About Guerrilla Scholarship "Guerrilla Scholar" is a nominal job title of Dr. Sheldon Greaves, the author of Cogito! It is briefly defined as pursuing the life of the mind through unconventional means and methods. This web site is for the promotion and support of independent scholars, amateur scientists, artists, and all those who enjoy the life of the mind but can't, won't, or ought not to do so within the confines of academia.
Guerrillascholar.com is dedicated to the proposition that to acquire knowledge, no matter how obscure, is an essential human activity, and that using our insight to improve the world is the highest expression of the human spirit.
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One of my favorite Bay Area cultural institutions performed last night (o5 March) at the Campbell United Methodist Church. The Bay Choral Guild presented a wonderful program of some of the essential masterworks of Renaissance and later sacred choral music. The program was billed as a selection of Lenten Devotions Through the Ages, although a few sub rosa “alleluias” managed to slip through (Note for non-geeks in Christian liturgy: this performance took place during Lent, and in some Christian liturgical traditions is it customary to forgo music that includes “Alleluia” or similar non-Lenten sentiments. But since this wasn’t a church service, I suspect that BCG won’t be getting any tickets from the Lent Police).
In carrying off this performance, the singers had to overcome a minor obstacle; the hall itself. Churches through the ages have had to strike a balance between a lively, sustained acoustic, which favors much of the sacred choral repertoire, and a less reverberant environment that lets you understand what the preacher is saying. Electronic amplification can bridge much of this gap in either direction, but my sense is that sustained reverb is not a priority in most modern church spaces. Pity. Because the music presented last night was of the kind that just cries out to be heard in bright, resonant spaces that sing.
That said, the choir compensated, I’m told, with some adjustments to their arrangement which took advantage of the characteristics of the church. The result was an outstanding performance. The blend was excellent with a good sense of ensemble. Lyrics were sharp and pronounced with distinction. The dynamic variation, particularly in the later pieces that make more use of that kind of thing, was carried off with confidence and emotional content. In particular, the performance of John Tavener’s Funeral Ikos was thrilling, raising Richter-scale goosebumps.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first piece on the program, Duarte Lôbo’s Requiem was special because I have some history with it. Years ago my wife and I were living with someone one who, coincidentally, is currently a member of BCG. One evening he brought home a CD titled “Portuguese Polyphony” that contained a superb recording of this mass. It quickly became a favorite of all of us. It was a real treat to hear this marvelous music performed so well. This was followed by an equally inspired performance of three motets by Christobal de Morales.
The second half of the program began with Tenebrae Responses by Carlo Gesualdo, followed by a short Motet for Passion Sunday by Frank Ferko. We were then treated to the Tavener I mentioned earlier. The program ended with four beautiful motets by Josef Rheinberger.
Bay Choral Guild has recorded several excellent CDs of their music. I am not usually one to be pushy about such things, but I do hope that they strongly consider making a CD of this particular program. It was one of the most enjoyable BCG concerts I’ve yet heard.
To learn more about Bay Choral Guild and to make a contribution, visit their web site at http://www.baychoralguild.org/.
I was intrigued to see an interesting article on the website of American Scientist magazine about the problem of the volatility of the data that narrates our civilization. The article, “Avoiding a Digital Dark Age” by Kurt Bollacker describes in detail several examples of how our high-tech world fails to imbue our information stream with any kind of permanence, even for a few generations, let alone centuries.
This is something I have been noodling over myself for some time. Back in 2007 I wrote about this problem myself in The Citizen Scientist (See “Words That Survive”) comparing modern methods of long-term data storage to some of the superstars of data longevity; the cuneiform clay tablet, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the papyri of ancient Egypt. I also gave some information about the Rosetta Disk, a interesting effort to preserve linguistic information developed by the Long Now Foundation, whose purpose, briefly stated, is to try to get people to think ahead on the order of about ten thousand years. The Rosetta Disk is mostly concerned with preserving thousands and thousands of pages of linguistic knowledge. Descriptions, grammar, phonology, lexicography of languages that are dead or dying.
But what I do not see (and it’s possible I just haven’t looked hard enough) is the part where this linguistic knowledge is actually directed at documents. In other words, the project does no seem to do much in the way of preserving actual texts one might want to translate by using all this carefully conserved arcane linguistic knowledge.
