Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch Jew and author of Ethics, was a systems thinker. Perhaps one of the greatest systems thinkers. Ethics is sometimes referred to as a "philosophical system," but it is that and more than that in describing a system. Spinoza is a material naturalist. He contemplates a deterministic system that incorporates the entire material world, and his name for that system is "god." While his contemporary detractors unfairly described him as an atheist, he was, in fact, a pantheist.
Professor Michael Morgan, the editor of Spinoza Complete Works, wrote this paragraph in his Introduction to the book:
"If the key that unlocked the secrets of possibility for us as human beings was unity and totality, the wholeness and order of all things, then the reality that grounded the aspiration to this unity and order was the fact that each of us, as natural objects and as human beings, was precisely located in that unity and order; each of our places was determined in every way, and we were thereby endowed with a very particular point of view on the whole. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 1665, as he attempts to clarify the nature of parts and wholes, Spinoza provides us with a famous image. Each of us is, he tells us, like a little worm in the blood. Nature is like the entire circulatory system or like the entire organism, interacting with only a small part of it and experiencing only a very limited region. Even if we grasp the fact that there is a total system and understand its principles to some degree, our experience is so circumscribed and narrow that we are bound to make mistakes about our understanding of they system and our place in it. Myopia confines our understanding, no matter how we seek to overcome it. And we do. We aspire to experience every detail, every event, and every item as part of the whole, to see it from the perspective of the whole rather than from our own narrow point of view. Our success is limited; we can free ourselves and act in terms of the whole, but only within limits. Our goal is to free ourselves from the distortions and corruptions of our finitude, to become free, active, and rational. These are all the same, and are aspects of becoming like the whole, which is what the tradition dignifies with the title "God" or "divine" or "the Highest Good."
For Spinoza, as Professor Morgan writes, "reason in us was akin to reason in nature; one order permeated everything and enabled us, as rational beings to understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it. This was the key to science, to ethics, and to religion. It was the key to all of life. It was his goal to show, clarify, explain and teach it --- to the benefit of all humankind." Morgan's remarks about Spinoza could have formed a preface to Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems. My purpose in highlighting Professor Morgan's statement is that systems thinking is not new. It has been going on for centuries, and I doubt if Spinoza was the first systems thinker.
By the 1960s, systems thinking had become more widely adapted in academic curriculum, at least at the collegiate level. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, is widely credited with introducing systems analysis to public policy during his tenure from 1961-1969. Systems analysis grew to become integrated in addressing engineering problems, business problems, communities, as well as looking at systems in nature (the environment). And it was during this time that Jay Forrester founded the System Dynamics group at MIT. Donella Meadows emerged from the System Dynamics group at MIT and began thinking about socio-ecological systems. Meadows' objective, as with Spinoza, was to "help us understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it."
"A system is not just any old collection of things," she writes. "A system is an interconnected set of elements ["people, cells, molecules, or whatever" she says elsewhere] that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose." These elements are "interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world." Systems can be simple, or they can be extremely complex. Spinoza's system, if you think about it, may be the most complex of all, because it attempts to contemplate all of physical nature as a system. At that level, one can only discuss a system in terms of grand generalities, as Spinoza does in Ethics.
I go back to the very first posting on this blog (see August 17, 2009 post) and the discussion of units of information as the most fundamental unit of physical nature. "Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching of the latest space satellite," Meadows quotes Jay Forrester from his book Industrial Dynamics. "Everything we do as individuals, as an industry or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system." The mechanism that provides that information-feedback is known as a "feedback loop," and it is regarded as responsible for creating consistent behavior within a system over time. A feedback loop is a mechanism that monitors the parameters of the system that triggers adjustments (which Meadows refers to as "resilience" or elasticity) and ensures stasis within parameters which, in many cases, ensures the survival of the system (human body, community, ecological niche) or continuation of functional purpose in the case of an engineered artifact or system of artifacts. Stasis and survival are not guaranteed; sometimes perturbations can overwhelm feedback systems resulting in the demise of the system.
This is reminiscent of Antonio Damasio's discussion of the brain's role in maintaining homeostasis in the body. "Life requires," Damasio wrote in Self Comes to Mind, "that the body maintain a collection of parameter ranges at all costs for literally dozens of components in its dynamic interior. All the management operations to which I alluded to earlier --- procuring energy sources, incorporating and transforming energy products, and so forth --- aim at maintaining the chemical parameters of a body's interior (its internal milieu) with the magic range compatible with life. The magic range is known as homeostatic, and the process of achieving this balanced state is known as homeostasis." (See April 8, 2011 post). Damasio is describing at least the human nervous system of which the brain is a part, but probably more than one system comprising a larger system that is the human organism.
Spinoza's system can only be explained in generalities because there is simply too much information in the universe for any intelligent body to comprehend. We are forced to acknowledge and live with a laissez-faire dynamical system for all of nature in the hopes that perturbations across nature are managed by nature's own information-feedback systems and stasis is achieved. We can try to control or engineer only the small subsystems we can touch in our remote corner of the universe (or multiverses). "People who are raised in the industrial world," writes Meadows, "and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control. . . . "Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find the proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror." We are also returning full circle to a previous discussion of "entropy" and the "thermodynamic condition." (See August 15, 2011 post).
Spinoza would be disappointed by Meadows' conclusion, but she is right. Our scientific method, our philosophy has largely abandoned deterministic systems; we think in terms of probabilities in order to manage uncertainty. (See July 30, 2011 post). This does not mean, Meadows says, that we should stop "doing" just because we can't control something or anticipate every surprise. But we can listen to what the system tells us and "discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone." And with this conclusion, Spinoza would have felt more comfortable.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2007)
A debate has raged over the past fifteen years as to whether music is an adaptation, a trait that emerged as a result of an evolutionary process. Several well-known psychologists and neuroscientists have weighed in on this subject including Steven Pinker, Daniel J. Levitin, and Pascal Boyer. Pinker, on the one hand, has dismissed music as "auditory cheesecake," while Levitin is convinced that music is an adaptation. Neither, in my view, is precisely correct. In the parlance of evolution, an adaptation is a trait that has a functional role in the life of an organism that evolved and is maintained as a result of natural selection. What we typically think of as music --- a song, with or without words --- is not an adaptation; it is not a trait. As is the case with language and learning, it is our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music that is the trait. That capacity has a functional role in the life of an organism.
In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker referred to music as "auditory cheesecake." It confers no survival advantage, he asserts, but music is merely a "confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Music, says Pinker, is a "technology [or a "spandrel" as Stephen Jay Gould might have said], not an adaptation." With music, humans merely exploit the language and communication system that evolved through survival and sexual selection pressures.
Levitin, a former musician and sound specialist turned neuroscientist at McGill University, explains that he "took notice" when Pinker called music "auditory cheesecake" and described music as "useless" as far as biological cause and effect are concerned. In contrast, Pinker puts language, vision, and social reasoning in the category of adaptations that have survival value for the human species. "Music could disappear tomorrow," Pinker says, and our "lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." The musician in Levitin was clearly professionally enraged. So he wrote a book on the subject, This is Your Brain on Music. The final chapter of this book, where Levitin challenges Pinker's views, is titled "The Music Instinct," borrowing a phrase from an earlier Pinker book titled The Language Instinct.
By "instinct," Pinker means that language does not have to be learned. But at its most fundamental level, Pinker does not mean that a language --- the English language, or the Chinese language, or the French language --- does not have to be learned. Humans are not born with genes for English, Chinese, or French language; specific languages are not inherited. At the biological level, we are born with a capacity for language and speech and a capacity for learning a language and speaking that language. In support of his claim that language capacity is a human adaptation, Pinker relies on several attributes, including the fact that it is universal across all cultures and that there are specific brain structures that recognize the rules of speech.
Levitin argues that our capacity for music and learning and creating and performing music is no different. The auditory system that detects, senses, and computes the attributes of music, as well as hands and feet that can be used to to create or establish rhythm, the vocal system that can create tone and pitch, and brain structures that uniquely relate to tone, rhythm, pitch, and chords are physical traits. "Music's evolutionary origin," Levitin writes, "is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists' criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely auditory cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other (non-human) species. Rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the frontal regions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords scaffold on certain properties of the auditory system that were themselves products of the physical world, of the inherent nature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtone series. Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability."
Like the English, Chinese or French languages, we still need to learn classical music, folk music, jazz music, and rock and roll music and we need to learn how to perform (speak) these different types of music. And we create technologies for performing music, just like we have created technologies for communicating words.
In The Information, James Gleick (see August 15, 2011 post) cites a 19th century missionary's experience in Africa with tribesmen who communicated across great distances with drum beats, on the one hand an early form of Morse Code, and on the other hand, the drumming relied just as much on rhythm as well as the tone from the beat for conveying meaning. Although it will likely prove impossible to determine, I do not think we can rule out that music (not the same kind of music we think of today) may have been an early prototype for language. Linguistics has led to the discovery that the human brain has formal rules for language syntax. Is the brain not hardwired with formal rules for mathematics and music as well?
Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained, " The fact that the brain comes equipped with many specialized inferences and can run them in the decoupled mode may explain why humans the world over engage in a host of activities that carry no clear adaptive value. To illustrate this, consider the auditory cortex of humans, which must perform several complicated tasks. One of these is to sort out the sounds of language from other noises. Information about noises is sent to associative cortical areas that categorize the sounds and identify the nature of their source. Information about the source's location is handled by other specialized circuitry and sent to specific systems. The auditory system must also isolate the sounds of language. All normal humans have the ability to segment a stream of sound emerging from someone else's mouth in terms of isolated sounds, then send this purified representation to cortical areas specialized in word identification. To turn a stream into segments, the system must pay attention to the specific frequencies that define each vowel and the complex noises of consonants, as well as their duration and their effects on each other. To do this, the auditory cortex comprises different subsystems some of which specialize in pure tones and others in more complex stimuli. All this is clearly part of a complex, evolved architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communication. But it is also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect, produce, remember, and enjoy music. This is a human universal. There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way." Boyer adds, "This phenomenon is not unique to music. Humans everywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that overstimulate their visual cortex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of dull browns and greens of their familiar environment. . . . These activities recruit our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artifacts very salient and likely to be transmitted."
