Philipp Rupprecht (1900-1975) illustrated children's books in Germany to help warn children about the dangers of Jews.
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| Jewish perverts attempt to lure Aryan children with candy |
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| Learning to recognize Jews by the shapes of their noses |
His knack for drawing Jews earned him a position as the political cartoonist for the Nazi newspaper, The Stormtrooper, where he worked enthusiastically from 1925 to 1945.
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| "Jewish Murder Plan against Gentile Humanity Revealed" |
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| Wealthy Jews attempt to seduce blonde women with money |
Hitler believed the arts were a crucial tool for shaping public opinion. His government commissioned thousands of patriotic works and sponsored art competitions and festivals in villages and towns to reinforce his message with the public. Recognizing the importance of political cartoons, the government released Rupprecht from military service so he could continue drawing for The Stormtrooper. Hitler supported the newspaper until the end of the war, despite shortages and competing demands for resources.
Those were truly the golden years for government sponsored hate mongering. Since that time, funding seems to have tapered off.
This may be partly because things didn't work out so well for poor Philipp. At the end of World War II, with Germany in ruins, Rupprecht was put on trial for his role as a cheerleader for the massacre of millions of innocents. He was sentenced to six years hard labor. After his release from prison he worked quietly as a painter in Munich until his death in 1975.
Despite the mountains of meticulous documentation produced during the war crimes trials, some still refuse to believe the concentration camps occurred. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has repeatedly complained about “the myth of the massacre of Jews known as the Holocaust,” asserting that “The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened.”
Khamenei's words alone have proven unpersuasive to most sane people, so Iranian forces have begun a talent search for the next Philipp Rupprecht. Perhaps pictures can galvanize public opinion where words have failed.
In December 2015 the Tehran International Cartoon Biennial announced a cash prize of $50,000 for the best cartoon about the Holocaust. An exhibition displaying 150 of the best Holocaust cartoons from the Tehran Biennial will open this week, timed to coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
When the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was confronted with the contest he attempted to minimize the government's official role, but the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum did an excellent job of tracking the funding for the competition to official Iranian sources.
39 comments:
Another excellent example making my case that politicized "art" is usually art of the worst kind. Unfortunately, people's appreciation of its degree of awfulness is often modified (plus or minus) by their own political views.
Bastards.
I agree wholeheartedly with Donald about politicized art.
I would add, with so many camera-ready micro-managed "outrages" shoved onto the cultural stage designed to coerce popular thought, it is horrifying to note how little attention gets paid to the very real, and very dangerous anti-jewish propaganda and the rising tide of violence directed at Jews; not just in countries run by Ayatollahs and religious totalitarians, but, depressingly, across "enlightened" Europe as well. And it is this last fact that is most worrying to me. Once upon a time Amitai Sandy could lead a brilliant demonstration-statement of what it means to both have free speech and a sense of humor about one's self, through his Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest. But in looking at it in retrospect, what teeth did it really have? The real fight happens, not over a drawing board in a studio, or on the magazine rack, or on the desktop, but in the street through physical coercion and in the bedroom (demographically). Just fooling around, so to speak, doesn't win long, serious wars.
At this point, the Islamist-fostered anti-semitism is so ignored by the current cultural police, it seems practically allowable. I wonder if the cultural clock will ever get back to 12 so that it once again becomes "fashionable" to talk about anti-semitism and real violence, rather than telegenic twitter-ready microagressions.
This preceding has been an editorial and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of David Apatoff, Blogger, Rob Howard, Felix Leiter, I'm Not A Robot, or Google Inc.
I think a big part of Holocaust denialism comes from the history professions' inability to treat it with emotional involvement. They want to treat it with the same level of detachment that they treat other atrocities of human history, which adds a bit of unreality to it. Racists, primed to disbelieve already, will intentionally or otherwise misread that detachment as fictionalization.
Islamists aren't reading Yale history textbooks. So it does not matter what the "history profession" writes about the Holocaust.
When ideological zealotry takes hold, whether religious, political, cultural, or pseudo-scientific, evidence no longer matters. The other side is always lying, and your side is always telling the truth. If Khamenei himself had been on the scene watching Jews being marched into ovens or gas chambers and taken out as ashes or corpses, he still wouldn't believe it. Madness is impenetrable.
Donald Pittenger-- I agree with you that political propaganda usually makes for inferior art (just as art commissioned by governments to reinforce some agenda is rarely artistically successful). Napoleon, Stalin or Mao all conducted art competitions and achieved mediocre results. On the other hand, I think artists such as Kollwitz, Goya and Daumier did some first class work with a political agenda.
Anonymous-- Agreed.
Kev Ferrara-- I was not familiar with the work of Amitai Sandy or his competition. Having looked it over, I have to say that the quality of the images doesn't seem to be on a higher plane than Rupprecht's. I agree that it is less odious when people make fun of themselves internally, but there has to be a better, more effective example that Sandy's.
I do find it ironic that the Islamic militants you describe who produce such vile propaganda are the first to take offense and issue fatwahs against political cartoonists who make drawings that the Islamic militants find unacceptable.
Richard-- I'm not sure there's a successful way to get around the problem you describe. I think historians try to take a dispassionate, fact based approach precisely because audiences assume an emotionally involved historian will exaggerate. Historians assume that a dry statistical approach will have more credibility. Ultimately, there is no persuading people who don't believe in empiricism.
