Free Will and Determinism

 The Choice is clear

Faced with a choice between free will and determinism, the choice has always been clear.  Neither our legal system nor our morality could exist without free will.  No-one could be accused of a crime or a sin, unless we accept that they had free will, that they had a choice.  In recent eras, the conviction that determinism is wrong has been reinforced by expressions like "biological determinism" and "social determinism."  

Biological determinism

"Biological determinism" is widely recognized as the fallacious belief which claims that the limitations and diminished social status of women are determined by their biology, not by patriarchal societies and cultures.  In fact, there is a schism inside feminism with French feminists recognizing some role for biology and American feminists denying biology.

Social Determinism

"Social determinism" allows the idea that members of the upper classes of society are in fact superior. Some 19th-century novels, in particular, Dickens' Oliver Twist, have been criticized for the alleged subtext that certain characters, like Oliver, were morally superior and immune from corruption because they were the biological offspring of a wealthy ruling elite. 

Christian philosophy

Christian philosophy has been particularly challenged by the incompatible, mutually exclusive dichotomy of an omniscient, omnipotent God and individuals who have free will.  If God knows what I'm going to do and chooses to allow me to do it, how can I be blamed for whatever I do?  Partially in response, John Calvin elaborated a new kind of deterministic Christianity which became the basis of Puritanism.  According to Calvinism, God has already chosen his "elect" and there is limited possibility for atonement for most of humanity. Anathema for Calvin was the Catholic practice of indulgences; that is, that I could buy my way into heaven by purchasing another gold chalice for the church. 

Puritanism

The word "puritanism" was first used, quite mockingly, to describe the most extreme anti-Catholics, who wanted to "purify" Christianity of any vestige of Catholicism.  One of the causes of the American revolution was that Puritans who had ventured to North America in part to practice their particularly fervent "Protestantism" (meaning "protest" against Catholicism) discovered that, under the Quebec Act, the English government had granted a landmass stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Mississippi Valley to French Catholics.

Physics and free will

Just when I was ready to relax and accept free will as an obvious state of affairs, I was introduced to Sabine Hossenfelder's "You don't have free will, but don't worry." In her vlog, Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, presents straightforward, no-nonsense analyses, explanations and critiques of the current state of physics.  Her style--which is key to the vlog's appeal--is to do away with uncertainty and waffling.  She offers her opinions and judgments as ineluctable facts, and the alternatives as "rubbish" (one of her favourite words).  She is, as it were, the Judge Judy of physics.

I must confess that while I find it relatively easy to deny the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God, I find it much harder to dismiss the laws of physics. Human brains and human bodies, Hossenfelder argues, are collections of particles and atoms and molecules.  We might feel that we are making choices and changing reality by exercising free will, but particles, atoms and molecules will do what particles, atoms and molecules will do.  This is what our brains do; they follow the laws of physics.  Our feelings of having made a decision are chronologically after our brains have completed the chemical reactions necessary in decision making. To put it simply--as Hossenfelder does--the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics.

The argument is so counterintuitive that it is hard to credit.  However, counterintuitive does not mean wrong.  The argument aligns with Pierre-Simon Laplace's Demon, as described in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture:  On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself.  Laplace (1749 - 1825), the "French atheist mathematician," claimed that a Demon who had "perfect knowledge" of the present would be able to perfectly predict the future.

 Laplace’s Demon could say with confidence what the probability of every future history will be, and no amount of human volition would be able to change it. There is no room for human choice, so there is no such thing as free will. We are just material objects who obey the laws of nature.

Thought Experiments on free will

Despite the fact that Hossenfelder is not only a theoretical physicist but a German theoretical physicist, she does not seem very taken with Gedankenexperiments ("thought experiments" in English). As a counter-argument to Hossenfeld's, I performed the following simple thought experiment. I placed both of my hands on my desk. I told myself that I would then decide which hand--left or right--I would raise. After reflection, I raised my left hand. According to Hossenfelder, my decision . . . actually there was no "decision," my raising of my left hand was determined at the Big Bang. Like the falling of a domino in a chain of dominoes, the raising of my left hand was an inevitable consequence of the tumbling of the first domino, the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe.

Don't worry, be happy!

What does my thought experiment prove?  Not much--except perhaps how extremely counterintuitive the denial of free will is.  I'm left to wonder if every word that Shakespeare wrote was the inevitable consequence of interacting particles--not a reflection of the brilliance of the Bard.  Diminishing Shakespeare does seem to diminish us all.  But Hossenfelder tells us "not to worry."  We can think of our lives as stories or films, and we can carry on believing in our free wills until we arrive happily at the end of the story which is our inevitable, pre-determined conclusion.

Free Will as legal fiction

Sean Carroll presents the inescapable argument that life as we humans know it would be impossible without the concept of free will.  The legal system, human psychology, human sociology and human life, itself, would all be quite baseless without free will.  Whatever you might choose to do or not do in life would mean nothing because choice itself is an illusion and all consequences are already determined.  However, the fact that the concept of free will is necessary does not prove that free will actually exists.  Free will might, in fact, be another example of a "legal fiction"  (see my post on Terrorism and Madness); that is, something we pretend to believe because it serves a legal purpose.   If so, free will is the legal fiction of all legal fictions.

 

Free Will in The Swerve

In Stephen Greenblatt's remarkable research into Lucretius, the Roman poet/philosopher, and Poggio Bracciolini, the 15th-century "book hunter" and papal secretary, who saved Lucretius's work from ignominy, the existence of free will is once again in question.  Writing fifty years before the birth of Christ, in his poem On the Nature of Things, Lucretius repudiated all religions as cruel superstition, denied the existence of an afterlife and the idea that human beings had immortal souls.  He described the nature of all things, including humans, as collections of particles in constant motion; in other words, much as sub-atomic, quantum-theory physicists do today.

