The Dogs of WWW

@kkomaitis and @j2bryson discuss the anniversary of the New Yorker cartoon On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.

Obviously this is no longer true. Konstantinos Komaitis raises the important topic of surveillance capitalism and government snooping. There is more than enough data to know how many dogs you have, what you call them, how often you take them for walks, which other dogs and dog-owners you meet in the park, and how much you spend on dog-food and veterinary bills.

Joanna Bryson also raises the topic of deep fakes. Does this mean that some of those cute dogs we see on the Internet don't even exist? Or perhaps shifting our understanding as what counts as existing?

 

The title of this post is a reference to the words Shakespeare gives to Mark Antony:

Cry Havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war.

In its original meaning, crying havoc is a signal for looting and plunder. On the internet, this would include stealing your data and stealing your identity. 

In its article on the dogs of war, Wikipedia reproduces a Punch cartoon from 1876, showing Russia threatening war against Turkey in revenge for its losses in the Crimean War twenty years previously. Isn't history interesting?

Wikipedia: On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, The Dogs of War, Crimean War (1853-1856), Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)

Capitalism and Witchcraft

According to a new paper, "big data evidence suggests that the English language area was not capitalist between 1800 and 2000" (via @kvistgaard).

The authors analyse the occurrence of "pertinent keywords" found in Google Books from the period in question. As far as I can see from the abstract, the keywords are selected on the assumption that capitalism can be associated "with any form of over-average importance or even dominance of the economy" .

The argument appears to be that an era is capitalist only if people are strongly conscious of the economy and of certain economic phenomena, and that this consciousness is reflected in the literature of the time.

This doesn't allow either for the possibility that people didn't talk about capitalism because they took it for granted, or for the possibility that they were suffering what Engels called "false consciousness". (Marx is often credited with this concept, but he never used the term himself.) Foucault showed how the Victorians thought differently about certain things (such as discipline and sexuality) but that doesn't mean those things didn't exist.

It is also worth noting that the literature that is preserved in Google Books may not fairly represent different social classes. As Ruth Livesey comments in relation to a different collection, "although there is much to be learned about middle-class life ... relative few that give central place to class".

What about the reverse argument? The religious authorities were obsessed with witchcraft between 1550 and 1700, particularly in Germany and Scotland, and King James VI of Scotland wrote a treatise on witchcraft. So if we analysed "pertinent keywords" (not to mention the "necessary hashtags"), we might be able to "prove" that witchcraft was more prevalent than capitalism in this period.

However, as @kvistgaard points out ...

Evidence-based policy leads to policy-based evidence. Then and now.

Twitter is not an appropriate place to seriously discuss concepts like "existence" and "truth".

— Ivo Velitchkov (@kvistgaard) January 7, 2018

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Yasmeen Ahmad, How Much Of Data Science Is Witchcraft? (Forbes 5 May 2016)

Jamie Doward, Why Europe’s wars of religion put 40,000 ‘witches’ to a terrible death (Observer 7 January 2018)

Alex Hern, Minister explains Rudd's 'necessary hashtags' after week of confusion (Guardian 4 April 2017) - not really relevant to this post, but included to explain the side-reference to necessary hashtags

Barbara Humphries, Nineteenth century pamphlets online (The ephemerist, 153, Summer 2011).

Daniel Little, False Consciousness (University of Michigan-Dearborn, undated)

Ruth Livesey, Class (Oxford Bibliographies, March 2011)

Steffen Roth, Vladislav Valentinov, Arūnas Augustinaitis, Artur Mkrtichyan, Jari Kaivo-oja, Was that capitalism? A future-oriented big data analysis of the English language area in the 19th and 20th century (Futures, Volume 94, November 2017, pages 1-84)

updated 28 June 2020

A History Lesson From Michael Gove

On Andrew Mitchell (who is alleged to have called police "plebs")

“throughout history there have been ministers who it was assumed would have to go but toughed it out in office and then went on to deliver worthwhile reforms” (Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2012)

Suggesting that the police recollection of 'plebgate' may have been wrong, the Education secretary said people often had 'different recollections of the same event' and pointed to 1950s Japanese film Rashomon in which several characters gave a differing accounts of the same story. (Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2012)