My own view is that language and music are means of communicating information and that language and music were preceded by proto-language and proto-music, both probably emerging in the same relative human time period. Both, in my view, were likely essential to human evolution as a social species. It also may be true, as Darwin surmised, that music was favored by sexual selection pressures. I think back to the views of V.S. Ramachandran (see October 25, 2011 post) attempting to resolve the discrepancy of views between Steven Pinker and S.J. Gould on language and evolution. For Ramanchandran, language did not evolve from some general mechanism for thinking (Gould), but neither did it evolve specifically for purposes of communication (Pinker). What is innate and what evolved, says Ramachandran, is the competence to acquire rules of language. The actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements). Can we say that what is innate about music is the competence to acquire rules of music, and that the actual acquisition of music occurs as a result of social interaction? If we think of music simply (at least initially) in terms of rhythm and vocal intonation, there is little to separate music and language including symbolic attachments. The most significant difference, however, is that music appears to reach and appeal to human emotions in a way that language perhaps does not. (See January 14, 2012 post and November 6, 2011 post).
Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin has made his career studying music and the human brain. In This Is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explains each of the attributes of music --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- and describes how the brain's architecture is essentially hardwired to deal with each element. "Different aspects of music are handled by different neural regions --- the brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal such as pitch, tempo, timbre, and so on. Some of the music processing has points in common with the operations required to analyze other sounds; understanding speech, for example, requires that we segregate a flurry of sounds in words, sentences, and phrases, and that we are able to understand aspects beyond the words, such as sarcasm. Several different dimensions of a musical sound need to be analyzed --- usually involving several quasi-independent neural processes --- and they need to be brought together to form a coherent representation of what we are listening to."
When we comprehend music, not as a song, but in terms of its attributes --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- we can recognize that these are not "technologies" as Pinker refers to music.
In the discussion of Christof Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach (see January 14, 2012 post), I mentioned the long-associated relationship of music and mathematics. Steven Pinker describes our "mathematical intuition" --- babies have the capacity to register quantities very early, which may not necessarily involve counting as we know it, but to distinguish between more or less and later to distinguish intuitively in terms of probabilities. From early mathematical intuition emerges human activity such as counting, measuring, shaping, estimating, moving, and proving. Each of these activities leads to more formal mathematical reasoning: counting (arithmetic), measuring (real numbers, calculus) shaping (geometry, topology) estimating (probability, statistics), moving (mechanics, calculus, dynamics), proving (logic). Formal mathematics emerges from our mathematical intuition, says Pinker. This same reasoning informs me that formal music emerges from our musical intuition --- our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music.
While music exploits some of the same neural pathways that speech and language exploit, the fact that there are specially evolved components of the brain that are used in processing some of the elements of music would suggest that our capacity to appreciate, learn, and manipulate the attributes of music had some independent evolutionary value. Levitin observes that music "technology" has been around a long time --- at least 60,000 years based on musical artifacts that have been uncovered. But our capacity for music --- by which I mean our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating and performing music --- must have preceded the creation of musical artifact: there is music in song; there is music in tapping fingers and feet, which does not require a flute or drum. The origins of human language and whether it preceded music are, like the origins of music, murky. There is evidence that human language is at least 50,000 - 100,000 years old. For those who subscribe to the view that a FoxP2 gene mutation contributed to the development of human speech, that might put language in the 50,000 - 60,000 years ago range, about the same time as the oldest age of musical artifacts. It is therefore not entirely outside the realm of plausibility that our language instincts and our music instincts co-evolved or that one only slightly --- in the eons of evolutionary timescale --- preceded the other in human evolution.
In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker referred to music as "auditory cheesecake." It confers no survival advantage, he asserts, but music is merely a "confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Music, says Pinker, is a "technology [or a "spandrel" as Stephen Jay Gould might have said], not an adaptation." With music, humans merely exploit the language and communication system that evolved through survival and sexual selection pressures.
Levitin, a former musician and sound specialist turned neuroscientist at McGill University, explains that he "took notice" when Pinker called music "auditory cheesecake" and described music as "useless" as far as biological cause and effect are concerned. In contrast, Pinker puts language, vision, and social reasoning in the category of adaptations that have survival value for the human species. "Music could disappear tomorrow," Pinker says, and our "lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." The musician in Levitin was clearly professionally enraged. So he wrote a book on the subject, This is Your Brain on Music. The final chapter of this book, where Levitin challenges Pinker's views, is titled "The Music Instinct," borrowing a phrase from an earlier Pinker book titled The Language Instinct.
By "instinct," Pinker means that language does not have to be learned. But at its most fundamental level, Pinker does not mean that a language --- the English language, or the Chinese language, or the French language --- does not have to be learned. Humans are not born with genes for English, Chinese, or French language; specific languages are not inherited. At the biological level, we are born with a capacity for language and speech and a capacity for learning a language and speaking that language. In support of his claim that language capacity is a human adaptation, Pinker relies on several attributes, including the fact that it is universal across all cultures and that there are specific brain structures that recognize the rules of speech.
Levitin argues that our capacity for music and learning and creating and performing music is no different. The auditory system that detects, senses, and computes the attributes of music, as well as hands and feet that can be used to to create or establish rhythm, the vocal system that can create tone and pitch, and brain structures that uniquely relate to tone, rhythm, pitch, and chords are physical traits. "Music's evolutionary origin," Levitin writes, "is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists' criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely auditory cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other (non-human) species. Rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the frontal regions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords scaffold on certain properties of the auditory system that were themselves products of the physical world, of the inherent nature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtone series. Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability."
Like the English, Chinese or French languages, we still need to learn classical music, folk music, jazz music, and rock and roll music and we need to learn how to perform (speak) these different types of music. And we create technologies for performing music, just like we have created technologies for communicating words.
In The Information, James Gleick (see August 15, 2011 post) cites a 19th century missionary's experience in Africa with tribesmen who communicated across great distances with drum beats, on the one hand an early form of Morse Code, and on the other hand, the drumming relied just as much on rhythm as well as the tone from the beat for conveying meaning. Although it will likely prove impossible to determine, I do not think we can rule out that music (not the same kind of music we think of today) may have been an early prototype for language. Linguistics has led to the discovery that the human brain has formal rules for language syntax. Is the brain not hardwired with formal rules for mathematics and music as well?
Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained, " The fact that the brain comes equipped with many specialized inferences and can run them in the decoupled mode may explain why humans the world over engage in a host of activities that carry no clear adaptive value. To illustrate this, consider the auditory cortex of humans, which must perform several complicated tasks. One of these is to sort out the sounds of language from other noises. Information about noises is sent to associative cortical areas that categorize the sounds and identify the nature of their source. Information about the source's location is handled by other specialized circuitry and sent to specific systems. The auditory system must also isolate the sounds of language. All normal humans have the ability to segment a stream of sound emerging from someone else's mouth in terms of isolated sounds, then send this purified representation to cortical areas specialized in word identification. To turn a stream into segments, the system must pay attention to the specific frequencies that define each vowel and the complex noises of consonants, as well as their duration and their effects on each other. To do this, the auditory cortex comprises different subsystems some of which specialize in pure tones and others in more complex stimuli. All this is clearly part of a complex, evolved architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communication. But it is also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect, produce, remember, and enjoy music. This is a human universal. There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way." Boyer adds, "This phenomenon is not unique to music. Humans everywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that overstimulate their visual cortex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of dull browns and greens of their familiar environment. . . . These activities recruit our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artifacts very salient and likely to be transmitted."
My own view is that language and music are means of communicating information and that language and music were preceded by proto-language and proto-music, both probably emerging in the same relative human time period. Both, in my view, were likely essential to human evolution as a social species. It also may be true, as Darwin surmised, that music was favored by sexual selection pressures. I think back to the views of V.S. Ramachandran (see October 25, 2011 post) attempting to resolve the discrepancy of views between Steven Pinker and S.J. Gould on language and evolution. For Ramanchandran, language did not evolve from some general mechanism for thinking (Gould), but neither did it evolve specifically for purposes of communication (Pinker). What is innate and what evolved, says Ramachandran, is the competence to acquire rules of language. The actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements). Can we say that what is innate about music is the competence to acquire rules of music, and that the actual acquisition of music occurs as a result of social interaction? If we think of music simply (at least initially) in terms of rhythm and vocal intonation, there is little to separate music and language including symbolic attachments. The most significant difference, however, is that music appears to reach and appeal to human emotions in a way that language perhaps does not. (See January 14, 2012 post and November 6, 2011 post).
Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin has made his career studying music and the human brain. In This Is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explains each of the attributes of music --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- and describes how the brain's architecture is essentially hardwired to deal with each element. "Different aspects of music are handled by different neural regions --- the brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal such as pitch, tempo, timbre, and so on. Some of the music processing has points in common with the operations required to analyze other sounds; understanding speech, for example, requires that we segregate a flurry of sounds in words, sentences, and phrases, and that we are able to understand aspects beyond the words, such as sarcasm. Several different dimensions of a musical sound need to be analyzed --- usually involving several quasi-independent neural processes --- and they need to be brought together to form a coherent representation of what we are listening to."
When we comprehend music, not as a song, but in terms of its attributes --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- we can recognize that these are not "technologies" as Pinker refers to music.
In the discussion of Christof Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach (see January 14, 2012 post), I mentioned the long-associated relationship of music and mathematics. Steven Pinker describes our "mathematical intuition" --- babies have the capacity to register quantities very early, which may not necessarily involve counting as we know it, but to distinguish between more or less and later to distinguish intuitively in terms of probabilities. From early mathematical intuition emerges human activity such as counting, measuring, shaping, estimating, moving, and proving. Each of these activities leads to more formal mathematical reasoning: counting (arithmetic), measuring (real numbers, calculus) shaping (geometry, topology) estimating (probability, statistics), moving (mechanics, calculus, dynamics), proving (logic). Formal mathematics emerges from our mathematical intuition, says Pinker. This same reasoning informs me that formal music emerges from our musical intuition --- our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music.
While music exploits some of the same neural pathways that speech and language exploit, the fact that there are specially evolved components of the brain that are used in processing some of the elements of music would suggest that our capacity to appreciate, learn, and manipulate the attributes of music had some independent evolutionary value. Levitin observes that music "technology" has been around a long time --- at least 60,000 years based on musical artifacts that have been uncovered. But our capacity for music --- by which I mean our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating and performing music --- must have preceded the creation of musical artifact: there is music in song; there is music in tapping fingers and feet, which does not require a flute or drum. The origins of human language and whether it preceded music are, like the origins of music, murky. There is evidence that human language is at least 50,000 - 100,000 years old. For those who subscribe to the view that a FoxP2 gene mutation contributed to the development of human speech, that might put language in the 50,000 - 60,000 years ago range, about the same time as the oldest age of musical artifacts. It is therefore not entirely outside the realm of plausibility that our language instincts and our music instincts co-evolved or that one only slightly --- in the eons of evolutionary timescale --- preceded the other in human evolution.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools (2011)
The subtitle of Robert Trivers' tome to his nearly lifelong obsession with deceit is The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Here is the "logic":
1) Deception is widespread across nature. We are most familiar with this fact in the context of camouflage. Evolution has favored genetic characteristics that conceal a species from its predators. This is not deception in the sense of an intentional or purposeful mental act, but it is nevertheless deception. Trivers also documents deceptive behavioral acts in the non-human animal kingdom that are designed to enhance reproductive success, but again these are typically not intentional or purposeful mental acts, but genetically-driven hardwired behavior in the species. Cognitive-based acts of deception in the non-human primate community appear to occur.
