October 28, 2007
Winners and Losers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:10 PM EST An interesting show now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is titled “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945.” A wall placard near the beginning of an exhibit of photomontages, in 1918 a new and now almost a vanished art form, notes that in Germany photomontage sought to capture what the placard calls the fragmentation and mechanization of modern life, with the implication that in Germany the form rarely conveyed a sunny view of life, but notes that in Poland and Czechoslovakia, where independence from foreign subjection and domination were the outcome of the First World War, photomontage was more optimistic and even celebratory. Looking over the exhibits, this seemed fair enough, and the placard reminded that events often described as catastrophic are not catastrophic for everyone; for some people they are in fact good news. The First World War is a particularly pointed example of this phenomenon. From the German point of view, it was a bitter defeat culminating in gross injustice. The latter half of that view was soon echoed by many decent (perhaps excessively decent) Englishmen, who were within a decade prepared to see the war as a catastrophe, as were most Americans. This is the view we have inherited. Pick up almost any textbook on twentieth-century history, and World War I is depicted as a catastrophe, a tragedy, a senseless slaughter, etc. If you are a Pole or Czech, of course, the First World War meant national liberation. That process was interrupted in 1939, which saw German annexation of the Czech lands, Soviet reoccupation of Eastern Poland, and the subsequent murder of six million Poles, followed by more than 50 years of Soviet-imposed tyranny. Now the Czechs and Poles are again masters in their own house, and my guess is that World War I still looks like liberation to them, merely the first installment, but liberation all the same. If you are a Czech or a Pole, was it worth it? My guess is that it was, and that this view is underappreciated in the English-speaking world because people who have not lost their political independence to a foreign conqueror in a thousand years—and who may secretly mourn the loss of domination of a quarter of the globe—probably underestimate the sweetness of being master in one’s own house. My guess is that most Irishmen also see the First World War as something less than a pure catastrophe, and for similar reasons. Of course, there used to be a good joke (the punch-line was “the Elephant and the Irish Question”) about the tendency of Irish nationalists to quite absurdly see every phenomenon through the prism of their own national myth, but it was, I am fairly certain, an English joke. The death of millions of people may seem like a stiff price to pay for the political independence of some Poles, Czechs, and Irishmen. And wouldn’t they have gotten their freedom anyway, had the war not broken out? Maybe, maybe not, and in any case the First World War was the graveyard of four empires, the Russian, German, Hapsburg, and Ottoman, and while it briefly expanded three others, the French, British, and Japanese, we now think it left them as walking corpses. So add to the list of nations in the long run freed by the war most of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. National independence has been accompanied by other kinds of catastrophe in many of those lands, but cries for the return of the former masters are still pretty muted. An educated person shown in 1914 a prevision of what was to come would very possibly have quoted Heraclitus: “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.” Most of us no longer know Heraclitus, or the Greek in which an educated middle class European would a century ago have quoted him, which does not make our world worse than the one the wars destroyed. The tag from Heraclitus is true, whether we know the tag, or agree with it. To bring this up to date, most of the evidence suggests that the outcome to date of the Iraq war still looks less unrelievedly disastrous to many Shiite and almost all Kurdish Iraqis than it does to Sunni Iraqis, Europeans, and Americans. That placard at the Guggenheim rather startlingly reminded me of this.
October 28, 2007
Our Wellsian Future Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:05 PM EST There’s a new report from the London School of Economics that might give half of everyone’s descendants cause for alarm. According to Oliver Curry, an evolutionary theorist, “Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time. . . . The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.” Those curious to know more about the “genetic upper class” can read, in this BBC article, that “men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices, and bigger penises. Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, [and] glossy hair.” Leaving aside the question of what Pantene and Victoria’s Secret would do in such a future, not to mention all the “male enhancement” spammers, this prediction is just flat-out ridiculous. As the BBC points out, it’s really just a rehash of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, except with the London School of Economics behind it. But Wells’s book wasn’t supposed to be a scientific prediction, and in any case we now know enough to resist taking such projections too seriously. Curry’s underlying assumption, that “sexual selection . . . was likely to create more and more genetic inequality,” runs contrary to most everything we know about evolution. Sexual selection leads to the development or exaggeration of specific animal features—the male mandrill’s colorful face, for example—but if there’s been any instance of a species electively dividing itself through sexual choice, I’m certainly not aware of it. Even if there were, it seems pretty dicey for Curry to assume that humans 100,000 years in the future will favor the same physical characteristics our pop culture glorifies today. If there is anything of intellectual interest in Curry’s theories, it is probably his emphatic assertion that humans are still subject to evolutionary pressures. One of the major debates in evolutionary science is over the question of whether humans still face natural selection, or whether technology and culture have moved us beyond that point. Curry—who, incidentally, is not trained as a scientist—seems to have made up his mind on this question. Indeed, he apparently thinks technology will serve as an evolutionary force of its own. This is an intriguing notion, but I’ll wait for someone else to articulate it before taking it seriously.
