et cetera

There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with Harper’s, and I like very much that the brief biographical note appended to the article does not mention The New Yorker.

An aside.
One of these days I will write a long essay here about Harper’s and The New Yorker, explaining why Harper’s is clearly superior, flawed though it is by the omnipresence of Lewis Lapham’s imperious ego.

Another aside.
Lazily entering the phrase “new yorker” into my browser search bar just now, I forgot that I had it temporarily pointed at the OED, and discovered that the second possible disambiguation there is:

B. adj. (attrib.). Found in or characteristic of the magazine The New Yorker (founded 1925), noted for its urbane and sharply observed view of American life.

Followed by the following quotes:

1934 Fortune Aug. 75/1 No advertising man is believed, by the editors, ever to have understood a New Yorker joke. 1948 Hearst’s Internat. May 175/1 Literary critics and editors of other magazines are always referring to ‘The New Yorker style of writing’. 1959 Times Lit. Suppl. 2 Jan. 4/2 He surveys the established Old Guard.., the new ‘realists’.., the New Yorker School. 1992 New Yorker 3 Feb. 65/1 (advt.) The design is distinguished and very New Yorker: Eustace Tilley-patterned endpapers.

(A search for “harper’s” results in the suggestion to try harping, vbl. n.)

End asides.
One of the most remarkable sections of the article is a passage briefly enumerating the stories of the bodies this couple has found. The following is a small part of this:

Some favourite recent searches that have landed people here:

• whirled music from corrugated tube
• this thought is not mine
• why sport?
• petty anonymous writer
• anonymuncule
• first chicken

We learn about the perks that accompany a Nobel Prize, including a living alarm clock in the form of a white-robed soprano sporting a tiara of lit candles.

Jerry A. Coyne, “The Complex James Watson“, in The Times Literary Supplement, 12 December 2007.

In which Jonathan Bennett refers to all females working on conditionals at the time of his writing by employing a single proper name:

Whenever I report what someone ‘told me’, ‘warned me’, or the like, I always mean that he or Dorothy did so in a personal communication.

Bennett, Jonathan. 2003. A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.viii.

WHEN BOTH ARE STRANGERS

Let us say the young Lakes from Chicago are about to move to Strangetown, where John Lake will manage the new branch office his firm has just opened. Business is the usual reason for moving to a new community. John will, of course, meet a few people through business. If the town is small and characteristically friendly, Mary will probably get to know her neighbours quickly. The Lakes will become members of the church and, by participating in a variety of church and community activities, gradually enlarge their acquaintance.

Emily Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 10th Edition, 1960, p. 272.

On a tour through Iowa farming communities, Rudolph W. Giuliani endured the test of making small talk.

From the Times news feed for Adam Nagourney, “Iowans Check for Dirt Under Giuliani’s Nails“, New York Times, 20 August 2007.

Among those Americans who care enough about politics to have registered themselves with The Democratic Party and intend to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary elections, 7 percent think that Barack Obama is a Muslim (CBS Poll). I find it very difficult to interpret this sort of information. In particular, I am curious how stable this judgement is among the 7 percent. Suppose each person who responded that Obama was Muslim was asked a further question concerning why the media has not paid as much attention to Obama’s religion as to his race, and then given the chance to revise their answer to the initial question. Of course in order for this not to be a clue that they had answered incorrectly, each question in the poll would have to be followed with a similar question about the presuppositions or entailments of the response provided. In this way the poll would become deeper, in the sense that it would elicit people to provide opinions they had been forced to integrate in some albeit minor way with other beliefs they possess. Would the percentage differ at all from 7 percent? We might be optimistic that it would drop substantially or pessimistic that it would drop not at all. I initially started writing this with the optimistic view in mind—surely, I thought, these 7 percent have provided a snap response, perhaps fooled by the existence of the question in the poll into assigning a higher probability to the chance of Obama being Muslim than they would otherwise (here it is important whether the question was a request to identify Obama’s religion or a request to answer yes or no to whether Obama is a Muslim, but the CBS report does not provide this information). Moreover, I optimistically thought, a little prompting for some inference to the best explanation ought to help them out here—the best explanation for the media not covering Obama’s religion in any significant way would certainly be that he is not Muslim. But then I remembered recently reading a very interesting paper by Tom Kelly called “Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization”, forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy [PDF], which has the following abstract:

Suppose that you and I disagree about some non-straightforward matter of fact (say, about whether capital punishment tends to have a deterrent effect on crime). Psychologists have demonstrated the following striking phenomenon: if you and I are subsequently exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on the question, doing so tends to increase the extent of our initial disagreement. That is, in response to exactly the same evidence, each of us grows increasingly confident of his or her original view; we thus become increasingly polarized as our common evidence increases. I consider several alternative models of how people reason about newly-acquired evidence which seems to disconfirm their prior beliefs. I then explore the normative implications of these models for the phenomenon in question.

The particular psychological evidence to which Kelly refers does not immediately bear on the question I am considering here, but it is clear that the evidence suggests a quite broad pessimism about our capabilities as epistemic agents. After all, this evidence shows that prior belief can swamp the proper assessment of new evidence, while in the case I have suggested I was initially optimistic that people would revise their beliefs simply by further reflection, with any new evidence restricted entirely to the presuppositions of the secondary questions (for example, that the media has not paid as much attention to Obama’s religion as to his race). So perhaps we should be pessimistic, not merely that the number would stay at 7 percent, but that the auxiliary questions would entrench the confidence of the 7 percent in their false beliefs.