But the problem remains; how do you preserve the intellectual essence of who and what you are? Granted, you take the chance that future centuries will see you as little more than a convenient warning to others, but that’s not something we can control. I would rather our world be dismissed based on what we leave behind than to see us rendered irrelevant because our society was rendered mute by its own technical cleverness.
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Both Bollacker’s article and my own look for technical fixes, but in hindsight I’m less enchanted with that as a solution. The cuneiform tablets of the city of Ebla were fired to rock-hardness when the palace was burned by the troops of Naram-Sin 4,300 years ago. But in between that event and their discovery and translation, nada. They may as well not have existed at all. Other ancient texts were preserved as part of living traditions, often by people who adopted them and made them their own. The Arab preservation of many Greek classics comes to mind, as does the copying of pagan Roman and Greek works by European and Byzantine Christian monks. As such, they benefited by being part of a living tradition which meant that enough people were interested in these works to make copies and copies of copies. Copious copies of something render it harder to wipe out and, as an aside, make it less necessary to hoard documents all in one place. That was both an advantage and a weakness of the Library of Alexandria. It was a grand, magnificent institution; much more than a collection of books. It was a university, a laboratory, a forum, a performance center.
But its notoriety and its centralized location made it vulnerable. It was at least partly burned by Julius Caesar during his siege of Alexandria, many of its scientific works were burned by the order of the Christian Emperor of Byzantium Theodosius in 389 CE, in an effort to rid his realm of “pagan” influences. It was finally irretrievably destroyed in 642 by the Muslim Caliph Omar, who said that if the contents of the library were contained in the Koran, then the library was redundant. If not, it was unnecessary.
So while I think that we need some kind of technical fix for the long-term preservation of our knowledge, it is clear from the pages of history that communities of learners and curious minds can do much to keep culture and information alive. Frankly, we already have excellent methods available to us now. We can keep publishing books and print them on archival quality paper. We can continue to fund libraries. Private collections will also play their part. But at the end of the day, the question will come down to whether we value our history, science, literature, art, music, film, and so forth enough to hold on to it. The communities of the curious and the passionate can do as much to tell our story to the future.
This morning’s massive earthquake in Chile caught my attention because of its magnitude: 8.8. I remember experiencing the Loma Prieta quake here in the Bay Area in October of 1989. That one was pegged at something like 6.8, so the quake in Chile was one hundred times more powerful. As I write this, tsunamis are heading across the Pacific, threatening a long list of nations. Now that these nations are more connected commercially than ever before, I’m wondering what potential exists for overall disruption of the global economy?
Landsat satellite image of Thera. |
It’s happened before. In fact, one of the best-known technological transitions is due to a cataclysmic event in the Mediterranean around 1600 BCE. I’m referring to the volcanic explosion that blew open the island of Thera, also known as Santorini. This explosion weighed in at around 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which is comparable to the Richter Scale used to describe the intensity of earthquakes. Like the Richter, it’s a logarithmic scale, each step being ten times bigger than the one before. The scale is based on the size of the plume of smoke and ash, and the volume of ejecta blown out by the event. a VEI event of level 7 blows out more than 100 km3 of material.
Just for comparison, Mt. St. Helens in 1980 scored a 5. The Krakatoa eruption in 1883 and Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 were both sixes.
Anyway, back to our story. This was the late bronze age. To make bronze, one needs copper and tin. Copper was common in the ancient Near East, but commercially viable supplies of tin were not. Most of it came from mines around the Black Sea. The relative rarity of tin made it an important strategic mineral that found its way to buyers in the Mediterranean basin through a trade network run by the Minoans. Thera wiped out the Minoan civilization and destroyed many of the coastal trading towns that were part of the tin trade.
So because of the destruction of Thera, the tin supply dried up. This prompted the peoples of the Near East to turn to iron as an alternative. Up to that point, bronze was actually the preferred material for most things; it was quite hard and strong enough for most purposes. It was easy to work, didn’t require as much heat to forge or cast it, and it didn’t rust. But with the tin supply gone, they had little alternative, and the Iron Age began.
I don’t expect quite so drastic a change in our economy because of the Chile earthquake and the tsunamis it created, but it does make one wonder about how vulnerable our global economy is to the ripple effects (pardon the pun) caused by disasters like this in far-away places.
