The Rest is Noise

I saw a reviews of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century in the Economist some years ago, but I did not expect it to be THAT good. It's full of clever analysis of major musical works and trends of the 20th century, as well as .. superb gossip.

A word of warning: you'll probably find yourself listening to a lot of music through Youtube after each chapter in the book.

Some gossip that was new to me:

Sibelius was a recluse and drank a lot. Given that he was a Finn, nobody noticed. Hitler liked to entertain his guests by playing classical music on his gramophone, including Sibelius' Finlandia. The nazi affection with his works gave Sibelius a bad reputation among the Allies. Additionally, music theorists Adorno and Leibowitz really disliked him: for them Sibelius represented kitchy and backward romanticism whereas the future was to belong to atonal music.

Atonal music really got a foothold in Europe in Darmstadt music summer schools that were co-organized by the Office of Military Government of the U.S. and generously funded by other U.S. organizations. The generous funding meant that the composers did not really need to consider writing music to an audience other than themselves.

Edit/post script:
I had not thought about postmodernism in music before reading this book. I think Ross does not explicitly use the term. However Wikipedia's postmodernism article states, as I suspected that the ultra-modern atonal experiments of Darmstadt gave way to more postmodern minimalism (Cage, Riley) already in the 1960's.

Paradigms

Economics: Making Sense of Modern Economies is a thematic collection of articles originally published in the Economist. The collection is fairly informative for people with no background in economics. Section 9 discusses schools and trends in post-war economics and clarifies the positions of many people whose names one just comes across (Krugman, Stiglitz).

One of the things that I never thought about is how economics as science fits the idea of paradigm of Thomas S Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's examples are mainly about physics, but it is unclear how many paradigm shifts we have observed there: maybe only two, from Aristotelian to Newtonian and from Newtonian to 20th century physics (relativity and quantum phenomena). Briefly, as explained in any Philosophy of Science 101, a paradigm is a consensus among scientists about the theory, method and problems of their field. An era of such consensus is called "normal science". A paradigm is manifested in text books and archetypal examples. At some point there emerges an anomaly that does not fit in the existing theories. It will be ignored for some time, but maybe it eventually becomes too well-known, and there will be a period of scientific crisis. A new theory may emerge to explain the anomaly and may establish a new paradigm. Earlier views about scientific progress had emphasized that the new theory should explain the anomaly and, moreover, "absorb" the earlier theory by explaining everything that it explained, too. Kuhn's view was that this is not the case, theories can be incompatible.

In economics, the theories to be tested are crucial to avoid crashes and crises. A crash can be seen as an indication that relied on a wrong theory that did not anticipate it. These anomalies are quite well-known to many of us: 1970's stagflation, 1997 South-East Asian crash, and the 2008- depression.

Section 9 offers a useful guide to the current big schools of economics. Apparently in macroeconomics these are "freshwater" economists who dread government interference with the markets, and "saltwater" economists who think "the grit in the economic machine justified some meddling by policymakers" (p. 283). Since the 1980's the views coerced in a "brackish" semi-consensus in model-making and the brackish views influenced central banks. The dynamic stockhastic general equilibrium (DSGE) modeling seems to an example of this.

Interestingly (for a philosopher of science at least) the modellers knew that DSGE models weren't always very good. The Bank of England's DSGE model does not include financial middle-men (p. 284) and therefore it is quite useless in analysing banking crises. But there was no priority in fixing the model when there was no banking crisis. Kuhn would probably like this.

The Social Construction of Reality

I've read Berger & Luckmann's classic Social Construction of Reality since I'm somewhat interested in reality and how it is built. I'm not sure if I know now, but as a blueprint for a field of study "sociology of knowledge" it is certainly interesting.

Here's a completely vulgarized version of the whole thing: to become an adult member of a society, a kid goes through primary and secondary socialization. Primary socialization takes places (typically) within a family, the secondary by social institutions like schools. One of socialization's tasks is to legitimize the social structure. By doing so, it generates a body a knowledge. The body of knowledge is used to interpret natural phenomena, ergo: construction of reality, and even the subject's identity in the society. A better explanation of the story can be found in wikipedia.