2) Deception is therefore an adaptive strategy that favors survival and reproductive success and must be understood in that light.
3) Deception is widespread in the human species. Trivers cites examples of deception in courtship that appear to be related to reproductive success. There are examples of deception that are related to survival. The Folly of Fools is a catalogue of the examples and means by which humans deceive other humans, a subject that a prior posting in Shakespeare's King Lear addressed (see August 28, 2011 post). And while deceit is a frequent, clever device in Shakespeare's works, deceit has been a feature of the literature of tragedy and comedy since ancient times. False identity is a frequent dramatic device in comedies. The big difference, however, in acts of deception by humans and deception in other species is that human deception is largely, but not entirely a cognitive phenomenon.
This brings us to the larger topic of Trivers' book: self-deception in human life. The question he poses from the outset of this book is this: our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner. Why then, do we act to "destroy" or depreciate the quality of that information through self-deception? Intuitively, one would think that gathering, correctly interpreting and using accurate, detailed information would the be the successful evolutionary adaptive strategy; however, the extensive catalog of the ways in which humans deceive themselves, and The Folly of Fools overwhelms its readers with examples that make you feel that that is all that we do (a point I will come back to later), suggests, by its prevalence, that self-deception is the successful evolutionary strategy. Trivers' explanation: self-deception is essential to humans' ability to practice deception --- "we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Trivers' lament is that if humanity understood better that the reinforcing cycle of self-deception and deception we practice frequently has such disastrous consequences for humans --- he discusses aviation and space disasters, war and other conflicts, and even professional disasters in the social sciences --- we would be better at fighting self-deception and reap benefits, both individual and social that we are foregoing by succumbing too easily to deceit.
Readers who are willing to cast aside his and her various biases --- cultural and religious, personal including emotional --- and mentally transport themselves to a state that one of my college professors, John Harsanyi, and later John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance" (see May 12, 2010 post and January 11, 2011 post) will easily accept that the litany of ways Trivers describes that we deceive ourselves are true. The telling of false historical narratives begins with self-deception. This includes self-deception that is deployed for purposes of in-group-integration, nation-building and the construction of religion and religious institutions. Importantly, self-deception is aimed at inflating the self (ego), or, correlatively, derogating others, inducing a sense of empowerment, moral superiority, and control. These examples occur at the level of individuals, however they are deployed at the group level and have their group-level "us versus them" correlates: inflating the family, the community, the corporation, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, the species, etc. and derogating other families, communities, corporations, tribes, nations, religions, races and species.
Where The Folly of Fools falls flat is the absence of any significant discussion of how self-deception actually occurs. The fact of self-deception is well-documented by Trivers, but the mechanism is not. There is certainly a larger story here, and some of the prior postings on this blog cover some of the elements: bias, imagination, and memory. The term "bias" appears many times in this book, but it is nowhere systematically explored as it is in Robert Shermer's The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post). Trivers' tome would benefit from inclusion, even if only by reference, of a discussion of the literature of bias. It is instructive for how false historical narratives, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and even our assumptions about the behavior of others are formed. Underlying the formation of bias is how the mind really works --- something we know a lot about now although our knowledge is by no means complete either. The idea of heuristics, as described by Shermer (again, see June 12, 2011 post), the brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal shortcuts, when there is no formal means for solving the problem is significant in the formation of beliefs. If Shermer is right that evolution has brought us to form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts, then Trivers' starting point to his thesis (stated above) --- that our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner --- is misplaced, or is at least missing an important aspect of how our mind works, that we do not always take in "accurate and detailed" information.
Other postings on this blog have discussed the fact that areas of our brain are devoted in part to trying to explain the information that our sensory organs have delivered to the brain. (See e.g. May 22, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post). In other posts I have referred to this as our "storytelling" capability, but it includes our capacity for abstraction and imagination and analysis. Imagination is deployed for a variety of mental acts: to explain the physical world that is either to large or too small for us to see (see July 30, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post); to explain history after rigorous research supported by contemporaneous documentation (see January 14, 2012 post, December 16, 2010 post and March 24, 2010 post); to create pure fantasy (see e.g., June 28, 2011 post and March 28, 2010 post); and to merge both fantasy and history in a retelling that is is either fiction or historical fiction (see July 17, 2011 post and November 16, 2011 post). Douglas Hofstadter, whom I mentioned in the previous post, had this to say in Godel, Escher, Bach:
"Not all descriptions of a person need to be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores that person's name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent non-existent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entity; we can split one description into two when we find it represents two things, not one --- and soon. This 'calculus of descriptions' is at the heart of thinking. It is said to be intensional and not extensional, which means we can 'float' without being anchored down to specific objects. The intensionality of thought is connected to its flexibility; it gives us the ability to imagine hypothetical worlds, to amalgamate different descriptions or chop one description into separate pieces, and so on. Fantasy and fact intermingle very closely in our minds and this is because thinking involves the manufacture and manipulation of complex descriptions."
This is what our mind does, and self-deception is one potential outcome of our cognitive processes. Sometimes that self-deception is accidental, sometimes it is unknowing, and sometimes it is intentional. As Robert Shermer and others have documented, the deception can begin at a very early age before we are of a maturity to act against it and by the time we reach an appropriate age to question what we believe, we are too invested in or it is too costly to rebut engrained beliefs. At this point, it is a matter of memory and human memory is not limited to "accurate and detailed information." (See September 20, 2011 post). The brain has ways of categorizing information in less than a detailed way.
It is possible to read The Folly of Fools and conclude that humans suffer from a persistent state of delusion. If that is the true, the skepticism that Enlightenment philosophers confronted (see February 27, 2011 post) may well still be warranted, and perhaps John Searle's view of the 21st century that the era of skepticism was long past (see January 21, 2011 post) is perhaps unwarranted. I don't think so. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter cites research indicating that truth telling appears to be the default position of the human brain, and that deception involves extra cognitive effort requiring more energy. The question of whether humans are more inclined to tell the truth or to self-delude themselves is an unanswered question in my view, but I am not inclined to the view that our default state is self-deception. In the prior post discussing Carter's observation, I noted she had not discussed or accounted for the mental short-cuts we often engage in (heuristics) that may rely on certain biases in our perception or understanding of things observed. Those short-cuts may circumvent the extra cognitive effort that self-deception requires.
Trivers seems to think that our difficulty in addressing reality is that neurophysiological system (and hence our conscious experience) is always a fraction of a second behind the actual sensory experience. "Regarding one's personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true. We see (consciously) incoming information as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited." It is true, as Trivers says, that the left side of our brain devoted to explaining what it is we are experiencing follows by milliseconds the actual sensory experience of what is actually happening to us. But we are talking milliseconds. The fact of the matter is that humans do have the ability to see the future coming (sometimes imperfectly, but sometimes with greater prescience than we realize). As we live our lives, we are, during our waking hours, facing forward. One of the most amazing capacities of the human mind, and perhaps some other species as well, but certainly in humans is that it plays what Antonio Damasio referred to as the "movie within a movie," and we are able mentally visualize and anticipate what is about to happen. Mirror neurons may trigger something as we watch another person that enable us to anticipate what is going to happen to someone else. So we are not living our lives facing backward. Perhaps it is when we are asleep, as Rita Carter noted (see November 6, 2011 post), and our mind is busy building memories, that we are looking backwards.
1) Deception is widespread across nature. We are most familiar with this fact in the context of camouflage. Evolution has favored genetic characteristics that conceal a species from its predators. This is not deception in the sense of an intentional or purposeful mental act, but it is nevertheless deception. Trivers also documents deceptive behavioral acts in the non-human animal kingdom that are designed to enhance reproductive success, but again these are typically not intentional or purposeful mental acts, but genetically-driven hardwired behavior in the species. Cognitive-based acts of deception in the non-human primate community appear to occur.
2) Deception is therefore an adaptive strategy that favors survival and reproductive success and must be understood in that light.
3) Deception is widespread in the human species. Trivers cites examples of deception in courtship that appear to be related to reproductive success. There are examples of deception that are related to survival. The Folly of Fools is a catalogue of the examples and means by which humans deceive other humans, a subject that a prior posting in Shakespeare's King Lear addressed (see August 28, 2011 post). And while deceit is a frequent, clever device in Shakespeare's works, deceit has been a feature of the literature of tragedy and comedy since ancient times. False identity is a frequent dramatic device in comedies. The big difference, however, in acts of deception by humans and deception in other species is that human deception is largely, but not entirely a cognitive phenomenon.
This brings us to the larger topic of Trivers' book: self-deception in human life. The question he poses from the outset of this book is this: our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner. Why then, do we act to "destroy" or depreciate the quality of that information through self-deception? Intuitively, one would think that gathering, correctly interpreting and using accurate, detailed information would the be the successful evolutionary adaptive strategy; however, the extensive catalog of the ways in which humans deceive themselves, and The Folly of Fools overwhelms its readers with examples that make you feel that that is all that we do (a point I will come back to later), suggests, by its prevalence, that self-deception is the successful evolutionary strategy. Trivers' explanation: self-deception is essential to humans' ability to practice deception --- "we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Trivers' lament is that if humanity understood better that the reinforcing cycle of self-deception and deception we practice frequently has such disastrous consequences for humans --- he discusses aviation and space disasters, war and other conflicts, and even professional disasters in the social sciences --- we would be better at fighting self-deception and reap benefits, both individual and social that we are foregoing by succumbing too easily to deceit.
Readers who are willing to cast aside his and her various biases --- cultural and religious, personal including emotional --- and mentally transport themselves to a state that one of my college professors, John Harsanyi, and later John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance" (see May 12, 2010 post and January 11, 2011 post) will easily accept that the litany of ways Trivers describes that we deceive ourselves are true. The telling of false historical narratives begins with self-deception. This includes self-deception that is deployed for purposes of in-group-integration, nation-building and the construction of religion and religious institutions. Importantly, self-deception is aimed at inflating the self (ego), or, correlatively, derogating others, inducing a sense of empowerment, moral superiority, and control. These examples occur at the level of individuals, however they are deployed at the group level and have their group-level "us versus them" correlates: inflating the family, the community, the corporation, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, the species, etc. and derogating other families, communities, corporations, tribes, nations, religions, races and species.
