THE LAST MAN STANDING

Jerry Harkins

The problem with men is they are rapidly becoming obsolete.  Already it is possible to run a cattle ranch of 10,000 units[1] without the services of an actual bull.  Already scientists have created mice using sperm manufactured from stem cells harvested from female mice.  No males needed, thank you.  Within ten years they’ll be making the stem cells from recycled motor oil and within another generation women will be able to order bespoke artificial sperm from Amazon.  Maybe they’ll keep a few male specimens in zoos to remind them of the bad old days when men ruled the world and the roost which they had done ever since our ancestors came down out of the trees some twenty million years ago.  As John F. Kennedy said, life isn’t fair.  But it used to be that it was mainly unfair to women.

At the moment, it seems that things may be changing and not a moment too soon.  Take, for example, one of the most ancient forms of discrimination, the taking of young girls by older men as wives or mistresses or, in many cases, just taking them.  According to some authorities, Peter Abelard was 36 in 1115 A.D. when he met Heloise d'Argenteuil who was 14.  There ensued love at first sight and one of history’s great romances.  Their age disparity was not so unusual in the twelfth century and even Heloise’s youth was not a serious concern.  It is true that Peter was castrated but not for marrying her and not even for statutory rape.  Rather, thinking to protect her, he sent her to the convent.  Thinking to protect herself, she denied being married to him.  But that infuriated her uncle who took it to mean she had been living with him in sin.  Both had guessed wrong about the uncle’s moral priorities.

Important men have always and everywhere preferred much younger wives and mistresses.[2] Helen of Sparta (later Helen of Troy) is the mythical archetype.  She was in the first blush of youth when she married King Menelaus who was already famous for his military exploits when he and four other kings drew straws for her.  There is, of course, nothing strange about May-December romances unless you think it strange that in 99% of them it is the woman who plays May to the man’s December.  In living memory, we have Charlie Chaplin who was 36 years older than Oona O’Neill.  Leopold Stokowski was 42 years older than his third wife, Gloria Vanderbilt.  Woody Allen is 35 years older than his third wife Soon-Yi Previn and Hugh Hefner was 60 years older than Crystal Harris.  Melania Knauss was 28 when she met Donald Trump in 1998.  He was 52.  She was his third wife.  Callista Bisek was 27 when she and Newt Gingrich began their adulterous affair in 1993.  He was 50.  He made her his third wife seven years later after she insisted he convert to Roman Catholicism.

It is important to note that these were probably not forced marriages.  In each, the men and the women got pretty much what they set out to get.  It is likely that all involved love of one kind or another.  In addition, the men got youth, beauty and fecundity while the women got security, power and prestige.  Chaplin and O’Neill are prime examples.  There is no doubt theirs was a love match.  They adored each other in spite of having to live in exile from the United States where he was caught up in the red-baiting hysteria fomented by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  He got a beautiful and talented woman who gave him peace and love and eight children.  Having survived the dysfunctional family of Eugene O’Neill, she got pretty much the same things. 

But.  There’s always a but and in this case it is the fact that, throughout the ages, society has been simultaneously titillated and irritated by such alliances.  The women are often thought of “gold diggers” or “trophy wives” and the men are said to be “cradle robbers.”   There is always the suspicion that the men are exercising a sense of entitlement akin to the alleged medieval practice of droit de seigneur.  And there is the stark reality that such alliances reflect and reinforce the inferior status of women in general.  Whether they wind up happily or unhappily, more often than not they become fodder for the scandal media and late night comics.  Again, the pattern was set by Helen and Paris.  You will recall that she was awarded to him by Aphrodite and he was later mortally wounded in battle.  He or Helen (accounts differ) begged his first wife, the nymph Oenone, to save him but she, the spurned woman, refused and he died.  It seems Helen was then returned to Menelaus and they lived more or less happily together ever after.  Or perhaps only until Mephistophilis gave her to Doctor Faustus who sold his soul for her.  “Was this,” he gasped, “the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Illium?”  Well, it was complicated, even more so than Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde.  As Lysander tells his beloved Hermia, "The course of true love never did run smooth."  Which is true even when a great playwright turns the turbulence into a comic farce.

As Darwin explained. “…individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind.”  The Alpha males – the biggest, fastest, smartest and most aggressive members of the troop – could and did mate with any females that attracted their attention.  It was natural for them to focus on the youngest, the most attractive and the most fecund.  The biological morality of the system was impeccable.  Like Caesar boasting to the Roman Senate, Mr. Alpha could say, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”[3]  It may seem unfair to females in retrospect but the truth is most of them accepted the inequity as their natural condition.[4]  The title of the 1966 best seller seems to fit:  Been Down So Long, It Seems Like Up To Me.

But it had always been unfair because it both reflected and projected the attitude that the differences between the sexes rendered the female inferior.  Thus, male supremacy was necessary and natural and a whole range of female distinctions and disabilities was justified.  This is, of course, a logical fallacy but men needed it to cope with the tensions implicit in the knowledge that women were in a position to judge the central element of their self-image, their sexual prowess.  They wanted to think of her as the “little woman,” soft, weak, emotional, flighty and all the rest.  To a large extent, she was lovable specifically because she was so vulnerable.

It was never true that little boys were made of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails while little girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice.  Nor was it ever true that women are merely imperfect men.  Thomas Aquinas believed “… woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence.”   Tom seemed to miss the  obvious conclusion from his analysis that God was stupid.  Either that or God himself was misbegotten.  For as Genesis insists, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them.”  Sigmund Freud was no smarter when he famously wrote, “Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.”  His psychology was as vacuous as Aquinas’s physiology.  In fact, like Aquinas, Freud was a classical misogynist but change was already in the air. 

