October 2008 Archives

Trevize is grumpy as hell that he's chosen Gaia - a superorganism - instead of either the technologically-superior First Foundation or the "mentalic" (psychosocial scientifically advanced) Second Foundation as the future of humankind.

The moment of coincidence took my breath away. I opened Isaac Asimov's fifth book in The Foundation Series, thinking I would start to read it for a few minutes to shift my mind toward sleep, having just finished watching Maya's extraordinary documentary on Toekomsten 02068. A futurologist, Maya interviewed people who attended the 01958 World's Fair in Brussels, inquiring as to their experiences then, their reflections on how society has changed - or not - since then, and their projections another fifty years into the future. Jose interpreted the Flemish for me, gesturing occasionally to supplement the English. :-)

The film confirms and goes beyond the fiftieth anniversary retrospective exhibition at The Atomium, Between Utopia and Reality. I spent an afternoon there last week: incredible. Honestly, walking out of the tram station and catching my first full view of this massive structure was awe-inspiring; it felt alien. As I approached, that impression only intensified. This architectural wonder representing an iron crystal looms into the atmosphere. I wondered if my fear of heights would hamper exploration.

I detailed my enthusiasm about the exhibit to a gang of potential troublemakers, carrying on about how well the exhibit presented the spirit of achievement and optimism of attendees while posing the critical questions indicated by evident contradictions in design and implementation. Specifically, how the constructed sensibility of a joined and shared humanness across fifty-two countries and widely-disparate cultures highlighted the public demise of colonialism and the threatening battle between the Soviet Union and the U.S. The witnesses/participants in Maya's film confirm the dominance of the Fair's spectacle over its overt theme,"A World View, A New Humanism," critiquing the Fair's overt display of technological prowess and power. Mirroring the implicit message of the Fair itself, the insidious face of nationalism remains largely unnamed by the film's participants although it is clearly recognized. One man laughs as he recalls the positioning of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.'s pavilions with the Church in-between. The visual production of the film is superb: the subjects speak conversationally in 02008 against backdrops of scenes from the Fair in 01958. The imagery is fantastic: a science fiction tableau that, while sometimes quaint, in other respects still appears futuristic today.

Listening to the film's participants muse about what has changed or not over the last half-century is sobering. Almost universally, the bouyant hope that they experienced at the World's Fair has faded to a grim concern. The most poignant evidence for me involved language. Many of the participants described worsening conditions of today's society, or at least that there have been no substantive changes, certainly no improvement, since 01958. While recognizing achievements and differences between these two times, the underlying international dynamics remain essentially the same. A man who worked as a translator at the 01958 Fair spoke of how the speed of communication would increase because of all the innovations (e.g., the telephone); while telecommunications may indeed be the single driving factor in the vast transformations of globalization, the apparent need for speed unifies the present with the past.

The impetus for acceleration is accompanied with a selfishness that was variously described by participants in terms of money (for us)/peanuts (for them), abundance/lack, even suggesting hoarding/poverty. A young person of today wondered why we - who have so much - cannot share more with those who have so little? I felt the most telling clue to these dynamics was an instance when a participant shifted from Dutch to English. He was describing the insistent accumulation of "us" (he may have meant Belgians specifically but my sense was the broader white west) in contrast with inequities in Africa (in particular, although again he may have meant the broader underdeveloped world). In the midst of his impassioned speech he described what he perceives as the dominant, individual attitude, abruptly codeswitching to English:

Admittedly, it is a challenge to care about people and places removed from one's intimate, social, and professional circles. Sometimes it is difficult to care even within these microcosms. I am not sure when, during viewing, that I began thinking of Gaia. Probably at the point of temporal shift in focus, as participants shifted their gaze from reflecting on the past to imagining the future. I recalled the lecture at the University of Massachusetts last year by Dr. Lynn Margulis concerning her theory of endosymbiosis, a variation of the Gaia hypothesis. There is a commonsense-ness to this concept that adheres to the basic scientific principle of simplicity; I am astonished at the resistance in the scientific community to grant much credibility to the hypothesis. Indeed, at the lecture I attended there was not a single question from the audience - a phenomena which occurred only this one time during an entire year's series of lectures. Of course, the common sense can be wrong, but often intellectual absolutisms are also proven false, or at least contingent. For instance, this incredible notion of "being an individual" as if no interdependence facilitates existence.

Jose summarized the overall gist of people's articulations in the film. The older people, she explained, can attribute some meaning, some vision to the future, while the young people in the film are at a loss. Perhaps, she mused, when you are young you have not yet accumulated enough experience to be able to project ahead. Reflecting on her own life, she said the hype and hope of the 01958 World's Fair lasted until 1965, and then something changed. "You could feel it in the air," she said. "Maybe things were not going to be ok."

Returning to Asimov, Trevize has decided he must re-discover Earth. Twenty thousand years into the future, Asimov imagines a universe in which the planetary origin of humanity has become lost in antiquity. "How is it possible," Trevize wonders, "that we have all forgotten?"

Memory depends on what we say and don't say, which stories we tell, and how we tell them. Perhaps the future does, too.

Near the end of the 02068 documentary, reflecting on its message and projecting its potential meaningfulness, is a quote by Fred Polak about an emerging sustainable vision for the future. He qualifies: "our images of this future are still very fuzzy, very poorly defined" (translated into English, 1961, The image of the future). I found info on Polak from Merrill Findlay, On the fluttering of butterfly wings, a member of an organization called Imagine the Future Inc.