Kev Ferrara-- Sad but true. So what's the answer (other than trying to make sure madmen don't get access to nuclear weapons)?
Sad but true. So what's the answer (other than trying to make sure madmen don't get access to nuclear weapons)?
If only the problem was that mission-specific.
I do find it ironic that the Islamic militants you describe who produce such vile propaganda are the first to take offense and issue fatwahs against political cartoonists who make drawings that the Islamic militants find unacceptable.
As I see it, the main strategy of all Ideologies is information control.
> "Ultimately, there is no persuading people who don't believe in empiricism."
This is a new problem in historiography, born out of a misguided desire to make history look like the sciences. The very idea that history could be actually empirical is, to me, a non-starter.
History lives by rhetoric, it is one of the argumentative arts, and that rhetoric is a feature not a bug. It's how we delve deeply into human subjects. The historians of old provided competing emotional narratives, and the astute reader would use that experience to help color their impressions of the past. It's not that fact doesn't play a role, it's that its role was secondary to a discussion of human intention.
The Western historians' obsession with looking like scientists will be their undoing -- the East has no such qualms about pure empiricism -- they'll fill the argument with as much emotion as is necessary to powerfully make their case, while we'll be left cataloging trivialities.
Kev Ferrara-- That's one heck of a list (although I think including incidents that take place during open warfare tends to inflate the numbers).
Kev Ferrara wrote; "As I see it, the main strategy of all Ideologies is information control."
Well, some are worse than others. Only a very few are so brazen as to apply such a grotesque double standard: "It's appropriate for me to use cartoons to attack you and undermine your legitimacy but if you attempt to do the same to me, you should be put to death." It's hard to reside on the same planet with an entity that thinks that way.
Richard-- If your point is that historical knowledge is subject to the same epistemological infirmities as all other human knowledge, I agree. I don't know of anyone who has found a way around the limitations of knowledge pointedly identified by Descartes and Hume.
Other than that, I think you overstate the case for historical subjectivity, which can be very dangerous. There are people who insist that the world is only 6,000 years old, despite the evidence of geology that it is 4.54 billion years old. If you go to the Creation Museum in Kentucky you'll hear that cave men lived alongside dinosaurs. Others who share your view about historical truth feel entitled to disbelieve the historical evidence for climate change or evolution because they think their faith or emotion is entitled to more weight than factual "trivialities." Such people don't need any additional excuses to take liberties with historical facts. Stalin, Lenin, Hitler and Mao all shared your view that the "role [of fact] was secondary to a discussion of human intention" which is why legitimate historians now scoff at their "rhetoric" infused versions of history. That kind of "history" served to justify all kinds of atrocities. Stalin employed the Moscow show trials to resolve historical disputes. Mao employed the red guard.
It's true that some "historians of old provided competing emotional narratives" but that is exactly why Thucydides, who went out of his way to be accurate and complete, is regarded as the first great historian. We have a glut of rhetoriticians trying to "powerfully make their case" and a paucity of meticulous historians willing to follow wherever the facts lead them. But in my view, legitimate historians follow the latter path, not the former.
That's one heck of a list
I find it harrowing. Other lists provided on that site, which count all the incidents in preceding full years are worse. The imagination reels. For instance...
2015
2014
And so on, down through the years...
The listing of each incident detailed individually, I find, is a strong antidote to the "a million deaths is a statistic" aphorism. Even itemized, the scope of the horror is difficult to comprehend. I can't blame people for simply shutting down emotionally or changing the subject.
I think including incidents that take place during open warfare tends to inflate the numbers.
Presumably, Isis would assert that every atrocity listed was a military victory.
I realize I've said nothing about illustration in this post. Sorry.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "I realize I've said nothing about illustration in this post."
One of the things I like about illustration art is that it is engaged in the world in concrete ways that more abstract art forms are not. I think the lists you offered have a tangible effect on illustration art. They are the reason why Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris had to change her identity and go into hiding when Islamic extremists imposed a fatwah on her for suggesting a "Draw Mohammed Day." Your list of atrocities explains why Norris took the threat seriously, and why the FBI told Norris they could not protect her. There are madmen among us, and that inspires both passionate pictures and passionate responses to pictures.
> "There are people who insist that the world is only 6,000 years old, despite the evidence of geology that it is 4.54 billion years old. If you go to the Creation Museum in Kentucky you'll hear that cave men lived alongside dinosaurs. Others who share your view about historical truth feel entitled to disbelieve the historical evidence for climate change or evolution because they think their faith or emotion is entitled to more weight than factual "trivialities.""
I don't think it is a coincidence David that your examples are decidedly not examples from history, but science.
who share your view about historical truth feel entitled to disbelieve the historical evidence for climate change or evolution because they think their faith or emotion is entitled to more weight than factual "trivialities." Such people don't need any additional excuses to take liberties with historical facts. Stalin, Lenin, Hitler and Mao all shared your view that the "role [of fact] was secondary to a discussion of human intention" which is why legitimate historians now scoff at their "rhetoric" infused versions of history.I liked your blog, Take the time to visit the me and say that the change in design and meniu?
Richard wrote: "I don't think it is a coincidence David that your examples are decidedly not examples from history, but science."