Where The Folly of Fools falls flat is the absence of any significant discussion of how self-deception actually occurs. The fact of self-deception is well-documented by Trivers, but the mechanism is not. There is certainly a larger story here, and some of the prior postings on this blog cover some of the elements: bias, imagination, and memory. The term "bias" appears many times in this book, but it is nowhere systematically explored as it is in Robert Shermer's The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post). Trivers' tome would benefit from inclusion, even if only by reference, of a discussion of the literature of bias. It is instructive for how false historical narratives, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and even our assumptions about the behavior of others are formed. Underlying the formation of bias is how the mind really works --- something we know a lot about now although our knowledge is by no means complete either. The idea of heuristics, as described by Shermer (again, see June 12, 2011 post), the brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal shortcuts, when there is no formal means for solving the problem is significant in the formation of beliefs. If Shermer is right that evolution has brought us to form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts, then Trivers' starting point to his thesis (stated above) --- that our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner --- is misplaced, or is at least missing an important aspect of how our mind works, that we do not always take in "accurate and detailed" information.
Other postings on this blog have discussed the fact that areas of our brain are devoted in part to trying to explain the information that our sensory organs have delivered to the brain. (See e.g. May 22, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post). In other posts I have referred to this as our "storytelling" capability, but it includes our capacity for abstraction and imagination and analysis. Imagination is deployed for a variety of mental acts: to explain the physical world that is either to large or too small for us to see (see July 30, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post); to explain history after rigorous research supported by contemporaneous documentation (see January 14, 2012 post, December 16, 2010 post and March 24, 2010 post); to create pure fantasy (see e.g., June 28, 2011 post and March 28, 2010 post); and to merge both fantasy and history in a retelling that is is either fiction or historical fiction (see July 17, 2011 post and November 16, 2011 post). Douglas Hofstadter, whom I mentioned in the previous post, had this to say in Godel, Escher, Bach:
"Not all descriptions of a person need to be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores that person's name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent non-existent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entity; we can split one description into two when we find it represents two things, not one --- and soon. This 'calculus of descriptions' is at the heart of thinking. It is said to be intensional and not extensional, which means we can 'float' without being anchored down to specific objects. The intensionality of thought is connected to its flexibility; it gives us the ability to imagine hypothetical worlds, to amalgamate different descriptions or chop one description into separate pieces, and so on. Fantasy and fact intermingle very closely in our minds and this is because thinking involves the manufacture and manipulation of complex descriptions."
This is what our mind does, and self-deception is one potential outcome of our cognitive processes. Sometimes that self-deception is accidental, sometimes it is unknowing, and sometimes it is intentional. As Robert Shermer and others have documented, the deception can begin at a very early age before we are of a maturity to act against it and by the time we reach an appropriate age to question what we believe, we are too invested in or it is too costly to rebut engrained beliefs. At this point, it is a matter of memory and human memory is not limited to "accurate and detailed information." (See September 20, 2011 post). The brain has ways of categorizing information in less than a detailed way.
It is possible to read The Folly of Fools and conclude that humans suffer from a persistent state of delusion. If that is the true, the skepticism that Enlightenment philosophers confronted (see February 27, 2011 post) may well still be warranted, and perhaps John Searle's view of the 21st century that the era of skepticism was long past (see January 21, 2011 post) is perhaps unwarranted. I don't think so. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter cites research indicating that truth telling appears to be the default position of the human brain, and that deception involves extra cognitive effort requiring more energy. The question of whether humans are more inclined to tell the truth or to self-delude themselves is an unanswered question in my view, but I am not inclined to the view that our default state is self-deception. In the prior post discussing Carter's observation, I noted she had not discussed or accounted for the mental short-cuts we often engage in (heuristics) that may rely on certain biases in our perception or understanding of things observed. Those short-cuts may circumvent the extra cognitive effort that self-deception requires.
Trivers seems to think that our difficulty in addressing reality is that neurophysiological system (and hence our conscious experience) is always a fraction of a second behind the actual sensory experience. "Regarding one's personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true. We see (consciously) incoming information as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited." It is true, as Trivers says, that the left side of our brain devoted to explaining what it is we are experiencing follows by milliseconds the actual sensory experience of what is actually happening to us. But we are talking milliseconds. The fact of the matter is that humans do have the ability to see the future coming (sometimes imperfectly, but sometimes with greater prescience than we realize). As we live our lives, we are, during our waking hours, facing forward. One of the most amazing capacities of the human mind, and perhaps some other species as well, but certainly in humans is that it plays what Antonio Damasio referred to as the "movie within a movie," and we are able mentally visualize and anticipate what is about to happen. Mirror neurons may trigger something as we watch another person that enable us to anticipate what is going to happen to someone else. So we are not living our lives facing backward. Perhaps it is when we are asleep, as Rita Carter noted (see November 6, 2011 post), and our mind is busy building memories, that we are looking backwards.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000)
I am not a music scholar. I enjoy listening to music, and I enjoy playing music. But I have never taken the time to study music as much as I might like. My introduction to J.S. Bach did not arise listening to his music. I learned something about part of his musical oeuvre while reading Douglas Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach twenty or more years ago. Hofstadter's interest in Bach is the canon and fugue, and specifically Bach's The Art of the Fugue and The Musical Offering. Admittedly, I struggled reading Hofstadter's book. I was not familiar with Kurt Godel, and, except for his name, I was not familiar with J.S. Bach either. Only the prints of M.C. Escher, which fascinated me, had I had some prior exposure to. And Godel, Escher, Bach is not really about Kurt Godel, M.C.Escher, or J.S. Bach. Their ideas or works are mere tools for Hofstadter to talk about the coherence of the brain --- what some refer to as the "binding problem" --- which refers to the brain's ability to simultaneously receive several sensory inputs, triggering many different neurons in different parts of the brain, perhaps triggering a memory and/or a mental image of something about to happen, resulting in a unified conscious experience. Godel, Escher, Bach was a heady reading experience, even if I did not understand it all at the time, and I have often thought that it deserved a re-read a couple of decades later.
But our subject here is J.S. Bach. Hofstadter caused me to listen to The Art of the Fugue. I was probably lured into thinking that a Bach fugue is just as inventive and interesting as an Escher print. The sensory experience is different. Escher is a visual experience that confounds all experience. For a Bach fugue, you can close your eyes and make the fugue primarily an auditory experience. Best heard and listened to with a set of headphones, the meaning of fugue comes alive in Bach's exposition. If this is Bach, I thought, I am sold. I listened to The Well Tempered Clavier and The Goldberg Variations as well and discovered the same experience. What the listener is experiencing is polyphony: multiple voices, sometimes "speaking" at the same time, often responding to an earlier voice, but nevertheless speaking harmoniously and recursively. This is referred to as counterpoint. Among contemporary composers, the music of Steve Reich is an example of counterpoint. In harmony and recursion, there is a sense of coherence that simulates in part the kind of coherence that the binding problem speaks to.
Music and mathematics have been associated with each other since antiquity, and there is a "mathematical" feeling to Bach's music, not only its metre, but its harmony as well. This has been noted by others, including Hofstadter. Where music, like the compositions of J.S. Bach, present patterns and harmony, it is not surprising that we should find a relationship between numbers, functions, and rhythm and harmony. In contrast, I think of a work like Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, which for lack of a better word seems "chaotic," inspired by that aspect of life where patterns are disrupted and dissonance prevails. It is still music, but the mathematical beauty that some find in canons and fugues seem to break down in a composition like Skies of America. In the liner notes to Skies of America, Coleman writes, "Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms . . .The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in range without changing keys. There are eight themes and a harmolodic movement for each theme." But harmolodics, admits Coleman, is an expression that is "freed from tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules." Fugues and canons, which are constrained by tonal limitations and harmonic rules, do not march to the harmolodic theory. It may not be the case that all forms of music share an affinity with mathematics.
The affinity between music and mathematics must be derivative of the physics of sound and how sound is managed by the auditory cortex in the brain. Pascal Boyer points out that the architecture in the brain's auditory cortex evolved to allow humans to to hear specific frequencies for vowels and consonants, and this capacity has predisposed our species to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. "This is a human universal," he writes in Religion Explained. "There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way."
Boyer's view that music is an outgrowth of our capacity to hear speech and communicate is not a universal view; others believe that music is a prototype communication system connected to our emotional wiring. In short, some form of music, preceded linguistic communication. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter describes a "tingle factor" associated with music triggering an emotional response --- relaxation, arousal, tension, relief --- because sound is processed in parallel by the limbic system, which notes its emotional tone, and perhaps recognizes a similarity between a musical tone and vocal signals that carry emotional messages. J.S. Bach's fugues and canons generate an emotional tug that primarily triggers relaxation in my view, and certainly a sense of order within the world. The emotional connection may explain a close correlation between music and religion, particularly where rapture is a component of the religious experience.
In reading a biography of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), by one of the leading Bach scholars, I thought I might learn more about the fugue and counterpoint. I did not. I probably learned more about counterpoint from Hofstadter. Wolff's book assumes a level of knowledge of music and Bach's music that I do not yet have. But I did learn much more about Bach the composer and the man then my limited experience with his most familiar fugues and canons, which are perhaps the most secular pieces of his ouevre.
Bach is a musician of the 18th century Enlightenment, and not surprisingly his music is inspired by his belief in his god, and the influence of the Lutheran Church in central Germany is huge in both his life and the life of the community in which he lived. Bach is the composer of many sacred works that I am totally unfamiliar with, but I suspect that true Bach aficionados are undoubtedly rapturous about. Just as religion and the State were joined at the hip, religion and the arts had sponsors in common, if not unified interests as well. Religion likely embraced music because it did "tingle" emotions and, as others have opined, music can be a shared community building experience that institutions, whether religious or not, have deployed in the recruitment and retention of adherents. To the extent that religion is a transcendent experience, music can be transcendental as well. A tour of any major art museum around the world to look at the paintings of leading painters prior to and even during this era reveals the close relationship between art and religion. Even in the 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and ordinary life that does not transparently wear some religion on its canvas, there is nevertheless the theme that no event, however small in the cosmic scheme of things, is not one of god's creations. In science and math, Newton and Leibniz were both wedded to their religions and the governing political-religious authorities. The interesting side of this relationship is that the arts are substantially funded by the political or religious authorities. On the payroll of the communities in which he lived, Bach was essentially a public servant, and his professional obligations included providing for church music and music at other public events. True, there were some private, secular gigs on the side at coffee houses and other venues that provided remuneration, but composing and performing sacred music for church services was the priority of his employment. For musicians today whose music might be said to be inspired by the sacred, funding from political and religious authorities or sources is not all that significant. One has to wonder, however, whether the world would ever know Bach's canons and fugues if it was not for that system of public funding of the arts that existed in centuries past.