Findlay describes Polak as

"a Dutch sociologist who, in the late '40s, wrote a book about how we humans simultaneously live in the present and that Other place, the future. About how we imagine that mythic Other Place to explain our present and how our images of that place, the future, then 'act as magnets on our behaviour in the present' to precipitate social change."

I'll adapt Findlay's question (posed in 1994) to the narratives in Maya's film, encompassing the challenges left by the shifts in attitude from a pervasive belief, a mere five decades ago, that 'things will get better' to today's stark pessimism that 'we may not even make it.'

The thing is, we can use language to remember what we need - not just what we want. We can use words and stories to motivate and propel trajectories that lead us to the sustainable future so many of us believe is possible.

This post distills a series of thoughts from reading three different texts: The Heroic Model of Science (Chapter 1, Telling the Truth about History by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, 1991); The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen (2000), and an Interview with Ilan Stavans by Richard Birnbaum (@ 2003).

Three threads are primary: language, interaction, and science. "Language" is engaged theoretically and in practice, particularly the practices of interpretation. Although the references in the three selected texts refer mainly to written translations, I extrapolate 'down' to in-the-moment generation of understanding in everyday talking with each other, based on cooperation or agreement between people about meaning. I also extrapolate 'up' - or at least 'over' - to the interlinguistic skills that are most obviously evident in simultaneous interpretation. As to interaction, there are numerous levels from the microsocial to the macrosocial and the temporal to the ephemeral. The history of science is significant because of its influence on how people in western countries learn.

Why these three texts, beyond the coincidence of reading them more-or-less at the same time? Appleby, Hunt & Jacob (hereafter AH&J) investigate "what sorts of political circumstances foster critical inquiry" (p. 9). They write specifically in regard to the discipline of history by "examin[ing] critically the relevance of scientific models to the craft of history" (p. 9). I borrow their analysis as a way to explore the relevance of scientific models to other disciplines, particularly communication and the intersection of communication with political economy (especially governance), management (the organization of business), and culture (identity, ritual, and social relations).

AH&J challenge relativists and skeptics, sometimes lumping them together as postmodernists, arguing that in some ways they can "leav[e] the impression that the linguistic conventions of science have less to do with nature and more to do with the sociology of the scientists...in this way they have confused the social nature of all knowledge construction with the self-interest of the constructors, forgetting that all social beings participate in the search for knowledge and sometimes do so successfully" (emphasis added, p. 8-9). AH&J offer definitions for "skepticism" and "relativism," showing how these attitudes form the substance of conflict with another historical attitude, that of religious absolutism. Tensions among these attitudes form the roots of the culture wars we see in the U.S. today.

"We view skepticism," write AH&J, " as an approach to learning as well as a philosophical stance...skepticism can encourage people to learn more and remain open to the possibility of their own errors" (p. 6-7).

Relativism, a modern corollary to skepticism, is the belief that truth is relative to the position of the person making the statement" (p. 7). There is an important nuance to this definition: truth is not directly relative to the person, rather, it is relative to "the position of the person." (Note: "modern" means the idea of relativism wasn't around when the initial fight took place between the skeptics and the religious. "Relativism" is an outgrowth of that fight.)

Religious absolutism is "the conviction that transcendent and absolute truth can be known" (p. 15).

All of these stances can be overdone, hence AH&J propose a standard for knowledge, i.e., for what we believe to be true:


The last phrase, it seems to me, is most crucial. If we are interested in democracy and social justice - meaning a fairness for groups of people of varying types - then we must find ways of producing and valuing broad social, political, and economic structures that are acceptable to everyone, even those whose self-interests differ from our own.

Jonathan Rosen, in a section about the ways Judaism and Christianity have borrowed from and influenced each other through the ages, writes about "open fearlessness, that willingness to assimilate outside cultures into your own without worrying that they will corrupt your beliefs" (p. 83-84). One of the anchors he poses for the Jewish religion is the collective realization, a very, very long time ago "that only words were durable" (p. 79). The Talmud, he argues, "is a sort of cathedral built across the ages and spanning all the earth - or perhaps I should say it's a Temple, or at least a translation of one, built out of words and laws and stories" (p. 81).

I want to make three points simultaneously: language as a power with literal force; the "extraordinary religiosity" (according to AH&J, p. 50) of early (and at least some contemporary) scientists; and the inescapable fact that scientists today are the inheritors, intellectual descendants, and cultural products of the heroic science born of the Enlightenment. Certainly I am. I want to both rescue and continue the project of "truth with a purpose: the reform of existing institutions" (AH&J, p. 41), while seeking to escape or alter additional repeat performances of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century culture wars.

Power of Interpretation:

Language is key. Rosen's parallel between the Internet and the Talmud speaks to a proliferation of heterogeneous meanings that suggests an antidote to "the nature of books never to be quite right and of words always to elude our grasp" (p. 54). The refusal of words to mean one thing only, and to mean only that one thing always and forever, is precisely the juncture where understandings are forged or splattered. Words are durable while truth about what the words mean remains elusive. Rosen's desire "to embrace contradictory traditions" (p. i) seems similar to AH&J's focus on "the interplay between certainty and doubt" (p. 10). This enables Rosen to keep faith with "the business of life [which] is to learn, not to know" (p. 33). For AH&J that interplay "keeps faith with the expansive quality of democracy" (p. 10). Learning, democracy, science, and faith are inextricably intertwined: language is their confluent expression.