October 28, 2007
Historical Contingency Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST Alexander Burns posted on “Contingency and Political History,” considering the case of Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in October 2002, and he speculates that had Wellstone not died in that crash, he’d very possibly be neck-in-neck with Hillary Clinton in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. By this theory, Wellstone would be rewarded by the Democratic electorate for his vote against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. Mr. Burns goes on to name a few other politicians whose deaths in plane crashes seems to have altered, generally in a smallish way, American political history—a man who might have kept the Republican John Danforth out of the Senate in 1976, another who would have similarly obstructed the senatorial ambitions of the Republican John Warner in 1978. I have no reason to doubt either the probability of those outcomes, had those candidates not died, or Mr. Burn’s assurance that recent American political history is marked by a fair number of deaths in crashes. If anything, these accidental deaths do not seem to me to be dramatic enough to sufficiently underscore Mr. Burns’s larger point, that contingency bulks larger in political history than we like to think. Another way to make that point is to consider not premature deaths but deaths for a time improbably avoided. Winston Churchill, for example, was hit by a taxi in 1931, in New York City, and badly hurt. UPI wrote his obituary that night but had to periodically update the draft for another third of a century. Had Churchill died that day, it has sometimes been asserted that he would now be remembered only as the cranky opponent of Indian independence. My hunch is that this whimsy too confidently dismisses the possibility that had Churchill died that day, India might now be a province of the Third Reich, the Japanese empire, or the Soviet Union, in which case Churchill’s crankiness about Ghandi’s character would not now be memorable. Then there is Hitler, who was repeatedly exposed to enemy fire on the Western Front, where he was both wounded and gassed. Had Hitler died on the Western Front, or a couple of years later in the Beer Hall Putsch, or in any of the failed assassination attempts, it seems safe to say that history would be unimaginably different. Hitler beat the odds again and again, almost certainly a fantastic piece of bad luck for the rest of us. One could go on with examples of this kind, although at considerable risk of anticlimax. It occurs to me that that this sort of reflection probably isn’t as stimulating as would have fairly recently been the case. My hunch is that more and more people in the West have a lively sense of the role of contingency in history, an awareness that may be behind the boom in alternate history. It was not always such. In the summer of 1969, a month or so before departing for college, I was part of a left reading group, invited by a girl a year or two older, on whom I had a desperate crush and for whom I was prepared to do anything, as the following may suggest: The first book we read was the once-famous The Role of the Individual in History, by Georgi Plekhanov, first published in 1898. In 1969 Plekhanov seemed at least mildly heretical, even a bit thrilling, because Great Man theories of history were not yet the subject of systematic derision by our schoolteachers. Most of us believed in Great Men, probably because all of our parents had several times voted for someone they thought a Great Man, and in a few cases had served in armies or navies commanded by people they had taken for such. Plekhanov didn’t believe in Great Men, and he was determined to smash any idea to the contrary, which he did with a vigor that in the summer of 1969 startled me. His polemics against the idea of great men shaping history still had something to push against, a sort of popular Carlylean conviction that Great Men were a real portion of historical explanation. Nowadays, Plekhanov is, I’ll bet, a name unknown not only to my students but to most of my colleagues, but in one sense his thought has triumphed, at least in the schools. Outside the schools, I think a sense of historical contingency is on the rise.
October 26, 2007
Al Gore and the Nobel Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:10 PM EST After Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize there was considerable discussion here about whether he deserved it. I thought not, as it seems to me that his contribution to the problem (assuming it is a problem) of global warming has been highly propagandistic and intellectually dishonest. It seems I’m not alone in this attitude. John Christy, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was the co-winner of the prize, doesn’t think very much of Al Gore’s labors in the vineyards of climate change either. Here’s what he said on CNN the other day.