A couple of years ago I began making 3-D collage art, otherwise known as shadowboxes, in order to… hell, I have no idea why I started doing it. Part of it was inspired by a visit to the San Jose Museum of Art where they had an exhibit of the drawings of M. C. Escher. Another part was the character of the “boxmaker” computer in William Gibson’s Count Zero, who made boxes with bits of junk artfully arranged in the fashion of American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). But that never really quite explains it all. I have always liked art and enjoyed the thought of making it. I am only a marginal hand with pencil or charcoal, and with watercolors even less than that. But the idea of making a statement or narrative by assembling things in a box was something I knew intuitively that I could do well enough to create something pleasing (at least to me).
So, I began assembling boxes. Some were more elaborate in their planning and execution than others, but they were all a lot of fun. I enjoy seeing them hanging in our living room. Then I had a visit from my friend Lee, a very gifted artist in his own right. Lee has a little art boutique in Frisco, TX, as does his partner Sandra. Lee saw my stuff and liked it. I sent photos so he and Sandra could both see them, and the result was an offer for them to display my boxes in Lee’s boutique to see if they sell.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the notion of me…me… being an “artist” in the sense of someone actually buying my stuff. But there it is. So, before I box up my boxes and ship them to the state I associate least with things artistic, a gallery of images (the photos are rather marginal, for which I apologize in advance).
“Habitat.” 3-D collage with dollhouse furnishings and added objects. Click to enlarge. Photo by the author. |
The first of these is called “Habitat.” It was directly inspired by that visit to the San Jose Art Museum. The Escher drawings on display were not his finished ones, but the planning drawings, the studies that showed how he approached his works. I love these kinds of displays, that show the creative process in action, complete with eraser marks, as it were. I wanted to somehow replicate the topsy-turvy feel of an Escher mindscape, so I created a miniature interior using dollhouse furniture and features, like the staircase and window frame. The eye peeking through the window is mine.
“Untitled.” Click to enlarge. Photo by the author. |
The second is called “Untitled” for obvious reasons. It was based on a kind of family prank we did when I was young. Somehow, for some reason we acquired an emptied eggshell and decided it would be great fun to hang it on the wall. We did so in a way that made it look like it was stuck there, as if by gravity. It was placed in a corner of the living room where it was visible, but not blatantly so. Guests would furrow their brows at it and ask “Uh… is that an egg on your wall?” We’d reply in the affirmative and leave it at that. Jokes that leave people perplexed are nearly as much fun as the kind that make them laugh, although the truly enlightened guests did.
“The Great Game.” Assemblage made of found game parts and foam-core board. Click to enlarge. Photo by the author. |
“The Great Game” is rather political. It uses parts of various recognized games (Chess, Monopoly, Checkers, Magic, The Gathering, Backgammon, Panzer Blitz, etc.) to make create a landscape of confused, warring ambitions and cross-purposes. For those of you not familiar with the reference in the title, “The Great Game” was a popular phrase in the latter part of the British Empire used to describe the constant thrust and parry of colonial warfare and politics, pitting one great power against another, the ever-present challenge of local insurgency. When used ironically, it also includes the plight of all the locals caught in the middle.
“Tree of Knowledge” Assemblage made of found objects and clipped printed and written documents. Click to enlarge. Photo by the author. |
“Tree of Knowledge” plays on the archetypal theme of the tree of life. I have always been impressed that in Genesis there is a tree of knowledge of good
and evil as well as a tree of life. Even though it is “forbidden”, it is also necessary. When humans eat its fruit, God observes, “See, the man has become as one of us, knowing good from evil.” So the “tree” is just a twig from our yard, but its “leaves” are cut from various pages of printed materials, as well as some old scholar’s notes written in fountain pen that I found in an 1880 edition of The Annals of Sennacherib I acquired some years ago. Other items are added and arranged to give a chaotic blend of themes and ideas, some of which may or may not be oblivious to the central theme. Anyone who has done intellectual work will understand the way the universe of knowledge and fancy does not order itself for us willingly.