An aspect of Christoph Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach that intrigues the reader is the intellectual candor of the author. One of the learnings from this biography is that Bach's life, while documented in some ways, is not well-documented in other important details. Furthermore, much of Bach's written musical scores have not survived. Bach himself did not write down much about his life. And Wolff admits in his preface, "Thus, conjectures and assumptions are unavoidable, and this book necessarily calls for numerous occurrences of 'probably,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' and the like." If only the writers, editors and redactors of the Bible and its commentators --- Hebrew and Christian portions alike --- had the courage to muster that kind of intellectual courage to admit that their sources were not so well documented and could not bring themselves to confess that they were forced to speculate and conjecture, and that some of what they were retelling was, quite frankly, "probably" the stuff of fiction. There are a lot of "probablys," "would haves," and "perhaps'" in this telling of the life of J.S. Bach. Still, it is a credible biography; there is enough of a contemporaneous historical record about his life, and the written works he left behind that support the telling of this story, despite what is missing.
A highlight of Bach's life in music, in my view, is his constant rewriting and even "morphing" of earlier musical works. One could only learn this from an expert on Bach. Wolff refers to this as Bach's constant pursuit of musical perfection. This is not all that unusual in modern times: songs written in today's musical genres do not always sit still; they have ways of evolving. Bach evolved his music to suit different instruments and perhaps a different listener. His secular music borrowed from his sacred music. Wolff conjectures that in borrowing from previous compositions, Bach was economizing in meeting his obligations to his employers, essentially saying that there was no way that Bach could truly create a novel composition week-in and week-out for decades without borrowing from earlier investments of creative time. Wolff is probably correct. This fact also allows Wolff to conclude that while we do not have every written composition that Bach created, we probably have the core of his work, enough to conclude that, for his time, Bach was the most inventive musical composer of his time, whose works resembled no other composer.
But our subject here is J.S. Bach. Hofstadter caused me to listen to The Art of the Fugue. I was probably lured into thinking that a Bach fugue is just as inventive and interesting as an Escher print. The sensory experience is different. Escher is a visual experience that confounds all experience. For a Bach fugue, you can close your eyes and make the fugue primarily an auditory experience. Best heard and listened to with a set of headphones, the meaning of fugue comes alive in Bach's exposition. If this is Bach, I thought, I am sold. I listened to The Well Tempered Clavier and The Goldberg Variations as well and discovered the same experience. What the listener is experiencing is polyphony: multiple voices, sometimes "speaking" at the same time, often responding to an earlier voice, but nevertheless speaking harmoniously and recursively. This is referred to as counterpoint. Among contemporary composers, the music of Steve Reich is an example of counterpoint. In harmony and recursion, there is a sense of coherence that simulates in part the kind of coherence that the binding problem speaks to.
Music and mathematics have been associated with each other since antiquity, and there is a "mathematical" feeling to Bach's music, not only its metre, but its harmony as well. This has been noted by others, including Hofstadter. Where music, like the compositions of J.S. Bach, present patterns and harmony, it is not surprising that we should find a relationship between numbers, functions, and rhythm and harmony. In contrast, I think of a work like Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, which for lack of a better word seems "chaotic," inspired by that aspect of life where patterns are disrupted and dissonance prevails. It is still music, but the mathematical beauty that some find in canons and fugues seem to break down in a composition like Skies of America. In the liner notes to Skies of America, Coleman writes, "Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms . . .The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in range without changing keys. There are eight themes and a harmolodic movement for each theme." But harmolodics, admits Coleman, is an expression that is "freed from tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules." Fugues and canons, which are constrained by tonal limitations and harmonic rules, do not march to the harmolodic theory. It may not be the case that all forms of music share an affinity with mathematics.
The affinity between music and mathematics must be derivative of the physics of sound and how sound is managed by the auditory cortex in the brain. Pascal Boyer points out that the architecture in the brain's auditory cortex evolved to allow humans to to hear specific frequencies for vowels and consonants, and this capacity has predisposed our species to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. "This is a human universal," he writes in Religion Explained. "There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way."
Boyer's view that music is an outgrowth of our capacity to hear speech and communicate is not a universal view; others believe that music is a prototype communication system connected to our emotional wiring. In short, some form of music, preceded linguistic communication. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter describes a "tingle factor" associated with music triggering an emotional response --- relaxation, arousal, tension, relief --- because sound is processed in parallel by the limbic system, which notes its emotional tone, and perhaps recognizes a similarity between a musical tone and vocal signals that carry emotional messages. J.S. Bach's fugues and canons generate an emotional tug that primarily triggers relaxation in my view, and certainly a sense of order within the world. The emotional connection may explain a close correlation between music and religion, particularly where rapture is a component of the religious experience.
In reading a biography of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), by one of the leading Bach scholars, I thought I might learn more about the fugue and counterpoint. I did not. I probably learned more about counterpoint from Hofstadter. Wolff's book assumes a level of knowledge of music and Bach's music that I do not yet have. But I did learn much more about Bach the composer and the man then my limited experience with his most familiar fugues and canons, which are perhaps the most secular pieces of his ouevre.
Bach is a musician of the 18th century Enlightenment, and not surprisingly his music is inspired by his belief in his god, and the influence of the Lutheran Church in central Germany is huge in both his life and the life of the community in which he lived. Bach is the composer of many sacred works that I am totally unfamiliar with, but I suspect that true Bach aficionados are undoubtedly rapturous about. Just as religion and the State were joined at the hip, religion and the arts had sponsors in common, if not unified interests as well. Religion likely embraced music because it did "tingle" emotions and, as others have opined, music can be a shared community building experience that institutions, whether religious or not, have deployed in the recruitment and retention of adherents. To the extent that religion is a transcendent experience, music can be transcendental as well. A tour of any major art museum around the world to look at the paintings of leading painters prior to and even during this era reveals the close relationship between art and religion. Even in the 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and ordinary life that does not transparently wear some religion on its canvas, there is nevertheless the theme that no event, however small in the cosmic scheme of things, is not one of god's creations. In science and math, Newton and Leibniz were both wedded to their religions and the governing political-religious authorities. The interesting side of this relationship is that the arts are substantially funded by the political or religious authorities. On the payroll of the communities in which he lived, Bach was essentially a public servant, and his professional obligations included providing for church music and music at other public events. True, there were some private, secular gigs on the side at coffee houses and other venues that provided remuneration, but composing and performing sacred music for church services was the priority of his employment. For musicians today whose music might be said to be inspired by the sacred, funding from political and religious authorities or sources is not all that significant. One has to wonder, however, whether the world would ever know Bach's canons and fugues if it was not for that system of public funding of the arts that existed in centuries past.
An aspect of Christoph Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach that intrigues the reader is the intellectual candor of the author. One of the learnings from this biography is that Bach's life, while documented in some ways, is not well-documented in other important details. Furthermore, much of Bach's written musical scores have not survived. Bach himself did not write down much about his life. And Wolff admits in his preface, "Thus, conjectures and assumptions are unavoidable, and this book necessarily calls for numerous occurrences of 'probably,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' and the like." If only the writers, editors and redactors of the Bible and its commentators --- Hebrew and Christian portions alike --- had the courage to muster that kind of intellectual courage to admit that their sources were not so well documented and could not bring themselves to confess that they were forced to speculate and conjecture, and that some of what they were retelling was, quite frankly, "probably" the stuff of fiction. There are a lot of "probablys," "would haves," and "perhaps'" in this telling of the life of J.S. Bach. Still, it is a credible biography; there is enough of a contemporaneous historical record about his life, and the written works he left behind that support the telling of this story, despite what is missing.
A highlight of Bach's life in music, in my view, is his constant rewriting and even "morphing" of earlier musical works. One could only learn this from an expert on Bach. Wolff refers to this as Bach's constant pursuit of musical perfection. This is not all that unusual in modern times: songs written in today's musical genres do not always sit still; they have ways of evolving. Bach evolved his music to suit different instruments and perhaps a different listener. His secular music borrowed from his sacred music. Wolff conjectures that in borrowing from previous compositions, Bach was economizing in meeting his obligations to his employers, essentially saying that there was no way that Bach could truly create a novel composition week-in and week-out for decades without borrowing from earlier investments of creative time. Wolff is probably correct. This fact also allows Wolff to conclude that while we do not have every written composition that Bach created, we probably have the core of his work, enough to conclude that, for his time, Bach was the most inventive musical composer of his time, whose works resembled no other composer.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Jose Saramago, Cain (2011)
The story of Cain in Genesis is brief: No more than 30 or so sentences over 25 verses. Cain, the first child of Adam and Eve, is born and he grows to become a farmer; Cain and his brother Abel, a shepherd, make an offering to God, and Cain's offering is snubbed by God while Abel's offering is not; Cain takes this badly and kills his brother; God asks Cain what happened to Abel and Cain lies to God by stating that he does not know (here Cain utters the memorable phrase, "Am I my brother's keeper?"); God knows that Cain has lied and that he has killed his brother; Cain is told by God that he will wander the earth forever as punishment (a fate worse than death); God places a mark on Cain's forehead so that no one will slay him to ensure this fate worse than death; Cain wanders to the land of Nod, where he sleeps with a woman who bears him a son named Enoch. That is it. We do not know how the woman Cain slept with came to be born, unless the woman is Eve herself, which would not be totally out of character with other incest stories of the bible. Adam and Eve had one more son named Seth, and we are not informed of any daughters. The inference is that there must be other humans out there besides Adam and Eve copulating and multiplying, but the Genesis story provides no illumination of their existence. A shortcoming in the tale of the primordial first family.
Leave it to Jose Saramago's imagination to fill in the blanks of the Cain story. And not only does Saramago fill in a few blanks of Cain's story, but the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses, Joshua, Noah, and Job as well. For Cain is not merely a wanderer, but he is a time traveler as well: Cain, travels back and forth in time, and, with the fortune of a Forrest Gump, Cain just happens to make an appearance on the stage of many significant biblical events recorded in Genesis and Exodus. Who knew? And the wisdom Cain arrives at at the end of his journey is that God is not only petty, but he is a bad guy, not much different than the devil. God is neither merciful nor loving, and he certainly has little empathy or compassion for man or his Chosen People. This is a world of fallen human beings (see August 28, 2011 post): humanity characterized by lust, incest, rape, murder, jealousy, deception, and real estate wars.
Saramago is careful to point out that Cain is neither Jewish nor Israeli. While standing at the walls of Jericho with Joshua's army, Cain is asked whether he is Israeli. He says he is not. Well then if you are not Israeli, what are you? Saramago explains, "When Cain was born, there was no such thing as the Israelites, but neither was he a Hittite, an Amorite, a Perizzite, a Hivite, or a Jebusite." He is a man without an identity, or as Saramago describes, a "man without definition." But in one sense --- as wanderer --- his wandering is the story of the Israelites, the Jews. And as a time traveler, he is like the "prophets" Jeremiah and Isaiah whose prophesies of the future are based on the vantage point of the biblical authors in the future who project themselves into the past.