Like all social movements, women’s rights had antecedents but the flood gates began to open when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others convened the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.  The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was introduced in 1878, passed in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920.  The struggle for contraception rights was ignited by the arrest of Margaret Sanger in 1916 and was finally settled by the Supreme Court in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.  Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963.  Title IX giving women equal treatment in higher education became law in 1972 and Roe v. Wade affirmed the right to abortion in 1973.  These and other milestones rectified practices and traditions that were at least obsolete and often outright evil.  But the most important force that changed history was the introduction of Enovid in 1960.

Enovid, known as The Pill, was the first contraceptive that was simple, virtually certain and reasonably safe.  Moreover it was something that a woman could control herself.  Although at $10 a month it seemed expensive at the time, given its benefits, it was actually a bargain.  What it did was to separate sex from reproduction by removing the risk of unwanted pregnancy.  Relations between the sexes would never be the same even if a lot of men have not yet gotten the memo.  Freed of the risk of unexpected or unwanted pregnancies, women could now aspire to as much independence as they wanted and demand equality in every aspect of their lives.

Freud, ever the fabulist, said, "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”  The answer is and was obvious to anyone who listened to what women were saying.  The vast majority of them want equality:  equal pay for equal work, equal opportunity in the workplace, equal protection of the law, equal access to health care and, prominently at the moment, equal respect and dignity.  To one degree or another, they have made gains in these and other areas with the striking exception of respect and dignity.  Some churches, politicians and businesses have learned to say the right things but we still seem surprised at the intensity of the resentment women express at being groped or denigrated or made the object of lewd remarks.  When a powerful man is outed for harassment, abuse or even rape, other men may know it’s ugly but are ready to move on in the interest of more important things like electoral success.  When an antediluvian politician boasts about his sexual conquests, we brush it off as “locker room talk” and elect him to the  office of his choice.  The President of the United States recently implied that a female member of the United States Senate would prostitute herself for campaign contributions.  His spokeswoman said this was not sexist because he had used the same locution referring to other politicians of both sexes.  Women who object to this sort of thing are labeled “feminazis.”  It’s as though the progress made in other areas has had two unintended consequences:  an effort on the part of men to assert and protect at least their sexual dominance and an increased willingness of women to protest such treatment publicly.  Thus there is more abuse and we read about abuse more often.

Increased awareness of a growing problem may portend real change even in the face of the entrenched misogyny of powerful institutions including many religious denominations.  It may be that the legal system will find a way to balance the antithetical claims of equality before the law and due process of law in situations that almost always arise in deep privacy and involve significant power imbalances.  On that great come and get it day there will be no more glass ceilings, no more gauntlets in front of Planned Parenthood clinics, no more casting couches.  It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.  It is however not necessarily something to bet the farm on in the short term.  Longer term it seems inevitable that women will achieve equality unless they don’t need it anymore because men have become extinct.  As Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

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Notes

[1] A “unit” is a cow and her calf.  All the calves will be female, there being no further need for males.  And just so you know, today the cow still gets pregnant using real bull-provided sperm.  However, she never actually encounters the gentleman.  The bull is induced to mount an artificial vagina which has been infused with the scent of a real cow in heat.  Like many human males, the bulls are not especially smart and tend to be indifferent as to where their sperm is deposited.  Same thing is true of pigs.  All kinds of pigs.

[2] Well, not every important man.  Benjamin Franklin advised a young man to seek an older woman as his mistress for eight reasons.  The second was, “Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a thousand Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick.  Thus they continue amiable.  And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.”  And the last reason was because “They are so grateful!!”  [Emphasis and exclamation points in the original.]  Franklin did not follow his own advice.  He met Deborah Read in 1723 when he was 17 and she was 15.  They undertook a common law marriage in 1730 which lasted until her death in 1774.  She was a shrewd business person and a faithful spouse which is more than can be said for Ben who maintained stables of mistresses in Paris and London for years.

[3] Caesar had three wives and numerous mistresses including Cleopatra who was 31 years his junior.  As a teenager, he married Cornelia who was 13 at the time.  His third wife was Calpurnia whom he married when he was 41 and she was 16. His second marriage, to Pompeia, was a political deal that lasted less than five years.

[4] One exception was Heloise who disdained marriage and the subordinate role of women in general.  She wrote, “…whomever concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection for it is evident that she seeks not the man but his wealth and is willing to prostitute herself for it.”  Again accounts differ and some writers claim he forced her to marry him somehow.  But reading the letters, there can be no doubt she had loved Abelard and admired him even when she disputed philosophical issues with him.

THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG

Jerry Harkins

                  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one has a right to his 
                 own  facts.                                                                               
                                                                                     –Daniel Patrick Moynihan

            For two and a half millennia, philosophers have worried about whether or not error has any rights.  No one thinks deliberate malicious error –– lying –– has any standing at all although it is often difficult to find a consensus on what is deliberate and malicious.  But the concern has been with inadvertent error, "honest" mistakes that have the potential to result in consequential harm.  By and large, the answer has been no.  Senator Moynihan for example was saying that no one has the right to claim that the earth is flat or the moon is made of green cheese.  Like most people, he apparently thought there is a body of "facts," eternal, unchanging verities universally agreed upon.  There does seem to be such a canon.  The earth is a sphere.  All men are mortal.  1 + 1 = 2 is true and the notion that 1 + 1 = 3 has no standing, no rights, no place at the table.  Sadly, as we shall see, the universe is governed by the Uncertainty Principle and the class of eternal verities, while not null, is infinitesimally small.

