Fear of Terrorists on the Campaign Trail

Because there are no seriously contested Congressional races in Maryland, I have missed the trend of campaign ads that focus on terrorism:

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Friday a quartet of new ads focusing on national security. One, airing against Rep. Dan Maffei of New York, accuses the congressman of "backing constitutional rights for foreign terrorists." Another, in a bellwether Iowa district, claims that Democratic candidate Staci Appel supports "passports for terrorists." These ads open with footage from Islamic State fighters.

One of the most insistent alarmists is David Perdue, running for the Senate against Michelle Nunn in Georgia. His ads accuse Nunn of “supporting aid for terrorists” -- this is one of those long causal chains connecting some Islamic charity that was once one of George Bush I's “ten thousand points of light” to Hamas -- and also tries to drag in immigration: “She’s for amnesty, while terrorism experts say our border breakdown could provide an entry for groups like ISIS!”

Yeah, our “Open Border,” where we have recently spent several billion dollars building fences and beefing up security; did you know that the Feds spend more on border control than on all other law enforcement activities put together?

I have to say I am puzzled over this. I regard ISIS as a bunch of monsters and a menace to the security of the Middle East, but the notion that they present a serious threat to Americans strikes me as overblown. You mean to say that your life is so sweet, orderly and safe that your biggest worry is would-be caliphs on the other side of the world? I suppose the point is that gruesome images from Syria and Iraq make Obama look weak; but don't we have worse problems?

Here's another question: at what point does the constant exaggeration of our problems by political alarmists -- Ron Paulites who think civilization is collapsing, security hawks who claim ISIS is after your children, leftists who think Fascists in the NSA and CIA control the country -- begin to weigh heavily on the national mood? Is one reason people in the modern world are so anxious and depressed that we are constantly bombarded by alarmist messages? I get ads every day that say some investment guru is predicting a "25 year depression," and since my internet profile is mostly liberal, I am sure others get much more of that sort of thing. Gun owners constantly hear that Obama is after their guns; environmentalists that global warming is some sort of existential threat; and then there's the way we make every school shooting into a media frenzy.

People need to relax. And politicians who fish for votes by spreading unjustified panic have a lot to answer for.

Imperial Segway

Nerd style

The New AP Test Framework is Becoming a Lightning Rod

Lots of news coming out of Jefferson County, Colorado, where an attempt by the school board to change the AP history curriculum has led to protests by teachers and students. The board, recently taken over by conservative activists, has created something called the Board Committee for Curriculum Review:

The charge to the committee is to review curricular choices for conformity to JeffCo academic standards, accuracy and omissions, and to inform the board of any objectionable materials. The committee shall regularly review texts and curriculum according to priorities that it establishes, however, at any time, the Board may add items to the list for review. The committee shall report all comments (majority and minority) to the board in writing on a weekly basis as items are reviewed. Board members may move for discussion or action on items reported when matters warrant public discussion or action. The committee’s initial projects will be a review of the AP US History curriculum and elementary health curriculum.

Review criteria shall include the following: instructional materials should present the most current factual information accurately and objectively. Theories should be distinguished from fact. Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage. Content pertaining to political and social movements in history should present balanced and factual treatment of the positions.

Got that, hippies? We'll have no encouragement of civil disorder in our schools!

Except, wasn't the American Revolution an illegal bit of civil disorder? Are the schools going to offer a balanced and factual treatment of George III's position on American independence? That would be interesting, at least. And how can they offer a balanced, factual description of, say, the position on race questions of the Democratic Party in 1920, without instigating social strife? Will they ban discussion of Nixon's wiretapping escapades or Bill Clinton's philandering because that would undermine respect for authority? What will they say about the Vietnam War? The Civil War? The mind boggles.

People like the activists on the Jefferson County school board want to have things both ways. They want a positive, patriotic approach to history, but they also want to "present the most current factual information accurately and objectively." And since the facts about things like slavery and the Indian Wars hardly promote American patriotism, it is very hard to do both. Fortunately in the US the notion that what we teach kids in history classes should be true is very firmly entrenched, so it has so far been pretty much impossible for public schools to bury the basic facts about our checkered past. But every time rumors start about leftists taking over the curriculum, certain conservatives freak out and start talking patriotism and respect for authority.

Where Britain has Invaded

This terrific map showing all the places in the world where British troops have fought comes from Stuart Laycock's All the Countries We've Ever Invaded. Laycock says British troops have fought in 90 percent of the world's nations.

The Die

Icosahedral (20-sided) die from Roman Egypt, carved of serpentine, with Greek letters on the faces. In the Met. Presumably this was part of an oracle, although you never know.

Anti-Sectarian Intolerance

The latest from the increasingly strange world we live in:

A California charter school has decided to pull Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir, The Hiding Place, from its library because the content was deemed too religious. . . . When the Pacific Justice Institute, a Christian legal defense group, sent a cease-and-desist notice, the school superintendent responded, “We . . . do not allow sectarian materials on our state-authorized lending shelves.”