This is why Ilan Stavans can assert with conviction: "I find translators, in many ways, to be the real protagonists of culture . . . Translators are the underpaid heroes of culture." Translators - and interpreters - are always in between. Rosen explains how the Talmud "devised a culture intended to be a kind of middle term between extremes - between destruction and new creation, between the dead and the living, between God and man, between home and exile, between doubt and faith, between outward behavior and inner inclination" (p. 131).

Interpretation is a form of communication that has to work within and between "the chaotic contemporary forms of communication that," Rosen explains, "are so often accused of diverting us from what is true. The chaos and the incongruities, it turns out, are part of the truth" (p. 119). On that basis he compares the "interrupting, jumbled culture of the Internet" (p. 10) with "a page of the Talmud" (p. 19): "all those texts tucked intimately and intrusively onto the same page, like immigrant children sharing a single bed" (p. 10). "Those portions and their accompanying readings," he continues, "swim in a sea of commentary . . . so large that it seems at times to expand [like the Internet] to include everything" (p. 30).

Language in History:

Before elaborating on Stavan's thesis, let me summarize the discussion of language and its role in history provided by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, because they present the discipline of linguistics in the creation of heroic science as an equal partner to the discipline of science. "The Enlightenment," said to begin in 1690, "set the terms of the modern cultural project: the individual's attempt to understand nature and humankind through scientific as well as linguistic means" (p. 39). Concurrent with the emergence of sciences and history as disciplines, "the European philosophes also developed new approaches toward old languages and texts. Reading old documents, indeed reading any document, is never as simple as it looks. Even picking up the local newspaper you ask, well, why did they run that story? Or, I wonder what party that journalist has joined?" (p. 37)

The discipline of linguistics began with criticism of written texts, called hermeneutics. It didn't take long before "the language in a text, the words on the page, became too important to be left to clerical interpreters" (AB&J, p. 38). The Christian Bible was, at the time, the standard of absolute knowledge; it came under particular scrutiny. Ironically, clergy had originally invented hermeneutics, using the Bible as the reference point for all kinds of statements of absolute truth concerning the world and time. Now, AB&J continue, "The words had to be enlisted in the enterprise of creating wholly secular and scientific learning, but with consequences for ... the present generation" (p. 38).

Stavans says, "Using language as a category is a way to say who we are in front of a mirror." He goes on to illustrate how words change meanings over time, illustrating how the evolution of meaningfulness is what goes on socially, among and between people. When you, or I, use language - when we talk or write - we are "saying who we are" to ourselves.

When I wrote earlier that I am cut in the vein of heroic science, it is because I recognize how I think and talk in those terms. AH&J present a range of descriptions:

"Diderot described the follower of the Enlightenment as an eclectic, a skeptic and investigator who 'trampling underfoot prejudice, tradition, venerability, universal assent, authority - in a word, everything that overawes the crowd - dares to think for himself, to ascend to the clearest general principles, to examine them, to discuss them, to admit nothing save on the testimony of his own reason and experience'" (citing Diderot's article on eclecticsm in the Encyclopedie (1751), p. 39).

I am not an ideal type, but there is certainly a resemblance. How about this: "a new kind of person...hard to govern, suspicious of authority, more interested in personal authenticity and material progress than in the preservation of traditions, a reader of new literature, novels, newspapers, clandestine manuscripts, even pornography, all especially produced for an urban market" (p. 40). This description hardly marks me special, rather it describes today's average western person. To wit, "a new cultural type who could be a pundit, prophet, fighter against tyranny and oppression, original thinker, elegant writer, sometimes pornographer, reader of science, host of salons, or occasional freemason" (p. 35).

The average western person today, as well as trained scientists and elites, however, is also subject to the culture wars that are the legacy of the original, historical figures of the Enlightenment who "battled with clergy and churches and at moments risked martyrdom" (p. 18). "In the culture wars of the present generation, language, with the many uses and abuses that can be attributed to it, has figured prominently in the arsenal of weapons" (p. 38). Today, continuing the trend of the Enlightenment when secular hermeneutics turned the scientific method on the Bible, all words are related to other words.

The Fulbright Commission celebrated sixty years in Belgium and Luxembourg with a prestigious academic panel at the Palais de Academie in Bruxelles. I got to tag along with the more recent Schumann-Fulbright program that sponsors study of European Union institutions.

Professor Francis Balace complemented the education I gleaned a few days earlier at the Atomium's fiftieth anniversary exhibition by describing the dearth of practical knowledge about the U.S. that most Belgians had until after the second world war when, he repeated several times, Belgium was "a good pupil" by negotiating specific policies regarding education in order to be included in the Marshall Plan. Two comments in particular caught my attention, both in the nature of an aside: one regarding the linguistic divide and another about war graves.

In the heat of WWII, and on the basis of prior history, no Belgians expected to be rescued by Americans; it was an article of faith that the British would prevail against the Nazis on Belgian soil. For whatever military and political reasons, part of Belgium was eventually freed by the U.S. and the line distinguishing those parts rescued by Britain and those by the U.S. "corresponds exactly," Professor Balace emphasized., "with the Belgian linguistic division" of today. This is a matter of curiosity to me, as are the reasons why the Flemish Deaf Community dispensed with an umbrella label for all regional varieties of sign languages in Belgium that were once recognized as distinct from Dutch Sign Language, now describing a (supposedly) distinct Flemish Sign Language. Are the language politics of signed language communities being dictated by the language conflicts of spoken language communities? I do not know enough except to express sadness if this is the case. (See the last two paragraphs of this brief history by an external, non-deaf researcher.)