Richard, if you want to redefine history to exclude science, it makes your case stronger but I'm not sure anyone would recognize what's left as "history." A huge part of history is based upon the science of archaeology. Another huge-- and growing-- part of history is based on the science of genomics, which tracks the migration of humanity out of Africa and around the world. Chemistry-- and carbon dating-- is how we place historical events in sequence. For example, that's one way we know for a fact that humans and dinosaurs never lived side by side 6,000 years ago. The sciences of geology and biology tell us a great deal about natural history. Closer to the present, forensic sciences prove what transpired when Tsar Nicholas and his family were executed by the bolsheviks, despite human efforts to rewrite history and conceal the crime.
You say, "It's not that fact doesn't play a role, it's that its role was secondary to a discussion of human intention. The Western historians' obsession with looking like scientists will be their undoing." I admit there are many people eager to make facts "secondary" to their human intention. For example, religious fundamentalists would like to believe their faith takes priority over geological facts. I say it doesn't. Historians have to be mindful of their limitations, and of the elusive nature of objective truth, but within those constraints I'd say that western historians' obsession with behaving like scientists is their glory, not their undoing.
> ' if you want to redefine history to exclude science, it makes your case stronger but I'm not sure anyone would recognize what's left as "history."'
Conversely, is study of the Big Bang history? It's certainly in the past -- distantly so.
I'm not arguing that fact be damned, but that the interesting work in history (as opposed to natural history, biological anthropology, archeology) isn't in unearthing facts -- we have mountains of data at this point -- the problem is of making sense of the data, which will ultimately be about human intentions, and thus subjective, and surrounded in rhetoric.
Take, for example, the Intentionalist vs. Functionalist arguments about the Holocaust. It has enormous implications for who holds most of the blame of the Holocaust -- a single guy, a handful of guys, all of whom are now dead, or vast swathes of the German people, perhaps a culture at large, which is very much still alive.
We have the data points, the interesting ones, for determining the case. Court is in session, the jurors are in place. Seeking more data would be grasping after trivialities at this point. We're at the hard part, determining what was the case. That will be a problem of argument, rhetoric, not of science.
Richard wrote: "is study of the Big Bang history? It's certainly in the past -- distantly so."
I would say, "of course." It's a combination of history and physics, just as your example about the Holocaust is a combination of history and ethics. Neither one is an absolutely pure strain, but then what is?
The big bang is unquestionably part of the history of the universe. Natural history is by definition history.
Putting aside the label "history," I think our biggest difference comes where you say, "...the interesting work in history (as opposed to natural history, biological anthropology, archeology) isn't in unearthing facts -- we have mountains of data at this point -- the problem is of making sense of the data, which will ultimately be about human intentions, and thus subjective, and surrounded in rhetoric." Unlike you, I find the new data from the Hubble Telescope and the Hadron Collider to be truly momentous. You assert that that "human intentions" are the ultimate issue; it was easier to believe that, and view the universe through anthropocentric eyes, back when we believed the sun revolved around the earth. But then Keppler and Galileo came along with all that annoying "data" and transformed our sense of our place in the universe. Today fresh data show that the time of human life, or any life, is a blink in the long history of a universe that will continue expanding, lifeless, forever. Who is "trivial" now?
If you want a theoretical physicist's perspective on how scientific data is crucial to human relevance and meaning, I recommend Sean Carroll's excellent new book, The Big Picture. You can get the flavor from his youtube talks. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40eiycH077A ).
Physics is not done by a long shot. We've probably only just begun our journey of understanding. We have a bunch of theory at this point, some of it we can test and be sure of through practical application, a lot we can't. We don't know how to integrate quantum mechanics with relativity. We don't know if there are other dimensions, or if there are, how many. We don't know if everything is a hologram. Whether information is conserved or not in a black hole. We don't know if we even have the ability to accurately experience reality. So we don't know if math is something we bring to the table, or whether it exists outside us. We have inaccurate math that works excellently for making physical predictions, and accurate math that is meaningless and applies to nothing. We don't understand time without time, or reverse time, or negative mass, or why the square root of negative one means anything at all. We don't know if there is a speed limit to the universe. We haven't discovered all the particles and we probably haven't discovered all the forces. In the most famous equation everybody knows, we don't know why speed of light is squared or what that might mean physically. (etc.)
If we can't test some theory or another, it would be really bad science to consider it truthful. And certainly not factual. So it would be very presumptuous to consider The Big Bang idea, as abstractly theoretical as it is, as an Historical event. Not to get too deep in the abstract weeds, but if the big bang begins time, when did it happen?
The Big Bang is, thus far, a mental construct understood in an equivalent way (through theory and calculation) as the entropic heat death of the universe is understood. And I don't think anybody sane would consider conjecture about the future to be history.
> "The big bang is unquestionably part of the history of the universe. Natural history is by definition history."
Then we're talking around each other.
If, for example, in the past, I added 1 and 1 and resolved an answer of 2, I would not describe maths as a function of history. Yet, any math I do is, once complete, 'historical'.
As I look out on the universe, any measurement I make is already in the past. In fact, my very experience is past, as our sensory organs take time to tell us about the present -- by the time I have discovered the present, it is past.
It would seem that a definition of history as all that is past is not particularly useful -- it suffers from being too general -- we'd be left studying almost exclusively history, as we can never make a measurement of or act upon the future.
Kev Ferrara, I agree 100% that there are lots of exciting physics discoveries in our future. This is a thrilling time to be a theoretical physicist, as we are finally capable of collecting facts to prove or disprove many of our farfetched theories.
