Seward - Great new bio

Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man by Walter Stahr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Excellent read, especially in light of the new Lincoln movie

I had never read a full bio of Seward before, and this was great.

First, looking near the end of his life, I did not know he was such a conservative on Reconstruction. Indeed, while not a racist like Andrew Johnson, he fully supported the generally conservative nature of his approach. He appears not to care much for the fate of post-war Southern blacks, and also, ironically at least, fretted about too much federal intervention in states' rights. It made me wonder if he would have tried to influence Lincoln that way, had Lincoln lived.

Oh, and other things that kind of connect to the Lincoln movie?

Apparently, a fair amount of bribery was used to get the treaty of purchasing Alaska approved by the Senate; shades of 13th Amendment passage. (And, speaking of, which the movie doesn't tell us, Kentucky's Rep. Yeaman? Was named minister to Denmark for his vote swap; that's a pretty big payoff.)


Anyway, beyond that, it's stuff like this, and other stuff by Seward's "Karl Rove," Thurlow Weed, that make this a very good read.


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Are great philosophies in danger of being made into pop psychologies?

Like friend Leo Lincourt, when he alerted me to this Julian Baggini column on that subject, I didn't even know there was (even if "only" in the UK) a "Live Like a Stoic" week.

Right there, I'd say, yes, that's in danger of making a philosophy of life into pop psychology.

His nut graf, like a good sermonizing-type column, is at the end:

Stoic week has a valuable part to play in getting people to think more about how the deepest issues in their lives might not be just local psychological difficulties but concern more profound questions about how to live. But please, let’s not reduce all that’s true, good and beautiful to techniques and interventions to cure the blues and put smiles on our faces. Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality. 

He's right, and in more ways than that.

Philosophies of life have never been about "achieving of happiness." In fact, many of them, certainly including but not limited to Platonism, have sharply questioned what happiness is, whether it is achievable, and how central it and its pursuit should, or should not, be to human life.

Psychology does none of those things.

The true meaning of Hanukkah?

Contra this New York Times guest columnist, the true meaning of Hanukkah is not that the Jews resisted the Seleucids (instead of a magic menorah).

Rather, here's some of the truer meanings of Hanukkah:
1. That in Big Religion, like Big Business, luck is as important as anything else. I of course am using luck in the sense of contingency and nothing metaphysical. Had the Maccabees lost one or two battles (entirely possible) or had Rome not told Antiochus Epiphanes to get out of Egypt, thereby triggering events that led to the Maccabee revolt, Judaism might be a "backwater religion" today and Christianity never even have come into existence. (Some other Messianic Jewish cult might have taken its place, though.)

2. It helps to have good scriptwriters. Between the canonical Book of Daniel and the deuterocanonical books of Maccabees, the Maccabeean party within rebelling Jews (did you know that the revolt had factions?) come off smelling like roses. The fact is that the ancestors of the Pharisees were ready to make peace when Jews were guaranteed religious freedom, but the Maccabees insisted on fighting for political freedom, too. That, in turn, probably fueled an impulse toward Messianic Judaism less than a century later, when a Roman, name of Gnaius Pompeius, or Pompey the Great, ended the brief experiment with Jewish political freedom.

3. It helps to have good scriptwriters, part 2. Although we're not sure, it's likely that a fair percentage of Jews in Palestine were comfortable with Hellenizing.

4. It helps to have good scriptwriters, part 3. Again, we're not sure, but a fair amount of Jews of 164 BCE likely held beliefs ascribed to the Sadducees in the Christian New Testament — including that there is no such thing as an immortal soul because it is not mentioned in the Torah (Penteteuch, books of Moses) and that's all the canonical scriptures there are. However, by the time of the turn of the eras, it's clear that, while not yet a fringe position in Judaism, it was certainly moving that direction.

(Update: See LOTS more at this longform for just what Daniel, First Maccabees and to some extent Second Maccabees, presumably willfully and polemically, get wrong.)

