Due process

When I was a student, I was twice elected to be one of the two undergraduate representatives on my College Council.  Looking back, I realise that I was rather ineffective, never fully understanding the relative importance of the various items on the agenda, nor knowing how to be persuasive in discussion, nor being able to build alliances with those academics who were sympathetic to the student viewpoint.  It was, as they say, a learning experience.  During this time, I thought it important to attend the monthly student union meetings, to be informed about the issues that my fellow students were discussing and aware of anything that might need to be presented to the College Council on the students’ behalf.  It was at one of these meetings that I witnessed a disreputable breach of good process, that was successful in the short term, but caused sufficient reputational damage that it was soon rescinded.

The student union in the College was responsible for distributing funds to societies and clubs, generally according to their popularity, adjusted for the costs of the activity.  The newly elected head of the student union was keen to reallocate money away from one of the big sports clubs, to fund other societies with which he had more sympathy.  His plan had some merit, but it would be controversial.  His proposed funding allocations were due to be debated at an open meeting, under item 10 of a long agenda.  It would likely take an hour or so to get to this item, after various reports, updates, and a discussion about the annual college party, had been dealt with.   As I headed to the meeting, I passed the College bar, where members of the under-threat sports club were gathering.  They were going to drink beer first, prepare their speeches, and then show up at the meeting to vote against the proposed cut in funding.

The meeting started, sparsely attended, and the minutes from the previous month were approved.  The head of the union then suggested a change to the order of the agenda: we could, he said, take item 10 now, to approve the new funding allocations, and then go back to item 2, ‘matters arising from the previous meeting’.   The attendees all laughed, thinking this was a joke but the chair, persisting with his plan, invited anyone who wished to speak for or against the recommendation on club funding allocations to raise their hand.  One student – clearly briefed beforehand about this ploy –spoke in favour of the redistribution of resources, after which the resolution at item 10 was passed without dissent.  The multitude of sport club members who were about to lose 20% of their annual funding were still sitting in the bar, unaware that they had been disenfranchised.  An hour later, when they arrived at the meeting, there was uproar when they discovered that the motion they had come to vote down had already been approved. 

Under “any other business”, the captain of the sports club proposed a motion of no confidence in the head of the student union, which was passed by a show of hand.  A constitutional crisis loomed.

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Apocalypse

Three years ago, my son’s godfather and I built a series of plywood and garbage 2″x4″ tables in my basement. My son’s godfather is a big model train guy – “there’s no scale like O scale” – and he and I have purchased quite a lot of track, rolling stock, and scenery for my son’s benefit over the years. I say for my son’s benefit but obviously, we’re buying stuff because we like it, and we’re hoping beyond hope that he’ll inherit our hobby, or obsession, or what we convince ourselves is a happy and healthy addiction, unlike our unhealthy addictions which are well known and need no restatement.

However, three or four months ago, my son started asking for Lego “modular” buildings, which are designed to be connected to one another to create Lego town landscapes. As a member of my town’s long range planning committee, I love this: he seems to intuitively understand that creating a coherent and lively, dense and connected townscape is one way that we get to celebrate the concept of community – far more than what Scarborough does in its personality-free high speed Route One and Payne Road corridors. My son in his Lego aspirations is showing a desire to be a part of a quietly and humanised urban landscape, with bookstores, Grand Emporium legacy department stores, boutique hotels, town halls, and police stations. And even a few suburban homes scaled in line with the town – and all located by a train station of our own, shared design, including a frequent traveler lounge (hanging out with his father through O’Hare and Newark and Sea-Tac has made the boy a keen observer of airline business class amenities) and a depersonalised train ticket dispenser which obviates the need for a local ticket office agent.

At a certain point in late November, the boy asked to put together the Lego town in place of the O Scale Lionel train layout. I was torn, because the model train stuff was a connection to the early 20th century that would be severed for my son, and I really want him to be as excited about that sort of thing as I am. But as I thought about it, he’s already there: he knows more about World War II than his teachers and his school mates, and if I’m honest, he knows more about pre-Civil War western US expansion than I remember from my undergraduate American history education at Harvard. He’s not rejecting anything: he’s trying to create something new of his own. And swallowing hard – and not telling his godfather in Massachusetts who loves O Scale more than he loves New Haven thin crust pizza – we destroyed the model railroad layout and started building the Lego town, complete with Lego trains but far more focused on the buildings, the minifigures, the road plates. We casually destroyed one world in order to create a new one based on a very different scale and purpose.