Someone in the audience felt it necessary, during the question-and-answer session, to expound upon Belgian reverence at U.S. military cemeteries - a theme that has been repeated at every official event I've attended since arriving here last month. The discussion that followed introduced some nuances, such as differences in memory and sentiment according to generation. The historical tidbit Professor Balace contributed was the fact of the United States government's purchase (near the close of WWII) of "an extra five hundred graves in preparation for the next war." This confirms the critique I offered of the U.S. Embassy film, An Invisible Bridge, of an underlying attitude of nationalistic preparation for institutional violence that might also be fed by the pomp of standing for both country's national anthems. I did stand, of course, but uneasily. Such ceremonial prelude for an academic session felt awkward. (I find it similarly so at U.S. domestic sporting events.)

Professor Luc Reychler's topic echoed Minister of State Herman de Croo's introductory veneration of "fundamental connections" generated by the vision of J. William Fulbright, whose scholarships have enabled academics to reach high levels of influence in diverse communities across the globe. Professor Reychler described the network of 600,000 Fulbright scholars as an international brain trust, whose collective wisdom is needed to extract us from "the media crisis," which, among other faults, promotes a counterproductive division between politicians and academics. The basis of Professor Reychler's presentation concerning the present was a critique of the "unadaptive responses" of the U.S. government to a series of shocks since 2000. (9/11, evidence of our rich lifestyles adversely affecting the rest of the world, and the "inconvenient truth" of climate change - no doubt he used that phrase deliberately.) He summarized the cumulative effect as a "negative synergy" but sought to counter the inevitable gloominess of current global dynamics as "an unprecedented challenge" which can be successfully engaged.

Professor Reychler's basic prescription includes a number of specific initiatives aimed collectively at improving relations and collaboration between academics and politicians. The usual dichotomy cannot be allowed to persist, regardless of whatever seeds of truth there may be in politician's accusation that academics lack practical experience and academics tendency to cloister in the realms of teaching and research. (Just for the record, I'm adding a bit of emphasis to this critique of the academy, probably because I am operating right at that wall Professor Reychler described as the "talk about" transdisciplinary research and the effort to achieve it.)

Specifically, Professor Reychler described the 85:1 ratio of investment in military research versus peace-oriented research. Eighty-five to one! "Peace building," he explained, "requires a combination of multiple, coordinated initiatives." Not unincidentally, Professor Reychler noted declines in academic freedom, a trend that is apparently not even being tracked. (Although it is certainly a topic of conversation in my graduate program and others, where graduate students are coached to adapt our actual interests to the narrow parameters established by funders in their attempt to guarantee that research results generate profitability and/or contribute adequately to their own predetermined purposes.)

The final panelist, Professor Alison Woodward, spoke with an eye toward the future, describing the juxtaposition of migration with our so-historically-recent ability to maintain intimate connections with family and friends in geographically distant places. Drawing upon work in the sociology of intimacy, Professor Woodward noted how emotions are entering the realm of political discourse: even in the formal academic setting of this talk (attended by U.S. Ambassador Sam Fox) "love" had already been mentioned. This "rediscovery of the personal" is interwoven and interactive with the new age of migration that is in radical contrast with migrations of the past in which intimate ties were necessarily cut.

Others are also showing ways in which communication networks challenge international politics, matters of citizenship, and "the larger political economy of design," simply put by Saskia Sassen as "the work of making". Professor Woodward argues,

- among families in particular, and (I would add) between friends. What so many feel as a threat of interdependency need not be perceived as an ill, rather, the increasing ability to keep bonds and forge bridges (the two types of interpersonal networks that compose society, as defined by Robert Putnam) bodes well for international relations.

The first question of the open Q-and-A session concerned the problem of dragging publics into policies before they understand them. The speaker was critical of European organization, describing it (presumedly the EU) as "weak and disorganized," with "the European population 20-30 years behind events," a condition which forces progress to be made "ad hoc without popular support." I would characterize the phenomenon of knowledge lag as, at least partially, an element of the media crisis that Professor Reychler named. I am not a technological utopianist (however much I tend to come across as one), and there are problems with blaming social ills on the media, however the rituals we engage concerning what is produced, seen, heard, and distributed - whether as entertainment, advertising, infotainment, documentary, or incisive fact-based and contextualized journalism - are problematic. Surely we can do better than we are.

The quotes I pulled from this long NY Times magazine article show me some of what I think is Obama's deep wisdom - he is not playing divides against each other, but trying to find the places where opposite sides can connect. It is this ability to see through to the worth of values, and find ways to honor and respect the differences in values that make up all of American culture, that attracted me to him in the beginning. He understands "diversity" from the inside.

What are the "cultural issues" he's talking about?

There is a

...need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong . . .Because, in fact, if you've grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that's going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you're watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we'd better be paying attention to that.

The article (also published by the International Tribune), is interesting and informative). The reporter harks back to Obama's emergence on the national political scene at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. At that time and place, Obama spoke about a broad politics comfortable with "worshiping an awesome God in the blue states" and having "gay friends in the red states." He elaborated to the NY Times reporter (Matt Bai),

"...that Washington's us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. 'If voters are similarly polarized and if they're seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we're not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done.'"

Some of the insights I appreciate from the reporter include describing George W. as "more of a uniter [of the American public] than he ever intended" because of the vast disapproval with his policies, and, although not naming Hillary, the evidence of how her protracted fight for the nomination has helped Obama's organizing in the long run. "In three states -- Texas, Indiana and North Carolina -- more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004."

