafernik's website ZombeeWatch.org.

 --And then there's the article on the California legislation, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed yesterday, allowing "autononmous" or driverless cars in California.

"Today we're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality - the self-driving car," Brown said. "Anyone who gets inside a car and finds out the car is driving will be a little skittish, but they'll get over it."

Google Inc. has been developing autonomous car technology and lobbying for the regulations. The company's fleet of a dozen computer-controlled vehicles has logged more than 300,000 miles of self-driving without an accident, according to Google. "I think the self-driving car can really dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

Autonomous cars can make roads safer, free commuters from the drudgery of driving, reduce congestion and provide transport to people who can't drive themselves, such as the blind, disabled, elderly and intoxicated, Brin said. "I expect that self-driving cars will be far safer than human-driven cars," Brin said.

Brin predicted that autonomous vehicles will be commercially available within a decade. He said Google has no plans to produce its own cars, but instead plans to partner with the automobile industry to develop autonomous vehicles.

Why is it that this seems much more sfnal to me than smartphones do? I suppose it's because it strikes me as in some ways a more conscious technological development than the by contrast feckless, sometimes frivolous development of all the silly gadgets that distract rather than assist us. Autonomous cars seem hands-down more socially utilitarian and have the tremendous potential of saving many, many lives (and prevent many, many personal bankruptcies due to the catastrophic medical costs and chronic disability that attend most serious traffic accidents. Our (in this case visibly administered) culture tends to oppose sensible solutions for serious, large-scale problems (for instance, affordable health care). The politicians, venture capitalists, and financiers who determine which technologies are brought into existence prefer to support the development of weapons, tools of surveillance, and gadgets and toys big corporations can endlessly "upgrade" to technology that is unglamorously utilitarian. (Here in the US, from infancy most individuals imbibe their values primarily from the advertisements they consume.) Or else they're simply whacko gimmicks based on dubious notions of coolness, like Argentinean publisher Ererna Cadencia's use of ink that vanishes from books two months after the date of purchase. (The idea is that disappearing ink will force consumers to read the books they buy, in a timely fashion. It's supposed to be for the authors' benefit, though I have to say that I myself would hate to see my books vanish and be unavailable for future rereading: rendering books into utterly disposable entertainment.)

--The third item doesn't report on a piece of new technology, but rather on an almost seismic shift in attitude. (Like parasitic creatures wielding ovipostors, infected organisms, and driverless cars, certain attitudes, too, can be sf tropes.) In this case, the shift in attitude is striking for being found in a rather conservative source, the editors of the Seattle Times, who have a long history of endorsing Republicans, which in Washington State can mean way off the spectrum of the local norm. They certainly consider themselves a voice of the mainstream. Four days ago, they published an editorial urging the approval of Initiative 502-- to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana. Many, many people have been urging this for a long time, including former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. Many conservatives have even urged it. Nevertheless, US jails are crammed with offenders of the prohibition against marijuana use and sale. The editorial is reasoned and reasonable.

What would legal marijuana be like? Consider what has happened in Seattle. The city has become a sanctuary for medical marijuana, with aboveboard dispensaries. Recreational marijuana is readily available in Seattle on the illicit market, and users of small amounts are no longer prosecuted. For several years, recreational marijuana has effectively been decriminalized in Seattle, and there has been no upsurge in crime or road deaths from it.

Virtual decriminalization resulted from the force of broad public pressure on prosecutors here in King County. Several years back, while I was performing Superior Court jury service, the prosecuting attorney conducted a discussion among the jury pool of which I was a member about drugs as part of the voir dire for a drug prosecution. About three-quarters of my fellow potential jurors expressed the opinion that marijuana use ought to be decriminalized. (The prosecutor, by the way, was resigned rather than surprised by this opinion.) I read in the Seattle Times not long after that prosecution policies were going to be changed to be more in line with public opinion. I was struck by this. I'd always assumed that jury service was largely a waste of my time, since jurors have in recent years been forbidden the democratic exercise of nullification, a traditional alternative for jurors faced with rubber-stamping unjust outcomes. After that, I wasn't so sure.

The fact is, we are constantly adjusting what is real, what could be real, what probably won't ever be real. Sfnal tropes have a lot to do with the process. But I'm particularly interested these days-- because of my nearly finished novel in progress, "Deep Story"-- in what becomes real,as memory, in an individual's brain, and what the coherence of narrative has to do with the process.