Greenblatt paraphrases Lucretius's Latin poem:

The swerve is the source of free will. In the lives of all sentient creatures, human and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. For if all of motion were one long predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom.

The "swerve" is "an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter," but how it proves free will is less than obvious.  Greenblatt asks rhetorically, "what is the evidence that free will exists?"  But what follows is more an inkling than an answer.  The analogy of a horse race invokes "the thrilling spectacle of a mental act bidding a mass of matter into motion."  Lucretius further argues that a man

may deliberately hold himself back: Both willing oneself to go forward and willing oneself to remain stationary are only possible because everything is not strictly determined, that is, because of the subtle, unpredictable, free movements of matter. What keeps the mind from being crushed by inner necessity is “the minute swerve [clinamen principiorum] of the atoms at unpredictable places and times” (2.293–94).

The Possibility of free will

In a seemingly unrelated vlog post, Do We Need a Theory of Everything?, Hossenfelder opens the possibility of a swerve and of free will.  She asserts: "There is no reason that nature should actually be described by a theory of everything." Nature might occasionally swerve outside of or from between the theories of physics.  The human being might be more than and different from the sum of her parts; therefore, capable of behaving unlike particles, atoms and molecules.   It seems more than possible that human consciousness, what physicists call an "emerging property," might actually, in moments of swerve if not beyond, affect the material universe--instantiating what we call free will.

 

The Truth about Money: Money Good; Money Bad

What is money?

Anything can be used as money:  paper, tokens, clay tablets, seashells, tree bark, pixels on a computer screen, strokes on a ledger somewhere, even people.  Historically, not just slaves and cumal were used as money.  The Bible tells us a man can beat his servant because "he is his money" (Exodus 21:20-22).  As Jacob Goldstein reiterates throughout Money:  The True Story of a Made-up Thing:    "money is money because we believe it’s money."

However, some things become like money (a soft way of saying they become money) even when people doubt, question or just don't notice.  Silver, data, Modigliani nudes, and, most importantly, "commercial paper" have all become forms of money despite doubts, questions and ignorance.

                        In 2008, the day after the Lehman bankruptcy, this Modigliani

                        sold for $150 million (USD). Someone was shifting

                        currency from the stock market to the art market.

Money Good

Goldstein quotes Marco Polo who wrote that his readers would not believe this but  "the Great Kaan [of the Mongol empire] causeth the bark of trees, made into something like paper, to pass for money all over his country."  The result of the Kaan's "bark of trees" money was a unified, stable and prosperous empire.  When the Ming Dynasty attempted to return to traditional (money-less) ways in China, the result was three hundred years of poverty, deprivation and starvation.  Even today, world-wide, getting food from farmers' fields to the shelves of your local grocery store is facilitated by; in fact, dependent upon money.

Money is infinite

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, one after another, representatives of the US Federal Reserve announced that they could provide a limitless supply of US dollars to support American businesses?  Of course, it's obvious that money is a product of our collective imaginations and is therefore infinite (or at least only limited by our collective imaginations), but it was unprecedented for the Fed to publicly confirm this fact.   

Wealth inequality versus poverty 

Steve Pinker was quite right to point out the difference between wealth inequality and poverty in his tome Enlightenment Now.  What Pinker calls the "lump fallacy" is the mistaken notion that the economy is a "zero-sum" game:  "that if some people end up with more, others must have less."  On the contrary, if history shows, as Pinker claims it does, that we have all prospered over time--even if unequally--we have nothing to complain about.

Pinker's point is well taken, but I suspect that in this argument he might be confusing wealth and money, the real economy and the financial markets.   Money is infinite but the planet itself is finite, and its wealth/resources are similarly limited.  The real economy becomes very much a game of winners and losers when the biggest winners are willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term gain through, for example, global warming (which, as Pinker later argues, is the real and most threatening problem of our time).

What every kid should know about money

Perhaps I need to remind you, dear Reader, and myself that this blog is about education.  I really don't know what is being taught in grade schools and high schools these days, but shouldn't every middle-schooler know how money is created? 

Goldstein concurs with every other source that I have consulted on the subject: "Most of the money in the world is not just stored in private banks; it is created by private banks."  I found it reassuring that Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has a very straightforward explanation, directed at high-school students, of how private banks create money.  Khan displays the mathematical formula which shows that for every $1000 which the Federal Reserve introduces into the monetary system, private banks, using the fractional reserve system, create $10,000.  

The Federal Reserve was created at a "secret meeting"

As long as farmers are getting paid and the grocery store is getting paid and I have enough money to pay for groceries, who cares how the money was created?  Is it a problem that private banks create money?  To answer this question we would, of course, first have to acknowledge that private banks do create money. 

According to the "History" section of the Federal Reserve website, the Fed began with a gathering which included a senator, his secretary, an economist and three private bankers who met in November, 1910, on Jekyll Island.  (The name sounds like something from a Gothic novel, but the place does exist.  I played golf there once and even slept in the famous Jekyll Island Clubhouse which was pretty run down by the time I stayed there.)  The secrecy of the meeting is emphasized in the "Federal Reserve History."  Senator Aldrich . . .

went to great lengths to keep the meeting secret, adopting the ruse of a duck hunting trip and instructing the men to come one at a time to a train terminal in New Jersey, where they could board his private train car. Once aboard, the men used only first names – Nelson, Harry, Frank, Paul, Piatt, and Arthur – to prevent the staff from learning their identities. For decades after, the group referred to themselves as the “First Name Club.”