The Lord murders innocents at Sodom and Gomorrah; orders Moses to slaughter thousands of Israelites because they turned their attention to an idol; orders Abraham to slay and sacrifice his son; tolerates the devil heaping misery upon Job; the Lord commits genocide of nearly the entire human race when he causes the flood. Cain abhors what he witnesses in the Lord's behavior. But Cain is neither Abraham, nor Noah, nor Moses, nor Job. Cain refuses to be respectful of the Lord. In the end, Cain sabotages the Lord's plan to purify the human race by designating Noah and his family to protect a select few of each species, including the human species, from the Lord's flood, and to start life anew. As Noah's ark endures the flood and they wait for the waters to subside, Cain slays Noah and his family, so when the waters have finally subsided, Cain is the only human left. How now can humans possibly multiply? Sounds like the same internal procreation riddle that plagues the Genesis story from the birth of Cain. As Cain disembarks the ark, the Lord asks where are Noah and his family? This time Cain tells the truth: they are dead. I killed them. And the Lord and Cain argue who among the two of them is more loathsome. The lingering question that remains at the close of Saramago's narrative is how all those events that Cain, our wandering time traveler, witnessed far into the future ever happened, now that he and the Lord have killed off the entire human race except for Cain? There are no women remaining for Cain to procreate with.
Imagination is a wonderful human attribute, and it is certainly one important characteristic that distinguishes our species from its closest relatives. Paul Bloom has contemplated why imagination has survival value. It triggers emotional responses, and it creates pleasure, both of which have survival value. "Imagination is Reality Lite," writes Bloom, "a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work." I have a difficult time, however, succumbing to a conclusion that fantasy has significant survival value. Fantasy is at best an exaptation, just as V.S. Ramachandran concludes that our ability for abstraction is an exaptation (see October 25, 2011 post).
Imagination is what we use when we plan for the future, and that capability has significant survival value. (See May 22, 2011 post, indeed another post revolving around a novelist who took liberties with biblical stories.) Being able to view the past in different ways, seeing the strengths and weaknesses of the ways our predecessors carried out their lives, and even fictionalizing the past so as to provide an angle on the past that our predecessors could not see, is part of the art of imagination and planning for the future.
As I wrote previously in this blog, I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity. The biblical stories served exactly that purpose as they were merged, edited, and redacted ultimately to serve the national goals of the Jewish kingdom.
I don't think Saramago is out to preserve our memory with his imaginative retelling of the Cain story. And while Saramago is whimsical in his treatment of the Lord in Cain, he is not satisfying a desire for pleasure from fantasy either. But I do think he is out to remind us that our memories are fragile, capable of being rewritten in ways that make us look at things differently, perhaps in a revolutionary way, causing us to pause to plan our future in a different way than we have been carrying on all these millenia. What Saramago's imagination has succeeded in doing, however, is to show that the biblical stories are no more than products of a fertile imagination, just as Saramago's Cain is the product of a fertile imagination. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain simply cannot be real. If God made man in his image, which is the biblical telling of our creation, we are rotten murderers, mass murderers to the core. If man imagined God in our image, then God cannot be perfect. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain dovetail in these respects: God is a fallen character. But I submit there is a third perspective: that (1) man imagined God as an unseen agent, who is not defective and is all-powerful, to explain what we are unable to explain about the world and universe around us, and, (2) as social structures among homo sapiens developed, leaders among men claimed special powers to communicate with God to either justify or sustain their relationship of power (authority) over other men. And it is the leaders among men who choose to make God what they want to make of him (or her): at one-time loving and empathetic, at another time a warrior and mass murderer, and at other times utterly indifferent. This third perspective is more consistent with the history of God in the Abrahamic religions. By this third perspective, God is wholly imaginary as well, a work of fiction.
Leave it to Jose Saramago's imagination to fill in the blanks of the Cain story. And not only does Saramago fill in a few blanks of Cain's story, but the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses, Joshua, Noah, and Job as well. For Cain is not merely a wanderer, but he is a time traveler as well: Cain, travels back and forth in time, and, with the fortune of a Forrest Gump, Cain just happens to make an appearance on the stage of many significant biblical events recorded in Genesis and Exodus. Who knew? And the wisdom Cain arrives at at the end of his journey is that God is not only petty, but he is a bad guy, not much different than the devil. God is neither merciful nor loving, and he certainly has little empathy or compassion for man or his Chosen People. This is a world of fallen human beings (see August 28, 2011 post): humanity characterized by lust, incest, rape, murder, jealousy, deception, and real estate wars.
Saramago is careful to point out that Cain is neither Jewish nor Israeli. While standing at the walls of Jericho with Joshua's army, Cain is asked whether he is Israeli. He says he is not. Well then if you are not Israeli, what are you? Saramago explains, "When Cain was born, there was no such thing as the Israelites, but neither was he a Hittite, an Amorite, a Perizzite, a Hivite, or a Jebusite." He is a man without an identity, or as Saramago describes, a "man without definition." But in one sense --- as wanderer --- his wandering is the story of the Israelites, the Jews. And as a time traveler, he is like the "prophets" Jeremiah and Isaiah whose prophesies of the future are based on the vantage point of the biblical authors in the future who project themselves into the past.
The Lord murders innocents at Sodom and Gomorrah; orders Moses to slaughter thousands of Israelites because they turned their attention to an idol; orders Abraham to slay and sacrifice his son; tolerates the devil heaping misery upon Job; the Lord commits genocide of nearly the entire human race when he causes the flood. Cain abhors what he witnesses in the Lord's behavior. But Cain is neither Abraham, nor Noah, nor Moses, nor Job. Cain refuses to be respectful of the Lord. In the end, Cain sabotages the Lord's plan to purify the human race by designating Noah and his family to protect a select few of each species, including the human species, from the Lord's flood, and to start life anew. As Noah's ark endures the flood and they wait for the waters to subside, Cain slays Noah and his family, so when the waters have finally subsided, Cain is the only human left. How now can humans possibly multiply? Sounds like the same internal procreation riddle that plagues the Genesis story from the birth of Cain. As Cain disembarks the ark, the Lord asks where are Noah and his family? This time Cain tells the truth: they are dead. I killed them. And the Lord and Cain argue who among the two of them is more loathsome. The lingering question that remains at the close of Saramago's narrative is how all those events that Cain, our wandering time traveler, witnessed far into the future ever happened, now that he and the Lord have killed off the entire human race except for Cain? There are no women remaining for Cain to procreate with.
Imagination is a wonderful human attribute, and it is certainly one important characteristic that distinguishes our species from its closest relatives. Paul Bloom has contemplated why imagination has survival value. It triggers emotional responses, and it creates pleasure, both of which have survival value. "Imagination is Reality Lite," writes Bloom, "a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work." I have a difficult time, however, succumbing to a conclusion that fantasy has significant survival value. Fantasy is at best an exaptation, just as V.S. Ramachandran concludes that our ability for abstraction is an exaptation (see October 25, 2011 post).
Imagination is what we use when we plan for the future, and that capability has significant survival value. (See May 22, 2011 post, indeed another post revolving around a novelist who took liberties with biblical stories.) Being able to view the past in different ways, seeing the strengths and weaknesses of the ways our predecessors carried out their lives, and even fictionalizing the past so as to provide an angle on the past that our predecessors could not see, is part of the art of imagination and planning for the future.
As I wrote previously in this blog, I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity. The biblical stories served exactly that purpose as they were merged, edited, and redacted ultimately to serve the national goals of the Jewish kingdom.
I don't think Saramago is out to preserve our memory with his imaginative retelling of the Cain story. And while Saramago is whimsical in his treatment of the Lord in Cain, he is not satisfying a desire for pleasure from fantasy either. But I do think he is out to remind us that our memories are fragile, capable of being rewritten in ways that make us look at things differently, perhaps in a revolutionary way, causing us to pause to plan our future in a different way than we have been carrying on all these millenia. What Saramago's imagination has succeeded in doing, however, is to show that the biblical stories are no more than products of a fertile imagination, just as Saramago's Cain is the product of a fertile imagination. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain simply cannot be real. If God made man in his image, which is the biblical telling of our creation, we are rotten murderers, mass murderers to the core. If man imagined God in our image, then God cannot be perfect. The God of the Bible and the God of Cain dovetail in these respects: God is a fallen character. But I submit there is a third perspective: that (1) man imagined God as an unseen agent, who is not defective and is all-powerful, to explain what we are unable to explain about the world and universe around us, and, (2) as social structures among homo sapiens developed, leaders among men claimed special powers to communicate with God to either justify or sustain their relationship of power (authority) over other men. And it is the leaders among men who choose to make God what they want to make of him (or her): at one-time loving and empathetic, at another time a warrior and mass murderer, and at other times utterly indifferent. This third perspective is more consistent with the history of God in the Abrahamic religions. By this third perspective, God is wholly imaginary as well, a work of fiction.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reports about a significant development in medical research that occurred during the 1950s and continues to provide benefits for both research and therapy for decades thereafter. If that was the tag line about this book, it might never had ended up on the best-seller lists. Add to that tag line that the book confronts a thorny question of medical ethics --- what sorts of disclosures must be made by medical researchers who take body tissue (in this case, cancer cells from a dying patient), and the fact that those in the medical research supply chain subsequently earn millions of dollars from that body tissue, and perhaps some in the public begin to pay attention. And add to that stew the fact that the donor was a poor African-American woman whose heirs never benefited from her donation; whose descendants suffered anxiety and some level of anger because of misinformation and ignorance when their mother's name and contribution to medical science became public knowledge two decades after she died; whose descendants never sought financial compensation or benefits, only recognition for their mother's contribution to medical science, and you have a best-selling page-turner. While there are several protagonists in this story --- including the author --- the primary protagonist are the so-called "HeLa" cells taken from the cervix of Henrietta Lacks by a doctor at Johns Hopkins University. The HeLa cells were the first "immortal" human cells ever grown in culture --- cells that reproduced themselves prolifically. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine, as well as other scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. The significance of these cells is that because they created a virtual pipeline of human cells that could be replicated in the billions, they enabled medical research to be undertaken on actual human cells, rather than on humans themselves or some other animal.