 My absence over the last month from this space, by the way, has been due to a family emergency followed by illness. I'm on the mend now, though I'm still a bit shaky and weak, which forces me into making frequent retreats back to bed. I hope to resume regular posting soon.

ETA: I see that the Seattle Times has actually endorsed Obama-- and that they did so last time around, too. Pardon my misperception.

How do we destroy a powerful and pernicious narrative?

Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh, in her essay Over Wo(my)n’s Dead Bodies: On Surviving ‘Liberation’ assesses the US's invasion of Afghanistan almost ten years in:

Brushing aside my insecurities, I am resolved to address the contention that this war is a necessary step in liberating the women of Afghanistan. Despite Laura Bush's optimism, I don't believe the War on Terror has made anyone safer, not least the women of Afghanistan.

I contest Mrs. Bush's assertion by taking notice of the dynamics of modern Afghanistan that make her premise entirely problematic. You see, firstly I am unconvinced that the majority of Afghans have much access to sources of international news. A recent poll conducted by the International Council on Security and Development found that nearly 92% of men (women were not polled) in Qandahar and Helmand provinces knew nothing of the September 11th attacks. Further, they reported that nearly 40% of all those surveyed believe the war is being waged to "destroy Islam" and others, Afghanistan itself. If after ten years a majority of Afghans from the most war-torn areas remain unaware of the US's principle argument for the war, I cannot accept that the 2001 invasion held significant political meaning for the majority of Afghan women.

Beyond this, Afghanistan is a country where the majority of its citizens, nearly 78% according to a 2008 UNICEF report, live in the provinces. This also means that a majority of Afghanis have extremely limited access to civil infrastructure like electricity, running water, roads or means for transportation. Poverty rates are amongst the highest in the world, and literacy amongst the lowest. In the case of women, statistics show that only 12.6% are literate, most of them residing in Kabul and Herat. Several surveys do demonstrate an increase in enrollment of girls in secondary schools in Kabul compared to ten years ago. They also find that provinces not involved in the heaviest fighting report improvements for women when it comes to freedom of movement outside the home. Still, many claim that these changes are only cosmetic, and that conditions for women have either stayed the same as they were under the Taliban, or have worsened as a direct result of insecurities caused by war.

Mokhtareizadeh argues that "in a situation where living is far from assured, liberation is unthinkable"-- but then insists that the narrative of "liberation of women" (recently graphically reinvoked by that infamous July 2010 Time magazine cover story) is not only irrelevant but is also profoundly pernicious:

Many post-colonial theorists contend that discursive change must be a precondition for structural transformation. In other words a process of decolonization necessitates not only the transformation of the political and economic apparatus of colonialism, but also its legitimizing narratives. I see this issue of freeing the women in Afghanistan through war as nothing more than a narrative used to legitimize the apparatus of imperialism, and unfortunately it is not only the political elites who are recycling this story.

There was a great and sobering opportunity, following the September 11 attacks, for all those "meaning makers" (journalists, academics, artists, etc.) to seriously contend with the ideology of American exceptionalism that has kept much of the US public naïve about the injurious role US foreign policy has played in the world. Instead public discourse was concentrated on otiose queries like, "why do they hate us?" And determined that the principle issue between ‘the West' and ‘the Rest' were civilizational in nature - i.e. Samuel Huntingdon's foolish "clash of civilizations" theory. Thus, it is no surprise that many people were persuaded that the U.S. must help the abject Muslim women in need of liberation. Notice the refusal by many leftists to critically reflect on the perils of bestowing cultural icons (e.g., the veiled Muslim woman) on serpentine historical and political realities.

Rather than seeking to ‘save' the women of Afghanistan, with the superiority it implies and violence it affects, solidarity activists can critically engage by making a concerted effort to recognize their own responsibility to address the injustices that forcefully shape the world in which we live. Critical engagement also involves struggling to understand and manage cultural differences. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod specifies actions we can take , "What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts...that shape their desires and understanding of the world... I do not know how many feminists who felt good about saving Afghan women from the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth or contemplating sacrificing their own consumption radically so that [other] women could have some chance of having what I do believe should be a universal human right - the right to freedom from the structural violence of global inequality and from the ravages of war, the everyday right to having enough to eat, having homes for their families...have the strength and security to work out, within their communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live a good life, which might very well include changing the ways those communities are organized."