On the purpose of teaching history

Gove ... wants history teachers to inculcate a sense of national identity ... (but) that is not what history teachers think they are there to do. (Francis Beckett, A History Lesson For Michael Gove, New Statesman, Jan 2012)

On the style of teaching history

Gove stresses 'facts' in school curriculum revamp (BBC News Jan 2011) See also Ofsted: Primary school history 'lacks narrative' (BBC News March 2011)

Gove champions British narrative history and is a big fan of H.E Marshall’s ‘Our Island Story: A History of Britain for Boys and Girls from the Romans to Queen Victoria’. He is also a fan of Niall Ferguson, a historian who champions the British and American empires. If history taught an interesting story, his logic goes, the kids would like it and be more capable of reciting ‘interesting’ patriotic facts. (John Westmoreland, Make Gove History, Counterfire April 2012)

For his GCSE history assignment a few years ago, my older son had to analyse a series of contemporary newspaper reports of Jack the Ripper. I guess the point of this assignment was to help the students understand how history is constructed from "different recollections of the same event".

Framing a riot

In Predicting a Riot, @DavidAllenGreen (aka Jack of Kent) points out that riots are used to validate and reinforce existing political opinions. Our political opinions influence how we read any given civil disturbance.

He also points out that a riot is a complex event, with many different things going on, and that to understand causes and effects, we need to be clear about which effects we are trying to explain. He attributes this point to the historian Conrad Russell (son of Bertrand).

Listening to the media reports of the riots in Tottenham over the weekend, I was struck by the amount of time devoted to looting. Although there were some police injuries, the media story was that most people seemed more interested in stealing televisions than attacking the police. Media coverage of other recent protests have been dominated by the unruly behaviour of Cambridge undergraduates and the children of pop stars.

It is difficult to find objective evidence about the causal relationship between the riot and the looting. Thus people will tend to form opinions that are determined by their general political stance. Some will regard the looting as an almost inevitable consequence of the riot, while others will regard it as accidental and opportunistic.

But maybe the looting serves some political purpose. If crowds can be easily diverted from legitimate political protest into pointless vandalism, egoism and self-interested thievery, this serves to discredit the original political agenda. So who benefits from this diversion? Right-wing bloggers such as @HolySmoke are already rubbing their hands with glee The looting is a PR disaster for UK Uncut (Daily Telegraph 8 Aug 2011). And politicians of all parties are distancing themselves from plans to cut police budgets.

Jack of Kent is viewing these events as a contemporary historian, and wondering how these events are perceived by people with different prejudices. But we can go further and ask how these events could be being orchestrated and framed in order to propagate a given set of perceptions.

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In a Linked-In discussion A systems perspective on the riots in England, James Llewellyn says that a systemic approach "might ask us to consider whether there is a wider problem at work".

Some systems thinkers apparently don't stop to ask WHETHER there is a wider problem at work, they seem to take it as a guiding principle that there ALWAYS MUST BE a wider problem at work.

For the purposes of this discussion, James chooses to focus on a system he calls "the capitalist system", and (perhaps not surprisingly) finds some problems with this system. (Some systems thinkers follow a second guiding principle: that you can ALWAYS find problems with any reasonably important and complex system, if you look hard enough.)

Having chosen to focus on "the capitalist system", James asks ethical questions (values) as well as cause-effect questions (linear type solutions). He also asks a basic ontological question - does the category of "looter" include Bernie Madoff as well as the kids who stole televisions and trainers?

This ontological question may have some relevance for the aetiology of the riots. Some of the rioters have sought to justify their own behaviour by reference to the "looting" behaviour of the bankers, as well as a socioeconomic classification in which shop-keepers counted as "the rich". If the media are to be believed, some of those caught up in the riots do not appear to have been "have nots" or "underclass", but were middle class aspiring young people, who already had televisions and trainers and were apparently caught up with the fervour of "liberation" and "opportunity". Thus their way of understanding and framing the systems in which they were operating affected their ethical and instrumental choices; those who are convicted of various crimes will experience lasting change to their social identity. As has Bernie Madoff.