Despite the fact that the  Federal Reserve is a model for monetary systems all over the world (including in Canada, Russia and China), and there are widely available descriptions of how the system works, more than 100 years later, the shadow of secrecy still seems to hover over how the system works and how private banks create money. Consequently, as I outline in How Is Money Created, for conspiracy theorists, the Fed is part of a cabal of satanist bankers out to control the world while, for others, it is an altruistic gathering of civil servants.  Officially and perhaps most accurately, it is a mix of the private and the public.  However, which is the dog and which the tail, and who wags whom remains a matter of debate.

Commercial banks, investment banks and shadow banks

For most of us, a bank is a bank.  (However, if you googled "types of banks," you might be in for a surprise.)   As Alan Blinder explains in After the Music Stopped,

[ . . ] commercial banks do have deposits--that's why we call them banks.  Investment banks do not.  They fund themselves almost entirely by borrowing. Remember, with a 40-to1 leverage, capital constitutes a mere 2.5 percent of assets.  They must borrow the other 97.5 percent.

Blinder points out that "By most estimates, the shadow banking system was [in 2008]  far greater than the conventional banking system."  "The shadow banking system," as Blinder explains is "a complex latticework of financial institutions and capital markets that are heavily involved in various aspects of borrowing and lending."  The important takeaway here is that these shadow banks are non-banks and therefore not regulated as stringently as commercial banks.  Current estimates of the size of the shadow banking system put it at $1.2 trillion.

In a 2015 post, I reported estimates of the unregulated derivatives market as being between 710 trillion and 1.2 quadrillion US dollars.  At the time,  I remember thinking these numbers were too big to be believed.  How could there be an unregulated market that was 50 times greater than the GDP (the total value) of the US economy?  According to Investopedia the current (2019) value of the derivatives market is estimated to be over a quadrillion dollars or 10 times the GDP of the entire world.

Commercial paper is money

The mind boggles at the size of these numbers.  How are they possible?  What are the mechanics that allow such fantastically large amounts of money to be created? When I read that "financial institutions  . . . are heavily involved in various aspects of borrowing and lending,"  I interpret that they are creating money.   As Goldstein explains, the collapse of 2008 "is a story about money itself—a new kind of money that started flowing through a new kind of banking system that nobody quite knew was a banking system."  This new kind of money is "commercial paper."  It usually comes in denominations of $100,000  and is issued by commercial banks and investment banks on behalf of large companies seeking funding. 

Solutions

About having private banks create money, Goldman comments, "For nearly a hundred years, some of the smartest economists in every generation have said this is a horrible way to do money."  One solution, as Goldman describes, is "dazzlingly simple":

The root of the issue is that basic banks do these two, very different things. (1) They hold our money and make it easier for us to get paid and make payments. (2) They make loans. The dazzlingly simple argument from all of these great economists comes down to this: split those into separate businesses. Variations on this idea are usually called “100% reserve banking” or “full-reserve banking” (as opposed to the current, fractional-reserve banking system)  [. . . .]

Another solution now being debated and seriously considered, as Goldstein reports, is called "Modern Monetary Theory or MMT, for short."  The underlying principle is that the government should take over control of the creation and distribution of money to ensure full employment and sustainable development of available resources, reducing the money supply to prevent inflation when these objectives are met.  Oddly, much of what has been happening in the context of the 2020 pandemic, with governments distributing money directly to businesses and individuals, seems in line with Modern Monetary Theory.  We are in the process of discovering how the theory works in practice.

Whatever the future holds, it is inevitable, as Goldstein concludes:

that money will change. The way we do money will look as strange to our great-great-grandchildren as a world where banks print their own paper money with pictures of Santa Claus.

Addendum

In response to this post, one of my readers (Thanks D!) email a link to this Front Burner podcast on Modern Monetary Theory:  Never Mind the Deficit!

The Politics of Adjectives

"If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from? "

 

                                                                anonymous

"The Great Canadian . . . . whatever"

Have you ever noticed how many Canadian businesses and organizations brand themselves as "The Great Canadian . . ." something or other?  Ever wonder why?  In a brief article in the Catholic magazine Commonweal in 1929, Harvard Professor of Literature, Douglas Bush, asked the question "Is There a Canadian Literature?"  His answer was that in order for a Canadian literature to exist it must produce evidence of greatness, a great novel or poem or play--something great enough to be included in the established canon of great literature.  The sardonic response has been that in order for anything to be "Canadian" it must also be "great"; ergo, "The Great Canadian Bagel," "The Great Canadian Restaurant," "The Great Canadian Theatre Company," etc, etc. 

 

Canadian Nationalism:  An oxymoron?

During my enthusiastic Canadian nationalist phase in the mid-to-late seventies, I naively imagined that most Canadians would be eager to embrace Canadian literature, performance and art.  To my shock, Canadians, who would claim admiration for Dutch painting, Italian opera, Swedish cinema, German theatre, and English or American literature, reacted with outrage at the thought of having anything described as "Canadian" "shoved down their throats."  (The violence of this expression always took me aback.)   For the intelligentsia and literati inside Canada, "Canadian" invariably implied "parochial," "tribal," and that famously misunderstood expression "a garrison mentality."

 Does Canada even exist?

I must admit, I have long suspected that the name "Canada" came from Portuguese map-makers who labelled the topography of my homeland "ca nada" meaning "here nothing."  (See Pure Laine Québécois)  Frank Davey,  who is routinely described as “a leading authority on Canadian literature,” is quoted as saying that “Canada does not exist except as a political arrangement for the convenience of individuals accidentally happening to live within its arbitrary area.” Hugh MacLennan, author of what, for some time, was consider the quintessential Canadian novel, Two Solitudes, was also categorical that "there is no Canadian literature." Eventually, we came around to admitting that Canada does exist as a nation, a state, an imagined community of people and diverse peoples, a big piece of real estate with borders and a quirky history, and it was okay to call something Canadian because we had a flag and a beaver and a constitution and a police force mounted on horseback, and Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Celine Dionne and hundreds of thousands of other names worth mentioning.