Because, I guess, we're going to teach about the Holocaust now without mentioning religion.

I have read again and again about American teachers and even principals who seem to think that the establishment clause forbids them from teaching about religion or assigning religious books, which it does not. As if it were possible to understand humanity without looking into religion.

The Hiding Place is a bit controversial because it is an explicitly Christian book about the Holocaust; the ten Boom family helped Jews for Christian reasons and Corrie wrote about her experience in Christian terms. If I were going to teach one book about the Holocaust I would certainly choose one by a Jew. But what I think is the best text for teaching this subject is a completely separate matter from what school libraries can have on their shelves, and they absolutely can and should have religious books. The difference between preaching religion and teaching about religions is too subtle for a lot of people, but it should not be beyond school principals.

Islamic Treasures at Christies

Some highlights from an auction coming up at Christie's in London on October 9, titled Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds. Above, calligraphic exercise from Iran, c. 1600.

Illustration from a volume of Persian poetry, from India, c. 1580.

Blue and white Ottoman dish from Bursa, 15th century.

Detail of a wooden panel from Fatimid Egypt, 11th c.

Koran pages, Andalusia, 13th century.

Nasrid cabinet, Granada, 15th century.

Silver inlaid brass bowls from Fars, Iran, 14th century.

Book page from Iran, 19th century.

The Historical Roots of ISIS

Fascinating essay by historian David Motadel on the history of organizations much like ISIS. In the nineteenth century, western imperialism and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire created a great deal of political chaos and moral uncertainty in the Islamic world. One result was the rise of several "caliphates" that like ISIS combined unremitting war against outsiders with religious fanaticism at home:

The most sophisticated 19th-century Islamic rebel state was the Caucasian imamate. Its imams rallied the Muslims of Chechnya and Dagestan into a 30-year holy war against the Russian empire, which sought to subdue the region. During the struggle, the rebels forced the mountain communities into a militant imamate, executing internal opponents and imposing Shariah law, segregation of the sexes, bans on alcohol and tobacco, restriction on music, and the enforcement of strict dress codes — all hugely unpopular measures. Czarist troops confronted the imamate with extreme brutality, eventually shattering it.

Motadel notes that although there were several rebellions or states like this, none of them lasted very long:

Created under wartime conditions, and operating in a constant atmosphere of internal and external pressure, these states have been unstable and never fully functional. Forming a state makes Islamists vulnerable: While jihadist networks or guerrilla groups are difficult to fight, a state, which can be invaded, is far easier to confront. And once there is a theocratic state, it often becomes clear that its rulers are incapable of providing sufficient social and political solutions, gradually alienating its subjects.

I think that like those other states, ISIS is not likely to last very long, but that will be small compensation for its victims.

Matthew Simmonds

British sculptor Matthew Simmonds has had an interesting career. He graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1984 with a degree in Art History, but after floundering around for a few years he decided that instead of studying old art he wanted to make something new. So in 1990 he began training as an architectural stone carver, and he worked on the restoration of medieval monuments like Westminster Abbey and Ely Cathedral. Once he had mastered the techniques, he began creating his own sculptures; he won his first prizes in 1999. He now lives in Italy. (Above, The Regular Division of Space by Domes, 2011)

All of his work that I have seen is like these, architectural fragments emerging from stone. (Basilica IV, 2011)

They remind me of some of M.C. Escher's surreal etchings -- imaginary spaces the make us long to explore them. (Gothic Stone, 2003)

Elevation V: Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, 2010

Critic Merete Prydes Helle once wrote of him,

Simmonds makes a play of architecture and ornamentation on a small scale, but the spaces created give the same feeling as in the buildings themselves; a place to rest, a place to travel with the eye and maybe find a moment of tranquility. The marble is opened up, and inside is a space within a building that only exists in the viewer's mind. What you sense is the significance of space.

To create a sculpture that catches the light and structure of a building and lets the eye wander, to feel that here my eye could live, here a part of me could stay, is a great achievement. The sculptures give the viewer a different perspective on space. They look different from every viewpoint. You long to be in them, and they seem almost more meaningful for that.

Vaulted Space, 2007

Romanesque Stone, 2003.

The Passage, 2003, Lots more at his web site and This is Colossal.

U2 as a Christian Band; Or, How Do I Feel about Christianity?

I've always liked U2. I've never owned any of their cds, though, because they get played on the radio often enough for me, and I've never bothered to learn anything about them beyond what I couldn't avoid picking up from the general discourse. The only song of theirs in my iTunes is "One." Anyway, one thing I like about them is that Bono's barely sensible lyrics always seemed to me to be seasoned with something approaching profundity:

Love is a temple, love is a higher law. . . .