What I think this implies for systems thinking is that we are not just called upon to take a systems perspective for our own understanding of some series of events, but also to appreciate the range of systems perspectives taken by the actors in these events, as well as the various commentators upon them.

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See also

The competing arguments used to explain the riots (BBC News Magazine, 11 August 2011) with commentary by two criminologists, Professor David Wilson of Birmingham City University and Marian FitzGerald, visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent.

England riots: 'The whites have become black' says David Starkey (BBC Newsnight, 12 August 2011), provocatively blaming the riots on the adoption of what he calls "black culture" by young people of all races, a point eloquently rebutted by Dreda Say Mitchell. "Very dangerous game to invoke the rivers of blood speech and Empire", comments @markhillary.

Decoding Disclosure

In her piece #WikiLeaks no favor to historians, Kiron K. Skinner believes there will be some unintended consequences of the recent deluge of WikiLeaks.

"Policy makers, intelligence analysts and statesmen [will] find it necessary to write to each other in code. ... Once frank and private interactions among statesmen will become more diplomatic. ... This will probably lead to greater secrecy and manipulation until technology devises yet more powerful lenses to reveal even the most private state encounters."

But surely historians have always been trained not to take any documents at face value. It stretches belief to imagine that private interactions among statesmen have ever been totally frank, or that official documents have ever been completely objective. Dr Skinner advocates other forms of historical document, such as contemporary interviews with political actors, but of course these cannot be taken at face value either.

Powerful people often oscillate between discretion and indiscretion. Journalists and spies have many ways of tempting people to boast about their knowledge and influence (Vince Cable being a recent victim of such techniques - see BBC News). Given the complex psychological and political factors that trigger specific instances of disclosure, there is no reason to believe that those items disclosed are either consistently more important or consistently less important than those not disclosed. As it happens, many of the WikiLeaks disclosures are pretty banal, and some commentators have gained the impression that the life of the professional diplomat is also pretty banal, but this impression may simply be a consequence of the WikiLeaks process together with selective media reporting. Anyone who believes that WikiLeaks provides some kind of "truth" should read Slavoj Žižek Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks (LRB 20 January 2011).

Scandal sheets such as Private Eye have always had coded ways of disclosing information. For example, famous people are often described as "tired and emotional" (drunk) or "discussing Uganda" (having sexual intercourse).

Historians will continue to have to wade through bureaucratic self-justification, empty boasting and unsubstantiated rumour, filtered through a gauze of topical references and codes, and to try and understand the hidden power of negotiating positions that were never made explicit. (Žižek mentions a crucial meeting in Portugal in 1974.) WikiLeaks isn't going to change this very much.

Global Injustice and Moral Challenge

@RSAevents My son is studying economics at high school, so I took him to a talk by Amartya Sen at the RSA last week on Reducing Global Injustice. (Follow link for audio and video. See also summary by Mick Yates.) Sen is undoubtedly one of the greatest economists of our time but he is not the most inspiring speaker, and spent much of the time explaining subtle differences between his position and that of other thinkers, rather than presenting a clear ethical argument from first principles. My son found Sen's conversation with Matthew Taylor extremely heavy going, despite Matthew's best efforts to draw out the more interesting aspects of Sen's recent thought.

Someone asked Sen to identify the greatest form of injustice, hoping that he would identify gender inequality, but he rightly refused to do so, saying that different forms of injustice are both incomparable (on what basis can you possibly say that gender inequality is greater or smaller than mass poverty or genocide) and interconnected (injustice against children, invalids, old people and women are not separate injustices). Sen has demonstrated his strong support for women's rights and feminism in his books, but that doesn't mean that gender ranks above all other possible injustices.

Meanwhile, the idea that gender inequality is the central moral challenge of the 21st century is being strongly argued by husband-and-wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - most recently at TED Global 2010. Their position: in the 19th century, the central moral challenge was slavery; in the 20th century, it was totalitarianism; but in this century the issue dominating moral debate is gender inequity. See for example Kristof Calls Gender Parity a 21st Century Moral Challenge, a report of a talk at Fordham Law School in February.