For me the issue of what constitutes ‘freedom' or ‘liberation' is something subject to historical context, and must be understood in the light of capacities and desires specific to the community in which one lives. If we wish to ‘liberate' Afghan women from disembodiment and violence, what vision of life after liberation are we asking them to be liberated to? Nowhere on the planet have we yet been able to significantly challenge the androcentric social system of patriarchy that is at the heart of disparate power relations between the genders. Not in Afghanistan, and not here at home.

The individuals and corporations who are determined to pursue the war cynically use the orientalist narrative to legitimize the war. Destroying the orientalist narrative may actually be harder to accomplish than ending the war. But while destroying the narrative probably wouldn't be enough to end the war, certainly, given the many false assumptions the US government's deployment of the narrative is embedded in, doing so would make the war more recognizable for what it really is. In any case, I think we need to work harder on changing the stories--and as Andrea says, not underestimate the importance of doing so.

Queens and their "long-term storage organs"

Whoa. Biologists have been making movies of sperm duking it out on inside the "seminal receptacles of insect queens' reproductive tracts as they jostle for a place in the queen's "long-term storage organ." Elizabeth Pennski reports in the 19 March issue of Science

Females sometimes mate more than once in quick succession, filling their reproductive tract with rival sperm that must compete for access to unfertilized eggs. Two groups now show details of what life must be like for those sperm, with one offering unprecedented movies of this sperm competition. On page 1506, Susanne P.A. den Boer of the university of Copenhagen demonstrates that such rivalries in some ants and bees have led to the evolution of seminal fluids containing toxins that impede rival sperm and to female fluids that counter these toxins. Another team, reporting online in Science, followed red- or green-glowing sperm as they jockeyed their way through the reproductive tracts of fruit flies. Both papers drive home the point that "the competition between males continues in a very fierce way," inside the female, says Tommaso Pizzari, an evolutionary biologist at the Unviersity of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Hmm. It seems a bit more interesting than just the usual narrative of male sperm fighting among themselves. First, there's the matter of reproductive tracts possessing "sperm storage organs" (hell, why not just call them "sperm banks"?)-- which I can't say I'd ever heard of before. Second, the sperm fight among themselves in order to secure a place in the female's "sperm-storage organ" (which doesn't really fit the (largely discredited) courtship narrative of insemination). The third interesting thing is that the queen secretes a fluid that preserves the sperm that make it into the sperm-storage organ from the toxins meant to kill off rival sperm:

Den Boer, University of Copenhagen colleague Jacobus Boomsma, and Boris Baer, now at the University of Perth in Australia, find sperm in some bees and ants do more than physically displace rivals. ...For the multiple mating species studied, two leafcutter ants and the honey bee, seminal fluid form a given male enhanced the survival time of its own sperm in a lab dish but damaged unrelated sperm and even sperm from a brother. Adding spermathecal fluid that an queens make within their reproductive tract countered these effects, say Boomsma....

....Once the sperm reach their destination for long-term storage, the female apparently wants to keep all the sperm healthy and has evolved ways to counter the seminal fluid. This study "beautifully reveals just how nuanced reproduction can be," says Pitnick.

I seem to be hearing Mae West's voice speaking... What's that, Mae? Did I just hear you say " It's not the men in your life that matters, it's the life in your men?"

PolicySpeak vs. Narrative

Linguist George Lakoff, considering the monumental degree to which the public discussion of health care policy in the US has been permeated and distorted with mid- and disinformation, does not focus on the one inescapable given, viz. that the lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries (the medical-technical business complex) will stop at nothing to preserve the corrupt status quo, but rather asks this question:

Barack Obama ran the best-organized and best-framed presidential campaign in history. How is it possible that the same people who did so well in the campaign have done so badly on health care?

....There has been a major drop in support for the president throughout the country, with angry mobs disrupting town halls and the right wing airing its views with vehemence nonstop on radio and tv all day every day. As the NY Times reports, Organizing for America (the old Obama campaign network) can’t even get its own troops out to work for the President’s proposal.

What has been going wrong?