But it was only yesterday that I learned that U2 is an explicitly Christian band. Joshua Rothman:

Most people think of U2 as a wildly popular rock band. Actually, they’re a wildly popular, semi-secretly Christian rock band. In some ways, this seems obvious: a song on one recent album was called “Yahweh,” and where else would the streets have no name? But even critics and fans who say that they know about U2’s Christianity often underestimate how important it is to the band’s music, and to the U2 phenomenon. The result has been a divide that’s unusual in pop culture. While secular listeners tend to think of U2’s religiosity as preachy window dressing, religious listeners see faith as central to the band’s identity. To some people, Bono’s lyrics are treacly platitudes, verging on nonsense; to others, they’re thoughtful, searching, and profound meditations on faith. . . .

As U2 grew up, they continued to talk about God without seeming to. On 1987’s “The Joshua Tree,” Bono combined sexiness with holiness, writing love songs sung to God, in the vein of the Song of Solomon. U2 has written a few straight-up love songs, like “All I Want Is You.” But, most of the time, when Bono uses the words “love,” “she,” “you,” or “baby”—which he does often—a listener can hear “God” instead.

Song lyrics are endlessly interpretable, of course—but, once you accept U2’s religiosity, previously opaque or anodyne songs turn out to be full of ideas and force. People sometimes sway to “With or Without You” at weddings, but the “you” isn’t a romantic partner (the line about seeing “the thorn twist in your side” should be a giveaway); the song is about how the intense demands of faith are both intolerable and invaluable (“I can’t live / With or without you”).

Interesting. And this makes me wonder about religion and art, and what it is that I personally find profound. I am attracted to religion in many ways: I like religious architecture and music, I like myths, I admire the call to take ethics seriously, and most of all I like the idea that there are deeper, more profound levels to life beyond the mundane, or underneath its distracting surface. But in practice I have never been able to tolerate church. On occasion Christian rituals move me, but more often they leave me cold. Theological disputation baffles me. I have no confidence in any sort of revelation, and I bristle at any suggestion that there are things I ought to believe because somebody says so. I find eternal life an absurdity, and I am too ambivalent about the notion of the sacred to participate in worship.

And yet because of my susceptibility to religious ideas and imagery, I repeatedly find myself drawn to art that is religious or quasi-religious. I cannot tolerate the bald assertion of doctrine, but I like the suggestion of it; sermons bore or offend me, but I like to get lost in the music of their echoes. So you'll find me in the back of the cathedral, admiring the carved angels; reading Tolkien; or listening to one of Palestrina's masses. Or to U2, whose music must have been appealing to the spiritual part of my mind without my really being aware of how or why.

The Names of Ancient Amazons

This is very cool! Ancient Greek vases often have inscriptions on them; for example the names of gods and heroes are sometimes written next to their pictures. Some inscriptions are, so far as anybody knew, gibberish -- that is, they mean nothing in Greek and aren't names we recognize. And some of those gibberish words are written next to pictures of Amazon warriors.

Two American classicists, Adrienne Mayor and J. Paul Getty Museum assistant curator David Saunders, got curious about apparent nonsense words written next to pictures of Amazons. Might they have meant something in a lost language? So they transcribed the names from 12 Athenian vases dating to between 550 and 450 BCE and rendered the Greek sounds as phonetic spellings.

They next submitted just the phonetic transcriptions without explanation to linguist John Colarusso of Canada's McMaster University in Hamilton, who is an expert on rare languages of the Caucasus. He translated the inscriptions into names—such as Princess, Don't Fail, and Hot Flanks—without knowing the details of the pictures of Amazons.

Colarusso thought the words were related to Abkhazian and Circassian, which are two of the North Caucasian languages. Now if Amazons existed (I think they did), they lived among the Scythians and Sarmatians of the Black Sea Steppes. Most scholars think that both the Scythians and Sarmatians spoke languages related to modern Persian, and Abkhazian and Circassian are not even in the same family. But surely the linguistic situation around the Black Sea was every bit as complex in classical times as it is today, and I don't see why some group of steppes nomads might not have spoken a North Caucasian tongue. The Scythian royal elite had Persian-sounding names, but the nation they ruled over might have included speakers of many languages, as the Mongol hordes included Turks, Manchus, and others. So perhaps the tribe from which Athens drew their famous Scythian police spoke a different, North Caucasian tongue. More:

On the Amazon vases, Colarusso found an archer named Battle-Cry, a horsewoman named Worthy of Armor, and others with names such as Hot Flanks that probably had erotic connotations. On one vase, a scene of two Amazons hunting with a dog appears with a Greek transliteration for the Abkhazian word meaning "set the dog loose." . . .

The names were probably nicknames or heroic appellations given to Amazons, rather than real family names. Even today, Colarusso says, speakers of modern-day languages in the Caucasus region often use public, descriptive nicknames rather than reveal their real names.

I think this is a wonderful piece of  work, and I hope it is confirmed by more research.