It was only a couple of months ago that scientists recorded two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, thereby confirming a key prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. If you haven't heard the tiny "chirp" made by this massive collision, it's definitely worth hearing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=science&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Science&pgtype=article&_r=0 )
Twenty years ago, I too would've called the Big Bang an abstract theoretical idea rather than an historical event, but today I think we have the same type of circumstantial evidence for the Big Bang that we use to draw historical conclusions about the regular, sensory world. If you came upon a country road at night and heard a car motor driving away in the distance, saw the glow of headlights going over the hill, and saw the dust settling back on the road, you'd be comfortable concluding that a car had just gone by even though you never saw it. It's not perfect, but you'd say it qualified as an "historical event" until new, better data arose to contradict that conclusion.
Today we have similar circumstantial evidence of the Big Bang. We know for a fact that the observable universe is expanding. Galaxies are receding in all directions, and the farther away they get, the faster they move away from us. Scientists calculated that if this expansion was the result of a Big Bang, we should be able to locate the residual heat from that event in the universe. That residual heat was in fact located, and the results matched our predictions with astonishing precision. Based on the rate of expansion, scientists further calculated that a Big Bang would have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. Lo and behold, it turned out the nuclear balance of stars fully supports that 13.7 billion date, with first, second, and third generation stars firmly in place with the expected balances. And of course, the chemical makeup of our solar system (and of the earth in particular) supports the timing of the Sun forming as a second generation star as expected, about 4.5 billion years ago. There are many other pieces of the puzzle that fit precisely. Someday we may come across a piece of the puzzle that does not fit, but so far no conflicting evidence has appeared (other than the faith of someone who has read the Bible and believes that the world is 6,000 years old).
Twenty years ago I would've agreed that "We don't know how to integrate quantum mechanics with relativity" but that seems to be a problem only at the extreme edges of reality, such as in black holes. For purposes of everything that happens on earth, and every lab experiment we've ever performed, we now have what Wilczek labels the "core theory" which successfully integrates quantum mechanics and relativity quite nicely. We can now describe and predict all the physics that are relevant to us in one big quantum field theory. Yessir, things are falling into place, even though our conclusions will only give rise to larger, grander challenges involving multiverses and the like. It's an exciting time to be alive.
PS-- I admit I am not a physicist, so this is a layperson's perspective. I welcome the more informed opinions of experts in the audience.
Richard-- Of course we are talking about more than mere math here. We are talking about observable phenomena and verifiable predictions about the behavior of matter, fields and particles.
I agree that there are legitimate semantic distinctions to be drawn between 1.) everything that took place in the past, and 2.) useful, meaningful history. But I think the kind of data I'm talking about falls into the latter category, or at least creates a necessary foundation for the latter category. It enables us to draw important conclusions about where we came from, and how we got this way, and even predict with more certainty where we are going. I also think it's difficult to tell in advance which type of raw data will ultimately prove to be useful, which is why it is important to collect all kinds of information, to be culled in different ways.
It's like the difference between basic and applied research. The purpose of the former is often difficult to fathom, yet it repeatedly pays huge dividends for us.
Peter Gay said that one of the most important pieces of history was a sense of drama -- that seems exactly right to me.
No one should be able to push through histories and go unaffected by the drama, and the trauma, of history: be it the Holocaust, Slavery, The Trail of Tears, and so on.
Yet, that is exactly the history that is being written today, that is being taught in schools, it's completely dehumanizing.
Take for example, the following text. This is the complete section on the Holocaust from a current history textbook.
Tell me if, reading this, you think a student would have an understanding of the seriousness of the Holocaust:
"
Antisemitism and The Holocaust
The prejudice of racism in America -- though the term racist is a misnomer: we are all members of the human race -- was evident from the days of Christopher Columbus onward. Antisemitism was a powerful motivating force in American history. The limits on immigration set in the early 1920s was in part a reaction against [Jewish] immigrants from Eastern Europe. The prosecutors of "Red Summer" had a dread of Blacks, Jews, and atheists, and sometimes of a nightmare conglomeration of all three.
But some antisemitism was an alien import. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: "Протоколы сионских мудрецов", or "Сионские протоколы", see also other titles) is an antisemitic and anti-Zionist plagiarism and literary hoax first published in 1903 in Russian, in Znamya; it alleges a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. A translation, taken as the literal truth, was published and popularized by the American industrialist Henry Ford. In the 1930s, the American Bund attempted to increase Nazi German influence, and to amplify the antisemetic messages coming from Berlin.
President Roosevelt treated the topic with care. Ethnographers and other scientific experts were drafted into the War effort, emphasizing that Americans came from every ethnic background. Jews were in every branch of the service, and rabbis were among the chaplains brought to aid them. But what came to be known as The Final Solution -- Hitler's plan to eliminate what Mein Kampf had called "the Jewish Question" -- was unknown to the American public. American newspapers had printed accounts of German oppression of its Jewish citizens, from Kristallnacht in 1938 onward. They had occasionally mentioned persecution of its Gypsies, Slavs, and other "non-Aryans," and the dreadful punishments meted out to those who opposed the Nazi regime."