His answer is simple: instead of offering the public at large a narrative, the Obama Administration has focused on the politicians:

The answer is simple and unfortunate: The president put both the conceptual framing and the messaging for his health care plan in the hands of policy wonks. This led to twin disasters.

. . . . . .

The policymakers focus on the list, not the unifying idea. So Obama’s and Axelrod’s statements last Sunday were just the lists without the unifying institution. And without a powerful institution, the insurance companies will just whittle away at enforcement of any such list, and a future Republican administration will just get rid of the regulators, reassigning them or eliminating their jobs.

Why do policymakers think this way?

One: The reality of how Congress is lobbied. Legislators are lobbied to be against particular features, depending on their constituencies. Blue Dogs are pressured by the right’s communication system operating in their districts. Congressional leaders have a challenge: Keep the eye of centrists and Blue Dogs on the central idea, despite the pressures of right-wing communications and lobbyists’ contributions.

Two: In classical logic, Leibniz’ Law takes an entity as being just a collection of properties. As if you were no more than eyes, legs, arms, and so on, taken separately. Without a public institution turning a unifying idea into a powerful reality, health care becomes just a collection of reforms to be attacked, undermined, and gotten around year after year.

Three: Current budget-making assumptions. Health is actually systematic in character. Health is implicated in just about all aspects of our culture: agriculture, the food industry, advertising, education, business, the distribution of wealth, sports, and so on. Keeping it as a line item — what figure do you put down on the following lines — misses the systemic nature of health. The image of Budget Director Peter Orszag running constantly in and out of Senator Max Baucus’ office shows how the systemic nature of health has been turned into a list of items and costs. Without a sense of the whole, and an institution responsible for it, health will be line-itemed to death.

In other words, the lobbyists' story is simpler, more direct, and emotionally urgent, while the Obama Administration doesn't have a story, but a list.

Lakoff elaborates:

PolicySpeak is the principle that: If you just tell people the policy facts, they will reason to the right conclusion and support the policy wholeheartedly.

PolicySpeak is the principle behind the President’s new Reality Check Website. To my knowledge, the Reality Check Website, has not had a reality check. That is, the administration has not hired a first-class cognitive psychologist to take subjects who have been convinced by right-wing myths and lies, have them read the Reality Check website, and see if the Reality Check website has changed their minds a couple of days or a week later. I have my doubts, but do the test.

To many liberals, PolicySpeak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest.

But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind PolicySpeak is just false. Certainly reason should be used. It’s just that you should use real reason, the way people really think. Certainly the truth should be told. It’s just that it should be told so it makes sense to people, resonates with them, and inspires them to act. Certainly new media should be used. It’s just that a system of communications should be constructed and used effectively.

I believe that what went wrong is (a) the choice of PolicySpeak and (b) the decision to depend on the campaign apparatus (blogs, Town Hall meetings, presidential appearances, grassroots support) instead of setting up an adequate communications system.

And here is his suggestion for a narrative he thinks would work:

Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people.

The insurance companies are doing their worst, spreading lies in an attempt to maintain their profits and keep Americans from getting the care they so desperately need. You, our citizens, must be the heroes. Stand up, and speak up, for an American plan.

He also suggests changing the language the Administration uses to talk about health care policy, and then reviews what he sees as the major mistakes the Administration has made. The remainder of his essay discusses "the Conservative Communication System" and the Culture War.

The issue is so personal, the villains so clear, that I never have understood why progressive change on this issue has been impossible in the US for so long.

Narratives of Hope

This morning, walking from home to the Online Cafe, taking in the array of Obama signs displayed before many of the houses and apartment buildings I passed, I thought about what what different things one of the key words/keywords of Obama's campaign, "hope," mean for the heterogeneity of citizens that I imagine are choosing to vote for him. Ninety percent of the US public are said to believe that the US is "on the wrong track." Such a belief isn't, of course, accompanied by a clear notion of what the "right track" would necessarily be. But the sense of "wrongness" (which such a characterization implies), without hope, can lead to despair. And although despair can be and has often been exploited by wily, unscrupulous politicians, it is, as with individual human beings, liable to a degree of chaos and disaster that en masse soon has the possibility of becoming intolerable and thus difficult to sustain as the new status quo.