National Differences, Globalization, and Prejudice

Roger Cohen called in a real estate agent to help him sell a house he has owned for twenty years in a French village, only to receive an impassioned plea that the house should never be sold but passed down to his children and grandchildren. This inspired a column about how different France is from Britain or the U.S. -- and, really, who can imagine an estate agent in London or New York advising a client not to sell? France lags behind other countries in some economic indicators not because of the details of government policy, Cohen argues, but because of

a culture that views the prizing of efficiency as almost vulgar. Effectiveness had no place in my chat with the real estate agent. Effectiveness does not seem to enter into it as I contemplate French butchers bard a chicken or prepare a cut of beef with deft incisions. Effectiveness is not the rule in French shopping habits. It lies at a far remove from the long conversations between shopkeepers and clients. Efficiency for the French is a poor measure of the good life, just as making a buck from the sale of a house pales before the expression of feeling about what a house may represent. Whether this is good or bad hardly matters. It is often bad for the French economy. It is also a fact of life.

These distinctive cultural components of nations are probably underestimated as globalization and homogenization create the impression that the same standards or systems can be pursued everywhere. I used to be impatient with such thinking. The Russians need a czar! The Egyptians need a pharaoh! The French need to strike! No, I would think, the Russians and the Egyptians and the French are like everyone else, they want to be free, they want governance with the consent of the governed, they do not want their lives subjected to arbitrary rules, or to live less well than they could without czars and pharaohs and strikes. Now I feel I was wrong about that. Globalization equals adaptation to insurmountable differences as much as it equals change. Some things do not change, being the work of centuries.

Anyone who contemplates the state of the world after 25 years of American hegemony has to wonder along these lines. What have the democracies we tried to foist on the Arab world done for anyone? What has the creation of post-colonial nation states done for Africa? Why is a thug like Putin popular in Russia? Is the party state thriving in China because rule by unelected mandarins really suits China best?

For anyone with a liberal mindset, these are cutting questions. On the one hand we are supposed to celebrate the diversity of cultures, and we recognize the danger of forcing all people into one mold of social and political organization; on the other we believe that some things are just plain bad, including police states, great inequality and the oppression of women. How can support for human rights and the vote be reconciled with tolerance for other ways of being human? I (as always) am looking for some middle ground, for ways to encourage education for girls and free speech without veering into shock and awe followed by "nation building" in the style of Bush II. But I doubt all of my own thoughts about these questions. I can look around the world and draw up a list of countries I think are bad candidates for electoral democracy, but how much of that would be prejudice? Any skeptic could have told us that Iraqi democracy was a foolish notion, but wouldn't a skeptic have said the same thing about India, one of democracy's great success stories? Is it realistic to say that some countries are not fit to be democracies, or it is racist?

In terms of policy, this always leads me back to caution: nobody in Washington knows any more about these things than I do, so we should be very, very careful about re-arranging the world to suit ourselves.

Textiles from Roman Egypt

Amazing that these things survive. Above, tapestry of Actaeon and Artemis surrounded by red flowers and dancing figures. Woven from linen and dyed wool. Dated to the 4th century CE, probably made at Akhmim in Egypt. Purchased in 1924 from an antiquities dealer in Cairo and currently in the British Museum.

Woven fragment from Egypt, wool and linen, 3rd to 5th century CE. In the Met, which has more than a thousand textile fragments from Egypt dating to the 1-500 CE period. All the images below are also from the Met. An hour ago I would never have guessed that so much beautiful weaving survives from the Roman world.

Two tunics, wool, from Akhmim, Egypt, 5th century CE.

Detail of the tunic above, showing Dionysian imagery around the neck.

Fragment of a Cover, Egyptian, 5th century CE.

Fragment of a tunic, Egypt, 5th century CE.

Woven square, Egypt, 3rd to 4th century.

Fragmentary Coptic hanging, 5th century.

Tapestry fragment, probably from Egypt, 4th to 5th century.

Textile fragment with birds, Akhmim, Egypt, 3rd century.

No Progress in Fifteen Years

Ben Casselman:

The government’s release last week of income and poverty data for 2013 brought renewed attention to the apparent stagnation of the American middle class — not just since the financial crisis hit six years ago this month, but for much of the decade that preceded the crash. The report showed that the economic recovery has yet to translate into higher incomes for the typical American family. After adjusting for inflation, U.S. median household income is still 8 percent lower than it was before the recession, 9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999, and essentially unchanged since the end of the Reagan administration. “As a country,” New York magazine’s Annie Lowrey wrote Friday, “we peaked in the late 1990s.”

This reminds me of The Matrix, in which the AI remarks, “1999, the height of your civilization.”

The House of Augustus

The ruins of the House of Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome have re-opened after extensive renovations. But if you want to see these frescoes in person you'll have to book far in advance, since for now only three groups of twenty people are being let in each day.

Above are two news photos from the re-opening; below, a couple of old wikipedia pictures of the frescoes.

How Slippery is a Banana Peel?

