Jeroen Bouterse – Page 4 – Jeroen Bouterse

Windmill-bashing Squared

(new 3QuarksDaily-column)

The most charitable, forward-looking take on the science wars of the 90s is Stephen Jay Gould’s, in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (2003), a delightful book about dichotomies between the sciences and humanities. His diagnosis is primarily that scientists have taken too literally or too seriously some fashionable nonsense, and overreacted; and if everybody can just calm down already, things will be alright and both sides could “break bread together” (108). Gould saw the science wars themselves as a marginal and slightly comical skirmish, almost a mere misunderstanding. “Some of my colleagues”, he said,

“have become legitimately disturbed by a few truly silly and extreme statements from the ‘relativist’ camp, largely made by poseurs rather than genuine scholars, and have mistaken these infrequent sound bites of pure nonsense for the center of a serious and useful critique. Then, falsely believing that the entire field of ‘science studies’ has launched a crazed attack upon science and the concept of truth itself, they fight back by searching out the rare inane statements of a few irresponsible relativists […] and then presenting a polemic defense of science, ultimately helpful to no one”. (99)

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A gospel and theodicy according to Rutger Bregman

(new 3QuarksDaily-column)

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History is a clearly written argument if ever there was one. Bregman believes humans are a kind species and that we should arrange society accordingly. The reason why this thesis needs intellectual support at all is not that it is particularly profound or complicated, but that there are so many misunderstandings to be cleared away, so many apparent objections that need to be overcome.

You have already thought of those objections, or you will if you take half a minute. Bregman confronts many of them squarely. He looks at historical atrocities, social-psychological experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment, and famous anecdotes about human cruelty or indifference, patiently explaining how we should look at these in a different light. The anecdotes turn out to be less damning to human nature, and the experiments more flawed than common perception has it.

Of course, this leaves, well, human history. Bregman is aware that his beloved humans have committed all kinds of horrific acts of violence over the millennia. This is a problem for his thesis, and it remains one. Though the book does present an attempt to explain all the violence in a way that lets human nature off the hook, I do not think that this attempt is satisfactory.

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A Sacrifice to a Dark God: Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Bradley, I want you to go with me to the lawyer, and I want you to go with me to the hairdresser, I must get my hair rinsed. I think I can do just that, it won’t be too much for me. Then I think I’ll rest.” (299)

In the first part of The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson wants to get away from London to start writing the great work of art he believes he has in himself. He sees himself as a puritan; art is not something produced lightly and easily, but is the fruit of discipline and ascetic preparation. This high-minded view of art and the artist stands in contrast to that of his friend and rival Arnold, a successful writer whose success Pearson resents and with whom he often clashes. “‘Art isn’t chat plus phantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silence.’ / ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art!’” (50)

Why I’ll change how I talk about proof

New 3QuarksDaily column:

I have some very simple New Year’s resolutions, and some that require an entire column to spell out. One example of the latter is that I want to make a subtle but meaningful change in how I talk to my (middle and high school) math students about proofs.

First, I need to be open about the fact that talking about proof in mathematics comes with an especially strong impostor syndrome: as a secondary school teacher, who am I to talk about the nature and limits of deductive reasoning in a discipline of which I have barely scratched the surface? I know high school proofs of high school mathematical concepts; I am vaguely aware that people much cleverer than I have tried to reduce all mathematical claims to analytical (logical) truths, or at least to a limited set of axioms; and I believe that after having mentioned this, I have to name-drop Gödel as the person who has supposedly put a stop to these projects, even though I have never studied his incompleteness theorem and doubt I would be able accurately to judge its relevance and meaning. That’s about it.

More here.

Nihilism in the 21st century

New 3quarksdaily column:

In a radio sketch by the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, David Mitchell plays an interviewer trying to get a cabinet minister to say what he really thinks about the government’s funding cuts. At first, Robert Webb, playing the minister, says there is no disagreement between him and the cabinet, but the interviewer presses on, continually repeating the same question: “OK …. but what do you really think?”

At one point, the minister unrealistically breaks under these faux-critical questions, and admits:

“It’s all lies. I hate it, I’m against it, all right? […] That’s it, my career is over.”