Of course the economy is crucial - it always was, even before this crisis - but Obama recognizes and keeps talking about the fact that "cultural issues matter far more in the rural areas than they do in the exurbs, because voters see those issues as a test of whether politicians respect their values or mock them." (Emphasis added.)

This next is a longer quote, because it might be part of what unnerves some people about him - his lack of need for public adoration. Perhaps what is unsettling about this aspect of Obama's character (his "organized unconscious" as David Brooks recently described it) is that the absence of a need for acceptance reduces public leverage on his decisions, which subsequently ups the ante of trust. Obama will surround himself with the best and brightest of varying points of view, and then he will decide based on the calculations of his own wisdom. What will do with a President not subject to manipulation? What I hope is that this quality of self-determination applies equally to the elites.

"It is often said in politics that a candidate's strength is also his weakness. Obama's greatest asset as a candidate, the trait that has enabled him to overcome both a thin résumé and the resistance of his own party's establishment, is his placidity. Even more than through his ability to give a rousing speech (plenty of other candidates, from Ted Kennedy to Howard Dean, could do that), Obama has differentiated himself from recent Democrats by conveying a sense of inner security that is highly unusual in a business of people who have chosen to spend every day asking people to love them. He does not seem like a candidate who's going to switch to earth tones in his middle age or who's going to start dressing up in camouflage to rediscover his inner Rambo.

Obama is content to meet the world on his terms, and something about that inspires confidence.And yet that same lack of pathetic neediness may in fact be a detriment when it comes to persuading voters who, culturally or ideologically, just aren't predisposed to like him. I once heard a friend of Obama's compare him with Bill Clinton this way: if Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross. That image returned to me as I watched Obama campaign in Lebanon. Clinton wouldn't have wanted to leave that gym until every last voter had been converted, even if that meant he had to memorize the scheduled sewer installation for every home in Russell County. Mark Warner, a similarly tenacious glad-hander, went to rural Virginia again and again because, deep down, he needed to change people's perceptions of who he was. Obama doesn't connect to the world that way, which is probably why his campaign has always preferred big rallies to hand-to-hand venues. Obama gives the impression that he's going to show up and make his case, and if you don't fall in love with him, well, he'll just have to pick up the pieces and go on."

Then, there is the matter of race/racism and whether the latent prejudice of whites will adversely affect Obama's chances. I like the reporter's critique: "The more important question is not whether race is a factor in people's votes but whether it is a determinative factor -- that is, whether Obama's being black is the disqualifying fact for white voters that it might have been 20 years ago or whether it has now been reduced to one of those surmountable obstacles that any candidate has to overcome." This merely calls for scathing honesty: is Obama's mixed heritage the ONE reason to vote for/against him? Although there is, no doubt, a small subset of the population who would say this matters the most, this is obviously the wrong basis of evaluation. I am in agreement with the reporter's conclusion: "it may be possible for racial prejudice to exist, as all the polls suggest it does, but for it to be only one significant influence among many, including voters' views on the economy and on McCain as an alternative."

Finally, I appreciate Obama's candor.

"I'm not a familiar type." He laughed. "Which means it would be easier for me to deliver this message if I was from one of these places, right? I've got to deliver that message as a black guy from Hawaii named Barack Obama. So, admittedly, it's just unfamiliar . . . I'm different in all kinds of ways. I'm different even for black people." (Emphasis added.)

In the end, I think this is what it comes down to: can you vote for someone unfamiliar? Of course you will feel the riskiness of it, but the only rational explanation for that sense of risk is fear. Not necessarily deep dread or panic, but uneasiness with the inability to predict what will happen. We never can, of course, but the uncertainty of tomorrow (even of later today) seems more manageable when you are working with the familiar. This is change at its essence: from something known to something new. The big changes that Obama might generate will be possible because of the small changes in the hearts and minds of people like us.

Barbara Capogrosso-Sansone defended her dissertation this summer, and I was lucky enough to wangle an invitation. What follows are the thoughts of a wannabe social scientist/activist who imagines significant connections between the languages of math (especially quantum physics) and human words as they are spoken and written in intentional conversation with one another. You may decide that the t-shirt John wore for the event describes me perfectly:

On the off chance that I might be on to something, well, you'll read what a mishmash I've made of Barbara's quantum Monte Carlo study of ultracold bosons in optical lattices. My attention was captured immediately because she's working with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Some folks have suggested that something like a BEC might be responsible for consciousness. (It can't be an actual BEC, because our brains - let alone the rest of our rather incredible bodies - cannot live at the supercold temperature involved.)

The general thing that I'm thinking, as I mentioned to Don in my exuberance that day, is that we are all really talking about the same thing, we're just using different languages to do the talking. "We" who? What "same thing"? Ah. I can't quite answer that, yet. The "what" is something along the lines of spirit - but it goes by many, many names: energy, power, life, creativity, inspiration, vision, to name those that leap to mind today. Perhaps it is the answer E.O. Wilson seeks, a theory of consilience. Perhaps it is the miracle Wendell Berry argues can never, ever, be captured by any equation humans are able to devise. Berry, btw, is also a fantastic resource on living in the presence of fear.