Of course, going back to books such as Haggai and the first part of Zechariah, where a failed early post-exilic revolt against the Persians, at the same time Darius I overthrew Cambyses, gets shoved under the rug, the Tanakh is full of "good" scriptwriting.

And, on another era of Jewish history, the New York Times just gets it wrong in this column, perpetuating a myth.

It's nice that Spain is making an (albeit limited) effort to welcome back Marranos, but most of the "Marranos" in New Mexico and Texas reportedly are NOT crypto-Jews from 500 years ago, but rather, Hispanic converts to Adventist sects of 100-150 years ago. In fact, I believe I first read about that ... in a NYT column!

#StarTrek: Did the transporter kill Kirk?

Massimo Pigliucci, over at Rationally Speaking, actually raises this stimulating question, with the introductory device of an iPhone app that lets you play around with philosophy.

The theoretical question raised by the app is (as I understand it; per co-blogger Ian Pollock, see comments):

Put James T. Kirk on a transporter. Only, somehow, two different Kirks are simultaneously spit out on the other end. Is the original Kirk dead, or not? That, of course, would be a philosophical question even with a normally functioning transporter spitting out just one Kirk — is the post-transporter Kirk really the same guy or not? But dual Kirks on the other end intensify all the thought experiment questions.

The app offers several different answers for users to choose:
A) Kirk dies, a Trekkie cries
B) Kirk is Kirk1, or Kirk2, whichever you like
C) Kirk is (Kirk1 and Kirk2) before and after
D) Kirk is (Kirk1 and Kirk2) only after transport
E) Kirk is Kirk1 and Kirk is Kirk2, adios transitivity of identity
F) It’s “indeterminate,” in your favorite flavor
G) It’s “nonsense,” colorless, green and sleeping furiously
H) Insoluble paradox
I) Unsure which way to go
J) Huh? What’s this all about?
K) My favorite response isn’t listed (comments please)

And, so far, a definite plurality is opting for A. That's my answer, too.

But, I'm taking the game further. In a long response, I added further thought experiments. What follows is an edited version of those comments. If anything here isn't clear, go to the original post and read things in context as necessary.

The original Kirk is dead, and each of the two twins is individualized from each other.

Ian then raised the issue of actual vs. replacement Mona Lisa paintings, and in light of a classical philosophy thought experiment used by Dan Dennett and others as an intuition pump, raised the whole cell replacement issue. Assuming we want to concentrate on brain cell replacement, my comments focus on that.

Per Ian, the "replacement factor" of cells is fuzzy (assuming we're concentrating on brain cells, even, for simplicity's sake).

In one sense, the replacement of one brain cell by an outside process and not a natural degeneration of a cell with replacement by one theoretically identical due to natural regenesis is to create a different person, if you'll allow me a Forrest/Greene type eternally branching personhood rather than universes idea. My thinking Thought A rather than Thought B makes me a different person. That's whether it's voluntary (per Susan Blackmore and her excellent Zen meditation questions on consciousness) or a Clockwork Orange involuntarism.

That said, what replacement rate is necessary to say we've killed off the old Gadfly and created a new one? In the brain stem, or even the cerebellum, might be pretty high, eh? But, in the cortex, or a crucial noncortex area like the amygdala, might be pretty low, eh? Even without "replacements," I'm now thinking of Phineas Gage. Did his unfortunate accident kill one person and create another? (See what a thought experiment monster you've created!)

On the other hand, certain types of strokes have shown that (with the destruction of old neurons but without replacement of new ones) even the cortex can be quite plasticene. So maybe, like with the Star Trek transporter, the "replacement factor" involves "rate" by time as well as "rate" by ratio.

With Mona Lisas, though, I'd at least lean toward Ian. There, at least, we have a difference that makes no difference, to quote Spock and get back to Star Trek. Whereas, a transportation mechanism is going to make a different Ian, subtle as the differences may be.