"In January, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi Concentration Camps. On April Eleventh, 1945, Allies liberated the Death Camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany. On the 12th, several journalists arrived, including Edward R. Murrow, one of the most lauded journalists of the time. He sent out a broadcast for American audiences on the Fifteenth describing what he had seen and heard. "There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were ploughing..."[2] On May third, Americans first saw newsreels of the camp. (Newsreels, film of weekly news reports shown in movie theaters, were major sources of information in the days before TV became popularized.) There they heard that the recent death rate had been about two hundred a day. They saw people in the last stages of malnutrition, disease, and "constant hard work, beatings, and torture." The camera also showed corpses of men stacked like cords of wood, and the crematoria where the dead had been burnt.[3]
Now for the first time the majority of Americans could guess at the extent of The Holocaust, one of the most ghastly episodes in the modern history of mankind. In April of 1933, three months after Hitler took power, the Nazis issued a decree ordering the compulsory retirement of "non-Aryans" from the civil service. This is known as the spark of the Holocaust. Before Germany was defeated, there were some eleven million people that had been slaughtered in the name of Nazi racial purity. Although the Jews were the favored targets and are the victims we most hear about when talking about the Holocaust, they were not the only victims. There were also millions of Russians, Poles, gypsies and others that were also murdered. Although the deprivation of the Jews started in the years following 1933, the mass killings didn't begin until 1941.[4]
The effect of this knowledge was augmented by the Nuremburg trials of 1945-1946. There many German officials, and some Concentration Camp governors, were put to trial for committing these murders, called crimes against humanity. American antisemitism has continued since that time, but it is at least officially frowned upon. The American eugenics movement also suffered a setback from which it has not yet recovered." END
David,
It is quite a different thing to guess that the sound of a distant car horn comes from a car, than that there was a non-moment 13.7 billion years ago this August when everything came out of nothing. A little perspective here would be gratifying. The idea that we know what our equations mean, physically, in realms and states we can't begin to fathom aesthetically is religious arrogance.
Just as an example, we know from holographic theory that all of physics, everything we have mathematized so far, can be transposed to re-express as projections off a 2-D boundary. So which is it? Are we real or a projection? The question seems rather fundamental.
More germane to the issue...
What is non-time? Is it forever? Or is it nothing and never? From my dumb perspective as an earth-bound symbol-juggling monkey, it seems like it must be one or the other. Which brings up the question; if an event occurs in non-time is it always happening or does it never happen?
Since I can only fathom the forward arrow of time, my presumption is that an event occurring in non-time must always be happening. Which means the big bang didn't "happen" it just happens.
And do we even know if time is constant? If it is not, then what does it mean to evoke a year? Let alone a billion years. The only surety we have on time, it seems to me, is our personal metric of the earth circling its sun.
Is it possible that with expansion from non-time, time has sped up from nothing to its present rate (maybe it is increasing in speed still?) or de-cellerated from infinitely fast to its present pace?
We can now describe and predict all the physics that are relevant to us in one big quantum field theory.
David, there's still debate about whether a curveball actually curves. You're way out ahead of things. And, along those lines, before you invoke Wilczek to bolster your case, you might want to read up on him. A complete "Core Theory" is a prediction of his, not a current reality.
Part of my love of science is being properly skeptical of it. Models aren't realities, and beautiful equations aren't always true or fathomable. Predictions aren't stories, and so can't be histories. Definitionally.
Richard wrote: "Peter Gay said that one of the most important pieces of history was a sense of drama -- that seems exactly right to me."
I would put it very differently: the importance of history is to tell us when a sense of drama is warranted and when it isn't. The Nazis were experts at injecting fake drama into history, whipping a resentful population into a froth with stories about aryan heritage, Bolshevik conspiracies and Jewish blood rituals. As we are unfortunately witnessing in the current election campaign in the US, dramatized history invoking strong emotions and sweeping conclusions is much more titillating to the popular crowd than careful, dry, measured, meticulous history.
My role model in this area is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preached that the virtue of being a true scholar is that careful knowledge protects you from being stampeded by people who are quick to over-dramatize situations as "unprecedented" and "dire." Emerson wrote, "some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended upon this particular up or down... . Let [the scholar] not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, tho the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly."
It's no surprise to me that the angriest campaign voices today, the ones that screech about the end of the Constitution and our way of life, find the most receptive crowds in states with the worst educational systems and the lowest literacy levels.
The historical events that you mention ("the Holocaust, Slavery, The Trail of Tears") are rare and have true drama-- even high tragedy-- to them, but they only acquired that status after honest, careful facts overcame disinformation campaigns funded by people who had very dramatic historical narratives of their own to peddle. That's why I think those who start out looking for the drama and attempting to shape history into exciting forms tend to make poor historians.
As for your point about school books and student audiences, I agree these are extremely important issues and I'd like to respond but right now I'm sitting in my office waiting for a conference call. So for now, let me offer that once every year, on Holocaust memorial day (May 4) I go to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, step up to a lectern in a large hall and take my turn reading aloud the names of little European children who were slaughtered in concentration camps, so they won't be forgotten. Every year I try to make it through the process without weeping. (I'm pleased to report, by the way, that I sometimes encounter staff from the German embassy, very serious and solemn, waiting in line with me for their turn to read names aloud in a heart rending ceremony). But the Museum is simultaneously full of school kids visiting Washington from all over the country. School buses drop them off out front and they race through the museum, texting each other, flirting and shoving. They hear people reading names and stick their heads around the corner to see what's going on, but they never stay long or investigate. If there is drama and sadness in the ceremony, it seems to have no relevance to them.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Are we real or a projection? The question seems rather fundamental."