So that is the story. But there is a subliminal story that leads me back to the subject of the previous post --- the subject of identity, specifically group identity. Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, does not explore the subject of cultural identity or racial identity, but she does explore, at least superficially through her narrative, group identity in the context of a family and the family members' genetic links to their past. Genetic identity is linked to various other forms of group or social identity: political identity (the heritability of power), ethnic identity, religious identity, family identity, racial identity, and caste. But as an article in the British Medical Journal notes, "These identities overlap in various ways, and genetic evidence will not affect them all equally . . . confusion looms when genetic markers conflict with other kinds of markers of group membership such as shared culture or historical narrative." This was a point I was making in the previous post, when I pointed out that Jews do not appear to define Jewish identity strictly in terms of a genetic link to the past. It may be, as genetic research on some Jewish communities suggests, that within some ethnic/religious groups genetic identity is stronger than other groups, but is this an attribute that anyone, Jewish or not, seriously wants to promote about what it really means to be part of a human subgroup? It smacks of Nazism.
As I read Skloot's story of Henrietta Lacks and her family and thought further about The Finkler Question, I was reminded of a Hebrew word, mizpah, which means an emotional bond between people who are separated (either physically or by death). The word might have application, for example, to Jews physically separated from one another by virtue of the diaspora and their mutual recognition of a shared Jewish identity. But it would also have application to Henrietta Lacks and her children and even the grandchildren that she never knew. This bond is a type of identity, and at its core is human emotion. Several books that have been discussed in this blog have highlighted the importance of emotion in building social relations. (See April 11, 2011 post, discussing David Hume and Antonio Damasio) As Dacher Keltner writes, "Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships." (See July 16, 2010 post). In the human context, certainly emotional bonding among the persons is an attribute of group identity, although the strength of this attribute may vary among the persons. As Frans DeWaal observes, however, this same emotional bonding may exist in some other species as well (see November 9, 2010 post).
Genetic identity is, of course, nearly definitive in the discussion of group identity at the species level, but within a species, different groups become influenced by nurture and culture and social constructs are developed. And while genes may be at the foundation of our physical design that triggers various emotions and behaviors that make us more or less social, nurture and culture are at the foundation of reinforcing and making some emotional social bonds stronger than others leading to the formation of social groups and their identity.
The tug of genetic identity is felt by Henrietta Lacks' daughter, Deborah, whose anxiety grows after she learns that her mother's cells have become famous. One of her fears is that the cancer that killed her mother might take her life as well, a fear which is quelled only when she learns that her mother's cervical cancer was caused not by a genetic disease or predisposition, but the human papillomavirus. Research indicates that individuals struggle with their genetic identity, but for reasons that appear to be related to the difficulty of many in understanding just what it is about genes that is important enough to focus upon in terms of identity. More significantly, it is an emotional bond that establishes this family identity, a bond developed during the early years' of nurturing Henrietta's children, and a shared historical narrative that ties mother and children together --- a narrative that Rebecca Skloot has told well.
So that is the story. But there is a subliminal story that leads me back to the subject of the previous post --- the subject of identity, specifically group identity. Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, does not explore the subject of cultural identity or racial identity, but she does explore, at least superficially through her narrative, group identity in the context of a family and the family members' genetic links to their past. Genetic identity is linked to various other forms of group or social identity: political identity (the heritability of power), ethnic identity, religious identity, family identity, racial identity, and caste. But as an article in the British Medical Journal notes, "These identities overlap in various ways, and genetic evidence will not affect them all equally . . . confusion looms when genetic markers conflict with other kinds of markers of group membership such as shared culture or historical narrative." This was a point I was making in the previous post, when I pointed out that Jews do not appear to define Jewish identity strictly in terms of a genetic link to the past. It may be, as genetic research on some Jewish communities suggests, that within some ethnic/religious groups genetic identity is stronger than other groups, but is this an attribute that anyone, Jewish or not, seriously wants to promote about what it really means to be part of a human subgroup? It smacks of Nazism.
As I read Skloot's story of Henrietta Lacks and her family and thought further about The Finkler Question, I was reminded of a Hebrew word, mizpah, which means an emotional bond between people who are separated (either physically or by death). The word might have application, for example, to Jews physically separated from one another by virtue of the diaspora and their mutual recognition of a shared Jewish identity. But it would also have application to Henrietta Lacks and her children and even the grandchildren that she never knew. This bond is a type of identity, and at its core is human emotion. Several books that have been discussed in this blog have highlighted the importance of emotion in building social relations. (See April 11, 2011 post, discussing David Hume and Antonio Damasio) As Dacher Keltner writes, "Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships." (See July 16, 2010 post). In the human context, certainly emotional bonding among the persons is an attribute of group identity, although the strength of this attribute may vary among the persons. As Frans DeWaal observes, however, this same emotional bonding may exist in some other species as well (see November 9, 2010 post).
Genetic identity is, of course, nearly definitive in the discussion of group identity at the species level, but within a species, different groups become influenced by nurture and culture and social constructs are developed. And while genes may be at the foundation of our physical design that triggers various emotions and behaviors that make us more or less social, nurture and culture are at the foundation of reinforcing and making some emotional social bonds stronger than others leading to the formation of social groups and their identity.
The tug of genetic identity is felt by Henrietta Lacks' daughter, Deborah, whose anxiety grows after she learns that her mother's cells have become famous. One of her fears is that the cancer that killed her mother might take her life as well, a fear which is quelled only when she learns that her mother's cervical cancer was caused not by a genetic disease or predisposition, but the human papillomavirus. Research indicates that individuals struggle with their genetic identity, but for reasons that appear to be related to the difficulty of many in understanding just what it is about genes that is important enough to focus upon in terms of identity. More significantly, it is an emotional bond that establishes this family identity, a bond developed during the early years' of nurturing Henrietta's children, and a shared historical narrative that ties mother and children together --- a narrative that Rebecca Skloot has told well.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010)
While I am not uninformed or without experience on the subject of this book --- Jewish identity --- I am probably not qualified to address it, at least competently. This small vignette from the novel explains my sentiment. One of the novel's characters, Hephzibah, who is the curator of a museum-in-the-making on Anglo-Jewish Culture, asks her non-Jewish lover, Julian Treslove, to take a break from his role as "assistant curator" because he would not have much to contribute until the museum was open. Almost immediately after making the request, she regrets it, because she realizes she has effectively said that a non-Jew is not competent to organize a museum about Jewish culture. "It wasn't fair to him. Jews might have been possessed of a crowded almanac of Jewish events, a Jewish Who's Who extending back to the first man and woman, but Treslove couldn't be expected to know in every instance Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out. What is more he would have no instinct for it. Somethings you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi." I don't have the instinct to address Jewish identity. Except for the last sentence of this quote, Hephzibah is probably correct, but I ask, does it have to be that way?
At a certain level, it is possible to generalize the subject of identity so that what is true for the Jewish identity is true of the Russian identity, the German identity, the Muslim identity, the atheist identity, the WASP identity, the African America identity. But reducing human cultural identity to its lowest common denominators deprives us the richness of the stories that define the culture and ethnicity of different humans.
The subject of identity, in this case Jewish identity, has to be approached in two ways: personal identity, what does it mean to be Jewish?; and cultural or group identity, what does Jewish mean? Howard Jacobson zigs and zags between both, as he should, because it is impossible to separate the two. Personal identity owes its existence to group identity: we humans are social animals. The title of Jacobson's novel, The Finkler Question, reveals the inseparability of the two. Finkler is Sam Finkler, Julian Treslove's lifelong friend, and a man with his own personal identity issues. For Treslove, his friend Sam Finkler is emblematic of all Jews. Privately, Treslove refers to Jews as "Finklers." "It took away the stigma, [Treslove] thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say or the Finkler conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself." Substitute Finkler for Jewish and one of the themes in this book is immediately revealed by it title: the Jewish Question.
The phrase the "Jewish Question" first appears in 18th century England as part of a debate over the rights of Jews in England --- voting rights, property rights. I did not dwell on it in my discussion of David Liss' The Paper Conspiracy (see November 16, 2011 post), but Liss fairly describes and frequently mentions the legal status of Jews in early 18th century England and their lack of property rights and voting rights. But while it began as a neutral phrase, the "Jewish question" evolved and took on an anti-semitic tone by the 19th century. A discussion of the "Jewish question" ultimately could not avoid a discussion of a "solution" --- whether it be assimilation, deportation and resettlement --- and by 20th century Nazi Germany, the solution became wedded with malice in the so-called "final solution," extermination. The phrase the "Jewish question" is a little bit like Treslove substituting Finkler for Jewish in his lexicon. Here the word "question," particularly in its anti-semitic context, really means "problem." Problems are in need of solutions.
The origins of the "Jewish question" begin long before 18th century England. They begin with the demonization of the Jews by Christians as early as the founding of the Catholic church, as former Catholic priest, James Carroll, has so thoroughly documented in Constantine's Sword. Regrettably, oppressors --- in this case, both Christians and Christian institutions --- almost never confess to their own problems and look at themselves in the same way that they look at others, and so we do not hear simultaneously from them about the "christian question." But there is in this history of demonization a "christian question," just like in other times and places there is a "muslim question," a "hindu question," a "communist question," or a "Hutu question." Jacobson at least implicitly, if not expressly, recognizes this through Finkler, who turns the tables on the "jewish question" by drawing attention to the plight of Palestinians in Israel and Gaza at the hands of their Zionist/Israeli oppressors through his involvement with a group of Anglo Jewish intellectuals known as "ASHamed Jews." Samuel Finkler, a man who is so thoroughly cloaked with a Jewish identity, has the capacity to assess critically his own cultural identity in the same way he assesses the identity of others. The "Finkler question" is as much about a Jewish assessment of the Jewish identity as it is about a non-Jew's assessment of the Jewish identity or a Jew's assessment of the non-Jewish identity.
Turning to the question of cultural identity, what does "Jewish" mean? Is the term's meaning found in the story told by Thomas Cahill in The Gifts of the Jews: the first people to provide humanity with a narrative history of near linear progress and hope that tomorrow will be better than today, which is better than the day before, in contrast to the "circle of life and death" narrative common to other cultures, such as the Mesopotamians or Hindus before the common era? Is the term's meaning found in the first people to embrace monotheism? After all, the first four of the Ten Commandments, purportedly given by god to Moses and the Jews, are about the unity and singularity of one God who is the source of all life. Is the term's meaning found in the covenant story of chapter 17 of Genesis, a story of a real estate bargain for a narrow swath of land east of the Mediterranean, south of Assyria, and north of Egypt, cleaved and sealed with a promise that all of Abraham's male descendants would thereafter be circumcised? A significant part of The Finkler Question's conversation, as well as Treslove's ruminations, are about circumcision and land. The ASHamed Jews' diatribe about Zionists and Israel is as much a diatribe about the illegal occupation of land as it is about the contradictions of Jews who "throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God." Is it found in the larger story read and re-read every year, along with the laws, rules, customs of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, continuing through to the story of Moses and those who wandered out of Egypt with Moses, found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and perhaps the oral tradition as well? Or is the meaning of Jewish found in the diaspora story, a wandering tribe in exile, yet seemingly able to assimilate in the communities of others until someone comes along and says we need to purify our community?