“High Tide.” Click to enlarge. Photo by the author. |
The last one is my most recent box: “High Tide.” This is just a simple display of some stones, a mussel shell (Mytilus californianus), and the carapace of a small crab, assembled together and suspended over a background of beach sand glued to the background. I used golf tees to support the objects so that they seem to be floating, inviting closer inspection. Even though it is one of the less elaborate pieces, it’s one of my favorites; very simple, uncomplicated, inviting and quiet.
So now, by an odd chain of circumstances, I am packing up these boxes and sending them out into the world, perhaps one day to adorn someone else’s home. Although I’ve grown attached to them, I frankly need the money and perhaps it’s for the best. I would like to make more boxes. Perhaps this will help me start putting some more ideas together. I have been jobless for nearly a year, but I have never gotten used to the sense of dislocation that settled over me when I was laid off. Putting stuff together into its own unique arrangement is remarkably affirming. It is putting yourself together when you are in pieces. Arguably it is even an act of defiance. Now that there might even be a modest dribble of income should these pieces sell, I have even more incentive to explore this and perhaps other media as an artist.
Perhaps commerce, rather than necessity, is the true mother of invention.
Before we get started, a huge “Thank You” to Johnna Cornett who reworked Cogito! into this nifty new look. Also a big thanks to my wife, Denise, who took the photo in the masthead during a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine.
Historians of science in general and paleontology in particular will recall the cautionary tale of Dr. Johann Beringer (1667-1740), a physician and a Senior Professor of Medicine at the University of Würzburg who also dabbled in natural science as a hobby. He was particularly passionate about fossils, and kept a private collection of fossils he had accumulated over the years. Then, in 1725 he was given some truly remarkable finds by some local lads he was employing to dig in the environs of nearby Mt. Eivelstadt. These fossils were unlike anything the good doctor had ever seen before; stark reliefs of animals, as well as images of the sun.
A print of some of Dr. Beringer’s infamous stones, bearing letters resembling Hebrew. |
Soon other, even more remarkable stones crossed his desk with images and reliefs of insects, plants, birds, celestial objects and even Hebrew letters. The following year, Dr. Beringer published a treatise on the stones called Lithographiae Wirceburgensis. After expounding several possible theories to explain these strange stones, he briefly considered the possibility of fraud, but dismissed the idea. However, legend has it that just as his book was going to press, the boys presented him with a stone bearing his own name and, in a fit of panic, he tried to buy up all the copies of his book.
Eventually, it was discovered that the hoax was perpetraited by two of his university colleagues. Apparently, Dr. Beringer wasn’t particularly popular. Beringer brought criminal charges against the two men and won in court. He managed to live down the hoax and went on to write two more books. But today, Dr. Beringer has become a symbol of gullibility and pride, a cautionary tale to those in the scientific profession who would pursue hypotheses without good evidence to support them. A good link to learn more about this incident is here.
The list of scientific hoaxes is long and colorful; to it we can add various other early frauds such as the Piltdown Man, and more recent deceptions propounded by the tobacco industry and the deniers of global warming.
The last Presidential administration became infamous for not merely suppressing unpleasant facts, but for spreading actual disinformation on scientific subjects. I have run both with scientists and spooks; both are deeply committed to winnowing facts from the chaff of noise, and in the power of the mind to uncover the truth. But the intelligence analyst and operative contend with the basic underlying assumption that someone, somewhere, is trying to mess with them. Scientists, by contrast, have little reason to think that the photons speeding towards a detector are engaged in some kind of D&D (that’s Denial and Deception, not the role-playing game) operation, although it might seem like that sometimes. One of my good friends, Dr. Shawn Carlson’s distillation of the scientific method is that Science is making sure you aren’t fooling yourself. But could it also be suggested that science is about making sure you aren’t being fooled? Should the training of a scientist include more instruction on detecting deliberate falsehood?
One can–and probably should–raise the point that scientists are not ultimately looking for facts as they are trying to refine a theory and to some extent that is true. But falsified information is still what it is, and a scientist who falsifies data will see his or her career swiftly buried with a watercolor epitaph. The intelligence community behaves likewise. If a source gets tagged as a “fabricator” that source is no longer taken seriously (unless some political hacks decide that fabricated information is okay as long as it’s what the boss wants).