 Is There an Anglo-Québécois Literature?

Always a glutton for punishment, as an English professor in Quebec, I went from defending the adjective "Canadian" to promulgating the modifier "Anglo-Québécois."  Reactions tended to be a rolling of the eyes rather than the visceral "shoved down our throats" response.  However, resistance to "Anglo-Québécois" was similar to what I had earlier witnessed in reaction to "Canadian." 

Josée Legault, in her book, L’invention d’une minorité : Les Anglo-Québécois, is adamant that   "s'il est indéniable qu'un certain nombre d'anglophones résidaient bel et bien au Québec, on ne pouvait toutefois parler de l'existence d'une 'communauté' anglo-québécoise"  ["even if it is undeniable that a certain number of Anglophones do in fact reside in Quebec, one can still not talk of the existence of an Anglo-Québécois 'community'."]  In an essay entitled  “Neil Bissoondath disait . . . .,” professor of literary studies Gilles Marcotte was equally adamant that “Il n’existe évidemment pas telle chose qu’une littérature anglo-québécoise [ . . .]."  ["There obviously exists no such thing as an Anglo-Québécois literature . . . ."] 

What the experts say

Just as professors, critics and authors who would seem to have a vested interest in the recognition of Canadian literature resisted the idea, English professors, critics and authors in Quebec, typically repudiated the notion of an Anglo-Québécois literature.  Jason Camelot is a professor of English at Montreal's Concordia University and the co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Language Acts: Anglo Quebec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century.   In his introduction to a special issue of the journal Canadian Poetry on Anglo Quebec,  Camelot agrees with Marcotte that “there is no such thing as Anglo-Quebec literature in the sense that there is now Can Lit and la littérature québécoise."  More surprising still, Linda Leith, author, editor and impresario, who has done more for and about English literature in Quebec than anyone, has avoided the expression Anglo-Québécois to describe her work and interests.

Thinking inside the box 

 I know we are all supposed to admire people who "think outside the box" but, really, I wish there were more people (like me) who could think inside the box.  I may not agree with Professor Marcotte, but I understand his logic.  For Marcotte, Québécois literature is by definition French.  Québécois literature in English, for Marcotte, would be the equivalent of a married bachelor.

The term "Québécois" only became the politically correct designation of a citizen of the province of Quebec in the late 60s and throughout the 70s.  Earlier, "Québécois" was understood to mean a resident of Quebec City. With "French Canadian" now signalling Francophones outside Quebec, inside my symmetrically-inclined, Canadian box, Anglo Québécois seemed all the more legitimate as a designation for Anglophones living inside Quebec.

The difference between a wine glass and a glass of wine

I must confess that when I began writing this post, a discouragingly long time ago, it was with exactly the opposite intention of what I have written here.  I intended to maintain my obsessive conviction that "grammatical mistake" should be "a mistake in grammar," and "comparative literature" should be "studies of literature in a comparative context." Any composition manual will tell you that placing an adjective in front of a noun is more succinct and elegant than following a noun with an awkward clause or phrase.  Additionally, an adjective in front of a noun has the potential of becoming the next big thing:  "post modernism" versus the more informative "modernism after 1965," "oral literature"  (a contradiction in terms since "literature" means what is written) versus "written representations of orality," and "block chain" versus "a chain of blocks"--this latter phrase at least gives an inkling of how this technology works.  Nothing whets the appetite of an academic more than the possibility of coining the next big thing, the next viral catchphrase.

Clearly, many of the phrases we accept are, to use one of my favourite academic expressions, "sites of debate." The problem I see is when we accept without debate. I still wonder why, when the Americas comprise two continents and 35 countries, the adjective "American" is typically, exclusively applied to the USA.  I spent four years studying the works of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce as "English" literature, barely noticing that these authors were all Irish. Politics matters.

I recognize that the appellation  "Canadian literature" means something more than and different from "literature in Canada," or "literature about Canada," or "literature by Canadians."  But I also see that when all these things have been happening for some time, the political decision to use the adjective this way makes sense, even if we might pause and stumble over exactly what the adjective "Canadian" might mean in this case.

 

Ideology

 

ideology (noun)

1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.

2. such a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation.

3. in philosophy, the study of the nature and origin of ideas.a system that derives ideas exclusively from sensation.

4. theorizing of a visionary or impractical nature.

(Random House Unabridged Dictionary)

 

In Ideology: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton describes ideology as follows: 

 

A dominant power may legitimate itself promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such `mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. (5-6)

Intertextuality

 

intertextuality (noun)

a term coined by Julia Kristeva to designate the various relationships that a given text may have with other texts. These intertextual relationships include anagram, allusion, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitation and other kinds of transformation. In the literary theories of structuralism and post-structuralism, texts are seen to refer to other texts (or to themselves as texts) rather than to external reality. The term intertext has been used variously for a text drawing on other texts, for a text thus drawn upon, and for the relationship between both. (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

In Intertextuality, Graham Allen describes "intertextuality" in the opening of the book this way:

The idea that when we read a work of literature we are seeking to find a meaning which lies inside that work seems completely commonsensical. Literary texts possess meaning; readers extract that meaning from them. We call the process of extracting meaning from texts reading or interpretation. Despite their apparent obviousness, such ideas have been radically challenged in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext. (1)

transtextuality (noun)

" . . . all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts" (Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree). 

Genette's term "transtextuality" is his particular variation on the idea most other critics call "intertextuality."