Two weeks ago, my son did roughly the same thing. We have what is called a Minecraft “realm”, which is an online world scape that I pay $6 a month for that enables the boy and his friends to build and create all sorts of stuff on line that, to me, has no meaning whatsoever, because video games are just about as meaningful to me as bitcoin, which readers of this blog will realise is to say, absolutely nothing. My son was getting a little annoyed at his friends’ creations – five other boys have access to the “realm”, three of which are particularly active but the other two boys have retained the right to come into the realm and be pests when they’re bored – so he reset the realm. Basically, he wiped it clean, much as we had wiped the plywood tables clean in the basement. The other boys still had access, and could still build whatever they wanted – but now on a new, clean tabula rasa.

The other boys descended into a kind of ten year old DefCon Five with a speed which should make anyone familiar with geopolitical conflict recoil in terror.

One boy threatened to hit my son in the face on the next day. Another cut him off from texting access. A third – frankly I’m not sure whether to be impressed or terrified – programmed an online bot to send my son text messages saying “Fuck you” every thirty seconds, and then told my son he would hack his school email account and use it to send bad messages to everyone at school.

My son did almost everything right – he let his parents know what was going on, he let his teachers know what was going on – and his parents intervened with alacrity but also with cool nerves. Other parents were informed, and on discovering their sons’ misbehaviour did all the right things. On discovering that the source of the civil unrest was the boy’s cavalier destruction of the realm, we realised that we hadn’t talked to him about stewardship – he was, in essence, the curator and protector of a creative sandbox which five other kids were using to explore their own creativity – and we hadn’t talked to him about the consequences of simply killing that world on a whim. He’s… well, I’m not sure he fully gets that yet, but on a certain level, understanding the power of global destruction is a lot for a kid who will turn eleven in early May. To the extent he’s absorbing any of this lesson is a huge step in his moral development; to the extent his friends are dialing back their own reactions and realising “wait, this is only digits in the cloud” is also a major step forward in their moral development as 21st century citizens. This whole episode, in other words, is going to create better adults out of this collection of five boys, united only by living in the same town in southern Maine, with parents who are both confused by the technology in which they live and at the same time are willing to open cans of whoop ass as appropriate when their kids text “Fuck you” to other kids.

But it does strike me that there is a creative element in human imagination which can be dangerous. The same instinct within us which drives us to paint, to sculpt, to write, to create, is at the root of the instinct to destroy. Not, per se, to destroy other people – our artistic impulse doesn’t motivate the Holocaust by any means. But our capacity to create makes it easy for us to destroy that which we have created without, really, feeling any obligation. I painted what I think is a very nice landscape painting of the Alberta foothills north of Calgary, which is now in the back of my car and, frankly, if it shatters in the -25C cold this evening and dissolves into atoms, I won’t really care about. But that unconcern also informs my feelings about four other paintings in the car – three by the ex-girlfriend, one by the boy – that also are as at risk to cold-driven destruction. In my mind, though, their continued existence or immediate destruction are both, well, “meh” events.

The boy and the ex-girlfriend might feel differently, though, just as the boy’s friends had a very different perspective on the instantaneous destruction of their Minecraft realm creations when my son hit “return” when asked “Are you sure?” by a dialog box a couple of weeks ago. I’m not arguing that our creations should be eternal: far from it. But we create all too easily, and we destroy even more readily than that. Yes, in most cases we create things that aren’t that good – my Alberta landscape is less than amateurish, it’s frankly just crap – but the ease with which we create and then can destroy leads to an impulse to destroy which really, frankly, isn’t healthy. It gives us a sense of power, that we can create, destroy, and create again – a sense that infuses our being from the earliest ages of awareness – which is at odds with the finite nature of our lives, of our existence in nature, of our experience of time and of being.