As to the "we" - I've got a rather broad criteria that includes anyone/everyone trying to find solutions to the challenges that face humanity today. Specifically, though, I aim to include the people I've met at UMass Amherst, in all our varied fields and disparate ambitions. In the midst of Barbara's exegesis on the dipole interaction and quantum phase transitions, she said there's something intriguing occurring in these optical lattices:

Mathematicians (perhaps more than any other kind of physical scientist?) deal with the observable, the measurable, the essentially reliable. Social scientists, on the other hand, strive for the predictable but are constantly having to engage the sheer diversity of actual human responses to living, i.e., the social implies the unbounded. There may be parameters to the "hopping" we can do, but the rules that determine these parameters are not yet known.

Honestly, I'm not sure I want those parameters defined too accurately, but I do think we (humanity) need to figure out the forces that can be used to alter the realities we live in, largely because the current conditions are frightening to those of us with relative privilege and still totally suck for the majority of the world's population. My basic thesis is that language is the tool.

The secondary thesis (if you'll just go along with the first one for awhile), technically an hypothesis, is that language is energy - quantum energy, in fact, full of potential that can be experientially realized. The energy is in the transformations created through the assignment of meaning - both to things said and to things perceived but unsaid. Barbara spoke of the Bose-Hubbard model (1989), and mentioned a kinetic energy term, "hopping matrix element" ("t"). Does it work as an analogy? Language operates within fields of understanding and mis- or non-understanding. We in the West, especially) tend to privilege "understanding," but misunderstanding is a potent space in-and-of-itself (see Chang).

Listening carefully to the language of math (especially by teachers of math and scientists using math), I hear metaphors of social interaction: "onsite repulsion" (e.g., prejudice?) "localized atoms" (e.g., jargon, culturally-specific terminology?), "zero compressibility" (no range of possible interpretation?), superfluid state (meanings in flux?) "Each line," Barbara explained a graph, "represents a particle, [these are] world-lines." Sounds like discourse trajectories to me! There are "hopping events" and "periodic boundary conditions in time." Could these be akin to particular complexities in conflict negotiation and other difficult forms of problem-solving?

What I find most instructive concerning the language of math that I think social scientists could learn from, is that when mathematicians come up against a dilemma, they invent a way to deal with it. Tell me the truth, what is the correlate in real life of imaginary numbers? Barbara's work goes even further than imaginary numbers, she is working with imaginary time.* Her atoms, somehow inversed in temperature, move in imaginary time, then hop to their nearest neighbor even though they could go somewhere else. Now, I do not know the significance of this in terms of physics, but if I extrapolate to the ways that discourse works, I would say something is indicated to the effect that simply reversing the conditions leads to a similar effect. Am I interpreting accurately enough? Flip the dynamics of oppression, it's still an equation of privilege/disadvantage. I know I am reaching here, so some of you that KNOW the math might explain how well the analogy does or doesn't hold. Basically, (it seems) some attractive force remains at work and effectively reduces the range of possibility to only that which is closest, even though more distant positions are possible (and, socially at least, probably more desirable).

Ok, I admit I'm straining a bit since so much time has passed since the event. My thoughts now are based on interpreting my notes, rather than recalling what excited me in the actual moment. Still, Barbara is working with mechanisms (a worm algorithm, winding numbers, superfluid stiffness) that enable the sampling of topologically different configurations, generating "a mass in order to calculate superfluid stateness." Again, it seems there is a calculation occurring across time and space that allows the identification of relativistic behavior, specifically, particle-hole symmetry.

Let me return to language, meaning, understanding and its opposite. What I say (these words I type) could be imagined as "particles"; they can only be understood if a suitable "hole" exists for reception. Gaps are crucial, of course, and low energy levels always seem a good idea (especially as we enter the age of conservation). Which means, as Barbara says,

If I wasn't excited before (i.e., driven to a higher energy state!), I got moreso as Barbara continued. Because even though the work begins in imaginary time, "the system of effective action" is translated into real time. Keep in mind that I am not making an atom-person comparison, but an atom-language comparison. "The transition," continues Barbara, "is driven by adding or subtracting a small number of particles...[This is a] different physics - quantum fluctuations, at some point it becomes more favorable for the system to delocalize." In other words (I think!), it becomes possible for atoms not to choose their nearest neighbor, but to behave in a truly alternative fashion. Amazing transformations then occur, such as the velocity of sound replacing the speed of light!

A bunch of people had questions at this point in the presentation; which was only (!) laying the groundwork for the discussion of results. Somehow along the way Barbara established a three-dimensional description of ground state properties, coming up with a phase diagram, information about strong coupling expansion, and a surprising finding concerning the critical region - which was bigger than predicted. What happens is a special kind of symmetry - based on the numbers (visible by graphing) and the relativistic behavior of sound itself. The symmetry is the crux (if I've got this right) of the transition from the mathematical world of the imaginary to the real, physical world.

WHAT IS INTERESTING?

The math and physics proper implications are far beyond me, but the pieces I grasp for language involve the importance of temperature (emotion may serve as the social science equivalent?), the changes from a homogenous to non-homogenous system (monocultural to mixed/multicultural?), and this discovery: "two bosons cannot occupy the same site." Again, a reach, but no two words - even the same word - can never occupy the precise same spacetime with exactly equivalent momentum. "This model," Barbara concludes, "is different than before, [which was] hard-core = only one (_____?) per site, and the interaction is long ranged." The gist I took away from the presentation is that added dimensionality matters. The parameters of various electric fields (imagine the matrix of social/cultural factors that generate belonging or identity or community) can be tuned independently, via this knowledge about the hopping matrix element, such that "there is only a three-body repulsion.... [in this] system, meanfield predictions show the system undergoes a solid-superfluid quantum phase transition, [which effects the]
• Charge density wave, and the
• Bond order."