"Hope," as a refusal of despair, allows us (finally!) to grab hold of the notion that it doesn't have to be this way. For decades, now, many people in the US have believed (or behaved as though they believed) that what is simply must be: that substantial change (except for the worse!) is simply impossible. Granted, the incompetents at the helm who've crashed the US economy are still insisting that their navigational principles are fundamentally sound. Rigging the system so that all wealth flows upward, into the hands of a very few, is, they keep telling us, the only way it can be. (Any other way is "socialism," which they've been telling us for almost two decades now was thoroughly discredited by the USSR's defeat in the Cold War.) But regardless of what the incompetents are saying, it is a fact that that key Obama word, "hope," carries with it numerous, partially glimpsed narratives that pose alternatives to What Is.

One of such narratives, because it involves race, isn't being discussed very openly where white people are present. And yet, it is absolutely palpable. An article in today's Toronto Star, King's Dream Nears Reality in Cradle of Civil Rights, focuses on it, though curiously without explicitly spelling it out.

On the Sunday before election day in America, politics and religion do mix. And few places are more fervently engaged than this town [Selma, Alabama], steeped in civil rights lore.

[Young boys play in front of the Brown Chapel, in Selma, Ala., Nov. 2, 2008. The church played a pivotal role in civil rights marches in 1965.

"It's your season to be blessed," sings the choir of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. "God made you a promise, you stood the test."

Parishioners rise to join the refrain and there's little doubt that many are thinking about the "promise" of tomorrow's election, with their favoured candidate Barack Obama leading in the polls.

"He's opened up the window and poured you out a blessing." Everyone's singing now, rocking in frenzied holiness.

"It's your season to be blessed."

The article then moves to another church a few blocks away, with a "less effervescent audience" [clearly the reporter is not a church-goer], where someone visiting (from a Catholic Church) for the occasion remarks

"I feel like Dr. King is looking down," Dorothea says, King's bust towering down from the monument in front of the church. "I feel like he's reached that mountaintop. He had that dream; now it's coming to reality."

Back at Ebenezer, the choir has given way to Rev. Frederick Reese, 79, and still pastor. A legend, who got his head cracked open trying to march from Selma to Montgomery on Bloody Sunday. His sermon plumbs the familiar biblical story of the Jews' deliverance from Egyptian bondage.

And within minutes, Reese and his audience are in a holy synchronization.

Like the Children of Israel "we've endured many difficulties, but the Lord has brought us to possess the land," he intones.

"You can hold out a little while longer," he implores.

Another alternative narrative can be glimpsed in a quote from Obama in an article in the UK's Independent:

Barack Obama is promising a $150bn "Apollo project" to bring jobs and energy security to the US through a new alternative energy economy, if his final push for votes brings victory in the presidential election on Tuesday.

"That's going to be my number one priority when I get into office," Mr Obama has said of his "green recovery" plans. Making his arguments in a radio address yesterday, the Democratic favourite promised: "If you give me your vote on Tuesday, we won't just win this election. Together, we will change this country and change the world."

The election has come during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but he declared: "We'll invest $15bn a year over the next decade in renewable energy, creating five million new green jobs that pay well, can't be outsourced and help end our dependence on foreign oil." The appeal of the idea that clean energy could help to kick-start the economy is such that Mr Obama's Republican opponent, John McCain, has also promised "millions" of green jobs if he wins.

. . . . .

In the mayhem of the election campaign, Mr Obama has yet to deliver a major speech about his renewable energy plans. But he has pledged to create five million new "green collar jobs", largely by greatly expanding the use of renewable energy, which should supply a tenth of America's electricity within four years, insulating a million homes a year and to put a million rechargeable "plug-in hybrid cars" on the road by 2015.

He also wants the US motor industry to take a lead in producing environmentally friendly vehicles rather than 4x4s. He promises to invest in clean engine technology, to increase America's hitherto lax car fuel economy standards by 4 per cent a year, and to boost sales of green cars by giving a $7,000 tax credit to people who buy them. And he has pledged to convert the White House fleet to plug-in hybrids within a year of taking office.

There is growing acceptance from economists in the US that a Green "New Deal" should be a fundamental part of the solution to the financial crisis and to America's long-term security concerns.