This year's IgNobel in physics went to Kiyoshi Mabuchi and his colleagues for their study of whether banana peels really are as slippery as they are portrayed in cartoons:

To determine exactly how slippery a banana peel is, Mabuchi and colleagues sacrificed a total of 12 Cavendish bananas, the iconic yellow banana found on grocery shelves around the world. They placed the banana skins interior-side down on samples of linoleum (the scientists stepped on five different sections of each banana peel, for a total of 60 measurements). The linoleum was placed on a force transducer, a sensor that measures the force, weight and pressure applied to an object.

Then a volunteer stepped carefully onto the banana skin and pushed his foot forward. By measuring the horizontal and vertical forces, the scientists came up the coefficient of friction that results from a banana peel sliding along the floor.

It turns out that banana skins are, indeed, very slippery. The average coefficient of friction of a banana on linoleum was 0.066, and friction was only slightly higher for a banana on hardwood flooring (0.083), the researchers reported September 30, 2012, in Tribology Online. These frictional coefficients are very low, usually reserved for substances like Teflon (with a friction coefficient of 0.04), ice (around 0.05) or other well-lubricated surfaces. By comparison, rubber sliding on concrete has a frictional coefficient of 1.02.

I once stepped on a banana peel and my foot slipped right out from under me, nearly dropping me to the floor. My thought, of course, was "What to you know, it's true."

The Mysteries of Higher Education for Lower Class Kids

Another piece in the Times today about smart kids from relatively impoverished backgrounds who get into good colleges but then flounder:

In spite of our collective belief that education is the engine for climbing the socioeconomic ladder — the heart of the “American dream” myth — colleges now are more divided by wealth than ever. When lower-income students start college, they often struggle to finish for many reasons, but social isolation and alienation can be big factors. . . .

But once those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive on campus, it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are and where they come from, that cause the most trouble, challenging their very identity, comfort and right to be on that campus. The more elite the school, the wider that gap. I remember struggling with references to things I’d never heard of, from Homer to the Social Register. I couldn’t read The New York Times — not because the words were too hard, but because I didn’t have enough knowledge of the world to follow the articles. Hardest was the awareness that my own experiences were not only undervalued but often mocked, used to indicate when someone was stupid or low-class: No one at Barnard ate Velveeta or had ever butchered a deer.

I have seen enough writing just like this — some of it personal, some of it sociological, with statistics — to believe that there is something to it. There really are people who get into elite colleges but drop out because they don't feel like they belong. Or perhaps they don't fully commit to these strange places they find themselves, or get the right sort of parental support, so they more easily drop out when things get tough. And I have to say that this is something of a puzzle to me.

This may be partly because my spot on the autistic spectrum left me largely oblivious to the sort of social slights that loom large in these narratives. I did recognize that I was snobbed off a couple of times at Yale, but this had the effect of making me more defiant about my small town Missouri background, and I ended up pretending to be much more of a redneck than I actually was. While I was in New England, my southern accent got stronger. But I loved learning so much, and got such a charge about being with the smart people and the brilliant professors studying the toughest and most fascinating subjects, that I didn't really care.

But, anyway, one of the things that strikes me most strongly about these stories is the sense, among students from inner city or rural backgrounds, that everybody else has some advantage they lack. This is mostly an illusion. One of the great discoveries I made at Yale was that nobody knows what all the fancy words mean, or recognizes all the allusions to classical authors. People who went to Andover were often just as much in the dark as I was, and they didn't ask for explanations from the same reasons of embarrassment. Once I had figured that out, I started asking, to the great relief of everyone around me. To get the most out of college requires a certain thickness of skin; but to get the most out of anything requires thickness of skin. If you live in fear of looking like a fool or being mocked for your ignorance you will never learn very much or achieve anything of note.

So we get back to one of the main themes of my writing: life is hard for everybody. There is nobody who glides easily from success to success along some magic pathway paved by money and connections. When I read these accounts of poor kids who drop out when things get hard, I focus mainly on their belief that other people have it easier than they do. Now certainly other people have it easier in certain respects. That is a fact of life. But everybody's life has troubles, and some rich kids from Westchester have worse problems than many poor kids from Queens. Plus, there are advantages to being a streetwise black kid, especially in a social sense — for somebody with the guts to trade on it, a background in a tough neighborhood and knowledge of the music popular there can open a lot of doors.

Another thing about these stories is that the protagonists come across as very much alone. Their parents are generally no help, and because they feel isolated they don't talk to their classmates about their problems. Again and again I read these stories and want to say, If you didn't know what that meant, why didn't you ask somebody? If you felt snobbed off by some elitist jerk, why didn't you talk to some non-elitist jerk about it? Likely half your classmates didn't recognize that allusion to The Stranger either, and elitist jerks are just as nasty to ordinary middle class white kids as they are to misfits. (They can be nastiest of all to each other.) If people only opened up to each other more, they would realize that everyone else is also struggling, and that might help them put their own struggles in perspective.