Genette reduces the term intertextuality to "a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts [. . .] the actual presence of one text within another." ("Glossary." Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. )

Genette categories the various forms of transtextuality; that is, all the possible relations between two texts, as follows:

i) intertextuality: quotation, allusion and plagiarism

ii) paratextuality: titles, covers, epigraphs, introductions

iii) metatextual: a critical relationship

iv) architextuality: genre suggested by title

v) hypertextuality: hypertext to hypotext; film adaptations are often described as "hypertexts" with the literary work upon which the film is based called a "hypotext"

What is Comparative Literature?

From English to comparative literature

Equipped with a collection of degrees in English language and literature, for two decades, I taught, researched and published in a field called "comparative literature."  As near as I can judge, the discipline got its English name in the early 20th century from a faulty translation of the French expression "littérature comparée."  The literature which comparativists study isn't comparative in any meaningful sense.   It would make some sense to call the subject "compared literatures" (a literal translation of "littératures comparées") or, even more obviously and aptly, "comparative studies of literature." However, we specialists learned to succumb and accept the terminology that got us tenure without a whimper until some first-year undergraduate asked us "what exactly does 'comparative literature' mean?" Then we mumbled and grumbled about students who hadn't done enough reading.

Comparative literature = literary theory

It might be a stretch to describe comparative literature as influential, but whatever fashionable nonsense we didn't originate we were quick to support and promulgate. Over the postmodern period, comparative literature became code for literary theory, and comparative literature never met a theory it didn't like enough to adopt. Whatever nascent passion a student might bring to the study of literature, you can be sure literary theory was ready to quell it.

 Identity crises

Comparative literature has been suffering from an identity crisis for about as long as it has existed  (see Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline), as has the discipline of English literature (see Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature). I have come to accept George Steiner's definition from his lecture/essay "What Is Comparative Literature?": "[...] comparative literature is an art of understanding centered in the eventuality and defeats of translation" (10).  There has been a turf war (more of a squabble really) between comparative literature and translation studies in recent decades.  Having done some translation work and research in translation studies, I came to the conclusion that Steiner got it right: comparative literature fills in the gaps in translation and tells us about what any translation is forced to leave out or leave behind.  We need a comparativist to tell us why a joke is funny in one language but not in another.

Comparative = 2 or more?

I think the expression "comparative study" means something because it suggests that the study is marked by "a consideration of at least two things."  I actually proposed this starting point at a meeting of comparativists once and was roundly told that my definition was "too narrow."  An additional irony (paradox? absurdity?):  for as long as I was active in the field there was a strident movement against explicit comparisons in the field of comparative literature on the grounds that such comparisons were out of date and smacked of "binary thinking."  (See Binary Thinking Versus the other Kind.)

Binary = bad!

In Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, Susan Bassnett traces the notion that “comparative literature should involve the study of two elements (études binaires)” (27) to Paul Van Tieghen’s La Littérature comparée (1931) and argues that “[i]t is possible to see almost all French comparative literature from the 1930s onward as coloured by the études binaires principle” (28).  Bassnett describes a binary approach as having served comparative literature “so ill for so long” (24) and cites the “narrowness of the binary distinction” as the first of a number of reasons that “[t]oday, comparative literature in one sense is dead” (47).  

 

         

Studies of Canadian literatures in two languages = binary = bad!

In his introduction to Textual Studies in Canada 5: The Aux Canadas Issue, Robert K. Martin argues that the “binary model is no longer acceptable to many Canadians” (3). Claiming that “the paradigm of two founding nations leaves little place for the native peoples of Canada” (3), and he invokes the need for Canada “to go beyond duality” (3) in order to remain open to other voices.  Insisting that it is not enough to “simply add a soupçon of otherness to an otherwise unchanged recipe” (3), Martin points out that “[t]he comparatist enterprise has too long sought to produce a paradigm with variations, without adequately recognizing how much the apparently descriptive paradigm becomes prescriptive.  If major Canadian works are like this, then one that is like that can’t possibly be major, or even Canadian” (4).

Major Canadian works of literature?

The problem with the counterfactual problem that Martin imagines is that the average Canadian scholar of literary studies would be hard-pressed to name a "major" Canadian work of literature and reluctant to even describe a literary work as Canadian.  The postmodern scholar would dismiss the concept of "major" or a canon of major literary works, and equally dismiss the notion of a national literature.  The postmodern project was the stalwart investigation of the eccentric and the minor in opposition to a major or mainstream national literature.  What Martin and Bassnett fail to acknowledge, which anyone who has ever touched the keyboard of a computer knows, is the incredible possibilities for refinement, subtlety, inclusion and advancement that a binary approach can offer.

Everything old is new again!

Ultimately, literary studies, both English and comparative, was born out of an attempt to escape philology.  No doubt, historically speaking, philology has a lot of tedium and absurdity to answer for.  My career was spent studying the intersections of language(s), literature(s), culture(s) and disciplines which, everywhere I look, is a basic definition of philology.  In fact, Spivak's new comparative literature sounds a lot like philology to me.  As Sheldon Pollock points out in World Philology:  "The lowest common denominator of philology is [. . .] how to make sense of texts."  Turf wars aside, making sense of texts--which today means making sense of intertexts--has always been the lowest common denominator of literary studies, comparative studies, translation studies, and a host of other disciplines both new and old.

What Is "Romantic Irony"?

Schlegel coined the term

These days, the concept of "romantic irony" is particularly difficult to grasp for a number of reasons.  In the first place, the phrase was coined by Friedrich Schlegel, the German romanticist, who was vague and aphoristic in defining the concept.