I did not ask whether the meaning of Jewish is found in connections among people to some mitochondrial DNA that links a genealogical family of people across generations. The phrase l'dor v'dor suggests that what Jewish means is connected through the traditions that are passed along between generations. The Nazis certainly thought in terms of a blood connection. But the Jewish treatment of the Marranos who converted to Christianity in order to avoid persecution in the times of Inquisition indicates that those who failed to continue to practice Judaism, even privately, were no longer full Jews. Likewise conversion to Judaism by a non-Jew brings about full membership in the Jewish community. Blood lineage is not an essential element of what Jewish means. Jacobson does not seem to think so either. Finkler is married to a woman, Tyler Gallagher, who converts to Judaism after they marry, and the story contains enough information that could lead one to conclude that Tyler is "more Jewish" than Finkler.
As for the novel's main character, Julian Treslove, unsure of his own identity, explores creating a Jewish identity. Treslove cannot maintain a relationship with any woman more than an evening, a day or a week. As the novel opens he seems to adore every woman who walks by him. He is the father of two children conceived during what appears to be little more than a one-night stand. In the novel's central act, Treslove is walking home after a dinner with Finkler and their mutual friend, an older Jewish man, Libor. He is assaulted by a woman, injured, and robbed, and she curses at him. At first he thinks he hears his assailant say, "Your jewels." He thinks again, maybe she said, "You're Jules." And the more he thinks about, he thinks she said "You Jules, you." No, it was more succinct: "You Ju." Treslove concludes that his assailant has mistaken him for Finkler. She thinks Treslove is a Jew. He rejects the idea that mistaken identity is one of mistaken appearance: he is the wrong size, the wrong temperature, the wrong speed to be perceived as Jew. It must be something else, he tells Finkler: it is a matter of spirit and essence. Spiritually I am like the Jews. He is reminded that Finkler once told him, "Ours is not a club you can join." And then he meets Hephzibah --- at a seder-in-November meal hosted by Libor. He begins a year long relationship based on mutual love and appears to be on the cusp of trying to establish a Jewish identity. Once again, however, he cannot consummate a relationship after a year of trying. Treslove cannot establish his personal identity.
As far as individual identity is concerned, there is no monolithic Jewish personal identity in Jacobson's novel. There are Jews who regularly go to synagogue and read the Torah every year; there are Jews who do not go to synagogue or rarely go to synagogue and do not read the Torah every year. There are Jews who are ardent Zionists and defenders of the modern Jewish state of Israel, and there are Jews who believe that the Zionists and the State of Israel have lost their way. There are Jews who will only marry another Jew. There are Jews who marry non-Jews, and sometimes they raise their children as Jews and sometimes they do not. There are Jews who are converted Jews. There are Jews who will only have marital affairs with non-Jews. There are Jews who consider themselves Orthodox, there are Jews who consider themselves "conservative," and there are Jews who consider themselves "reform." There are European Jews and there are Sephardic Jews.
Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well as cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in marginal ways. (See November 6, 2011 post). What is meant by "Jewish" for one era, is, and is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era. What it means to "be Jewish" in one era, is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era.
At a certain level, it is possible to generalize the subject of identity so that what is true for the Jewish identity is true of the Russian identity, the German identity, the Muslim identity, the atheist identity, the WASP identity, the African America identity. But reducing human cultural identity to its lowest common denominators deprives us the richness of the stories that define the culture and ethnicity of different humans.
The subject of identity, in this case Jewish identity, has to be approached in two ways: personal identity, what does it mean to be Jewish?; and cultural or group identity, what does Jewish mean? Howard Jacobson zigs and zags between both, as he should, because it is impossible to separate the two. Personal identity owes its existence to group identity: we humans are social animals. The title of Jacobson's novel, The Finkler Question, reveals the inseparability of the two. Finkler is Sam Finkler, Julian Treslove's lifelong friend, and a man with his own personal identity issues. For Treslove, his friend Sam Finkler is emblematic of all Jews. Privately, Treslove refers to Jews as "Finklers." "It took away the stigma, [Treslove] thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say or the Finkler conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself." Substitute Finkler for Jewish and one of the themes in this book is immediately revealed by it title: the Jewish Question.
The phrase the "Jewish Question" first appears in 18th century England as part of a debate over the rights of Jews in England --- voting rights, property rights. I did not dwell on it in my discussion of David Liss' The Paper Conspiracy (see November 16, 2011 post), but Liss fairly describes and frequently mentions the legal status of Jews in early 18th century England and their lack of property rights and voting rights. But while it began as a neutral phrase, the "Jewish question" evolved and took on an anti-semitic tone by the 19th century. A discussion of the "Jewish question" ultimately could not avoid a discussion of a "solution" --- whether it be assimilation, deportation and resettlement --- and by 20th century Nazi Germany, the solution became wedded with malice in the so-called "final solution," extermination. The phrase the "Jewish question" is a little bit like Treslove substituting Finkler for Jewish in his lexicon. Here the word "question," particularly in its anti-semitic context, really means "problem." Problems are in need of solutions.
The origins of the "Jewish question" begin long before 18th century England. They begin with the demonization of the Jews by Christians as early as the founding of the Catholic church, as former Catholic priest, James Carroll, has so thoroughly documented in Constantine's Sword. Regrettably, oppressors --- in this case, both Christians and Christian institutions --- almost never confess to their own problems and look at themselves in the same way that they look at others, and so we do not hear simultaneously from them about the "christian question." But there is in this history of demonization a "christian question," just like in other times and places there is a "muslim question," a "hindu question," a "communist question," or a "Hutu question." Jacobson at least implicitly, if not expressly, recognizes this through Finkler, who turns the tables on the "jewish question" by drawing attention to the plight of Palestinians in Israel and Gaza at the hands of their Zionist/Israeli oppressors through his involvement with a group of Anglo Jewish intellectuals known as "ASHamed Jews." Samuel Finkler, a man who is so thoroughly cloaked with a Jewish identity, has the capacity to assess critically his own cultural identity in the same way he assesses the identity of others. The "Finkler question" is as much about a Jewish assessment of the Jewish identity as it is about a non-Jew's assessment of the Jewish identity or a Jew's assessment of the non-Jewish identity.
Turning to the question of cultural identity, what does "Jewish" mean? Is the term's meaning found in the story told by Thomas Cahill in The Gifts of the Jews: the first people to provide humanity with a narrative history of near linear progress and hope that tomorrow will be better than today, which is better than the day before, in contrast to the "circle of life and death" narrative common to other cultures, such as the Mesopotamians or Hindus before the common era? Is the term's meaning found in the first people to embrace monotheism? After all, the first four of the Ten Commandments, purportedly given by god to Moses and the Jews, are about the unity and singularity of one God who is the source of all life. Is the term's meaning found in the covenant story of chapter 17 of Genesis, a story of a real estate bargain for a narrow swath of land east of the Mediterranean, south of Assyria, and north of Egypt, cleaved and sealed with a promise that all of Abraham's male descendants would thereafter be circumcised? A significant part of The Finkler Question's conversation, as well as Treslove's ruminations, are about circumcision and land. The ASHamed Jews' diatribe about Zionists and Israel is as much a diatribe about the illegal occupation of land as it is about the contradictions of Jews who "throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God." Is it found in the larger story read and re-read every year, along with the laws, rules, customs of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, continuing through to the story of Moses and those who wandered out of Egypt with Moses, found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and perhaps the oral tradition as well? Or is the meaning of Jewish found in the diaspora story, a wandering tribe in exile, yet seemingly able to assimilate in the communities of others until someone comes along and says we need to purify our community?
I did not ask whether the meaning of Jewish is found in connections among people to some mitochondrial DNA that links a genealogical family of people across generations. The phrase l'dor v'dor suggests that what Jewish means is connected through the traditions that are passed along between generations. The Nazis certainly thought in terms of a blood connection. But the Jewish treatment of the Marranos who converted to Christianity in order to avoid persecution in the times of Inquisition indicates that those who failed to continue to practice Judaism, even privately, were no longer full Jews. Likewise conversion to Judaism by a non-Jew brings about full membership in the Jewish community. Blood lineage is not an essential element of what Jewish means. Jacobson does not seem to think so either. Finkler is married to a woman, Tyler Gallagher, who converts to Judaism after they marry, and the story contains enough information that could lead one to conclude that Tyler is "more Jewish" than Finkler.
As for the novel's main character, Julian Treslove, unsure of his own identity, explores creating a Jewish identity. Treslove cannot maintain a relationship with any woman more than an evening, a day or a week. As the novel opens he seems to adore every woman who walks by him. He is the father of two children conceived during what appears to be little more than a one-night stand. In the novel's central act, Treslove is walking home after a dinner with Finkler and their mutual friend, an older Jewish man, Libor. He is assaulted by a woman, injured, and robbed, and she curses at him. At first he thinks he hears his assailant say, "Your jewels." He thinks again, maybe she said, "You're Jules." And the more he thinks about, he thinks she said "You Jules, you." No, it was more succinct: "You Ju." Treslove concludes that his assailant has mistaken him for Finkler. She thinks Treslove is a Jew. He rejects the idea that mistaken identity is one of mistaken appearance: he is the wrong size, the wrong temperature, the wrong speed to be perceived as Jew. It must be something else, he tells Finkler: it is a matter of spirit and essence. Spiritually I am like the Jews. He is reminded that Finkler once told him, "Ours is not a club you can join." And then he meets Hephzibah --- at a seder-in-November meal hosted by Libor. He begins a year long relationship based on mutual love and appears to be on the cusp of trying to establish a Jewish identity. Once again, however, he cannot consummate a relationship after a year of trying. Treslove cannot establish his personal identity.
As far as individual identity is concerned, there is no monolithic Jewish personal identity in Jacobson's novel. There are Jews who regularly go to synagogue and read the Torah every year; there are Jews who do not go to synagogue or rarely go to synagogue and do not read the Torah every year. There are Jews who are ardent Zionists and defenders of the modern Jewish state of Israel, and there are Jews who believe that the Zionists and the State of Israel have lost their way. There are Jews who will only marry another Jew. There are Jews who marry non-Jews, and sometimes they raise their children as Jews and sometimes they do not. There are Jews who are converted Jews. There are Jews who will only have marital affairs with non-Jews. There are Jews who consider themselves Orthodox, there are Jews who consider themselves "conservative," and there are Jews who consider themselves "reform." There are European Jews and there are Sephardic Jews.
Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well as cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in marginal ways. (See November 6, 2011 post). What is meant by "Jewish" for one era, is, and is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era. What it means to "be Jewish" in one era, is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era.
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