            Here I want to consider the place of error in science which is one of the ways human beings have developed to pursue truth.  Other disciplines, including philosophy, art and religion, must also confront error but the challenge is more conspicuous and often more consequential in science which limits itself to empirical truth.  It is also more urgent because of widespread scientific illiteracy which leads some people to repudiate even well established truth.  A truly frightening percentage of Americans reject such facts as evolution and climate change in part because of ideological bias but also in part because they do not understand the philosophy or the methodology of science.  "It's only a theory" is a common manifestation of this ignorance.

            The moral standing of error is particularly relevant in an environment whose leaders celebrate and promote alternative reality.  In effect, this means equal standing in the public forum for any proposition even if it is merely asserted and is unburdened by evidence.  There are in America today tens of millions of people who loudly and proudly reject a wide range of what Senator Moynihan might have been thinking of as "facts" simply because they do not comport with a given ideology.  There are more millions who passionately believe assertions that are at odds with decisive evidence.  They demand equal respect for their views to the point of insisting that they be certified in school textbooks and accommodated or even promoted in the law.  In this, they are supported by a long history of religious doctrine which may explain why so many fundamentalists of all faiths are attracted to irrational and often dangerous ideas.  Finally there are many who lie knowingly to gain political or economic advantage.

            We need to be very clear about this:  truth is never without ambiguity.  The current version of Darwinian evolution is not the last word on the subject.  The discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," did not close the book on either particle physics or theology.  Nevertheless intelligent design and the steady state universe are bankrupt ideas, errors properly consigned to the ash heap of history with the flat earth.  They are errors that once seemed plausible and even probable and the question is do they retain the right to be heard?  If not, at what point did they lose such standing?

            In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there has always been an attempt to make grudging accommodation for inadvertent error which is thought to be tolerable when it does not relate to a grave matter.  Still, Christian moral philosophers begin with the assertion that God has entrusted revelation and all moral truth to the church.  No fault is imputed to one who is "invincibly ignorant" of the law but that is a very high bar.  For one thing, it is alleged that no one can be ignorant of "natural law" which applies to virtually all human behavior.  And, of course, the church is the sole interpreter of natural law.  Secular law is slightly more liberal but the ancient Greco-Roman principle nemo censetur ignorare legem, no one is presumed ignorant of the law, is a foundational principle of Western jurisprudence.  "I didn't know there was a law against that" is no more acceptableas a  defense than "I didn't know the gun was loaded."

            There is, of course, a very good reason for this.  If ignorance of the law were allowed as a defense, it would automatically be invoked by anyone accused of any offense.  The ancient philosophers asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" –– Who will watch the watchmen?  Similarly who will prevent a prosecutor from bringing a case against a celebrity in order to build a public image for the next political campaign?  Who will denounce a county clerk for refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple because Deuteronomy says homosexuality is an abomination?  Who will dare say the emperor has no clothes, the Chief Executive is a liar and a fool or worse?  In a free society someone is bound to think and say everything that can be thought or said and dissent is often valuable.  Inevitably, though, some dissent will be wrong.  Resolving disputes in the political and religious realms is often messy.  In science, there is an empirical process for doing so but it too can seem to be disorderly.

            The world of right and wrong, truth and error is not binary.  Rather it covers the same spectrum as probability theory between the extremes of empirical fact and provable falsity.  As with probability, there are very few propositions that can be decisively and finally placed at either extreme.  Moreover, as our knowledge increases, beliefs thought to be at one extreme or the other sometimes shift in the opposite direction. An example is our understanding of how and when the world was created. 

            As recently as 1658, Archbishop James Ussher used biblical genealogy to calculate the precise date of the creation as Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC.  He and almost everyone else in Europe believed that the Book of Genesis was divinely inspired and therefore without error.  His 1,200-page work was a scholarly tour de force but it was also a spectacular error that remained the majority opinion for two centuries.  There had always been different views, some of them more nearly correct.  In the first century before the common era, Lucretius wrote "On the Nature of Things" which rejected the idea that the gods had anything to do with the creation of the material universe.  Like Bishop Ussher, his reasoning was cogent but, lacking evidence, it led to some fairly muddled theories.  Even when his conclusions turned out to be wrong, however, they were not dead ends but represented progress.  More often than not, they pointed toward truth, a phenomenon that leads to the conclusion that truth is not an absolute but rather a perception that is always evolving.  Sigmund Freud was only half right when he observed, "From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."  No.  From error to error one can get closer to the truth but only if one is on the right track to start with.

            The evidence that knowledge is an always-evolving body of perceptions is obvious even in science, the most empirical, pragmatic and operational of all the ways humans have created to pursue truth.  Perhaps the best example was the theory of geocentricity, the idea that the earth is the center of the universe.  This was a common sense deduction based on the observation that the heavenly bodies do appear to be revolving about the earth and the earth does not seem to move.  Again, there were always dissenters but it was not until the early Renaissance that Copernicus developed a mathematical model that positioned the sun as the center of the solar system.  His work was published posthumously in 1543.  In 1632, Galileo published observational evidence of heliocentricity which gradually became the accepted if only partial truth.  Galileo's model was a paragon of the scientific method.  It turned out to be incomplete but was a crucial step in the direction of truth.