At the same time, British ministers are planning a huge increase in environmentally friendly investment as a central part of its economic rescue plan. Japan's Prime Minister, Taro Aso, has called the green economy "a great opportunity for new growth". And plans are being laid in the Australian treasury for a 3,000 per cent growth in green jobs over the next decades.

But it is the American plans that could have the greatest effect in dragging the world economy out of crisis. Mr Obama believes that a new clean-energy economy "can be the engine that drives us into the future in the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades".

The head of Mr Obama's transition team, John Podesta, has called for "a new vision for the economic revitalisation of the nation and a restoration of America's leadership in the world", adding: "We must seize this precious opportunity to mobilise the country and the international community towards a brighter and more prosperous future."

The beauty of such a proposal is its absolute departure from two this-is-the-way-it-has-to-be narratives that have been dominating the political landscape since 1980. One of these narratives is the insistence that any opposition to the ever-increasing consumption of Oil is unthinkable; and the other, of course, is the rejection of any possible version of the New Deal's WPA program in the post-WWII US. We've been told over and over that it was an aberration and that it failed-- that wartime-spending was what bailed out the US economy, not government-provided jobs focused on building domestic infrastructure.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that tomorrow will see the start of a lot of new narratives, previously "unthinkable." Will we be entering the grammar of What Could be?

The "event" and narrative

One of the academic journals I regularly read, differences, has published a special issue, In the Event, which centers on the very notion of "the Event," with particular reference to Katrina. I'm finding this interesting reading (though I suppose that anyone who consciously hates theory would not share my response to the issue). The whole notion of "the Event" has long been a matter of concern for historians and philosophers, but it's not usually something anyone who's neither a philosopher nor a historian ever think about. An "event," for historians, is a singularity or a rupture. In the US, one could make the argument that cable news has pretty much fostered the impression that the Event doesn't exist-- "breaking news" is more likely to be a piece of utterly banal trivia as it is to be anything anyone would care about in a day's or a week's much less a decade's time, and a constant stream of shrilly proclaimed "breaking news" has pretty much led us to conclude that nothing in the public sphere is more important than anything else. And yet for many of us, there's been a sense over the last couple of weeks that we are in the middle of such an "event." But whether the global financial meltdown will qualify among future historians as an "event" remains to be seen.

The journal issue is conceptually grounded by Hayden White's article, "The Historical Event," which immediately follows the introduction. White is known for his important work on how the structures of narrative influence the writing and production of History. As he notes, the famed Annales School of history attacked the whole notion of the event:

"Event-history," it was held, was little more than entertainment and little less than fantasy insofar as it fed the dreams and illusions of a bankrupt humanism. In fact, the French historian Fernand Braudel tried to diminish the focus on the event in historical research because he saw it as the mainstay of a narrativist approach to history, which made history into a drama and substituted emotional gratification for the intellectual satisfaction of science in the process.

Reading this, I'm struck by this rather nice irony: thirty years ago, the hot new thing among up-and-coming young historians was writing "microhistories"-- that is, recovering the narratives of the everyday, ordinary people who never figure in history, from archival documents. This passion for telling the lives of ordinary people was a direct result of the work of the Annales School, which gave historians new ways of thinking and resources they hadn't previously had. Oh, sure, a few antiquarian types had told such stories as "curiosities," but because of the Annales work, this new approach was much more sophisticated than the antiquarian curiosity narratives. And of course the new approach continued to defy the assumption that diplomatic history (as the Great Events method was called) was the only True History. And if I recall the discussions of the day correctly, most of the historians interested in such narratives also wanted to make scholarly texts of history (again) readable by nonhistorians.

White notes something that philosophers of history have been worrying about for some time:

The historiological notion of event is much closer to the dramatic or rather dramatistic than it is to any possible scientific conception thereof. Historical narratives run much too smoothly to support any claim to realistic representation of the events they feature as their subject matter. Unlike the kind of natural events (or sets of events) studied by the physical sciences, real historical events run rather roughly and raggedly...

The Annales School, of course, claimed the name of "science" for its practice of "history." The typical Annales work examines "being" or structures rather than "events." A couple of paragraphs later, White discusses Alain Badiou's take on the Event:

[Badiou] assumes that being is everything that is the case and that there is nothing that is not the case. Nothing new can ever be added to being and therefore no event-- understood as an eruption of something coming from outside the totality of being-- could ever take place. And yet events seem to take place all the time, at least to observers or chroniclers of happenings in the real world. This "seeming to take place" could be construed as an event, but it would belong to consciousness rather than to the world exterior to it.