The idea that in 2010 we can already identify the central moral challenge of the 21st century seems farfetched. Totalitarianism didn't exist as an issue in 1910: nobody could possibly have identified totalitarianism as the central moral challenge of the 20th century until at least the 1930s and possibly not until the 1950s. For much of the century communism and fascism were widely perceived as opposites, and it took decades before people were ready to make sense of these as two contrasting manifestations of a single phenomenon which came to be labelled totalitarianism.

One might even argue that the various manifestations of totalitarianism grew up in the 1920s as a series of flawed responses to the very issues that were perceived as uppermost in 1910. So we should be very wary of declaring the central moral challenge of the century, as if we could predict the pattern of the next ninety years. History tells us that humankind is perfectly capable of creating appalling new injustices, which could make all present injustices seem trivial in comparison.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are highly acclaimed journalists, who have won Pulizer Prizes for their earlier work, and perhaps the desire to punctuate history in convenient 100-year chunks is a journalistic meme. But in calling out gender inequality as the central moral challenge of a century that has only just started, this not only brings them into conflict with those who would see some other injustice as equally or even more important, as well as those such as Sen who object to singling out any injustice as central. It also brings them into conflict with those such as Nancy Kallitechnis who argue that gender inequality has been a central moral challenge for thousands of years already.

What is the purpose/effect of singling out one central moral challenge? Presumably the intended effect is to mobilize efforts around this challenge, and around some set of perceived solutions. But this kind of thinking is dangerously close to slipping back into the centralizing mindset that Kristof and WuDunn have already identified as the central moral challenge of the century in which they grew up. For the 21st century, perhaps we need fewer hedgehogs and more foxes.

The Power of Projection

@snowded @rotkapchen @euan #history #texas .

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Dave Snowden saw Euan Semple's tweet Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards (original story NYTimes.com) and commented "Depressing HandMaid's Tale here we come".

When Paula Thornton said "Yes we did", Dave replied "deepest sympathies, do you need to emigrate?". Paula corrected him "Perhaps you missed my intent -- I'm proud of the action and was backing in. We believe in the pursuit of truth."

This vignette is interesting at many levels. Dave appears to have formed a negative judgement about the Texan vote, possibly based on little more than a somewhat unsympathetic report in the New York Times, and seems to have expected Paula to share his view. It can be extremely tempting to project our own opinions onto other people, especially those we consider intelligent and well-informed on other matters, and it is often a surprise to discover someone we like and respect turns out to have opinions that strongly clash with our own. Perhaps that's why we often avoid discussing politics and religion with work colleagues in the first place.

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As for the pursuit of truth, political battles between liberals and conservatives over American history will probably reveal more about historical truth than any amount of imagined objectivity on either side, for those who understand how to interpret it, but I just wonder how many Texan schoolchildren will get this.

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Following further debate on Twitter, Dave identified two positions: direct political/populist control and going with the academics. His appears to side with the latter option.

If we look at this in terms of Lacan's Four Discourses, "going with the academics" is what Lacan called Discourse of the University. I guess populism counts as Discourse of the Hysteric, because the Texan vote appears to be a response to a Master Discourse perceived as being controlled by the "liberal establishment". But where is the Discourse of the Analyst?

Is History One-Sided?

Not everyone liked Robin Hood. According to myth, he stole from the rich to give to the poor.

But shock horror: a document critical of Robin Hood has been discovered ('Negative' attitude to Robin Hood, BBC News, 14 March 2009).

(Notice, by the way, how the BBC subeditors insert coy quotation marks around the word "negative" - just in case anyone might think the BBC might be taking sides in this controversy - even though surely the word "attitude" already indicates that they are merely reporting an opinion.)

Julian Luxford of St Andrews University, described by the BBC as an expert in medieval manuscript studies, said: "Rather than depicting the traditionally well-liked hero, the article suggests that Robin Hood and his merry men may not actually have been 'loved by the good'.

Here are two important clues about the document.

1. It was written in Latin.
2. The manuscript is owned by Eton College.

According to the tradition that I learned as a boy, Robin Hood was well-liked by the poor and well-hated by the rich, including bishops and abbots. And of course the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Let me see: who would write a document about Robin Hood, in Latin, and deposit it in the Eton College Library? Obviously not a poor peasant.