But all of what I just wrote assumes that graduating from an elite college is a good thing. It certainly was for me; as I have said, I think the sort of education we offer in elite colleges is one of the very best things about our society. But that's just me. The general tone of these worrying essays is that poor kids should stay in college so they can get ahead. What if they don't want to get ahead? What if, instead, they want to stay someplace they feel comfortable, and hang out with the people they know? Is there something wrong with that? There are many serious people in America who think the worst thing about our world is our determination to get ahead no matter the cost to family, community, tradition, and the environment. Kentucky farmer/poet Wendell Berry serves as their patron saint; his acolyte, conservative blogger Rod Dreher, has recently thrown over his successful big city life and moved back to St. Francisville, Louisiana to raise his kids where he grew up.

Maybe some poor kids drop out of college, not because it is too hard for them, but because they decide they don't want to take that path in life. Is that a bad thing? Maybe our response to the statistics showing how much better rich kids do in college should be, not to railroad more poor kids up the meritocratic ladder, but to rethink meritocracy altogether. Maybe our focus should be on providing decent jobs for everyone willing to work hard, rather than throwing millions at the top stars and wondering why more of them don't come from poor families.

Pierre-Paul Proudhon

Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, about 1805 - 1806. Made as a study for a monumental painting for a criminal courtroom in the Palace of Justice in Paris, From the Getty.

Gordon Brown Defends Britain

I finally tracked down a transcript of the already famous speech that former British minister Gordon Brown gave last week on the eve of the independence vote in Scotland. Excerpts:

The vote tomorrow, the vote tomorrow, is not about whether Scotland is a nation; we are, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It’s not about whether there is a Scottish Parliament; we have it, after a referendum ten years ago. It’s not about whether there are increased powers; we are all agreed to increase the powers.

The vote tomorrow is whether you want to break and sever every link and I say let’s keep our UK pension, let’s keep our UK pound, let’s keep our UK passport, let’s keep our UK welfare state.

And let us, and let us tell the undecided, the waverers, those not sure how to vote, let us tell them what we have achieved together. We fought two world wars together. And there is not a cemetery in Europe that does not have Scots, English, Welsh, and Irish lying side-by-side. And when young men were injured in these wars, they didn’t look to each other and ask whether you were Scots or English, they came to each other’s aid because we were part of a common cause.

And we not, and we not only, we not only won these wars together, we built the peace together, we built the health service together, we built the welfare state together, we will build the future together.

And what we have built together by sacrificing and sharing, let no narrow nationalism split asunder ever.

And let us tell, and let us tell also those people who have been told unfairly by the nationalists that, if you vote No, you're a less than patriotic Scot. Tell them this is our Scotland. Tell them that Scotland does not belong to the SNP. Scotland does not belong to the Yes campaign. Scotland does not belong to any politician – Mr Salmon, Mr Swinney, me, or any other politician – Scotland belongs to all of us.

And let us, let us, let us tell the nationalists this is not their flag, their country, their culture, their streets. This is everyone’s flag, everyone’s country, everyone's culture and everyone’s street.

And let us tell, and let us tell the people of Scotland that we who vote No, love Scotland and love our country.

The Scotland of the Enlightenment and the Scottish inventors. The Scotland that was the author of the right to work here in Glasgow and the right to free healthcare. The Scotland that helped build the economic laws of this country, the welfare state of this country and contributed to the development of international aid.

And do you know, all these achievements and all the more achievements I can mention, these happened not outside the Union but inside the Union. They happen not in spite of the Union but because of the Union.

And none of us is any less a Scot as a result of it. . . .

And do you know, what sort of message would we in Scotland send out to the rest of the world, we the people who found a way of co-operation across borders, we who pioneered a partnership between nations, we who have stood as a beacon for solidarity and sharing? What kind of message does Scotland send to the world if tomorrow we said we’re going to give up on sharing, we’re going to smash our partnership, we’re going to abandon co-operation and conflict and we’re going to throw the idea of solidarity into the dust? This is not the Scotland I know and recognise and we must make sure it is not the Scotland we become.

Shieldmaidens: Were there Female Warriors in the Viking Age?

Were there female warriors in the Viking Age? Probably. But beyond that, everything about this questions is vexed, including how many women fought, under what circumstances, whether they had any special status, and so on. The reason the question is vexed is that the sources are not very good. Although I love the sagas, it has to be said that they are epics or novels, not histories, and while some of them are historical novels with good attention to detail, others include elements of outright fantasy. Under the right circumstances archaeology can tell us a lot about this question, but unfortunately in the part of the world where the Vikings lived the circumstances are mostly bad. (Figurine above was found at Hårby, in Denmark, in late 2012; it dates to around 800 CE. It probably depicts a Valkyrie.)