October 26, 2007
Expiration Dates Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:05 PM EST James Watson lost his job yesterday. The Nobel Prize–winning biologist resigned as the chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has worked on and administered genetic research for decades. The impetus for his resignation was the uproar over comments he made last week about genetics and racial differences. Speaking with London’s Sunday Times, Watson had commented, “All our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans’] intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Going further, Watson announced that racial equality is a sham: “People who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” A few people have suggested that the resulting outrage over Watson’s comments was an inappropriate response to the man’s free speech. It seems obvious, though, that the scientist’s comments were not the stuff of which intellectual debate is made. Watson himself has professed surprise at having made such remarks. One hesitates to question the mental capacity of an eminent scientist, but Watson’s comments, and his subsequent retraction of them, look like a pretty good case study in public senility. It’s probably inevitable that our society is going to fixate on the words of famous, accomplished people like Watson, no matter how old they are. But this latest affair makes me wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off imposing a kind of expiration date on public figures. A consensus agreement, perhaps, that 25 years after someone’s career-making accomplishment, we can stop assuming that he remains an impressive person. This sounds a little cruel, but in the long run I think people like Watson would benefit from it. If they stayed lucid in their old age, they would keep making headlines. If they acted like cranks, society would sigh and move on. Biographers might find their ramblings useful, but the rest of us could focus on more important news. Of course, there’s also reason to doubt whether anyone should ever have valued Watson’s opinion as highly as some do. I once had a biology teacher who said Watson’s main gift wasn’t for genetics but for self-promotion. Given how skillfully Watson’s evaded allegations of academic dishonesty, I think that assessment might be merited. I’d say we were fortunate to have him out of the public eye for good, but I doubt we’ll be that lucky.
October 26, 2007
Contingency and Political History Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:25 PM EST A few months back I made a post on what would have been President Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday. It struck me as a fitting occasion to consider the role that chance events play in history. This week, the anniversary of another event—a death, not a birth—seems perhaps an even more appropriate time for such reflections. It was five years ago yesterday that Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, along with his wife, Sheila, daughter Marcia, and aides Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic, and Mary McEvoy. Locked in a competitive reelection campaign, Wellstone was on his way to a funeral at the time he died. Though his opponent, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, was giving Wellstone a run for his money, the most recent polls had shown the incumbent pulling away from his challenger. One of the reasons was a controversial vote Wellstone cast in the middle of October, against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. At the time of the vote, Wellstone feared he had doomed his reelection bid. Just weeks later it seemed that Minnesotans were rewarding his risky stance. If Wellstone had not died on that day in October 2002, I think there’s a pretty strong chance he’d be neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in a fight for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Wellstone, who considered a run for the White House in 2000, might even have entered the 2004 race to face George W. Bush. We never would have heard of Howard Dean if the 2004 nominating contest had also featured a popular, charismatic, experienced Democratic senator who had voted against the war. Whether Wellstone would have captured the nomination in 2004, or subsequently won the White House, is something we can never know. But three years after that election, and five years after the Iraq War began, it seems clear that Wellstone’s credibility with today’s Democratic primary electorate would be extraordinary. Wellstone’s was not the only political career to get snuffed out in such a tragic way. The list of political figures who have been downed in plane crashes is actually quite astonishing. Democratic Rep. Jerry Litton died in a crash in 1976, in the middle of a Senate campaign. He would have likely defeated his Republican opponent, John Danforth, who instead went on to a long and influential career in Congress. In 1978, Virginia politician Richard Obenshain went down with a plane; he was replaced on the ballot by former Navy Secretary John Warner, who is today the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 1991, Republican Sen. John Heinz and former Sen. John Tower both died in the space of 48 hours in separate plane crashes. Tower was certainly at the end of his career, but Heinz’s future was still bright. Believe it or not, the list goes on. Of these men, Wellstone seems the most compelling example of political history gone awry through vehicular disaster. But in a country that celebrates its open, safe political process, these random accidents have exerted an uncomfortably significant influence in shaping the present. There’s not really a way around this, but it’s chilling all the same.
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