The Meaning of "romantic"

Additionally, what Schlegel meant by "romantic" is a subject of debate.  According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

What Schlegel meant by the term “romantic” and its apparent cognate "Roman" (usually translated as “novel,” but having among the Romantics a much wider sense) has long been disputed. [ . . .], Schlegel saw the historical origins of “the romantic” in the wide mixture of forms and genres that characterized medieval literature and took it as the point of departure for a genre-transcending notion that allows even Shakespeare's plays or Dante's Commedia to be Romane.

Romantic Irony

From a present-day perspective, "romantic irony" seems a contradiction in terms. We think of romance as implying passion, emotion and intimacy.  (See Understanding Romanticism.)  Irony, in direct contradiction, is aloof, intellectual and distant. The easiest way to get a handle on "romantic irony" is to simply think of it as the concept of irony as it emerged during the Romantic period of literary history in the late 18th and early 19th century.  "Romantic irony," like all other forms of irony, is "the interruption or disruption of an established or expected discourse."  (See What is Irony?) 

The English example of romantic irony

The typical way that romantic irony interrupts a discourse is that the author signals to the reader of  a literary text that "oh, by the way, what you are reading is a fiction."  Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is typically cited as an example of romantic irony.  These days this feature would typically be described as postmodern, which adds to the confusion about what romantic irony is.

 

Romantic irony and postmodernism

In fact, if you compared a "grocery list" of the typical features of postmodernism--crossing of genre boundaries, problematising of the self, challenging grand narratives, metanarrative, indeterminacy of the literary text, limitations of language to represent reality, etc--and those of romantic irony, the lists will extensively overlap.  You might even find them to be identical.

The Case Against "The Case Against Reality"

The Case Against Reality

When a friend (thanks Fred!) lent me a copy of Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality:  Why Evolution Hid the Truth from our Eyes, it was number five or six on the list of books I was planning to read.  However, glancing at the preface, my curiosity got the better of me, it jumped the queue and I started reading.  I had already heard the broad outlines of Hoffman's argument that what we call "reality" is a holograph filled with icons like the ones on the desktop of a computer.  I couldn't imagine that I would ever accept Hoffman's conclusions but reading, like life, is about the journey not the destination.

Analytic Philosophy

Much of my undergraduate education was in analytic philosophy, meaning I was schooled to pay particular attention to the terms Hoffman used in constructing his argument. Immediately, my skepticism was aroused by his use of the words "truth" and "true."  (I have already written on the concept of "truth":  see Does Knowledge Require Truth?)  Hoffman challenges the notion that our perceptions are "true," but I'm uncertain what the expression "true perception" means.  (I'm equally uncertain about what "true love" really means.  In fact, it seems to me every time I have heard the expression "true love" being used, the speaker was being sarcastic.)  Presumably, Hoffman is invoking the correspondence theory of truth; i.e., that something is true because it corresponds to reality.  

The Definition of "Truth"

Tracing Hoffman's argument, I noted that "truth" eventually became "veridical perception."  "Veridical" means "corresponds to reality" or in more common language "truthful."  By the time I reached page 65, I was ready to pack it in because Hoffman was either using a version of "truth" that no-one believed ("corresponds to reality") or he was using a maybe-half-full-maybe-half-empty definition of "truth" ("truthful").  However, Hoffman saw me coming, and on page 67, he tells us:

Consider three notions of veridical perception.  The strongest is “omniscient realism”—we see reality as it is.  Next is “naive realism”—we see some, but not all, of reality as it is.  The weakest is “critical realism”—the structure of our perceptions preserves some of the structure of reality.  If the FBT Theorem targeted omniscient or naive realism, then we could indeed dismiss its conclusions—no one (save lunatics and solipsists) claim omniscience, and few espouse naive realism.  But the theorem targets critical realism, which is the weakest, and most widely accepted, notion of veridical observation in the science of perception and in science more broadly.  The FBT Theorem does not torch a straw man.  (67)

Consequently, in reviewing Hoffman's argument, we must keep in mind that "truth" = "veridical perception" = "critical realism."  Can Hoffman maintain the coherence of his theories when "truth" only means that our perceptions "preserve some of the structure of reality"?

Fitness Beats Truth in Human Evolution

Hoffman's premise "the FBT Theorem," confirmed through game theory, is that "Fitness Beats Truth."  The theory is a counter-argument to the claim that as the species has evolved we have become better at perceiving reality (or, "the truth").   FBT argues that we evolve by taking advantage of "fitness payoffs."  Our perceptions direct us toward what is useful, desirable, helpful, beneficial; not what is real and true.  Much of the book is comprised of fascinating experiments and examples of how our perceptions (in particular visual perception) construct reality rather than apprehend reality.

Perception Versus Objective Reality

There is nothing new in the claims that we do not perceive objective reality or the "thing-in-itself" (in my day, we always used the German "Ding an sich" to preserve the expression's Kantian origins). For decades, I hammered away at students telling them that the tree falling in the desert didn't make a sound, that colours only existed in human brains, not on walls, that the reason we can watch movies is that our visual processing is slow and twenty-one frames per second looks like continuous action to us,  that with perfect perception, walking into a room,  we would perceive nothing identifiable, no chairs or people or walls, just infinite clumps of molecules and atoms, that they had never perceived what they thought they knew best, themselves, because they had never seen their own bodies in entirety or heard the distinct sound of their own voices.  What is distinctive about Hoffman's claims is the degree of disconnection and separation he proposes between objective reality and perception.

What Works Isn't Necessarily True

Ptomaine might have been absolutely wrong in his vision of the universe with the Earth holding steady at its centre but, as I lectured my students, that mistaken vision still worked to allow accurate calendars and navigation at sea.  Reading Hoffman, I was more than willing to accept that our perceptions could be useful without being accurate or truthful.  However, was it possible to make decisions or even claims about "fitness" when our perceptions were so far removed from any trace of objective reality?