The O Scale railroad layout, fortunately, remains simply a deconstructed potential – it’s all made of plastic and copper, and has been put away neatly in cabinets, awaiting the construction of new, alternate plywood tables on which it can be created anew. The Lego sets, made of seemingly eternal hardcore plastic, can be taken apart and reconstructed at will, with enough patience and given that we’ve saved all the instruction manuals in a plastic storage crate in a corner of the boy’s room. As adults, though, we build, destroy, forget, and ignore the costs, all because the act of creation – and its mirror image acts of destruction – are all to easy to learn, back when we were children.

Ironically, then, my son’s deletion of the Minecraft realm taught a much more powerful lesson than the worlds of 19th and 20th century children with their playthings: when he hit yes to the question “Are you sure?”, the destruction was permanent. We can’t recall it – indeed, I called Microsoft; the boy really did permanently destroy the realm. His friends acted, therefore, quite rationally in their despair and confusion. The lesson is really for the adults: we destroy at our peril, and we can’t get it back when we say yes to “Are you sure?”

The paintings in the car – both the lousy landscape by my hand, the more practiced works by the ex-girlfriend that she abandoned years ago, and the nostalgic doodlings of the boy from back when he was four years old in a tiny apartment in Seattle – may not survive tonight. But if they do, I’ll make sure to preserve the son’s childish attempts at representing trains. And when I let my own work, or that of the ex-girlfriend, shatter in the February arctic cold, I’ll at least pause and reflect and think about the fact that destruction means at least as much as the act of artistic creation.

Stay warm, folks.

Post contact

We live in a global world, whether most people acknowledge it or not. Even the states which reject it – North Korea, China in its more silly moments, Bhutan until recently – reject a globalised structure which, in their rejection, they acknowledge the universal reality. But as we slowly dismantle the liberal arts – not just those of the Western Enlightenment, but those of Confucian tradition, or of the Vedic sagas, or the stone inscriptions of the Mayans – we run the risk of forgetting that this global world is still new, and indeed, is not consistent in what it is to be global.

It is in this spirit that I wish to challenge Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, a professor at Cornell University, who recently wrote a piece in Aeon.co rejecting the idea of “pre-colonial” Africa. On the one hand, I understand what he’s talking about: he’s rejecting a historiographical tradition which privileges Western concepts of history – of primary sources in written form, of histories primarily of organized states or their equivalent, and in dealing with non-Western societies, in particular only their engagement with the West as being worthy of the concept of “history” at all. I’m not sure that’s worth argument: he’s right, that’s lousy historiography, but we’re not arguing with Hegel anymore. Hegel’s conception of racial identity has been dead for a long time, and using him as a straw man is child’s play, and I don’t think Taiwo is engaging in child’s play. However, the idea of a pre- and post-“history” is an important one, especially as we sit in 2023 looking at our imperfect and clearly incomplete global project as a human species.

It may be important first off to emphasise what I mean by “globalisation.” It’s not the interconnection of nation-state economies via increasingly all-inclusive trade agreements like GATT. It’s also not the increasingly unavoidable influence of social and media constructs across national, cultural, and linguistic borders: the universality of Disney and BBC and K-Pop and Latin American magical realism. Globalisation, rather, is the seemingly inexorable trend towards the human species being fungible across the surface of our planet. That process has been accelerated of late – by things like electronic media, and increasingly safe and easy transoceanic and transcontinental travel and trade – but it’s been going on for longer than our supposedly historical sources can remember.

It started through some sort of a diaspora which we only really can uncover today via mitochondrial RNA evidence found in ancient tombs or, more regularly, just ancient corpses who show up randomly. Hominids exploded out of Africa in multiple pulses over hundreds of thousands of years, and because of climate changes, varying levels of social organisation and curiosity, and who knows what else, modern Homo sapiens developed and settled in more or less isolated groups, isolated enough to develop unique and mutually incomprehensible language groups and folkways, with enough tenacity and wanderlust to populate every arable corner of the planet no matter how tenuously arable, and with enough sheer stubbornness to stick it out, everywhere.

We have no real knowledge of how long that took; it seems like the last bits of the New World in Patagonia were probably settled, or at least discovered, around 4000 years ago – the last bit of footwork, as it were – and the islands of the Pacific were finally taken over within the last 800 years. But the fits and starts in between, well, we’re pretty unsure. And the ebbs and flows in regional and local contexts are even more mysterious: to the early humans who lived in a valley, or ranged over what they thought of as “their” steppe, surely every encounter with another group was fraught.