Kev, I would refer you back to my earlier response to Richard: "If your point is that historical knowledge is subject to the same epistemological infirmities as all other human knowledge, I agree. I don't know of anyone who has found a way around the limitations of knowledge pointedly identified by Descartes and Hume."
I agree your question is fundamental, but Descartes' rational skepticism is an equal opportunity annihilator; it subverts not only physics but also all art, literature, music, institutions, relationships, etc. You don't know if that's really a Walter Everett painting in front of you or just a bouncing photon. So before I assume the burden of defending the rules of physics from Descartes' cogito, why did you bother to get out of your illusionary bed and comb your illusionary hair this morning?
But we are in total agreement on your point, "Part of my love of science is being properly skeptical of it." (I hope my quote to Richard from Emerson above will reinforce my credentials in this regard.) The heart of good science is skepticism, which frustrates impatient people, or politicians who would like to manipulate science for their purposes. The true and consistent skeptic is science's best friend. Science's worst enemies are those whose skepticism lurches from one extreme to another based on ideology. There are those who refuse to believe the scientific consensus on the health effects of tobacco, or on climate change, or on Ebola, falsely invoking "skepticism" when they are just ideologically resistant. Somehow when it comes to intelligent design or Terry Schiavo or the age of the earth, these "skeptics" find even the most random wisps of empirical data worthy of stubborn belief.
So to get back to the major thrust of your comment, am I jumping the gun on scientific certainty, in violation of my own credo? Well a lot has been happening in Physics recently-- we've been properly skeptical and restrained for decades about those mathematical models, because as you say, "Models aren't realities, and beautiful equations aren't always true or fathomable." But we can use those models to guide our search for evidence using our fancy new telescopes and colliders and satellites. And sonuvagun, there is the Higgs boson subatomic particle right where the formula predicted, the last missing ingredient in our standard model for the particles that make up the universe. That doesn't mean there aren't huge questions left for physics, but I do think it's enough to create a presumption that we now have a real "answer" until something better comes along. In other words, it shifts the burden of proof, and anyone who differs must now disprove this version.
As for Wilczek, I understand the limitations behind his label, the "Core Theory," but I was thinking more of the new book by Sean Carroll at Cal Tech (The Big Picture). Carroll writes about the core theory and concludes that at least for all earthly phenomena, including the atoms that make up you and me, the core theory knits together the quantum and the classical worlds quite well, and there's no point in continuing to say they represent two mutually incompatible descriptions of the world. And while we can't say that no other forces or elements will ever be discovered, Carroll says that they would have to be so weak they could have no material effect on the phenomena we are trying to describe.
Richard-- I know there is a huge tug of war over history textbooks. Was it always this way, or is this just a side effect of today's partisan rancor?
I agree the passage you quote is pretty awful. One of the ways it is awful is that it was obviously written by committee; rather than giving a solid, linear account of the Holocaust from start to finish, it is a patchwork quilt of different agendas. One editor clearly wanted to emphasize that there has been bias against others besides Jews (blacks, communists, native Americans, etc. and don't forget that strange reference to the American eugenics movement in the last sentence.) Another editor seemed intent on covering American media, the role of newsreels, and American popular opinion. Somebody else wanted to add that when it came to antisemitism there were American sympathizers such as Henry Ford. It looks like World war II was fought by committees over every sentence in this treatment.
The treatment of the genocide itself is chopped up in little unhelpful bits and scattered around. It's not clear how that nutty statistic about a death rate of "about two hundred a day" relates to the other death toll statistic of "some eleven million people." So I agree that it would be very difficult to get a sense of the drama or profundity of the event from this shallow, unsatisfying account.
On the other hand, there are other faults this treatment is clearly trying to avoid. For example, the authors don't seem to want students to feel smug or superior that it "can't happen here" because we are naturally superior to the Germans.
If this were written as "dramatically" as it might be, do you think it might inspire children to commit harassment or hate crimes against Germans or Muslims? How do you react to that?
I think Kev is saying that you're flattening the gradient of confidence, or perhaps flattening kinds of confidence, not playing a brain in a vat.
Even climate change is a complicated system that we don't really understand. We can draw strong correlations, we have a convincing causal chain theorized, but in fact our understanding may still be profoundly flawed. Why should this be any different from our understanding of human intention? Well, we're just really bad at science. Our brains weren't programmed for it. We like to equate our ability to understand nature with our ability to profoundly understand other humans, but we are not nearly so skilled. The depth of human analysis in a godawful episode of The Big Bang Theory is deeper than our understand of the big bang will ever be.
With human investigations we're dealing less with systems that require pure data, and more with systems that require analysis --psychical sympathetic analysis -- that's something we're very good at. We're programmed for it.
Even if they fall on the same gradient of confidence, they are of completely different kind.
> "I know there is a huge tug of war over history textbooks. Was it always this way, or is this just a side effect of today's partisan rancor? "
I hear all about today's particularly bad partisan rancor. Yet nowhere, save Twitter, do I see it in action.
People in daily life seem profoundly less partisan than their Civil Rights/KKK counterparts. The language of 'Communist!' / 'Fascist!' seems to have lost power since the 60s. And while the rhetoric has become more populist, working class, I hear no categorical difference between the arguments of today, and those of Vidal/Buckley, or even Nixon/Kennedy.