Dialectics, Binary Thinking and Formal Logic

Once again, Hoffman anticipated my skepticism.  I have to say, this feature, its dialectics, (the sense of debate echoing Plato's Socratic dialogues) made the book compelling reading for me.  Hoffman invokes "formal logic" as follows:

• "Suppose I tell you that p is some particular claim and q is some particular claim, but I refuse to tell you what either claim is."
• "Then suppose I make the further claim, 'p is true or q is true'."
• Then suppose the "claim, 'if either p is true or q is true then it follows that p is true'. You know that this claim is false, even though you don't know the contents of p or q." (72)

Hoffman is invoking binary logic here, and I happen to be a fan of binary thinking.  (See Binary Thinking Versus the Other Kind.)  However, 'either p is true or q is true' depends on the fact that p and q are mutually exclusive and never overlap.  Lest we lose track of the underlying terms, fitness ("fitness payoffs") and truth ("critical realism") have not been proven to be mutually exclusive categories; in fact, there is good reason to imagine significant overlap between the two.  In other words, sometimes the connection between our perceptions and some aspect of objective reality produces "fitness payoffs."  To be clear, what Hoffman is trying to argue here is that if he can show we evolve through fitness payoffs then he has proven that we do not see "the truth."   My counter-argument is that this logic only works if "fitness payoffs" and "critical realism" are mutually exclusive; that is, only one can be true, but it is equally reasonable to conclude that both p and q are true, and fitness payoffs sometimes involve seeing objective reality as it is.

What We Call "Reality" Is Like the Icons on a Computer Desktop

The next step in Hoffman's theorizing is what he calls ITP, "the interface theory of perception" (76, italics in original).  Hoffman's key metaphor is that what we perceive as "reality" is analogous to the blue file icon on the desktop of a computer.  Our perception is of "the interface--pixels and icons--[and] cannot describe the hardware and software it hides" (76).  Our interactions with the interface are helpful and useful, but they do not tell us anything about reality, about the computer's software or wiring.

Quantum Theory:  Consciousness Creates Reality

Hoffman is heading toward the conclusion that has become increasingly popular among sub-atomic physicists and quantum-theory wonks that consciousness produces reality rather than the other way around.  Citing physicist John Bell's experiments in the 1960s which are reported to prove that "an electron has no spin when no none looks" (54), and the broader claim that "no property, such as position or spin, has a definite value that is independent of how it is measured" (98), Hoffman reports the conclusion that "Quantum theory explains that measurements reveal no objective truths, just consequences for agents of their actions" (100).   In short, perception determines measurement.  Hoffman goes all the way in his hypothesis that consciousness creates reality, which he dubs "conscious realism" (184, italics in original).

According to "conscious realism," the interface which we typically call reality is "instantiated" by a network of conscious agents.  Conscious agents can start out as "two-bit" things, but "a realm of conscious agents [can] interact and instantiate higher agents" (192).

Science Has Failed to Explain Consciousness

Arguments privileging consciousness, including Hoffman's, seem, invariably, to point out the failure of science to explain consciousness.  Personally, I don't draw any particular conclusion from this "failure." Medical science, as Bill Bryson points out in The Body, has yet to explain asthma, along with hundreds of other medical and scientific phenomena.  The mind-over-matter cohort consistently disparages the claim that consciousness is an "emerging property" of physical properties of the brain.  Although we can now observe what goes on in the brain during perception and can even manipulate the brain to cause certain perceptions, the claim remains that we fail to explain how perception happens.  Since I am still mystified by the "emerging property" called fire, I am perhaps too at-ease accepting that consciousness is a similar "emerging property."  But I have to say, Hoffman's instantiated "higher agents" sound a lot like "emerging properties" to me.

What Is Knowable When Perception Has No Connection to Objective Reality?

The concluding chapters of The Case Against Reality, when Hoffman's prose becomes proselytizing and purple, are the least convincing and compelling.  For example, Hoffman writes: "We can, despite this poverty of translation, see a friend's smile and share their joy--because we are insiders, we know first hand what transpires behind the scene when a face fashions a genuine smile" (186).  Since any object before me, according to Hoffman, ceases to exist when I close my eyes, since even my own body is an icon which must cease to exist when I am not sensing it, how can I possibly conclude that my friend, my friend's smile or my friend's joy exist or that they are accessible to me in any "veridical" sense?

How Is the Holograph We Call "Reality" Created?

Of course, the big question is: if the world we perceive is a holograph, a series of computer-generated icons, who is making all this happen.  Hoffman does not dismiss the possibility that we are living in some alien kid's video game.  Hoffman is obviously a big fan of the film The Matrix.  Ultimately, he does get to the big Creator question:  "The idea of an infinite conscious agent sounds much like the religious notion of God, with the crucial difference that an infinite conscious agent admits precise mathematical description" (209).

Parallels with Descartes Meditations

Throughout my reading of The Case Against Reality, the parallels with Descartes Meditations seemed obvious.  Descartes gave himself the project of thinking that the world as he perceived it did not exist.  He even allowed that an evil demon was deliberately confusing his perceptions.  Descartes concluded that his only certainty, in the first place, was that the "I" doing the thinking must exist: Cogito ergo sum, "I think therefore I am."  From this premise, he concluded that God must also exist.  As outlined in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Descartes often compares the ontological argument to a geometric demonstration, arguing that necessary existence cannot be excluded from the idea of God anymore than the fact that its angles equal two right angles, for example, can be excluded from the idea of a triangle. The analogy underscores once again the argument’s supreme simplicity. God’s existence is purported to be as obvious and self-evident as the most basic mathematical truth.