            Galileo's evidence notwithstanding, the church clung to geocentricity because of three Old Testament verses which said the earth is "firm and secure" and "cannot be moved."  In their context, these lines are unimportant.  Their authors were merely stating a "fact" that seemed obvious to them.  The Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine, was himself a brilliant polymath but he did not understand the relevance of the new evidence and he feared the consequences of abandoning so entrenched an idea as geocentricity.  He supported his position with an ingenious and persuasive metaphysical argument about the artificial nature of mathematics that turned out to be irrelevant to the question at hand.

            The spirit of Bellarmine must have been troubled when, in the late 1920's, astronomers developed evidence that the universe had been expanding for about 14.2 billion years and that it had begun from a single point of origin.  Later this became known as the Big Bang Theory.  It was a revolutionary intellectual concept and many scientists sought flaws in it and alternatives to it.  Quickly, some came to focus on what was called the Steady State Theory, the idea that the universe remains always and everywhere essentially the same.  But in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs discovered incontrovertible proof that the Big Bang had indeed occurred.  Most scientists, including Albert Einstein, had long since abandoned Steady State for theoretical reasons but the new discoveries were empirical evidence which rendered Steady State untenable.  Except to Sir Fred Hoyle, a handful of his acolytes and a stubborn coterie of religious zealots who continued to promote the Steady State Theory.

            Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a genius, a distinguished British astronomer and a dedicated scientific gadfly.  He made many important contributions but rejected the Big Bang Theory because it seemed to require an impossible number of improbable coincidences.  He argued that the evolution of the universe and of life had been "guided" by a force that resembled Adam Smith's invisible hand.  He famously wrote that "…a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology."  Although a self-proclaimed atheist, his views are still frequently cited as support for the intelligent design theory.  Hoyle was wrong about the Big Bang.  He was similarly wrong in believing that Archaeopterix, the fossil intermediate between the dinosaurs and modern birds, is a man-made fake.  And he was wrong in thinking that oil and gas do not derive from the decayed remains of living creatures.  In some ways, his career paralleled that of Linus Pauling, the double Nobel laureate whose stubborn advocacy of massive doses of Vitamin C as a cure-all bordered on medical quackery.

            Neither Hoyle nor Pauling was crazy or ill-intentioned.  Some of their theories were highly improbable but not impossible.  At a minimum, the credibility they derived from the main body of their work forced other scientists to be more rigorous and therefore to produce more reliable science.  Error – honest error – serves the vital function of keeping the discussion alive and avoiding the ascendency of dogma.  It has a limited life span but often lingers beyond its usefulness.

            In the remarkable thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us, "For now we see through a glass, darkly;  but then face to face.  Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known."  He is attempting to describe the difference between heaven and earth but he is also making the case that all knowledge on earth is elusive and can never be perfect.  It is not so far from the modern physicists who teach the Uncertainty Principle or the mathematicians who need to develop tools like non-Euclidian Geometry and Fuzzy Logic to describe their phenomena.  Certainly there is no such thing as an alternative fact and no moral standing for those who practice tangled webs in order to deceive.  But it is the duty of the reader and the listener to decide what is deception and what is not and when error crosses the line and becomes untenable.  On one side of that line is the great value of testing truth as stringently as possible which is the same thing as the implacable search for error.  Error is inevitable and uncovering it is close to the heart of the scientific method.

MUSIC AND MEANING

Jerry Harkins

Some years ago I attended a concert the highlight of which was Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major, Opus 58.  Here is a close paraphrase of the description of the first movement given in the program notes:

The concerto begins in the strange key of B major, then flirts with A minor, an odd choice.  It pays a call on the less remote key of B minor but moves quickly to an amazing surprise, a dream episode in the completely strange key of B-flat.  There follows a second dream episode in the most unexpected key of C-sharp minor, and then a third in yet another strange key, E-flat.  The cadenza begins with a violent excursion in a blatantly wrong but unspecified key and then offers a peace-making gesture in the completely irrelevant key of A major.

In spite of the colorful words and phrases, the author clearly knew that he was writing about a work of genius.  Perhaps he was trying to make the point – dubious but debateable - that this concerto presages the movement away from strict tonality, and that certain key changes might have sounded strange to contemporary ears.  But by referring to what he called the composer's "dream episodes" he seemed also to acknowledge that the music actually means something.  This too is controversial.  The composer and essayist Ned Rorem for example has written, "Music has no intellectual significance, no meaning outside itself" and he explicitly includes what he calls "so-called programmatic" music. I believe Rorem is wrong.  His own remarkable organ piece "Mary Dyer Did Hang as a Flag"  is obviously programmatic and arresting in its invocation of the sounds accompanying Mary's martyrdom.  He might not have intended it but even listeners who know the story only from the title of the piece are sure to be disturbed by the music.

Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto simply cannot be appropriately described as strange or odd or unexpected or irrelevant or wrong in any way.  Moreover to do so creates self-fulfilling expectations which encourage careless errors.  For example, the concerto does not begin in the “strange” key of B Major;  it begins with a lovely 5-measure tune for solo piano in, of course, G Major.  The strings then repeat the same theme in B major.  The woodwinds follow and you will hear hints of the tune in different keys throughout the fifteen minutes of the first movement.  But the movement ends exactly where you would expect it to, solidly on the tonic chord, G major.  The "blatantly wrong" but unspecified key with which he says Beethoven began the cadenza is also G major although both cadenzas he wrote quickly abandon the tonic.  The second which was performed the night I attended begins with the G major chord before tripping down a two and a half octave run flatting the B's, E's, A's and D's as it goes thus winding up in A-flat major.  The first E-flat certainly calls attention to itself but, in the couple of seconds it takes to complete the run, your ear is fully adjusted and ready for the A-flat major.  You didn't have time to think "wrong."