You’d think that was enough. But after a pause, the interviewer replies:

-“Yes, but what do you really think?”

“Look, it’s all futile. We’re all nothing but specks of flesh going through this obscene dance of death for nothing. Everything is nothing.”

-“….Thank you minister.”

More here.

‘Theologians And Other Fuzzy People’ Two 20th-Century Dutch Novelists On The Sciences And Humanities

New 3QuarksDaily-column:

For better or worse, Dutch 20^th-century postwar literature comes with a canon of three authors: Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch, and W.F. Hermans. There, you learned something today. Other than this factoid, however, this post is not going to be a lecture about the landscape of Dutch literature, or even the literary qualities of these authors. I am introducing them because I am going to use two of them, and one in particular, to illustrate a point about discourse involving the landscape of science – that is, the distinction between the sciences and humanities.

The notion of a separation between the sciences and humanities usually revolves (again, for better or worse) around C.P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture. In this lecture, Snow tentatively suggests that what he calls the ‘scientific culture’ is probably more left-wing than the ‘literary culture’, as well as more progressive (scientists “have the future in their bones”). In his time, he saw his technocratic ideals represented best by the Labour party, to which he served as scientific advisor. In the 1970s, however, Snow (as chronicled by historian Guy Ortolano)[1] would drift away from the Labour party, and express himself in increasingly negative terms about all the nonsense one had to put up with as a liberal these days. Before his death in 1980, he expressed his sympathy for neo-conservative ideas.

More here

Stoicism In The 21st Century

New 3QD-column:

I remember the first time I thought I might be able to get on board with Stoicism. I read a passage in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, about a distinguished Stoic philosopher on a ship crossing the Ionian sea. The ship finds itself in a violent storm, catches water and seems to be on the verge of being overpowered by the elements. The narrator describes how everybody is working to keep the vessel afloat, all the while lamenting their situation.

In the midst of all the chaos, he looks for the Stoic – perhaps to anchor his own courage in the idea that the truly wise are unperturbed even by this seemingly dire situation. “And then”, he remembers later, “I beheld the man frightened and ghastly pale, not indeed uttering any lamentations, as all the rest were doing, nor any outcries of that kind, but in his loss of colour and distracted expression not differing much from the others.” Whether the philosopher at least manages to make himself useful at the pumps remains unclear.

More here.

River-Crossing Riddles Through the Ages

New 3QD-column:

Have you ever been in this situation where you had to get a group of 3 men and their sisters across a river, but the boat only held two and you had to take precautions to ensure the women got across without being assaulted?

This problem is one of 53 puzzles in the oldest extant puzzle book in the Western (Latin) tradition: the Propositiones ad acuendos iuventes or problems to sharpen the young. Its authorship is uncertain but it is often and plausibly attributed to Alcuin, who possibly sent them to the Frankish ruler Charlemagne in 800 AD. I hope you will allow me a brief introduction of these puzzles, before I go on to do what I hope will by then be redundant, namely spelling out why I think you should be thrilled by their existence.

More here.

‘A Condition for Survival’

New 3QD-column:

“For many years now a division has been established in our universities between the sciences and the humanities. This division is probably more absolute now than it has ever been before.” Thus complains, in 1946, the British Marxist scientist John Desmond Bernal.

It is a worry that seems to anticipate C.P. Snow’s later famous cri de coeur about the ‘two cultures’. Indeed, the two scientists knew and respected each other; Snow called Bernal “quite obviously and with no fuss about it, a great man”. More interesting than the question of priority, however, is the question why Bernal made this observation when he did, and with this sense of urgency.

More here.

“Oh, the humanities!”

New 3QD-column:

The Big Bang Theory has been one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history. Last month it ended. In many ways, it ended a long way from where it had begun; many commentators have noticed how the show has evolved together with cultural norms in the past decade. Its first seasons milked gender-stereotypes to a toe-wrenching extent; later, the main cast included more women, and generally changed its tone on gender and science – even making it a theme in several episodes.

Still, a sitcom like BBT needs its stereotypes, and BBT’s idea of geek culture did remain stereotypical; if not on the level of gender, then in other ways that I want to explore here.

More here.