The recent “Climategate” circus stinks of the kind of “black operation” one might see aimed at a political enemy to try to discredit them with innuendo, and that appears to be precisely what is going on. But it raises a larger question in my own, mind, namely that the producers of so much disinformation on climate change in particular are not taken down more strongly by the scientific community. I suspect the reason is that even if they did, the mainstream press will continue to go them in the name of “balance” and lend them the air of authority. However, I cannot help thinking that the mainstream scientific community is still being too tolerant of the global warming fabricators out there. Personally, I would like to see the scientific community take up the tools of the spook when investigating the claims of deniers, following the money, actively looking for signs of fraud, and adding those factors to the equation and to their results.
Apologies to our readers for the long hiatus. We had some technical issues that have now been corrected.
A huge thank-you to my good friend Kim McCall who came by and got us back up and running again.
More to follow, hopefully soon.
I’ve recently begun taking a class at nearby Foothill Community College in an effort to gain some mastery over mathematics. It’s an old, old project of mine. Ostensibly I’m at school for the same reason most of the other students believe they are here, namely to get an education that will translate into a job or a promotion. Since I decided to enroll as an alternative to pressing a thus-far fruitless job search, it’s easy to assume that I’m here for the same reason.
But it is not. There are two reasons for this. The first is because what you major in does not necessarily translate into job security or even a job. There were a lot of Computer Science majors at Berkeley when I was there who graduated only to find most of the jobs going overseas, and many of the remaining local jobs evaporated after the dot-com bubble popped. Higher education for the sake of a specific job has been a form of investment speculation for some time, now even more than before.
The second reason is a bit more complicated, and not entirely “finished” as ideas go. As you might gather from the title of this post, I have this silly notion that education is an end in and of itself. That is why I am diving into the second calculus class in a four-class sequence (I took the first one in 1998). I freely and frankly admit that there is a streak of idealism here, and I make no apology for it. I think that making education for its own sake a matter of public policy will lead to a better-educated populace, which is necessary for a strong and prosperous nation. What’s more, there is historical precedent that demonstrates this.
Education in the ancient world was not unlike today’s in that education was a path to a good job. In ancient Mesopotamia, you went to school to become a scribe, which meant that when you finished you could write letters or read letters for those who could not, keep accounts, draw up contracts and agreements, and so forth. A scribe was sort of a mixture of secretary, accountant, and paralegal. Ancient Egypt was similar; most scribes worked keeping records for the palace or the temples, and served many of the same functions. China was slightly different in that they placed huge emphasis on memorizing long, complex treatises on politics, philosophy, ritual, magic, astrology, and other subjects. Education was largely for people who wanted to take their equivalent of the Civil Service exam and get a government job. That’s what it all came down to: getting a job.
The ancient Greeks were the exception, as they were in most things. We get our word “school” for the ancient Greek word skholei, which means (Are you ready for this?) leisure. While trades and crafts were passed down through families or via apprenticeships as they were everywhere else, “education” was specifically for people who did not work for a living–and would never be caught dead doing so. The rich, the aristocrats “went to school” because Greek culture held that the proper pursuit for the gentleman of means was the acquisition of knowledge and refinement of the intellect. If one had suggested to them that education was for getting a job, they would have been scandalized. But think about that for a moment. Higher Education in this culture was nothing more or less than education for its own sake and emphatically not for purposes of employment.
What was “school” like in those days (around the 4th or 5th centuries BCE)? For the most part, it was people with time on their hands sitting in the Agora or in drinking parties (the word symposium means “drinking together”) and talking about the big ideas. Gradually the process was formalized and certain things were expected of a Greek education, leading to the introduction of the trivium and the quadrivium, but the idea that education was an end in itself remained foremost in Greek culture.
The Romans, who knew a good idea when they saw one, adopted this idea. Romans who had the leisure and inclination to do so spent long hours in the baths discussing and wrangling ideas as the Greeks had done. Indeed, no Roman gentleman could be considered educated unless he had a proper Greek education, including the Greek language, reading Greek literature and understanding Greek science and philosophy.
But I have not answered the question about why I think this is important, and why it proves my point that education for its own sake is fundamental to both a personal philosophy of learning and a national education policy. Perhaps you already see where I am going with this, but I’ll lay it out anyhow.