And you shouldn't.  Anyone who thinks about such matters during a performance is missing the point of the composer and wasting the price of the ticket.  Indeed "thinking" about music in a verbal sense may be a bootless exercise.  I have no idea what was going on in the mind of Beethoven when he composed the Fourth Concerto.  All I know is that hearing it gives me great pleasure.  My problem is that, as verbal as I think I am, I am unable to articulate that pleasure with any precision or even much confidence.  It's not simply that words fail me although they do.  I suspect it's more that emotional information inherently resists description by words. 

Granted that part of my pleasure derives from fairly obvious characteristics.  For one thing, Beethoven wrote tonal music which means that the sounds follow a set of rules which the human ear perceives as relationships that are pleasing and predictable.  Consider the famous opening of his Fifth Symphony in C minor:  four notes in two measures, three eighth notes on G and a half note on E flat.  Da Da Da Daa.  For several physical and biological reasons, that E flat is very satisfying.  With the three G's, the Da Da Da Daa is the C minor chord without the C.  The two remaining tones are, however, mathematically related and provide a sense of inevitability and completion or resolution. 

Almost all traditional Western music is tonal.  It "resolves" which is what makes the songs of the "Great American Songbook" memorable and comfortable.  Obviously the words help but there is also an entire genre of classical instrumental music, tone poems, composed explicitly to tell a story or set a mood with music only.  Among the most famous examples are Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" which is a modernist evocation of sexual awakening, Sibelius' "Finlandia" which is a patriotic description of Finnish history, and Gershwin's "Cuban Overture" the title of which is self-explanatory.  But there are also many compositions in traditional genres that were deliberately composed to address narrative or emotive purposes.  Among them are the following which I have tried to list on a spectrum ranging from obvious to subtle:  Tchaikovsky's  "1812 Overture," Copland's "Appalachian Spring," Bach's "O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden," Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," Ravel's "Bolero," Williams' incidental music for "Schindler's List," Holst's "The Planets," Mendelssohn's incidental music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," and Beethoven's "Symphony No. 6 in F Major."

It is impossible to miss the celebratory theme of the "1812 Overture" which proclaims a great Russian victory over Napoleon's Grand Armée.  It begins by quoting a somber Russian Orthodox hymn, "God Preserve Thy People," which reflects the anxiety of the people on first hearing the declaration of war.  Tchaikovsky then uses Russian folk tunes to describe the Battle of Borodino which was a defeat for the Russians and a pyrrhic victory for the French.  A dance tune, "At the Gate, at My Gate," describes the French arrival at the gates of Moscow but there is a quick transition to church bells, trumpets and cannons to proclaim a great Russian victory.  In case you are deaf to these, there is also the quotation of "La Marseillaise" which begins pridefully and fades to embarrassed defeat and then to a quotation of the national anthem of the Russian Empire, "God Save the Tsar."  This telling of the story, as Tchaikovsky knew, is greatly exaggerated.  The Russian Army did not win the Battle of Moscow.  Rather it burned Moscow to the ground and withdrew.  The bitter winter weather did the rest.  Still, 1812 works brilliantly as nationalistic propaganda.

The music for Bach's hymn "O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden," was taken from an earlier work by Hans Leo Hassler.  Bach used it for five different arias in the Saint Matthew Passion, each of them a dirge.  This is the fourth version in F Major and is an unmistakable expression of unspeakable grief.  The lyrics are saccharine in both German and English but the music is a convincing definition of the emotions aroused by the crucifixion.

Throughout its history, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" has encountered a bewildering storm of critical interpretation, much of it negative.  The scholar Anne Barton, writing in the Yale Shakespeare, points out that, "…condescension to the comedy as a matter of gossamer and moonshine, a charming trifle to be eked out theatrically by as much music and spectacle as possible, dominated both the criticism and the stage representations of this play until the second half of the twentieth century."   The incidental music by Mendelssohn has always fared better among the critics perhaps because it translates the Elizabethan rhetoric of the play for Victorian audiences and accurately captures the exuberance, the humor and the magic of the play.  When the Wedding March was played as the recessional at the marriage of the Princess Royal Victoria to Frederick III of Prussia in 1858 it instantly became a worldwide standard because it fit so perfectly with the joy and hope of the occasion.

I think of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony as subtle because it is so perfect one can listen to it without ever thinking of its program.  But it certainly has one.  Beethoven himself, a Romantic and a lover of nature and natural history, gave it the title, “Pastoral Symphony, or a recollection of country life.  More an expression of feeling than a painting.”  It is in five movements each of which he also titled:  “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country,” “Scene by the brook,” “Merry gathering of the country folk,” “Storm, Tempest,” and “Shepherds’ Song."  Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.”

Beethoven wrote a fair number of programmatic pieces, some like the Third Symphony, "Eroica," and the Ninth explicitly so, others like the famous Sonata 14 in C-sharp minor not.   Eroica is Italian for heroic and the symphony was composed to honor Napoleon.  Beethoven retracted this dedication after Napoleon declared himself emperor and used instead "Eroica" as the title.  Several weeks later however he informed the publisher that the real title was still "Bonaparte."  The C-minor Sonata, on the other hand, became "Moonlight" only five years after the composer's death;  he had titled it "Sonata quasi una fantasia."  The re-naming took hold in the popular imagination probably because the first movement calls to mind an emotion akin to Lorenzo's attempt to romance Jessica in "The Merchant of Venice."  He tells her, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears.  Soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony."  Beethoven himself probably had no such thought.  A German critic was the first to connect the music to moonlight and soon the sonata was being called that universally.