Stick with me - or rip me to shreds! We're witnessing (and probably participating in) huge "charges" of social density in waves (dare I say) of anti-Palinism (to give the most prominent current example). A transition resulting from this wave would be most welcome, would it not? (Well, if it goes the way we desire - I'm not sure the model provides the tools to predict which way a wave may break, yet.) But such a transformation will alter the social order - the relational bonds that tie us into certain elemental states will be disrupted, allowing the possibility for new and different bonds to form.

A Footnote:

*Stephen Hawking describes imaginary time as a "kind of time in the vertical direction," which is "not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time." The Beginning of Time, a public lecture by Dr. Stephen Hawking.

Bringing attention to the action of simultaneous interpretation draws notice to the fact that people are always and forever engaged with interpreting. Whether our languages are the same or different, similar or unfamiliar, we must interpret the meaning of what is conveyed. We assume a certain ease of understanding for many reasons, such as habit, agreement, perception, and tradition. These background reasons presume certain conditions, such as use of the same language, or familiarity with a common culture. If these conditions are not in place, our attention becomes more attuned to the presence of potential difference. If these conditions are present, however, we proceed normally, as if there will be no problems with understanding. Most often this is the case, and we communicate without conscious awareness of the amount of interpretation occurring in the background. Nonetheless, it is not going too far to say that without interpretation there is no communication.

The presence of simultaneous interpretation between two languages, then, merely accentuates processes that are already occurring. Once we decide to keep the fact of constant, continual interpretation in mind, what matters is not the matter of interpretation itself, but the frames of reference that inform the interpretation. Remove the actual interpreter, and this remains the case: what any one of us aims to communicate is sensible - as we intend it - only within the terms of our particular frame of reference; likewise, what is understood by others is only sensible as they receive it - which may or may not be within the same frame as our own.

Rocio pressed me hard the other night, wonderfully so, on the matter of my own frame of reference. I often find it quite difficult to recognize the assumptions of my own logic; so I appreciate questions that make me wonder. According to Stor Gendibal, one of the protagonists in Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge (1982, p. 128):

I must admit to Rocio's observation that I am trying to make sense of Europe's multilingualism from a basis of experience in a monolingual culture. I am from the U.S., with its fanatic emphasis on English. It is true I am impressed with the fluidity of Flemish-speakers (in particular, as most of my interactions this past month have been in Antwerp) to switch from Dutch to English with nary a blink. This includes, by the way, not only indigenous Flemings but also Moroccan immigrants and German transplants. Rocio's questions are important: am I overreacting because of my own distaste with monolingualism in general, or the spread of English in particular?

Yet, I also know a different America because of my work as an American Sign Language/English Interpreter. My thinking is rooted in a bilingualism that matches European multilingualism, and perhaps goes farther, as translations between spoken and signed language involve not only a shift in grammar (linguistics) but also a shift in modality (sensory perception).

Last week, Tumbleweed questioned another element of my frame of reference. My work as a signed language interpreter suggests that the critique I suggest is possible regarding the system of spoken language interpretation at the European Parliament is based upon comparing different types of interpreting - a logic that may or may not be valid. Just as I need to be reminded how much my thought has been shaped by the dominant monolingual culture, I need to continue to explore the divisions created between "conference interpreting" and "community interpreting." There are historical, professional, and economic distinctions between these types that are, in my view, indicators of class and power rather than of literal difference. In either venue, the action of simultaneous interpreting is the same: difference is maintained.

These questions go deep. They touch upon the danger of my biases being too much in the way. Rocio gave some great examples of how the perceived differences are huge between, say, a Spaniard from Valencia and a Spaniard from Catalonia - until one travels to France; or, say, the differences between an American from Texas and an American from New York, until one travels to Indonesia. If the settings are culturally close but not identical, one is aware of the distinctions, only. But when the context is broadened and the basis of comparison is shifted, then those distinctions of a close-close type vanish in the larger contrasts with people who are even more different.

As we observe a globalizing economy (try to) turn culturally distinct places into uniform amalgamations of everywhere and nowhere, and worldwide media establishes norms of ambition for peoples of all kinds, it may be that languages are the best preserve of substantive difference. The action of simultaneous interpretation is to resist a totalitarian logic of similarity - a logic that assumes we communicate better if we use the same language: a monolingualist logic. By virtue of its presence and use, simultaneous interpretation enables a medium of communication that can generate a field of social equality built interaction-by-interaction upon the constant recognition and continual presence of difference.

The pressure to use English is intense.

There are so many reasons.

Ah yes. There is the idea (of multilingualism, of the right to speak/read/write in one's mother tongue - or at least their official national language), and then there is what people do regardless of the ideal (notion, concept, belief, commitment) that the words of "the idea" point toward.

July, 2006, I opened a Facebook Group (Interpretation: An Action Learning Set) to facilitate some of the logistics of this research project. I received an email in response to the invitation I sent friends:

"Hey, what's this "interpretation" group?

Tell me more before I commit."

"All I really need," I answered, "is a translation of my research invitation into your national language, so that I can send it to all the relevant MEPS." The conversation that ensued was informative, to say the least. The extent of the questions and doubt caught me by surprise: nearly everyone asked why, nearly everyone expressed a reason - or two or three reasons - against it. (Conform.) I have to keep explaining myself (it is like a political campaign). Most friends eventually come around to seeing the point, but doubt is nearly always held in reserve: " . . . there's the practical level." Another criteria is marshalled that supercedes (supposedly) the original logic, point, or value, discouraging and weakening implementation.