Archaeology

I was inspired to write about this question by all the attention paid on the internet to a 2011 study by Australian archaeologist Shane McLeod. Lots of people have asserted, based on his work, that half the Viking warriors in Britain were women, but that is not what he found. This is what he asserted:

Viking women accompanied their male partners to Britain in far greater numbers than had been previously thought, a study has shown. Almost half of all bodies in burial grounds researchers examined were those of women - with some carrying swords and shields.

The numbers show that not only were the Vikings accomplished fighters but also the marrying kind who made sure their men had company. . . .  examination of 14 burial mounds found that it was not just the menfolk who came over. Of the 14 studied, six were women and seven were men, with one set not indistinguishable. The researchers came to their conclusion by examining objects found in the graves and looking at isotopes from their bones to identify where they were born. The bones were also examined for signs of which gender they belonged to - previous studies had just assumed that because the body had a knife near it it was a man. One burial site at Repton Woods near Derby, for example, was identified as female even though the remains of three swords were recovered. ‘These results, six female Norse migrants and seven male, should caution against assuming that the great majority of Norse migrants were male, despite the other forms of evidence suggesting the contrary,' the report says. ‘This result of almost a fifty-fifty ratio of Norse female migrants to Norse males is particularly significant when some of the problems with sexing of skeletons are taken into account.’ 

So even if McLeod is right, which is disputed, his main focus was on the number of women among Viking settlers, not among Viking warriors, and he claimed to have found only one female skeleton equipped as a warrior.

Perhaps you are wondering why Shane McLeod went to press after studying only 13 identifiable skeletons, a ridiculously small sample. He did so because identifying the sex of human bones is actually not easy, especially when they have been buried for centuries, and almost all the bones from Viking graves are too badly decayed to be analyzed in this way. Unlike raccoons and lions, male and female humans have exactly the same bones. The only differences are in the size and thickness, especially of the pelvis and skull. These differences are statistical, and there are outliers; there exist women in the world today whose bones would almost certainly be typed as male, and men whose skeletons would be identified as female. If you bury the bones under a ton of dirt -- remember that a cubic yard of dirt weighs 2,000 to 3,000 pounds -- they warp. If the soil is acidic, they gradually dissolve, and sadly for Viking archaeologists, most of the places where Vikings lived and died have acidic soil. Therefore the skeletons that survive are far from ideal for these purposes, and most of them don't survive at all. (Note the poor preservation of these Viking skeletons from Poland.)

Archaeologists bitterly dispute the sexing of partially preserved skeletons. Those archaeologists who come across as sexist fools in internet articles based on McLeod's work, because they prefer to identify the sex of skeletons based on the artifacts buried with them, do so because they do not trust the identifications made by forensic anthropologists. In graduate school I read about some field archaeologists who distrusted their lab so much they sent in the skeletons of ten known people who had died within the past century, and their lab got the sex of only eight correct. I suspect that even under good archaeological conditions, the sexing of human skeletons is never more than 90 percent accurate, and as I said the conditions in the Viking world are rarely good.

So while I consider the occasional reports of well-armed Norse skeletons that seem to be female to be evidence of female Vikings, I don't consider it proof. The situation is quite different on the Sarmatian steppes, where there are dozens of well-preserved skeletons of female warriors.

The Sagas

Viking literature has many references to women fighting, in both the more historical works and the legendary material. However, much of that does not really describe warriors. Some of the internet pieces I have seen lately cite a scene from Erik the Red's Saga in which Erik's daughter Freydis picks up an ax and goes after five women who pissed her off. No doubt many Viking women engaged in fist and knife fights, and some of them grabbed a spear when men tried to invade their houses. But that isn't the same as being a warrior. One of the standard saga scenes depicts an attack by a gang of farmers against a real warrior, typically a man of noble family who has served in the retinue of the King of Norway. These are not fair fights, and with his training, sword and helmet the warrior can easily overmaster two or three farmers; it takes four or even five farm boys to bring him down. The question that interests me is not whether some women might have picked up a weapon in an emergency, but whether any were actually trained as warriors and served in elite war bands. Even in the grimly sexist Mediterranean women appear in ancient battles when they were fought in towns, hurling roofing tiles and other missiles down on attackers. But it would be pushing things to call them "warriors."

The most famous legendary account of shieldmaidens comes from Hervor's Saga, part of the mythic material that depicts battles between Goths and Huns in the fifth century. The saga was written down around 1200, 750 years after those events, so it has little historical value. Wikipedia summarizes it like this:

The saga deals with the sword Tyrfing and how it was forged and cursed by the Dwarves Dvalinn and Durin for king Svafrlami. Later, he lost it to the berserker Arngrim from Bolmsö who gave it to his son Angantyr. Angantyr died during a fight on Samsø against the Swedish hero Hjalmar, whose friend Orvar-Odd buried the cursed sword in a barrow together with Angantyr. From the barrow it was retrieved by Angantyr's daughter, the shieldmaiden Hervor who summoned her dead father to claim her inheritance. Then the saga continues with her and her son Heidrek, the king of Reidgotaland. Between his sons Angantyr and Hlod, there is a great battle about their father's heritage and Hlod is aided by the Huns. However, Hlod is defeated and killed. In the end, the saga relates that Angantyr, had the son Heidhrekr Ulfhamr who was king of Reidgotaland for a long time. Heidhrekr's daughter was Hildr and she had the son Halfdan the Valiant, who was the father of Ivar Vidfamne. After Ivar Vidfamne follows a list of Swedish kings, both real and semi-legendary, ending with Philip Halstensson.