That said, suppose an ambassador at the final end of the transportation has never met Kirk in person before. He has no way of knowing how much or how little the process changed this person, who I'll call Kirk-1.

But, wait, wait.

Spock would know any subtle difference, right?

However, Spock is also getting beamed to different spots, so Spock-1 would, even subtly, have different recollections of Kirk before his latest transportation. (See, you've created a second thought experiment monster.)

So, what if Scotty-Prime has never been transported? But, with Kirk's latest transportation, it was a bit less fail-safe than normal. Let's say Spock's was, too, but not so badly. So, can Scotty-Prime convince Spock-1 that Kirk-1 is ... "problematic"?

And, to throw a bomb in the mix ...

Per a Peter Singer, should we then euthanize Kirk-1?

The genius of Schittke

I finally figured out how Alf Schnittke gets the sound, in the Tuba Mirum section of his Requiem, that sounds like a mix of electronic bending of male voices and high schoolers singing into sousaphone mouthpieces. The bass guitarist in the rock band setup that's part of the orchestration is playing a slide.

And, this is actually a good interpretation, at least of the first four sections.

Stravinsky vs. Prokofiev on neoclassicism

Igor Stravinsky/Wikipedia

Igor Stravinsky more than once said he did not want the label of “Neoclassical” applied to his music.

In part, I suspect it was some professional jealousy and rivalry with Sergei Prokofiev, who first got the label from his 1916 “Classical Symphony.” In a post about Albert Camus and how he disliked the label “existentialist” for his works, I similarly said it was probably in part due to professional rivalry with Jean-Paul Sartre.

But I also said it was because he wasn’t so much an existentialist.

Ditto with Stravinsky.

His early works, like “Firebird” and “Rite of Spring,” we’d call Late Romantic, or Expressionist, or similar, right?

But, what about, say “A Soldier’s Story”? Couldn’t we call it Neoclassical?

We could, but even if the label fully fit, Stravinsky was moving further back in time, at times.

“Symphony in C” and “Symphony in Three Movements” both seem to combine Expressionistic elements with Neoclassical ones. But if you look at something like “Symphony of Psalms,” you realize we’re in different territory.

With a nod of the head to Paul Hindemith, I’ve called that territory Neobaroque. Given that Stravinsky would go on to do things like setting Shakespearean sonnets to music, one could even argue for the descriptor of Neorenaissance.

Of course, Stravinksy, over a long and productive career, changed his stripes more than once, and so is harder to label artistically than is Camus.

But, if we are to put a label on him, either Neobaroque or Neorenaissance is much more accurate for the Stravinsky of post-World War I days than is Neoclassical.

I actually favor the Neorenaissance labeling, myself. It’s not such much based on his later musical structures as it is on his instrumentation. On one listening to “Symphony of Psalms,” the fact that he uses no violins sunk in, and I thought back to the viol-family dominance before the later Baroque. His strong use of woodwinds, including modern ones like sarussophone in “Threni,” underscore this. (In case you’re wondering, a sarussophone is somewhat like if a saxophone and a bassoon had sex and produced a child.)

Interestingly, I did not know that Ernst Krenek also did a setting of Lamentations.

Fall Foliage Feelings

Some poetic thoughts inspired by late fall in Texas …

FALL FOLIAGE FEELINGS

The trees have gotten a little more bare;

A few more leaves just fell.

The weather, poised on a knife’s edge of impending change

High winds rise, fall, rise again and change direction,

While clouds mass, then dissipate,

And skies darken hither and yon.

A clear, bright sun hits a cobalt blue canvas,

Framing the fall-tinged red oaks’ leaf-dying beauty.

Poignancy, introspection and bits of melancholy

Are the hoped-for fruits of a leaf-dying soul —

Autumnal moods for autumnal days

In a sometimes sadness-gilded autumnal life.