history: 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 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.