And it is doubtful that Beethoven was thinking of victory when he wrote the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony.  Nor was Samuel F. B. Morse thinking of either victory or Beethoven when he decided the letter V should be represented by three dots and a dash.  But early in 1941, the BBC began its "V for Victory" campaign and on June 27 of that year, it added Beethoven's four notes as an audio symbol. Previously those notes had been referred to as "Fate knocking at the door" in deference to a remark attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Beethoven himself.  The Fifth is ultimate Beethoven, a masterpiece that is dramatic and, in the view of many commentators, "heroic" in the sense of the composer vowing to conquer his encroaching deafness.  To me it seems heroic also in the sense that it recalls Winston Churchill's V for Victory salute adopted in response to the BBC campaign.  It expresses courage in the face of the existential challenge of the Battle of Britain and is, therefore, but a small step from representing the classical idea of the hero.  Unlike the Third Symphony which refers specifically to the death of a hero in its second movement, the Fifth passes over the tragic element of classical heroism and is triumphant from start to finish.

I think of Beethoven's titanic struggle with his impending deafness while he was composing both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fifth a kind of metaphor for the struggle itself and the Sixth for serenity in the face of inevitability.  The Pastoral is not acceptance.  It does not imply a surrender like that of Job, "I know that you can do all things;  no purpose of yours can be thwarted."  But now the composer is composed.  For the rest of his life his work will reflect Wordsworth's description of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility."  Even when it is dramatic, it will be more introspective, more complex and more profound.  Always the composer is speaking to himself but is also sharing his feelings with all of us.  The hearers then impose their own understanding of the work, sometimes overriding that of the composer.

The bugle call we know as "Taps" was composed as "Lights Out" during the Civil War to replace a drum tattoo of the same name.  Although it is still used to end each day at U.S. military posts,  soldiers immediately noted its appropriateness as a salute to their fallen comrades and that is how the whole world now knows it.  It is surely funereal but its ascending major chords speak also of pride.  Joyce Kilmer picked up on its stately, assertive, prideful cadences in the two refrains he wrote for his poem Rouge Bouquet.   "Comrades true, born anew, peace to you! / Your souls shall be where the heroes are / And your memory shine like the Morningstar / Brave and dear, / Shield us here, / Farewell!"

It seems beyond dispute that music – or at least music based on the diatonic architecture familiar to my ears – is a language and that it exists primarily to express emotional knowledge that words are not well suited to.  Victor Hugo thought so.  He wrote, "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."  It can also tell a story but simple narration is not its strong suit.  It is only when emotion is the subject of the story that musical expressiveness can transcend mere words.  Then the music can describe and almost resolve the mystery, ambiguity and uncertainty of so much of our experience.

What theologians call mystery and scientists call uncertainty are not the same thing but they derive from the same problem, the great truth that nothing is unequivocal.  Saint Paul tells us that we see only through a glass darkly which is not so different from what Heisenberg discovered about quantum events – that any attempt to simultaneously measure complementary variables such as the position and momentum of a particle necessarily involves errors the product of which cannot be less than Planck's Constant h.  The more precisely you measure one, the less precisely you can measure the other.  We attempt to overcome these ambiguities with the tools of language and mathematics– vocabulary, grammar and semantics or statistics, algebra and calculus.  Both are metaphorical systems and all metaphors limp, possibly because words and numbers limp.  The word chair for example is not something you can sit on but a symbol for a thing called a referent which you can sit on.  When Robert Burns says, "My love is like a red, red rose," he is trying to communicate the meaning of something he cannot point at:  the intensity, urgency and fragility of the emotion he calls love.  When James Joyce writes of the "hithering and thithering waters of the night" he is painting an impressionistic picture in your mind of the disquiet of the dark hours.  There is, however, no metaphor that can describe the color green to a person who has never seen it.  And when words fail, we are left with musical tones, a language made up of  rhythm, melody and harmony.

When a bugler at a grave site sounds the different inversions of the C-major triad that constitute Taps, we hear an impression of grief, love and respect.  The notes are neither complete nor precise definitions but they constitute a powerful intimation of what people are feeling.  Most musical statements of course are not nearly as unambiguous as Taps for the simple reason that most emotional knowledge is not as acute as that occasioned by a funeral.  Most feelings are innately vague.  They do not lend themselves to simple verbal explication which is why traditional psychotherapy is so difficult and why we need poetry.  All coding systems are insufficient and create a penumbra of uncertainty around all attempts at communication.  An essential task of the writer, the diplomat, the judge, the preacher, the artist and the composer is not to eliminate the uncertainty but to embrace it mindfully.  The language of music isolates and heightens such knowledge so we can experience it more keenly in spite of the uncertainty.

Uncertainty is not the enemy of comprehension any more than any answer is the enemy of any question.  Knowledge – the most important knowledge –  is what it is:  elusive and often evasive, beguiling, playful, seductive and even devious, difficult to uncover and even more difficult to communicate.  The challenge is to get closer to the truth, to revel in the pursuit, to satisfy curiosity, to be bemused by the veil beneath the veil, and to share hard won wisdom.  Music, like all the arts, exists to enrich both knowledge and the process of acquiring it.

