The difference between the French and Americans

I'm reading an issue of Connaissance des Arts which introduces an exhibition at the Musee du Quai Branly called "The Masters of Sculpture of Cote d'Ivoire." (Apologies for the missing accent marks -- I can't figure out how to produce them here.)

The works of art are beautiful and the commentary is informative. But here's a note one wouldn't hear, I think, in an American museum publication. After discussing the fact that the names of the Baoule sculpture masters are lost in the "limbo of the past," the author, Berenice Geoffroy-Shneiter, writes (in my rough translation, at 18):

In the wake of the great American ethnologist Susan Vogel, the Belgian art historian Bernard de Grunne has nevertheless identified the "print" of seven masters whose arbitrary names refer, most often, to those of European art lovers who have collected their works. Small consolation.

What Ms. Geoffroy-Shneiter says is of course correct: to live on as, for instance, the "Master of Vlaminck" is (at least to Westerners) a somewhat disappointing form of immortality, an immortality marked by personal invisibility. And that is small consolation, to the artists if they can be consoled somehow, to the people of Cote d'Ivoire for whom these artists are part of their heritage, or to anyone else who wants to respect these sculptors as individual people. 

No doubt an American museum catalog would readily, and conscientiously, take note of the loss of these artists' true names, and perhaps place that loss in the context of the global art market over time -- which is essentially what Ms. Geoffroy-Shneiter has done. But the closing sentence -- "Small consolation" -- seems to leap from scholarly discussion to personal feeling, and from dispassion to irony. Those two words, I have to say, have a certain (Gallic?) style. 

The real perils of realpolitik

Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (2010), details Israel's longstanding and extensive military links with apartheid South Africa, links that apparently included work on nuclear weapons and missiles that could carry them. 

The driving force behind the establishment of these ties, from Israel's perspective, was realpolitik rather than ideology. Shimon Peres played a significant role in establishing the program in its early years, when the Labor party ruled Israel. He "routinely denounced apartheid in public," Polakow-Suransky writes, and I assume those statements were sincere. But after a visit to South Africa in 1974, he wrote to the South African leaders he'd met with that "'this cooperation is based not only on common interest and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.'" (Chapter 5, text preceding note 27, Kindle location 1639 of 7386).

After 1977, when Menachem Begin and Likud came to power, "the confluence of interests and similar ideologies pushed the two countries into a much more intimate relationship after 1977." Polakow-Suransky does not see the Likud leaders as racist, but he writes that Likud's "ethnonationalist ideology allowed Begin and other Likud leaders to stomach racist apartheid policies because these were part of a larger nationalist project designed to protect a minority group that believed its survival was threatened." (Chapter 6, text following note 25, Kindle location 2256 of 7386) 

The result was a program that provided both countries with substantial benefits during years when they had few other allies. But the trouble with realpolitik is that it so often comes back to haunt you. That was certainly the case here. Polakow-Suransky reports that in 1993 a far-left Israeli politician, Elazar Granot, spoke at the Socialist International and "lavished praise on [Nelson] Mandela, comparing him to Moses and arguing that South Africa's president-in-waiting was even greater than Moses for he had actually reached the Promised Land." But, "[a]s Granot recalls it, the first words from South Africa's icon of forgiveness and reconciliation were: 'The people of South Africa will never forget the support of the state of Israel to the apartheid regime.'" (Chapter 12, text at note 19, Kindle location 4517 of 7386). 

Unlikely events involving Neal Stephenson novels

Earlier this year I purchased a new, paperback copy of Neal Stephenson's book Reamde (2011), a slightly science-fictional global thriller that I had fun reading. But when I reached page 726, I found that pages 727-759 were missing from the book; not pulled out, just never bound in.

What made this especially odd was that some years ago I purchased a new, paperback copy of another Neal Stephenson book, Cryptonomicon (1999). I enjoyed that one too, but when I reached page 790, I found that pages 791-822 were missing from it; again, not pulled out, just never bound in. With Cryptonomicon, I went to the public library and read the missing pages there, but I didn't think l I should have to do that twice -- and fortunately, Stephenson's agent graciously sent me a new copy of Reamde that had all of its pages.

One possible explanation for my twice buying incomplete copies of Stephenson's books is that there are a lot of incomplete copies around. I hope that's not true, for the sake of Stephenson and his many other readers. But the second possible explanation (the one his agent confirmed) was that I was (in book-purchasing terms) struck by lightning twice. 

What can be the odds of this? If one out of 10,000 copies of Stephenson's books is incorrectly bound, then the chance of buying two would be about one in 100,000,000. That's really not very likely! But if this could happen, doesn't it seem that I should be due to win the lottery soon? 

Non-immortal verse

From my grandmother's poetry collection, the first stanza of an 1896 poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, titled "Custer":

All valor died not on the plains of Troy.
Awake, my Muse, awake! be thine the joy
To sing of deeds as dauntless and as brave
As e'er lent luster to a warrior's grave.
Sing of that noble soldier, nobler man,
Dear to the heart of each American.
Sound forth his praise sea to listening sea--
Greece her Achilles claimed, immortal Custer, we.