> "If this were written as 'dramatically' as it might be, do you think it might inspire children to commit harassment or hate crimes against Germans or Muslims? How do you react to that?"
It's important for us as a civilization, as a species, to be able to handle emotional content like adults. The answer isn't to deny that which makes us human, but to embrace and perfect it. We need to learn to speak dramatically, emotionally, while remaining cognizant of our shared humanity. Civil rights leaders spoke unapologetically with passion, and it broadened and deepened the conversation.
Richard, I acknowledge there has always been acrimony in politics-- the Adams Jefferson rivalry stands out, and the personal attacks on Lincoln were brutal. And during the civil rights movement, the anger in the south resulted in a lot of overheated rhetoric and bad behavior.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that US politics are in a downward spiral unlike anything we've seen for many decades. You say, " I hear no categorical difference between the arguments of today, and those of Vidal/Buckley, or even Nixon/Kennedy." I'd urge you to revisit the Kennedy Nixon debates, for personally I think the difference between the debates then and now is like night and day.
The debaters back then seem more articulate to me, employing more complex sentences and multi-syllabic words. Perhaps they would not be as effective with today's voters or today's cable news circuit which seems to be shopping for grunts. The content of the debates were more substantive and their demeanor more civilized. Audiences back then would've been shocked by today's repeated monosyllabic sound bites and ad hominem attacks. Anyone who started bragging about the size of his hands or floating old discredited Vince Foster canards would've been driven from the field.
My own impression, comparing debates then and now, is that the US has dumbed down considerably. We have also, it appears, gotten meaner. In 1994, Newt Gingrich's infamous gopac memo changed the vocabulary of political debate. Gingrich urged Republican candidates to call their democratic rivals names such as sick, pathetic, and traitors. He urged Republican messages to include words such as decay, failure (fail), collapse(ing), crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, lie. You won't find words like that in the earlier debates, but after they were effective in 1994, conveying a crisis and getting Gingrich's party elected, that's all it took for the weapons to be adopted by both sides.
David,
Don't mistake me for a solipsist. Even if we are some kind of hologram, we must be some kind of special pinch-able case of it. We are still real, insofar as the word real was coined to refer to the existential state we exist in, whatever it might be. I'm fine with understanding everything as duality, or whatever-ality. Wherever the best understanding of the evidence leads us...
I certainly don't doubt history where there is enough circumstantial evidence, disinterested testimonial, and logic to go on. I'm not a radical skeptic, I'm a pragmatist. But being a pragmatist doesn't circumvent epistemology. The more we rely for knowledge on single sources, untestable anaesthetic abstractions, probabilistic guessing methods, computer modelling, or cherry-picked proxies, the more skeptical we should be about the conclusions proffered no matter how subscribed we are to them at the emotional or ideological level.
Just to use two examples which have some controversy attached... Evolution and Climate Change.... On the theory of evolution, in all my years, I've never seen a single decent fact or argument to tell against it. For anybody who cares to look, through a transmission electron microscope, at the fossil record, at the migration history of humankind, at Galapagos... the circumstantial evidence, the present evidence, the history, the mechanism/structure... the "for" column is piled to the sky and the "against" column is a bunch of nothing. I don't think the theory is perfect, as the epigenetic and "junk dna" aspects are still being investigated. But the footing is sure.
The footing for Climate science in physics is sure too. However it is, and has been, as a discipline making claims far in advance of what is actually defensible. Almost as bad and blinkered by assumption and ideology as nutrition science has been. Both fields are under attack from within and without for good reason. Hopefully, with time, these immensely important fields will be purged of their defensiveness and become the beacons of enlightenment we need them to be. Any consensus coming out of these fields should be put in a holding pen, pending further review.
Carroll writes about the core theory and concludes that at least for all earthly phenomena, including the atoms that make up you and me, the core theory knits together the quantum and the classical worlds quite well, and there's no point in continuing to say they represent two mutually incompatible descriptions of the world.
Fair enough. But the issue is not earthly. The issue whether The Big Bang, as unearthly an event as one can imagine, should be understood as history in the same way that The Peloponnesian War currently is. The question of how time works at quantum or lower dimensional levels or in non-time or during expansion (or what-have-you) can completely alter our understanding of "the narrative" of our universe. Or whether the sequential aspect of narrative - or even the presumption of locality - plays into it at all. This is even more paradigm-bending an idea than spatial curvature. I mean, if the big bang began non-locally in non-time, in what sense did we expand out from it? We, in fact, may be in a contracted state by comparison.
In other words, I agree with you that from our terrestrial perch we are pragmatically bonded to the familiar physics, to time, matter, locality, and personhood and the narratives built thereupon. But when we get extraterrestrial; into non-time, dark matter, other dimensions, infinite parallel realities, nonlocality, twistor space, and holographic translations... who's to say we aren't just poetry-slamming in a new art form?
> "You won't find words like that in the earlier debates, but after they were effective in 1994, conveying a crisis and getting Gingrich's party elected, that's all it took for the weapons to be adopted by both sides."
Yes, the rhetorical tactics have changed. They have, as I mentioned before, become more working class. However, the actual dialectical content hasn't seriously changed.