So how does this discovery affect the "traditional" depiction of Robin Hood? Not much, as far as I can tell from the BBC report. It seems to tell us rather more about Dr Luxford and his notion of who were the "good" people in late mediaeval England.

I expect that Dr Luxford is reasonably competent as an art historian, and "well-liked" by his peers. However, like many other academics before him (see this blog for more examples), he has allowed his research to be popularized in a way that makes him look rather silly.

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Update: Dr Luxford was interviewed on the BBC Today Programme this morning (17 March 2009). He didn't repeat his point about "good people", and James Naughtie made a point of saying why we might expect monks to dislike Robin Hood (following, but possibly not triggered by, my tweet to the programme), so misrule is restored.

It turns out that Dr Luxford's discovery conveniently parallels the plot of a new novel by Adam Thorpe, so we also have another entry for the life-imitating-art category.

Of course the evidence for Robin Hood's real character is very thin either way. All I'm saying here is that we shouldn't just jump to the Robin-Hood-Bad theory on the strength of a single, predictably hostile document.

See also Alex Hudson, Prince Among Thieves (BBC 17 March 2009)

Purpose of Guerrilla

Today (2nd May) is the 200th anniversary of one of the key events of the Peninsular War, the uprising in Madrid against French occupation. Napoleon's armies were eventually pushed out of Spain and Portugal by a combination of regular forces (the British Army under Wellington) and irregular forces. We now refer to such irregular forces by the Spanish word "guerrilla", which literally means "little war". Wikipedia defines it as "bloody, spontaneous fighting"; the comma is important.

[Wikipedia: Guerrilla Warfare, Peninsular War]

For some historians, attitudes towards guerilla depends on the context. From a British perspective, fighting against the Napoleonic Empire was a Good Thing. People who are instinctively disapprove of Empire tend to look favourably on guerrilla that opposes empire.

Indeed, the traditional opposition between Guerrilla and Empire leads some people to infer the existence of Empire from the existence of Guerrilla. "People are fighting against America as if it were an Empire, therefore it must be an Empire." This is a dangerous and invalid line of argument. Any argument about the nature of America must surely be based on America's own actions and aspirations, not on the actions of its opponents.

The traditional opposition between Guerrilla and Empire may also lead to either automatic approval of all guerrilla, or automatic disapproval. But that's like saying "All War Is Justified", "My Country Right Or Wrong" or "All You Need Is Love". Grand slogans, but no substitute for intelligent thought.

America's own stance towards guerrilla is complex and context-dependent: guerilla in Vietnam or Nicaragua is not the same as guerrilla in Africa or Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare sometimes works in your favour; but as the British discovered long ago, powerful countries generally have more to lose than to gain from asymmetric warfare.

In the UK, intelligent but disaffected medical students often become comedians. In Latin America, a medical student became the glamorous face of the revolution, pinned up in countless student bedrooms, and now invoked as a fashion icon by people who have no understanding of politics or history. The purpose of guerrilla as marketing? I don't think so.

Troubled History

The suicide rate in Northern Ireland has increased dramatically since the end of the "troubles" [BBC News Aug 2005, June 2007].

There are several possible explanations for this.

1. Civil unrest provides a "buffer".

"When people come together to confront a general threat they tend to think less about themselves as individuals and more of the common cause". [BBC News Aug 2005].

2. The suicide rate represents the longer-term consequences ("fall-out") from the troubles. [BBC News June 2007] [Day of Private Reflection].

3. As the "troubles" have subsided, political attention has shifted to other issues - such as bullying. ["Paisley calls for inquiry into Ulster school bullies", Guardian June 2004.]

4. And the way people now think about the "troubles" may already be starting to shift. [See my earlier post: History Lesson.]


This diversity of explanation demonstrates that we have to be careful in ascribing purposes and effects to complex systems and events. A simplistic POSIWID analysis might latch onto the first explanation, looking for (perhaps even confident of finding) some positive benefits from (even the most terrible) negative events. [See my earlier post: Silver Lining]. Whereas a more subtle POSIWID analysis would be sensitive to the possibility of delayed long-term and socially constructed effects.

Farce

A farce is a type of breathless comedy, in which the action builds dramatic tension, accelerating to a frantic climax. In the classic Aldwych farces, the actor Robertson Hare would routinely lose his trousers, uttering the catchphrase "Oh Calamity". Other great farces include Fawlty Towers and Noises Off.