Philosophy of Mind

The absence of any mention of Descartes in The Case Against Reality is a strange lacuna.  The problems of Hoffman's argument are similar to those Descartes faced almost 500 years ago.  The philosophy of mind permits three possibilities in the relationship between consciousness (what is mental) and the world (what is matter):  idealism (everything is mental), dualism (mind and matter both exist), materialism (everything is matter).  Each comes with its own particular problems but the challenge of dualism, in particular, is to explain how matter creates non-matter or vice versa or how the two co-exist.

The Problem from which There Is No Escape

Hoffman declares "conscious realism" as a form of "monism" which implies that everything is mental.  If the world is entirely mental how is the appearance of a physical world created?  Materialism may have a problem of how matter creates consciousness, but reversing the order, having consciousness create matter doesn't really solve the problem.  Hoffman acknowledges that an objective reality exists, but he is left with the problem of how that objective reality is created, how conscious agents create the appearance of matter in a matter-less world.

Should the Washington Redskins Be Renamed the Washington Rednecks?

The Washington Redskins' name controversy

Wikipedians have outdone themselves in outlining the multiple aspects and perspectives of the Washington Redskins' name controversy. Personally, I have always interpreted the expression "redskin" as a racist slur. However, despite complaints, protests and a number of court cases, "Redskins" has survived as the name of the Washington NFL team since 1933. Justification and defense of the name include the fact that some Native Americans support its use and even use it themselves as an object of pride. Additionally, the expression's origins are etymologically neutral and only took on negative connotations from the way the locution has been used.

 

How language evolves

As I've pointed out elsewhere, in the evolution of language, usage trumps definitions and origins. How a word gets used eventually becomes its meaning. "Redskin," particularly as it has been dominantly used in American culture, is an intentional disparagement. Nonetheless, we might ask if "redskin" could be reappropriated as have other insulting epithets over the years. For example, in the art world, the word "impressionist" was understood as a criticism until the painters to whom the disparagement was applied--Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Matisse--began to describe themselves as impressionists. Similarly, words like "Yankee," "Jesuit," "Protestant," and "Suffragette" were originally intended as insults but have been reappropriated as labels to be proud of. In more recent times, members of the LGBT community have begun to self-describe as "queer" and "dyke." Even "gay pride" would have, not so long ago, seemed a contradiction in terms--which, of course, is why the expression exists and is paraded today.

Red skins and black face

As with Blackface (see Blackface and Best Evidence), there is nothing inherently immoral about the expression "redskin." The locution is racist because it has a long history of derogatory usage, and the insult has gone hand-in-hand with the mistreatment and genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Cancel culture

The first defense of "Redskins" to appear in my inbox was a video of a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist  who described the call to change the name as "cancel culture."  Merriam-Webster traces the origin of the expression "cancel culture" to "#MeToo and other movements."  It seems impossible not to notice that the people decrying "cancel culture" are typically privileged communicators:  celebrities, office-holding politicians,  journalists in the mainstream media, established authors, the already famous and affluent in general.  As my guru has pointed out to me, there is a difference between "free" speech and "privileged" speech.  Being a blogger for over seven years now and having written 104 posts which have been viewed 50579 times, I recognize that I am no competition for the Kardasians nor, at the other end of the spectrum, for Desmond Cole who reports that for two of his pieces as a freelance journalist writing for the Toronto Star: "each one had earned well over fifty thousand views"  (Cole, Desmond. The Skin We're In [p. 73]. Doubleday Canada. Kindle Edition).  In short, I appreciate the difference between "free" speech and "privileged" speech.

If you already enjoy some notoriety or you have the support network of a newspaper,  yours is a privileged position.  Whatever you do or say might put that privilege at risk.  Cole was eventually not employed by the Star (you can't be "fired" when you're a freelancer because you do not strictly speaking have a job) ostensibly for (overly?) actively supporting Black Lives Matter in Toronto.  Was his dismissal an example of "cancel culture"?   Or was it just a plain, old-fashioned case of being "let go," "your services are no longer required," "pack up your pencils," "here's your hat, what's your hurry!"?

Reductio ad absurdum

According to the Pulitzer laureate's reductio ad absurdum discourse, "cancel culture" is about hyper-sensitivity and alleged triggers. (Consider Do No Harm.) He goes on to suggest, ironically, that the name "Washington" should be changed because George Washington was a slave owner and a tobacco farmer. He might want to reconsider his irony (see Avoid Irony and What Is Irony?). In my country, Canada, the name and statues of our founding Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, are under attack for his role in establishing residential schools and policies of assimilation of indigenous peoples.

The Washington Rednecks?

The Washington football team will eventually be renamed but no, the new name won't and shouldn't be the "Rednecks."  Such a switch would just be changing one racist epithet for another.  In fact, it could be rightly argued that the name "Washington Rednecks" would be a celebration of racism.  However, the question is an interesting thought experiment.  How many privileged white people would be happy with the choice of the name?  We need look no further than Jeff Foxworthy's early"redneck" jokes to get the gist of the expression's unflattering intentions. (As in:  "You might just be a redneck if you go to your family reunion to pick up women.")

However, the expression "redneck" (like "redskin") seems etymologically neutral.  A white farmer's red neck from a hard day working in the fields might even be considered an icon of pride.  Certainly, many white people have taken on the appellation as an object of pride.

People who are revolted by "cancel culture" and mocking of sensitivity seem to be showing signs of hyper-sensitivity themselves.  Whatever Washington's new name turns out to be, as my guru wisely advises, "It's always better to err on the side of empathy."

Addendum

Apparently, the leading contender for the new name is the "DC Sentinels"--the same name used for the fictional NFL team in the movie The Replacements.