PRAGMATISM AND THE MORAL LIFE

Jerry Harkins

God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines

                                                                        –Portuguese Proverb

Many years ago, I was friendly with a young man who was certain that he was a more moral person than I or anyone else he had ever met.  Also smarter although this seems genetically linked to the belief in one's own moral superiority.  He was only a kid, fifteen or so, who was bright and passionately committed to an early and austere form of environmentalism.  His name was Charlie.  In his view of the world, there were no acceptable compromises, no shades of gray and no venial sins.  For example, he supported the most uncompromising positions of the Archdruid, David Brower, but condemned him for not being aggressive enough in defending Glen Canyon.  He accused Brower of being willing to lose that fight in order to use it to preserve the Grand Canyon.  As a committed pragmatist, I tried to explain to Charlie that being intellectually consistent was a luxury not usually available to practical politicians.  In the tenor of the times, Glen Canyon could not have been saved but its inundation could be used effectively to save the more important Grand Canyon.  Charlie disagreed.

I thought of Charlie last week when I read an essay about Danish zoos that have a policy of killing healthy animals who are deemed "surplus," which is to say unnecessary for protecting a threatened gene pool. [1] In selected cases the killings are followed by a public autopsy.  A photograph shows a group of about thirty men, women and children gathered around to witness the dissection of a beautiful two year old giraffe named Marius.  Poor Marius is spread out on a concrete slab set into what looks like the roof of a zoo building.  Another photo shows three women beginning to cut open a dead lion lying on a large butcher block.  There is blood on the floor and large cutting tools hanging on the wall of what looks like a filthy store room.  A third photo shows three young children dissecting two dead rats.  One of the children has a pacifier in her mouth.

The zookeepers, like the heart, have their reasons of which reason knows nothing.  It has nothing to do with the usual purpose of an autopsy which is to determine the cause of death because everybody knows that:  the keepers killed the animals.  They claim that their policy involves a combination of science and public education.  Indeed, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, has officials that make determinations as to which animals are surplus.  The giraffe coordinator is a fellow name Jörg Jebram.  In Marius' case, Jörg determined that his genes were well represented across Europe and he was therefore genetically unnecessary.  The zookeepers know the optics of all this are terrible and they are sensitive to the likelihood that some tender souls are bound to compare their decision-making process to that of other masters of eugenics in recent history.  Indeed, one of their objectives in mounting the public psychodramas is to teach little children and their parents that it is necessary and even noble to sacrifice the lives of individual animals in the interest of the species.

The New Yorker piece strives for objectivity by explaining both sides of the story but the author seems disturbed by the ethical issues.  Or maybe I'm reading my own discomfort into his prose.  My friend Charlie would be outraged if he knew about this policy.  His starting point would be that it is immoral to keep any animals in any zoos in the first place.  If he had been exposed to a little biology in college, he might also argue that the idea that zoos are the last hope of many species of avoiding extinction is fatuous.  Had he been exposed to a little philosophy, I think he might have said the end does not justify the means.  He would never change his mind.  But this essay is not about Charlie.  It is about my own discomfort with the "culling" policy and the manner in which the Danish zoos implement it.

I have no problem with killing animals for what I consider good reasons:  for food, for pest control and, in limited cases, for scientific research.  I would not personally kill an animal as a hunter for the pleasure of the sport and the idea of working in a slaughter house is repellant to me.  At the same time, I am grateful for those who do hunt because, as long as they obey the law, I believe they provide a necessary function in game management.  Similarly, I am not a vegetarian.  I have no quarrel with those who are.  At the same time, I am grateful for the long line of people who bring meat to my table.  I have been known to protect bees who built their hive under the eaves over the window of my study.  I enjoy watching birds but regard pigeons as rats with wings and Canada geese as terrorists.  I am willing to share my home with spiders but I am perfectly prepared to kill cockroaches or mice who invade my space.  In other words, I draw all sorts of fine ethical lines and respect your right to draw them differently unless I think they are clearly anti-social.  The problem is neither my lines or yours are completely logical.

Except for people like my young friend Charlie, making ethical distinctions is an exercise in what used to be called class inclusion/class exclusion logic which attempts to determine the validity of syllogistic propositions through the use of Venn diagrams, a form of mathematical logic.  The problem with this is that in the real world there is no such thing as a "valid" syllogism.  Pace, Aristotle!  It's not that syllogisms are not useful tools.  It's just that they do not express eternal verities.  For example, the major premise that all men are mortal is no more "valid" than the major premise that all pine trees speak French or that all pine trees are green.  More than 90% of all the people who have ever lived are alive right now.  Not one of them has died.  Obviously you don't want to bet that some of them will turn out to be immortal.  The probability of immortality is diminishingly small and the laws of probability clearly state that an event whose probability is "sufficiently" small will not occur.   Neither I nor anyone I know has ever come across a pine tree that speaks French and I am virtually certain that no one ever will.  Every living pine tree I have ever seen has been green.  But…

John Scarne was one of the world's greatest experts on gambling.  He had little formal education but, all by himself, he invented probability theory and the mathematics needed to derive it. [2]  He told the story of being present at a craps table in Havana one evening when a player made 36 or 39 (accounts differ) consecutive passes before crapping out.  The odds against such a thing are enormous but Scarne knew that the laws of probability also state that, given enough time or enough repetitions, an improbable event is sure to occur.  What impressed him was not the number of consecutive passes but the fact that he was present to observe them. [3]