Most of my arguments with friends to date have been based in communication theory, but there is also EU law:

"Therefore each citizen of the Union has the right, "[to] write to any of the institutions or bodies referred to in this Article or in Article 7 in one of the languages mentioned in Article 314..."

There are some layers of irony here, no? I am not a citizen of any European Union country, yet I am trying to apply an ethic that has been believed so strongly - or understood to have such utilitarian value - that it has been institutionalized into law; and am being told (essentially, repeatedly) not to bother. (Conform!)

Here we are, in the European Union's Year of Intercultural Dialogue. Without neglecting the initiative's achievements . . . are there really only words in one language by which such "dialogue" can be accomplished? If only one language is being used, can whatever communication that happens even qualify, potentially, as dialogue? Di = two, logue = word. Two words, two different words (or more), are necessary.

Thankfully, and due to extraordinary efforts from friends, their families, friends of friends, and their families (!), I presently have seventeen translations (of twenty-three).

The gathering was splendid.

The U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Brussels is large, impressive, and immaculately tended. We arrived a few minutes early but were immediately ushered in to mingle in the hallways and anterooms, sipping wine, juice or water and munching delicious appetizers from trays replenished regularly by the constantly circulating staff. Conversation with the delightful company was light and entertaining; it was me being there that edged on the surreal. :-)

I did not get to shake hands with Ambassador Fox, although we had a prolonged moment of eye contact just as he was being summoned to introduce a short film on Belgian-U.S. relations. An Invisible Bridge is a well-crafted summary of a unique international relationship between two peoples - or, rather between the idea of two nationalities with a special bond. Susceptible as I am to musically-produced emotional tweakery, I teared up at the presentation of NATO's heroic mission "to secure the future of Europe", noticing that a Belgian acquaintance next to me was also surreptitiously wiping tears away. When I asked her, post-film, she confessed. Her emotion stemmed from grief at unity lost - the togetherness of a single nation being ripped at its seams along a language divide.

Ambassador Fox is quite proud of the film and the interest it has generated across Belgium. I understand why: the ethos of the film appeals to a human need to belong, to know one is connected with others, a part of something larger than ourselves. The desire for a group identification is, at core, tribal; its modern form is the nation.

I am not advocating an end to the nation (not necessarily, for sure not yet). We need better institutional structures and mechanisms for balancing out economic disparities, and the state is still the best tool for experimenting with various possibilities. My problem with the film is along the lines articulated by a friend who rejected its glorification of war. For me, I can't say that I saw "glorification" per se. War is a tragedy, and its effects are still viscerally and personally real for many people in Europe: both those who lived through WWII (while so many died) and the children of people who lived/died during or because of the war. The tragedy of war is also etched in the beings of the millions of immigrants to Europe from regions of the world still swamped under the reign of violence.

What I witnessed in the film was an acknowledgment of war's horrors, and gratitude to those who made attempts to alleviate suffering. The problematic implication for me was the implicit assumption that war is a human inevitability. The film makes no statement about ending war; indeed, by shoring up the borders of nationality the film cultivates the exclusive attitude of distinction that makes war possible.

Still, I appreciate what I learned:

• Peter Minuit "bought Manhattan from the Indians" circa 1626. (The history obliterated by the neutral statement of fact nonetheless remains.)


• Father Pierre-Jean De Smet helped negotiate "peace" (my quotation marks) with Sitting Bull


• the Red Star Line carried millions of Eastern Europeans to the U.S. at the end of the 19th century


• the WWI Belgian Relief program organized by President Herbert Hoover, Ernest Solvay, and other prominent Belgians.


• rebuilding of the Library at the University of Leuven after its destruction during WWI


• the organized escape routes, known as the Comet Line, created during WWII for Allied soldiers


• the Battle of the Bulge occurred here, in the Ardennes mountain range

Here's a testimonial of a US veteran of the Bulge returning in 1994:

The most memorable part of our tour to Belgium was the warmth and gratitude expressed to us by the people of Houffalize and Bastogne. As Ken Aran expressed it, "our localized reception was more like a family. It was an experience I shall always cherish." One of many examples of Belgian warmth for us veterans was the parade at Bastogne in which the not-so-young veterans marched the length of Bastogne's main street to the McAuliffe Square. As we march along down the Rue Savlon, many school children hurried out to grasp a veteran's hand and marched along before approving and politely applauding crowds that lined the sidewalks. There were not always enough veterans' hands to go around, but some children then clasped hands with kids who were already joined with veterans.

There is a huge emphasis on the sentiment of Belgians' appreciation for the US military's role in freeing Belgium from the occupation of the Nazi's. Obviously this is a triumph and a matter of pride for soldiers and civilians who fought and won that war. There is no doubt that the gratitude of the persons and families affected is genuine; nor is there doubt that that war had to be fought. Because humanity (as a sociobiological species) is still riding a plateau of violence (war is collective, cooperative behavior), no doubt there will continue to be some wars that remain necessary. But not as many as we have, and certainly not the wars predicated on a competitive economic fight over the planet's resources.

We can do better than that. So I am disappointed on an ideological level with An Invisible Bridge. The economic ties between Belgium and the US are substantive: 900 US companies in Belgium, 500 Belgian companies in the US.

Let not the ties between the peoples of these nations be based on pillars of war or greed, and neither motivated by fear.