So how is this kind of event possible? As I understand it, Badiou thinks that events seem to occur because there is a disparity between being, on the one side, and the knowledge of being, on the other. Event occurs when knowledge of some hitherto unknown aspect of being as to be added to what has been previously known about being. It is, as it were, this "shock" to the knowledge-system by the insistent nature of a newly discovered truth about being that registers as an event to consciousness. In reality, Badiou argues, a new bit of knowledge is only apparently new: it is like the discovery of a hitherto unknown prime number in mathematics. It was always "there" (which is to say, was always "nowhere" but among the universe of numbers) only awaiting (as it were) that computer which is endlessly generation new prime numbers of all but infinite length for its registration.

After further discussion, White comes to the interesting conclusion that "specifically historical events" cannot occur "before a specifically historical kind of knowledge existed" because "it would have no ground or context against which to display its newness." In other words, whether certain happenings are classified as events has to do with consciousness.

White then traces the invention of historical event to Herodotus and then notes that it was the Romans who gave us the word historia-- "with its primary meaning of tale or story understood as the kind of account 'proper' to the rendition of a series of events into a 'history'." And this, White says, is where

the idea of history as a truthful account of events that really happened in the past cast in the form of a story with a plot is achieved. And this provides at least one way of identifying a specifically historical event. As Paul Ricoeur puts it: a historical event is a real event capable of serving as an element of a "plot." Or, as Louis O. Mink used to say: a historical event is one that can truthfully be described in such a way as to serve as an element of a narrative."

And so,

In order for a given singular event, set, or series of events to qualify as "historical," the event, set, or series must also be validly describable as if they had the attributes of elements in a plot of a story.

Which is to say, without a narrative, there's no event.

We might also then say: if there's no narrative that a singularity can fit into, if the singularity doesn't fit any of the stories historians are telling, then it can't be perceived as an event. Lack of narrative = invisibility. (But we all knew that already, right?)

Much of this discussion of the relation of event to narrative is familiar to me from the historiography course I took as a graduate student in history. But for the last twenty-eight years I've been thinking of narrative from the perspective of a writer, reader, and critic of fiction. There's much in the two perspectives that are similar. As a graduate student, I read fiercely for what I was taught to call "underlying assumptions." As a fiction critic, I'm always nailing the subtext. In the former case, the "underlying assumptions" often account not only for the conclusion the historian draws but also for the facts selected as relevant to a historical account. In the latter case, instead of the "conclusion," one finds the ideological implications of the work; and instead of facts selected, one finds choice of characters and circumstances and events described.

As a first-year graduate, writing a paper on the Roman Republic, I had the conceptual epiphany that every historian-in-training must experience. Suddenly I understood: history is about change! And that's why professional historians don't consider antiquarian histories interesting or useful. Curiously, science fiction is about change, too. (I've long believed that my jumping from historical scholarship to writing science fiction was no accident.) The doxa has it that in fiction there can be no story without change-- that a piece of fiction in which nothing happens is a vignette, not a narrative. (Which is not the same thing, of course, as saying it has to have a plot: it doesn't.) Ought written histories to be plotless in order to make them less susceptible to ideological manipulation and the inauthenticity that accompanies any narrative arc? Ought fictions to be plotless in order to free them from enslavement to the same stories about the same characters told in endless repetition? Some of the issues do seem to be the same...

I can't help wondering: is a historical figure in a traditional narrative of history, however faithfully and carefully rendered, any more real than a fictional character? Consider that very most personal of histories, the autobiography: writing an autobiography requires fictionalizing the self. (And let's not even go into the question of the authenticity of the "self.") Even if every fact put into an autobiography were documented, a degree of fictionalizing would still be necessary. If that is the case for autobiography, surely it must also be the case for biography. The fictionalizing isn't about telling lies or making up "facts" out of whole cloth: it's about imposing a narrative arc, a story on facts that are only fragments of a larger picture that can never be fully constructed.

If any of this interests you, check out White's article. He goes to an interesting place after he's laid down the groundwork I've quoted from. (It's Volume 19, No.2)