Sometimes, it was simply a matter of moving into a new area which had been recently vacated; many of the non-Latinate Indo-European tribes who moved into Northern Europe merely displaced the waning elements of Rome, for example. In other cases, genocide did the trick: Mongols displacing the late classical Scythians and Bactrians. And sometimes it was a mix of both: the Aryans, the Greeks, and the Mongols represented waves of peoples who invaded, but ultimately intermixed and blended into, the world of South Asia.

But it’s somewhat hard to dispute that by the Axial Age – around 2400 years ago all over, in the river basins of East Asia, the isolated peninsula of modern India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Fernand Braudel’s greater Mediterranea, and the three distinct regions the New World, North, Meso, and South America, if you’ll excuse the anachronism of calling it by the name of a 16th century Italian guy; and the three African core kingdoms of the West, Ethiopian, and Great Lakes – the world had sort of settled into segregated cauldrons of humanity that only very, very peripherally knew of one another’s existence. Was there contact? Yes, sort of, but it was rare and strange enough to be in the realm of magic and myth, of the “there be dragons” kind of legend even as coins and spices and the occasional slave was shifted across the sands or seas or mountains that separated these cauldrons of human development.

I use that term deliberately: these areas were isolated cauldrons and human development was taking place in all dimensions: social, moral, ethical, military, technological, whatever. They were hotbeds, moving forward the potential of what it was to be “human” in the way that complex, isolated systems anywhere play out the evolutionary potential of said system. Their isolation – which lasted in all cases for centuries or, more relevantly, for scores of generations – allowed social and ecological absurdities to play them selves out to exhaustion, and also to play themselves into a kind of local optimisation. The sense of regret we now experience for the disapperance of those local optimisations – whether Renaissance era European notions of beauty, or Song Dynasty notions of beauty, or Poiynesian conceptions of celestial navigation – sing to the idea that we, as generalised human beings, can still recognise that perfection can have been achieved locally even if it failed to be transmitted globally.

And that, indeed, is the real revolution we’ve experienced as a species in the last millennium. Starting with the first basic navigational revolutions of what to the West was the late Middle Ages (and to the Chinese was the Song Dynasty, and to the real originators was the Mamluk Sultanate), the peoples of Eurasia slowly eroded their cauldrons, and gradually became aware of one another. Words were exchanged, goods, eventually peoples; with the technology of sail it accelerated, and the contemporary revolution of moveable type accelerated it even more, on different dimensions.

The New World and Africa lagged in this bubbling over of the cauldrons, purely because of transportation issues. Until long-distance over-the-horizon sailing became reliable, sub-Saharan Africa, the New World, and even Japan were far more isolated from the other cauldrons than, say Europe or India or the Far East. And so Eurasia became our reference point – by the time of the real wall-tearing-down events of the 15th and 16th centuries, Eurasian globalisation was already self-referential.

So then the Columbian Exchange happened: a massive trade of humanity, culture, art, wealth, disease. Perhaps the purest anthropological cliff event in human history, recognising that by the time Austalasia and New Zealand were settled, the pathology of most human disease was widely distributed in the genomes of the people who made the rough sea journeys to get there. The New World’s intersection with a global humanity is defined not by a colonial event but by a holocaust. A group of people in the Western Hemisphere, isolated for hundreds of generations, had fewer deadly pathogens to which they were immune compared to the Petri dishes of people coming from the Eastern Hemisphere (which, even if only the Europeans were the initial contacts, were already a homogenous global sub-species with shared immunities).

Compare this with Africa: the equivalent of the Columbian Exchange was decisively against the Eurasians in terms of disease and immunity, even if the advantage of technology and tools were decisively in favor of the Eurasians. That is to say, the boundary event of globalisation for Africa – the historical century or so where they were both forcibly, gradually, and violently introduced to a global human experience – is both distinct, and unique. And therefore worthy of study – just as the Columbian Exchange is worthy of study, and just as the late classical / early medieval / Song / Mamluk / Mongol event is worthy of study.