Hervor was eulogized as:

More cheery in battle
than chatting to suitors
or taking the bench
at a bridal feast.

In these stories it is taken for granted that a woman can choose the path of the warrior, but then these stories also take it for granted that Odin walks among men, dragons sit on hoards of gold and a single hero can slay a thousand enemies. In fact the most common meaning of "shieldmaiden" in the ancient material is Valkyrie, the choosers of the slain who led the greatest warriors off to Valhalla after their deaths. Yet the regular appearance of armed mortal women in these stories is still suggestive to me.

Danish historian and mythographer Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150 to 1220) probably preserves more mentions of female Vikings than any other writer. Consider this, from his account of the Battle of Barvalla, around 750 CE:

Now out of the town of Sle, under the captains Hetha (Heid) and Wisna, with Hakon Cut-cheek came Tummi the Sailmaker. On these captains, who had the bodies of women, nature bestowed the souls of men. Webiorg was also inspired with the same spirit, and was attended by Bo (Bui) Bramason and Brat the Jute, thirsting for war...The same man witnesses that the maiden Weghbiorg (Webiorg) fought against the enemy and felled Soth the champion. While she was threatening to slay more champions, she was pierced through by an arrow from the bowstring of Thorkill, a native of Tellemark.

So there we have three female warriors, presented as historical figures. Yet they lived, says Saxo, 450 years before his own time, and his accounts of this period read more like Hervor's Saga than Tacitus or Livy. As you approach his own time and his sources get better, the shieldmaidens disappear. An interesting detail about Saxo's account is his notion that these women had men's souls. This is a literary trope we could find in a hundred histories, yet this is exactly the language used by some American Indians to describe people who switched gender roles. They weren't just men who wanted to live as women, they had women's souls. Or in some societies, two souls. I mention this because my impression is that people in traditional societies who chose to switch genders did so in a profound, lifelong way. Like the Albanian "sworn virgins," women who lived as men. In every way they took a male role, dressing like men, speaking like men, doing men's work, except that they never had sex because motherhood was forbidden to them. So I would suspect that if there were shieldmaidens they chose to live entirely as men -- in their dress, they way they cut their hair, and so on. They were not, I suspect, mothers, or if they became mothers they had to put their days as warriors behind them.

As you can see, though, the evidence for shieldmaidens is pretty sketchy. Your hard core, skeptical scholar just waves all these accounts away. Here is Judith Jesch, a historian who as written books on Viking women and is anything but sexist:

It is likely that there were occasions when women had to defend themselves and their families as best they could, with whatever weapons were to hand. But there is absolutely no hard evidence that women trained or served as regular warriors in the Viking Age. Valkyries were an object of the imagination, creatures of fantasy rooted in the experience of male warriors. War was certainly a part of Viking life, but women warriors must be classed as Viking legend.

Actually I agree: shieldmaidens are Viking legend. But so is Vinland, which turned out to be Newfoundland, and Midgard, which is Constantinople, and the sunstone, which is a sort of feldspar you can really use to navigate in cloudy weather, and all sorts of other things that have turned out to be rooted in fact. My feeling is that the number of female warriors in Viking stories, and the number of armed skeletons identified as female, suggests that there was some reality behind this particular legend. But I have to admit that I don't really know. (Above, female grave from Bogovej in Denmark)

UPDATE 9/10/2017

See here for an account of a well-preserved Viking female warrior from Birka in Sweden, dated to between 800 and 1000 CE, whose sex was confirmed by DNA testing.

Flakes and Skeptics in the Sixth Grade

So my son's sixth-grade reading teacher has assigned them all "unexplained phenomena" to investigate; Ben got the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident. On the one hand, the woman seems to be a flake, and I hate to think what she might be saying to them in class. On the other, this is actually a cool assignment for middle school kids: take an incident with a defined body of original data -- in Ben's case, the testimony of five witnesses and an audiotape recording their radio conversation with the base while they investigated the mysterious lights, plus various after the fact explanations -- and try to sort out what really happened. Ben and I have been having fun sorting through this. He started from the supposition since the source was "the military" the information ought to be good, but in fact the sources are five different servicemen and officers who reported quite different things.

I am certainly enjoying this more than helping with long division.

If I taught history to middle or high school students I think I might try an assignment like this, taking an event like a disputed police shooting and working through all the evidence, with the idea of showing how hard it can be to establish even the basic facts about anything.

Mythological Paper Cuts by Morgana Wallace

More here.