To repeat:  there are no eternal verities, syllogistic or otherwise.  The Law of Gravity does not hold true inside the nucleus of an atom.  Parallel lines do in fact converge in the vastness of spacetime.  Indeed it seems there is an important, inherent and invincible ignorance at the heart of all knowledge which, according to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle cannot be less than h, Planck's Constant.  We are left with probability which is measured on a scale from zero, impossible, to one, certain, but in which there is no absolute zero and no absolute one.  This can seem threatening.  Einstein is reputed to have said that God does not play dice with the universe.  Maybe.  It does sound like him.  But he certainly said Raffiniert is der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht.  God is subtle but not malicious.  Which raises the question:  is there a God?  Every culture has answered yes and each has created a unique idea of its gods' attributes.  In one way or another, these gods serve to explain the inexplicable and make and enforce the rules by which their adherents are supposed to live.  There are similarities and differences among all the divinities but they have tended to share one thing in common.  Until quite recently, they have all been personified.  All have been given names and most have been given images that make it easier to teach our children about them.  The Hindu God Shiva, for example, is depicted in human form but with a third eye and a snake coiled around his neck.  He and other Hindu deities are frequently depicted with multiple arms some of which do not have hands.

Another commonality is that all these gods often do things that seem inconsistent with their own moral precepts.  Zeus arranged a featherbrained beauty pageant which led to the Trojan War.  Wotan entrusted his hoard of magic gold to three flighty Rhine-maidens thereby endangering the entire universe and bringing about sixteen hours of opera so boring that tickets to it should require a five day waiting period.  Our own Judeo-Christian God wreaked misery on the life of his most faithful worshiper, Job, in order to win a trivial bet with Satan.  He tormented Abraham for what seems like the pure pleasure of it and when he went looking for a single moral person to spare from the flood, he picked Noah who was crazy as a bedbug.  Presumably good though for divine laughs.  However it does seem parlous to entrust morality or the social contract which allows us to live in communities to mythical creatures with eccentric senses of humor.

Morality must always begin with unprovable assumptions which is the reason people developed the idea of gods.  God is the easy answer and maybe the only absolute answer to every question.  Even the Enlightenment assertions referenced in the American Declaration of Independence lay out a deist foundation for civic morality.  Human rights are said to be an entitlement and endowment of our "Creator." [4] Once you have widespread agreement on something like this you can proceed to the difficult task of drawing lines between good and evil as long as you also agree that the lines are bound to be porous to one degree or another.  Thou shalt not kill except in a "just" war or in self-defense.  In democratic societies, the process of drawing such lines is called politics and, if we have learned anything about living harmoniously and productively in communities it is that politics works only when ideology is reduced to a bare minimum. 

The principal determinant of secular morality must reside in the act itself and its consequences not in some extraneous belief system.  But this has proven difficult for people to accept.  Thus, in the absence of sacred or secular dogma, societies must seek the broadest possible arbiter of morality.  In this regard, an act's contribution to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is more likely to succeed than its adherence to a preference for small government or Christian doctrine.  This is not logic;  it is pragmatism of a high order.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is, of course, an ideology but one that the founders thought to be self-evident and inalienable.  In other words universal and undebatable – a polite but essential fiction that is, in fact, widely shared in theory if not always in practice.  It is not a perfect recipe for civic comity but it seems to work pretty well.  It arose gradually from the humanism of the Renaissance, always encountering strident dissension and implacable hostility but still becoming the progressive tide of history.

In some precincts, the very word humanism has become a curse and, along with science, its great enabler, is damned as the work of the devil.  It has often seemed in danger from powerful forces, never more so perhaps than today when, all over the world, people are turning away from the imperfections of their institutions.  As it happens, those institutions are failing as they all do periodically but at present they seem to be doing so simultaneously.  Church and state, business and the media seem arrayed in a conspiracy of incompetence, unbridled greed and gross stupidity.  Still, we are not on a forced march back to the dark ages.

The problem with both contemporary conservatives and liberals is that so many of them take comfort in absolutism.  Like Charlie, they are unable to cope with a less-than-perfect world, with shades of gray, with compromise or with uncertainty.  They are simplistic moralists like the pig Snowball, the leader of George Orwell's Animal Farm:  "Four legs good;  two legs bad."  There is nothing more disheartening than a conservative who believes God is one of his own unless it is a liberal who is discontented with pragmatic leaders who are progressive but not liberal enough. 

So I am content with the illogic of drawing a line between giraffes and mosquitoes and with my American willingness to eat a cow but not a horse or a dog.  At the same time, I do not think any the less of the Swiss for their fondness for horsemeat, the Chinese for eating dogmeat, the Russians for their preference for strong central government or the Persians for their acceptance of theocracy.  I hope I never become comfortable with the slaughter of an inoffensive young giraffe but I also hope my discomfort does not make me feel morally superior to those less burdened than I.

Notes

1.  Ian Parker, "The Culling," The New Yorker, January 16, 2017, pp. 42 ff.

2.  Probability theory originated in the sixteenth century and was codified by Pierre Laplace in 1774.  Scarne (1903-1985) did pretty much the same thing a century and a half later.  See Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling, Simon & Schuster, 1974.

3.  Whether 36 or 39, this was not a world record.  The current record seems to be 154 which occurred in Atlantic City on May 23, 2009. The odds against that are a bit more than 1.5 trillion to 1. It is not known whether Scarne's ghost was present.  There was, however, a more incredible aspect of the performance in Havana.  Scarne's gambler, supposedly an American soldier on leave, made every point without interruption.  If his point was five, the next roll was also a five an so on.  I don't know about the lady in Atlantic City but 154 uninterrupted passes beggars the statistical imagination.

4.  A Creator is not necessary for the assertion of an absolute.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does well without one, stating in Article One that, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."  The word endowed may suggest an endower but not necessarily a living being who acts in history or an uncaused first cause.