Of course it is right, especially on Memorial Day, to remember those who died in battle, and those who lived afterwards with the consequences of the wars. But sometimes the passage of years clarifies our view -- and improves our poetry.

When a fish is not a "tangible object" and why this matters

A brief note on the intriguing case of Yates v. United States, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on February 25, 2015: This case asked whether a fish is a "tangible object," and answered: no. (By a 5 - 4 majority, with the deciding vote cast by Justice Alito, who agreed with the result but did not concur in the reasoning of the plurality opinion by Justice Ginsburg.)

How could a fish not be a tangible object? Obviously the dictionary would confirm that a fish is a tangible object -- it can, in fact, be touched. But "tangible object" in this statute, the Supreme Court concluded, did not mean all objects encompassed in the dictionary meaning of the words. Instead, to make a long story short, the Court concluded that in this particular statute -- part of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, enacted after the Enron bankruptcy and aimed, at least most directly, at preventing future massive financial frauds -- and as part of the statutory phrase "knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object," the words "tangible object" referred to objects "used to record or preserve information." (Plurality opinion at 20.) What Mr. Yates had done was to throw undersize fish overboard, to avoid federal fish & wildlife penalties.

That's all interesting. I'm not sure that Justice Ginsburg has the better of the argument in terms of the various tools of statutory interpretation she and Justice Kagan, who wrote the dissent, employ. (This case is a wonderful one for teachers of statutory interpretation, like me; in three quite short opinions it runs through many of the rules that currently play an important part in how statutes are read.) But the case certainly stands for one proposition: dictionary meaning, inconsistent with context, doesn't always control. And that might be a good sign for the Affordable Care Act, which poses a similar problem: does the statute, which permits tax credits only to people who buy their insurance from a health care exchange created by a state, actually, in context, also permit tax credits to people who buy their insurance from a health care exchange created by the federal government in a state that chose not to create its own? The fate of the Affordable Care Act rests, to a very large extent, on this precise question of statutory interpretation. 

Why is intelligence so rare?

This is just a question:

Whether or not life itself is a miracle, or the product of divine action, on the planet we live on life is all over the place. Life has existed on Earth for billions of years. Living creatures inhabit all sorts of environments, some of them seeming almost completely uninhabitable.  

And yet, so far as we know, no species except our own has attained our level of intelligence in all those aeons. Why is this? 

Our own history tells us that intelligence is an extremely useful trait to acquire; without it we would certainly not be kings and queens of the jungle. That suggests that if this trait had evolved before, it would have been likely to flourish. 

Is the reason it didn't evolve before that the ability to think as we do is such a huge genetic alteration that its arrival could require billions of years to take place as a matter of sheer biological luck? Well, the evidence doesn't seem to support this "huge alteration" idea, because lots of creatures have some measure of cognitive ability. At least some other animals, including parrots, dogs and chimpanzees, can learn something of our languages (which seem to be one of the most distinct of our intellectual accomplishments). Any number of animals -- perhaps even plants! -- have enough cognitive capacity to form purposes and try to achieve them. Our intelligence is greater than all theirs, we believe, but it doesn't seem totally unlike what they have. 

So if life on earth is prolific, and intelligence a useful and genetically reasonably available trait, and if evolution over millions of years has explored one way after another for achieving survival, why was intelligence so late to show up?

On the importance of small acts of kindness

Elsewhere in Justice: A Personal Account (2014), Edwin Cameron speaks about the impact on his life of acts of individual kindness. He grew up poor, and during one holiday, with no warning, a well-dressed woman showed up at his mother's door, asked if this was the Camerons' residence, and handed Edwin an envelope with cash in it. Not a huge amount of cash, but enough to make a difference that Christmas, materially and emotionally. (232-34) Later, as a scholarship student at an elite boys high school, he was the beneficiary of several quiet gifts of cash that made it possible for him to attend without being humiliated by poverty. (234-35)

To the extent these gifts should be seen as part of a social structure, they were instances of affirmative action for whites and perhaps more specifically for Afrikaners (Cameron's home language was Afrikaans (36-37)), and Cameron emphasizes this important point. (237)

But Cameron also emphasizes another important aspect - the profound impact of, and necessity for, individual acts of kindness. (235-36) On this too he is surely right, though not only because, as he reminds us so vividly, such individual acts can matter deeply for those whose lives they change. Individual charity is not a substitute for the just social institutions that the South African constitution aspires to create, Cameron reminds us, but I think it is unlikely that a society without personal charity ever could achieve just social institutions, and if it did, I'm not at all sure we would like the "justice" that society embodied. A society consists of individual people, and the state of their hearts matters for the society as a whole. 

Put a little differently, much as Hamlet did to Horatio, there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in some philosophy. The exact meaning of individual acts of kindness may be hard to explain or measure, but they can help transform the lives of everyone involved nonetheless.