I should find a sociologist to tell me how the field of sociology of knowledge developed from there as an empirical science (Berger and Luckmann discuss empirical studies but mainly develop a theoretical framework). For instance it would be interesting to know what happens in a large-scale socio-political change (let's say the collapse of socialism in Europe, urbanisation, China's new middle class etc). Then it would be interesting to know why people adopt certain types of hobbies, join clubs, vote against their own interest, listen to pop or jazz, go to sports events and demonstrations, write blogs etc.*


Again back to Michel Foucault: in what way his "archaeology of knowledge" or "geneology of knowledge" would be better or more profound than sociology of knowledge? I'm sure this question will give you sleepless nights while I read something completely different.


* Pierre Bourdieu might have a good answer, but I haven't read him properly.

Rebecca's case

Incidentally, I've moved to another country. But let's get to business.

"The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" might be Oliver Sacks' best known book, and consists of case histories. In one of them, Sacks tells about a 19 year old Rebecca who is mentally deficient (and unable to read) but loves stories. "With Rebecca [..] the emotional and narrative and symbolic powers can develop strongly and exuberantly [..] while the paradigmatic and conceptual powers [..] are only capable of a very limited development". Rebecca enrolls in a special theater group. "And now if one sees Rebecca on the stage [..] one would never even guess that she was mentally defective."

This is a moving tale of a young woman exceeding her limitations, but there's more. The roles that Rebecca adopts convincingly on the stage (I'd like to hear a real example) are probably people far more intelligent or "conceptual" than her (after all, she cannot read). Let's say, daringly, that they are fictional identities. Adopting such an identity allows us to do something we could not otherwise do. Maybe everyone needs a narrative. A high school student may say that the role models and ideals given by the media are stereotypical and restrictive (as they are), and that "we should live without such artificial constructs". But of course it's possible that we could not do anything without them. Did Barthes say so? Or Foucault (but he was too obsessed with his "discourse")? Or maybe Berger & Luckmann in "The Social Construction of Reality"..

History, less good

I've been postponing this entry. Howard Zinn passed away some years ago. His book A People's History of the United States is interesting and informative, but in my honest opinion it does not raise on the level of Watson's Intellectual History of the 20th Century (see my earlier post).

Here are some of the good bits, interesting facts worth noting:

• The conquistadores practically committed forced labour and genocide "In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead."
• In the North America, Zinn says the pre-colombian population was 25 million and the tribes were masters of farming the local crop, though the popular assumption is that European colonists were  better farmers with their tools and technology. This was not the case, Zinn states that the colonists were actually starving, and then enslaved Native Americans and brought in slaves from Africa simply to grow crops. "Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them." ..  "The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export." .. "Black slaves were the answer."
• The U.S. government provoked/started the Mexican–American War just to annex land "It was shortly after that, in the summer of 1845, that John O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, used the phrase that became famous, saying it was 'Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence..'" The Spanish–American War expanded the U.S. sphere of influence further with the pretext of supporting Cuba.
• There have been strong labour organizations in the U.S. like Knights of Labor. In 1886 to demand 8h working days "350,000 workers in 11,562 establishments all over the country went out on strike". Helen Keller was a labour activist. "When she became active and openly socialist, the Brooklyn Eagle, which had previously treated her as a heroine, wrote that 'her mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.'"
• In Zinn's view the Viet-Nam war was thoroughly unjustified and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started it was fabricated. "In early August 1964, President Johnson used a murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin ..  It later turned out that the Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest American officials had lied to the public."

Then what's wrong with the book? It's great that high school students get to know about these events (Wikipedia says that A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States). Zinn even coined the idea of the 99% that should become vocal as they did in the 2011 Occupy movement. Still I had trouble reading it. Zinn's style is good but quite often he forgets to support his argument with statistical data, instead relying on quotes from biographies, leftist newspapers and even letters. For instance:

• "Appeal to Reason, .. had half a million subscribers, and there were many other Socialist newspapers around the country, so that, all together, perhaps a million people read the Socialist press." What were the circulation numbers of mainstream papers?
• Zinn decries that voter enthusiasm in presidential elections fell during the 1970's. That's correct but he fails to mention that it was unusually high in the 1960's.
•  "Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International terrorist Conspiracy from Hell)". Interesting but isn't this more an artistic act than a people's protest against the privileged class.

Moreover I'm not sure if Zinn's basic premise is correct. Does the ruling 1% really want to keep the 99% poor and uneducated, and use all its political and financial tricks to reach this goal? Maybe, sometimes. But I liked reading Krugman's analysis much better.