Consider the respective impacts of each of these ancient educational systems over the long stretches of time since their parent cultures thrived and faded. At the top of the list, one must in all fairness place the Greeks. The intellectual accomplishments–including the glorious failures–still astonish us today. In fact the more one learns about them, the more amazing they become. It seems that there is hardly a subject that is studied today where one cannot find some ancient Greek noodling around in that general area. Yes, they got a lot of things wrong, but as Bertrand Russell pointed out in his epic history of western philosophy, the significance of Greek science and philosophy lies less in what they accomplished than in what they attempted. Those attempts essentially set the intellectual agenda of the western world for the next 2,500 years.
Now consider one last thing. None of these ancient intellectuals were paid, except for those philosophers and instructors who took on students. Socrates was a working man, a stone-cutter, so he is an exception. But the rest wouldn’t be caught dead working with hand tools, although this had changed a bit by the 2nd or 3rd Century CE. They did what they did because that’s what their culture inclined them to do, but more to the point, because they enjoyed it. It was fun.
One of the greatest intellectual and cultural flowerings in the history of the human race was driven, in large measure, by amateurs.
But I digress. This historical example strongly suggests that education for its own sake is a powerful driver of civilization and national influence. It is the raw material of innovation an national prestige. Unfortunately, our education system gives short shrift to this kind of education, favoring instead what can be measured through endless, pointless, standardized testing.
It is high time for education as an end in itself to become not merely fashionable, but a cornerstone of American educational policy.
Much is being made of the anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin’s walk on the moon that took place forty years ago today. Into this glut of remembrance and reminiscence I will add a few more words that I’m sure have been echoed elsewhere. I write this not because I am old enough to remember and brag on that gift of age, but because I must. The achievements of those years seem, even today, astonishing not just because of what they did, but because of what we do not do.
Today’s average toaster or coffeemaker probably has more computing power than the tiny on-board computer (with 4 kilobytes of RAM) that guided the Command Module on its journey. The magnificent Saturn V rocket was designed and built using slide rules and printed math tables. Today the argument that going back to space will result in a flood of new technology rings hollow to me because most of that technology was really created in the 60’s and 70’s. Today’s versions would be mostly refinements. One entertainment phenomenon from that time put it, “We have the technology.”
The Lunar Module returning from the moon to dock with the Command Module. NASA Photo. |
If you go back to the science fiction of the day, TV shows like the original Star Trek and movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey made assumptions about our day that seemed quite reasonable at the time. The background “history” of Star Trek and the setting of 2001 both assumed that we would be out among the solar system by now. I remember that time, and it seemed almost natural that we would do this. I remember reading books about self-sustaining space stations, colonies on the moon… it was just a matter of time. Consider this editorial written by a NASA official forty years ago this month. (.pdf file).
Public education flourished under the new priorities of space. Far more profitable than the new technologies that flowed from the space program was the vast army of better-educated citizens whose brainpower went on to fuel one technological revolution after another. For one brief, shining moment, an educated citizenry was rightly seen as a matter of national security. The moon landing eradicated excuses for incompetence. The popular refrain for years afterward was, “If they can land men on the moon, they can fix [insert problem]!”
From my perspective the US neutered its space program because the aims of the politicians who supported the race to the moon were rooted in political needs of the moment. We needed to avenge the embarrassment of getting beaten into space by the USSR. For those leaders, this grand adventure was a colossal exercise in political posturing. Even understanding the tenor of those days of the Cold War, it’s hard not to feel contemptuous of them.
But part of it also has to be facing up to some stark realities. Space is, hands down, the most dangerous environment for humans, ever. Asteroid mining and all the other industries that were part of the future vision are far from cost-effective. Even using the Space Shuttle, it still costs something like $10,000 to put one pound of stuff in orbit. Much exploration can be done better and cheaper by robots who don’t need to eat, breathe, sleep, and can tolerate hard vacuum.
Still, it’s hard not to want to see us return to space, to reach again for the stars. As a nation we suffer from the effects of manufactured cynicism; the accepted myth that the same government that put humans on the moon is incapable of any great thing. This Reaganesque absurdity still fuels toxic political agendas at the expense of our national confidence. It cheapens our priorities. The atrophied state of our space program is just one reflection of this, despite triumphs like the robotic exploration of the solar system and the discoveries uncovered by the Hubble Space Telescope.