Now I am no epistemologist or cognitive scientist, but I have a theory about what explains these phenomena, and it is that as humans we are too quick to invoke potential explanations and too slow to evaluate all of our evidence in the way suggested by standard theories of confirmation. Or to put it using a different metaphor, we weigh potential explanations too heavily and the evidence itself too lightly. Or again, we prefer to have all our phenomena explained by a weakly supported theory than to have most of our phenomena explained by a well supported theory. Think here of our penchant for conspiracy theories [PDF]. It strikes me that I could quickly think of a host of potential evolutionary explanations for this, but then I would have exhibited the feature of human psychology I have purported to describe to an exorbitantly ironic degree, rather than the merely blandly ironic degree at which I currently stand. (Note that this would have the benefit of giving an evolutionary explanation for why people want to give evolutionary explanations for everything under the sun. I leave it as an exercise whether this circle would be virtuous or vicious). So instead I offer a nice example of the way we proliferate explanations endlessly: Why do reporters use the code “- 30 -” to sign off their articles? (See Mark Eli Kalderon’s posts on the topic here, here, and here).

Of course this is all beside the point. Election ballots do not come with prompts to revise your beliefs in optimal ways, they simply come with names and checkboxes. Obama? Sounds dangerously like Osama, I’m not going to vote for him, now let me see, John McCain, now there’s a good American name, he invented the Big Mac didn’t he? Tick.

Women compete in a high-heel sprint in St. Petersburg on 21 July 2007. Approximately 100 women took part in the race wearing high-heeled shoes with a required minimum height of 9 centimetres to compete for a shopping voucher worth 50,000 roubles (approximately 2,000 US dollars). Via Feminist Philosophers.

I was lucky enough to come by the last ticket to the last performance of the Peter Weiss play Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade—or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade—in the recent production by The Classical Theatre of Harlem. Along with the definitive Gate Theatre production of Waiting for Godot, which N and I saw for her birthday last year, this was one of the best performances I have seen for a very long time. At once visceral and conceptual, in your face and ambivalent, Marat/Sade is that most endangered of aesthetic creatures—a work satisfying in every last respect. In the Oxford English Dictionary entry under theatre, theater, n. there appears the following paragraph:

(b) Phrases: theatre-in-the-round: see ROUND n. 5d; Theatre of Cruelty [tr. F. théâtre de la cruauté (A. Artaud (1932) Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté)], a collective term for plays in which the dramatist seeks to communicate a sense of pain, suffering, and evil through the portrayal of extreme physical violence; Theatre of the Absurd, a collective term for plays (chiefly French) portraying the futility and anguish of man’s struggle in a senseless and inexplicable world (cf. ABSURD n.); also fig.; Theatre of Fact, documentary drama.

Marat/Sade satisfies every one of these definitions. The play is set with spectators surrounding the stage (theatre in the round), Weiss was strongly influenced by Artaud (theatre of cruelty), the play is an icon of anti-theatre and includes a philosophical dialogue between de Sade and Marat that makes L’Étranger seem like self-help (theatre of the absurd), and—perhaps most remarkably—the entire play, including the play within a play structure, is based in part on the real life story of de Sade, who spent thirteen years in the insane asylum at Charenton (theatre of fact). As if that weren’t enough, it’s also a musical.

The central among many themes in the play is the tension between human nature and political progress. de Sade on the one hand expresses a cynical, atoms in the void determinism while ordering his actors around the stage like puppets, while Marat—seated in a bathtub in the middle of the stage (the real version of which can be seen in the Musée Grévin), pen and paper in hand, for the duration of the play—urges on the French revolution. Eventually Marat is stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday, who visits him under the guise of offering inside information about an imminent counter-revolutionary uprising. Symbolically, the play represents the triumph of realism over idealism. Weiss, having lived through the—for him, personally heartbreaking—failure of communism, clearly sides with de Sade over Marat, and the play delivers an aesthetic statement designed to ram this message home to a complicit audience.

The New York debut of the play was reviewed in the April 1966 edition of Harper’s (p. 124):

It was reported that two women fainted at different performances, a third had a heart attack, and I know of at least one gentleman who stalked up the aisle midway through the evening, muttering, “It’s nothing but a Goddamn freak show,” to his wife.

There is also an interesting review of this same production by Stuart Hampshire from The New York Review of Books in February 1966, though he gets it all wrong, mainly by misunderstanding the relationship between the theatricality of the play and the political themes. The problem is that he completely ignores the historical context in which Weiss is writing—though in his defence, the 3 volume Weiss masterpiece Die Ästhetik des Widerstands was still more than a decade from seeing the light of day. He also, bizarrely, says that “the audience will leave the theater without being assaulted or disturbed”. I don’t know how this could be possible; at the Harlem production, I was literally soaked with an industrial strength hose sprayed by one of the asylum inmates into the crowd. The highlight of the production, though, was the end. The play finishes with a riot, the asylum inmates revolting against the director of the asylum, the Abbé de Coulmier—another real life character–who is killed while his daughter is raped. The inmates then flee, leaving corpses strewn around the caged stage. It isn’t clear whether the play has ended. Very, very gradually, the corpses stand up and sarcastically applaud the audience, looking into our eyes, and walk away. de Sade strolls casually off stage, smirking. Eventually the crowd, deciding there is no further entertainment forthcoming, starts to dissipate.

I was reminded of the play when Mike and Giovanni and I recently visited the Strand, where I was delighted to find an autographed copy of David Markson’s The Last Novel. Markson writes that Artaud himself “spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums” (p. 32) and died “sitting up at the foot of his bed” (p. 128). On the way out of the store there was a card lying alone on the top of some books, with a print of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat.

Poetic harmony demanded that I steal it.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789.

I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in good health and spirits; codifying like a dragon.

Bentham, age 82, from a letter to a friend.

A death-mask made after Bentham died age 85.

(Quote from letter, and image of death-mask, from Laurence Hutton, “A Collection of Death-Masks“, in Harper’s, October 1892, pp. 781-793).