Which is to say, Taiwo is correct rhetorically – this is not pre-colonial or post-colonial as an event, and to speak in terms of colonialism incorrectly privileges a subsequent political event, the subjection of African societies by European military powers, over and above the really interesting anthropological event, the final tearing down of the pre-modern barriers between regionalised peoples. But he’s wrong to think that something didn’t really happen here, and that isn’t worth an independent – and yet also cross-cultural – exploration. The pots and kettles that, for millennia, bubbled up the dominating and yet essentially irrational social mores and folkways of human society really did exist, and over a shockingly short period of centuries, the lids came off and the stew of humanity boiled into the strange (and often distasteful) brew of our 21st century experience. When, and how, and why those pots boiled over is an essential topic for human exploration. Admittedly, it should be examined from every perspective – not just that of some white guys on the western edge of Eurasia who had a slight edge in small group organisation and firepower. But understanding how those guys got the edge, even as all of humanity plunged into a truly new world order of constant and unstoppable intermixing, and how and what happened when others got sucked into the fray, is surely central to how we can understand who were are today and where we might go in the future, for good or for ill.

Professor Taiwo wrote a phenomenal thought piece; I hope he can see, as he reflects on it, that in eliminating a colonial foundation, it is essential to lose the mystery of what happened when the barriers between an isolated Africa and the rest of the world – whether it be Eurasia or the New World – came down. The emergence of colonialism and imperialism are of separate interest, and if only for the moral damage they caused, demand further critical examination – but the real question is why Africa, and the New World, and India, and Han China, and Japan, and Europe, remained separate for as long as they did, remained independent and isolated cauldrons for as long as they did, and what caused them to spill and to create the messy global world in which we live in 2023.

Homer’s yule seas

The first week of the new year provided me the opportunity to visit an exhibition of paintings by Winslow Homer, at London’s National Gallery.  His work is surprisingly under-appreciated on this side of the Atlantic: according to the catalogue, this is only the second exhibition ever held in Britain devoted to his work; furthermore, and shockingly, there is not a single work by Homer held in any UK public art collection, despite him spending over a year living and painting in England, near Tynemouth in 1881-2. 

The image used to advertise the exhibition –- The Gulf Stream, 1899 – was a poor choice as it borders on cliché.  A black man lies on the deck of a small boat, staring impassively to the horizon.  The mast is broken, and a storm is fast approaching, yet he appears unconcerned.  He is surrounded by symbols: a handful of loose sugar canes lie on the deck to remind us of the importance of the sugar trade and the slave economy that maintained it, although it is unclear why the sailor would have need sugar on this fishing trip; on the distant horizon there is a bigger sailing ship, another symbol of global trade, but probably too far away and too busy to come to his assistance; his damaged vessel is circled by three grey sharks, coloured to match the uniforms of the soldiers of The Confederacy; the sea is tinted with splashes of dark red, perhaps the blood of previous victims of sharks, or perhaps a sly reference to the poetry of the artist’s namesake, whose heroes once sailed over “wine-dark seas” of the Mediterranean.  The nonchalance of this man in the face of nature’s threats divests the picture of emotional power.  It presents a puzzle for the mind to decode rather than a pleasure for the eye to linger over.

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Slow Train

It’s that time of the year.  Before the time for the giving of gifts comes the time for the making of lists.  What were the best twenty books of the year, the best ten tv shows, the best five art exhibitions, and the top three recordings of baroque music on period instruments.  I try to avoid spending time reading through such lists, although as I write this sentence it occurs to me that perhaps I should pay more attention, allowing me to compile my own list of the Best Lists of the Year.

Part of the problem is the calendar.  The advent of the year’s end seems to provoke within us the desire to review the current and then to make resolutions for the next.  The prevalence of this desire should not blind us to its oddness.  For most of human history the “year” that mattered was the crop-cycle for basic food supply.  In Europe these cycles are annual, with a season for planting seeds, a season for tending the growing plants, a season for harvesting crops, and a season when it is too cold for arable farming, during which the preservation of stored food supplies is paramount.  In other, warmer climates there are two or three crop-cycles each year, but these countries had little influence on the development of the Western model of annual thought. 

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