I like to think that our ability to go into space and to the moon was a reflection more of who we were than a measure of our technical prowess. Read any of the tributes to Apollo 11 today and you will see references to the can-do, pioneering spirit, which is certainly appropriate for this occasion. But there was another aspect of those times that is less acknowledged, and that was that the space program forged unity and a sense of purpose. The events leading up to the moon landing were a process of halting yet gradual unification until that climactic moment when Armstrong’s boot touched the lunar surface. At that moment the human race was one in wonder and awe. I’ve heard it said that the space program cost about $125 billion in today’s dollars. To replicate that pure focal point of purpose, even for a moment, would be money well spent.
I’ve been giving some thought lately to the idea that some corporations are “too big to fail.” It feels terribly wrong at the gut level, perhaps because America was originally envisioned as a place where people could fail and not wind up in some endless hell of debtor’s prison or servitude. We tend to forget that the right to get a second chance through options such a bankruptcy were a pretty big deal to the early patriots who brought the United States into being.
But now we have institutions that cannot be allowed to go the way of failed ventured when they, well… fail.
It strikes me that accepting this is a very dangerous thing. Consider that one defining power of any sovereign state is a monopoly on the use of lethal force. In other words, they retain to themselves the option to kill those who are a threat or perceived as such. Even countries that have renounced the death penalty have some kind of military or even a police force that has the option to apply this ultimate sanction.
Theoretically, this should also apply to corporations or any other organization that presents an existential threat to the state. Obviously we are not talking about killing the organization’s members literally, but dismantling the organization or at least stopping it from doing whatever it does that creates harm. But if an organization like, say, an investment firm or credit company that almost single-handedly pulls the national and much of the global economy into near-chaos, and that organization is deemed “too big to fail” is it also too big to shut down, if only temporarily? Even when every reasonable legal and moral tenet says you should?
Does “too big to fail” mean that companies like Goldman-Sachs, J. P. Morgan, Citicorp, Fannie Mae and all the rest are in fact powers unto themselves, independent of the US government? If they are too big to fail, are they too big to regulate? Are they too big to hold accountable?
For these and other reasons I believe that “too big to fail” very likely means “too big to exist.”
Last Saturday my spouse and I had the pleasure of listening to another excellent concert by the Bay Choral Guild at the Campbell United Methodist Church. The name of the program was “A World of Song”, a title which does not really do proper justice to the program.
One of the great lessons of anthropology, art history, and other fields dedicated to studying the varieties of human expression is that there are many, many ways that people to think about things. The full range of that diversity can be almost shocking when you run into it; shocking, exhilerating, and enlightening. This program encompassed a remarkable array of cultures and traditions.
I was also impressed that those songs that were not from English-speaking traditions were sung in their respective languages. Languages such as Mongolian, Latvian, Japanese, Senegalese, and others. I also have it on good authority that Artistic Director Sanford Dole brought in language coaches to ensure proper pronunciation by the singers. This is pretty typical of the level of detail I have come to expect from this group, and it showed in the performances. Even when one could not understand the language, the words were crisp and clear.
The program began with a stirring and technically daunting piece in Mongolian by Se Enkhbayar, followed by a “Dravidian Dithyramb” by Victor Pranjoti. That should give you some idea of the level of material that was performed, and performed very well. A few other highlights for me were a delightful rendition of Ralph Vaughan William’s arrangement of “Just As the Tide Was Flowing”, a piece I performed with a choir at some point in my youth, and then forgot amidst the fog of middle age. This performance brought it all surging delightfully back.
Where the first half of the program covered traditions rooted in the Eastern Hemisphere, the second half was devoted to the West. This included some beautiful pieces in Portuguese and Spanish, along with a sublime performance of James Erb’s “Shenandoah” as well as an original composition by Sanford Dole, “Girls of the Old West”.
It’s easy to conjecture that such a wide range of music types and traditions would feel like a rollerskate tour through a museum of fine art, and there might be some truth to it. But it didn’t feel that way. Bay Choral Guild is a highly talented and artistically competent group of performers that conveys a lot about about a given piece of music by dint of their excellent preparation and performance skills. This was an evening of small tastes, but highly satisfying nonetheless.
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