The purpose of a farce is laughter.

But when Bob Geldof describes the latest G8 summit as a farce [BBC News, June 8th 2007], he is not laughing. Nor was Danny Schechter when he described Live 8 as a farce [AlterNet, July 6th 2005].

To describe G8 or Live 8 as farce is an act of mockery, not one of despair. Bill Freind traces this tradition back to Marx; he suggests that "one of the best ways to critique global capitalism is through the satire, parody and outright derision that Marx employs in the Eighteenth Brumaire" [Bad Subjects, October 1999].

• Hegel writes: "all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur twice"
  
• Marx adds: "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce"

What would justify applying the label "farce" to both G8 and Live 8 is that they are arguably not real historical events. Like the reign of Louis Napoleon, which inspired Marx's most exuberantly humorous writing, they are merely parodies of earlier events, events which have already been consigned to what Trotsky called the "dustbin of history". G8 summits represent a fantasy-football version of the meetings between world leaders during the Second World War (Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam), while Live 8 purported to be a reenactment of Live Aid.

In other words, entertainment value only.

History Lesson

What is the purpose of history? 

I was listening to an item on BBC Radio called Transcending the Troubles, where I learned that the Apprentice Boys of Derry (Website, Wikipedia) are opening a new museum, with a permanent exhibition showing the history of the Siege of Derry. 

During the troubles in Northern Ireland (Wikipedia), it seemed almost impossible for sectarian groups to recall and celebrate historical events without this having the effect of bringing the conficts of the past into the present. History was enacted through parades and marches. Many people regarded these marches as deliberate provocation. In such a context, history may have (or appear to have) a divisive purpose.

As the troubles have subsided, it may now be possible for history to be constructed in a more bipartesan way. Perhaps a museum is a step towards indicating that the past is now past. Bygones be bygones.

If those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it, then the purpose of History is to avoid any such repetition. (Obviously there are some events in the twentieth century which we pray will not be repeated in the twenty-first.) But there is another purpose of History - to help define national identity. Perhaps we can hope to see a new national identity being forged in Northern Ireland, one that combines both Orange and Green celebrations?

Appeasement

One of the prevailing curiosities of the Second World War concerns the motive of the British Government (led by Neville Chamberlain) in appeasing Hitler in 1938. Appeasement is commonly regarded as tantamount to cowardice, and Chamberlain is reviled in contrast to the brave and heroic Churchill.

But what were the effects of this appeasement?

1. Gave Britain more time to prepare for war. [note 1]
   
2. Turned Germany's aggression eastwards. [note 2]
3. Triggered a shift in public opinion. [note 3]
4. Established a much stronger case for war when Hitler (as some people predicted) reneged on the agreement. [note 4]
5. Improved Churchill's political position.
   

If we evaluate appeasement against Chamberlain's sound-bite ("Peace For Our Time") then it may be regarded as an ironic failure. But if we look at appeasement as a regrettable but necessary step in the build-up towards the Second World War, then it could be seen as having made a useful contribution to the outcome of the war as a whole.

[Note 1] "Faced with the growing political and economic instability in Europe, the rise in Nazism and the increased irrelevance of the League of Nations as a means to deal with disputes, Britain engaged in one of the most massive military build-ups in modern history and instituted a peacetime draft. The rearmament budget of 1937 amounted to £1.5 billion." [Wikipedia: Appeasement of Hitler]

[Note 2] "It is possible to read Munich as a cynical attempt to turn Hitler’s aggression east giving the west more time to prepare for inevitable war and, in the meantime, killing off millions of Germany’s troops as well as millions of Soviet troops. Among other things, such an interpretation suggests additional motivations behind the 1939 Hitler/Stalin pact." [Wikipedia: Appeasement]

[Note 3] "The Munich Agreement marked the high tide of appeasement but was also the turning point in British public opinion." [Wikipedia: Appeasement of Hitler]

[Note 4] "Because Hitler soon violated the terms of the agreement, it has often been cited in support of the principle that tyrants should never be appeased." [Wikipedia: Munich Agreement]

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