An example answer on spending from Nixon/Kennedy's first:
"MR. NOVINS: Senator Kennedy, in connection with these problems of the future that you speak of, and the program that you enunciated earlier in your direct talk, you call for expanding some of the welfare programs for schools, for teacher salaries, medical care, and so forth; but you also call for reducing the federal debt. And I'm wondering how you, if you're president in January, would go about paying the bill for all this. Does this mean that you?
MR. KENNEDY: I didn't indicate. I did not advocate reducing the federal debt because I don't believe that you're going to be able to reduce the federal debt very much in nineteen sixty-one, two, or three. I think you have heavy obligations which affect our security, which we're going to have to meet. And therefore I've never suggested we should uh - be able to retire the debt substantially, or even at all in nineteen sixty-one or two.
MR. NOVINS: Senator, I believe in - in one of your speeches -
MR. KENNEDY: No, never.
MR. NOVINS: - you suggested that reducing the interest rate would help toward -
MR. KENNEDY: No. No. Not reducing the interest -
MR. NOVINS: - a reduction of the Federal debt.
MR. KENNEDY: - reducing the interest rate. In my judgment, the hard money, tight money policy, fiscal policy of this Administration has contributed to the slow-down in our economy, which helped bring the recession of fifty-four; which made the recession of fifty-eight rather intense, and which has slowed, somewhat, our economic activity in 1960. What I have talked about, however, the kind of programs that I've talked about, in my judgment, are uh - fiscally sound. Medical care for the aged, I would put under social security. The Vice President and I disagree on this. The program - the Javits-Nixon or the Nixon-Javits program - would have cost, if fully used uh - six hundred million dollars by the government per year, and six hundred million dollars by the state. The program which I advocated, which failed by five votes in the United States Senate, would have put medical care for the aged in Social Security, and would have been paid for through the Social Security System and the Social Security tax. Secondly, I support federal aid to education and federal aid for teachers' salaries. I think that's a good investment. I think we're going to have to do it. And I think to heap the burden further on the property tax, which is already strained in many of our communities, will provide, will make sh- insure, in my opinion, that many of our children will not be adequately educated, and many of our teachers not adequately compensated. There is no greater return to an economy or to a society than an educational system second to none. On the question of the development of natural resources, I would pay as you go in the sense that they would be balanced and the power revenues would bring back sufficient money to finance the projects, in the same way as the Tennessee Valley. I believe in the balanced budget. And the only conditions under which I would unbalance the budget would be if there was a grave national emergency or a serious recession. Otherwise, with a steady rate of economic growth - and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rockefeller, in their meeting, said a five per cent economic growth would bring by 1962 ten billion dollars extra in tax revenues. Whatever is brought in, I think that we can finance essential programs within a balanced budget, if business remains orderly."
Obama/Romney 2012 on spending:
"SCHIEFFER: This question goes to you first, Senator Obama.
We found out yesterday that this year's deficit will reach an astounding record high $455 billion. Some experts say it could go to $1 trillion next year.
Both of you have said you want to reduce the deficit, but the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ran the numbers on both of your proposals and they say the cost of your proposals, even with the savings you claim can be made, each will add more than $200 billion to the deficit.
Aren't you both ignoring reality? Won't some of the programs you are proposing have to be trimmed, postponed, even eliminated?
Give us some specifics on what you're going to cut back.
Senator Obama?
OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think it's important for the American public to understand that the $750 billion rescue package, if it's structured properly, and, as president, I will make sure it's structured properly, means that ultimately taxpayers get their money back, and that's important to understand.
But there is no doubt that we've been living beyond our means and we're going to have to make some adjustments.
Now, what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut. I haven't made a promise about...
SCHIEFFER: But you're going to have to cut some of these programs, certainly.
OBAMA: Absolutely. So let me get to that. What I want to emphasize, though, is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as- you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches.
OBAMA: And some of the cuts, just to give you an example, we spend $15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies. It doesn't -- under the Medicare plan -- it doesn't help seniors get any better. It's not improving our health care system. It's just a giveaway.
We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work. And I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page, programs that don't work, we should cut. Programs that we need, we should make them work better.
Now, what is true is that Senator McCain and I have a difference in terms of the need to invest in America and the American people. I mentioned health care earlier.
If we make investments now so that people have coverage, that we are preventing diseases, that will save on Medicare and Medicaid in the future.
If we invest in a serious energy policy, that will save in the amount of money we're borrowing from China to send to Saudi Arabia.
If we invest now in our young people and their ability to go to college, that will allow them to drive this economy into the 21st century.
But what is absolutely true is that, once we get through this economic crisis and some of the specific proposals to get us out of this slump, that we're not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways.
And we're going to have to embrace a culture and an ethic of responsibility, all of us, corporations, the federal government, and individuals out there who may be living beyond their means."
Sorry, that last one is Obama/McCain 2008
I've read this page a few times and sorry for the late comment on what is a very heady discussion.
Science, history, modern philosophies and religion are all being used to engender fascistic sentiments for global resolutions to the world's many troubles. What is at issue is deeper than each of the components as they are manipulated. When people begin asking what is reality, they are also asking, are we human.
The issued overlooked or taken for granted is whether human beings are loveable and by or in what way does such exist? The racism promoted by the cartoons is an attack on this very question. Are we loveable by our merits according to ourselves, or by some unseeable essence, unknowable in the usual sense? If not the latter, then what are we doing?
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