Sexual Assault on Campus, the Ongoing Saga

At Yale, the latest blow-up in the ongoing war over sexual assault on campus and what universities can do about it. NY Times:

In a 2018 disciplinary hearing at Yale University, Saifullah Khan listened as a woman accused him of raping her after a Halloween party.

The woman, who had graduated, gave a statement by teleconference to a university panel, but Mr. Khan and his lawyer were not allowed in the room with the panel. Nor could his lawyer, under the rules of the hearing, cross-examine her.

Instead, they were cloistered in a separate room, as her testimony piped in by speakerphone. He felt, he said, “there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my situation.” As he feared, Yale expelled him.

Mr. Khan’s criminal trial, months earlier, was markedly different. His lawyer cross-examined the woman in ways that horrified women’s rights advocates: How were you dressed? How much did you drink? Did you send flirty texts? And unlike the Yale hearing, the prosecutors had to prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The difference between those two hearings — in process and outcome — led Mr. Khan to make an unusual move: He sued his accuser for defamation for statements she had made during the Yale hearing. That lawsuit, filed in 2019, is challenging the way universities across the country have adjudicated such sexual assault hearings.

It is not some patriarchal plot that makes rape cases difficult to try. It is a very old principle of Common Law, originating in the Statute of Treasons enacted under Edward III, that no one can be convicted of a felony on the basis of one witness's unsubstantiated testimony. Since in most rape cases there is only one witness, the victim, the desire to get justice for rape victims runs smack against one of the pillars of legal fairness in our system. 

One of the compromises we make in America is to allow prosecutions to proceed based only on the victim's testimony, but only if the victim submits to wide-ranging cross-examination that will establish to the jury (on this theory) whether the witness is credible. Of course this is a sham, in that juries are no better than anyone else at recognizing who is lying. As a basic matter of epistemology it is, I think, all but impossible for us to ever really know what happened in case where the only evidence is the testimony of two witnesses who disagree. But that is how we do it.

Of course university disciplinary hearings are not criminal trials but civil proceedings, so they are not bound by the standards of evidence in the criminal law. Among other things, they do not allow the cross-examination of witnesses. But this introduced another twist into the Yale case. It is another old matter of common law that you cannot file a suit for defamation because of testimony given under oath in a trial; perjury is a criminal matter that only the state can prosecute. But since the Yale hearing was not a trial, well:

Normally, such a lawsuit would not have much of a chance. In Connecticut and other states, witnesses in such “quasi-judicial” hearings carry absolute immunity against defamation lawsuits.

But the Connecticut Supreme Court in June gave Mr. Khan’s suit the greenlight to proceed. It ruled that the Yale hearing was not quasi-judicial because it lacked due process, including the ability to cross-examine witnesses.

“For absolute immunity to apply under Connecticut law,” the justices wrote, “fundamental fairness requires meaningful cross-examination in proceedings like the one at issue.”

Since cross-examination was not allowed, said the court, the Yale hearing was not even “quasi judicial” and thus merits no real respect from the law.

If you want the details of the original incident, the Yale Daily News has them here. This story also mentions that Khan is suing the university for $110 million and the grounds that he was expelled without being allowed to properly defend himself against the rape accusation. This is what his lawyer said after he was acquitted in his criminal trial:

We’re grateful to six courageous jurors who were able to understand that campus life isn’t the real world. Kids experiment with identity and sexuality. When an experiment goes awry, it’s not a crime.

Here again we run into the problem that university disciplinary hearings for sexual assault feel to the people involved like trials. The victim is seeking justice, the accused is trying to defend his life and reputation. But because they are not trials, they are not protected by any of the sacred aura that surrounds actual criminal courtrooms. Hence, at least in Connecticut, the witnesses can be sued for defamation. According to the Times story, university lawyers across the country are now trying to figure out if witnesses in their Title IX proceedings might be subject to defamation lawsuits and what they might do about it.

The root cause of this mess is having universities carry out what are in effect trials for rape. On the one hand this seems to be required by Title IX, the federal law that guarantees women equal access to education; it's hard to get an education if you're constantly worried about getting raped, and it would be bizarre for universities to sanction people for, say, verbal harassment while throwing up their hands at actual sexual assault. On the other hand, by holding what look and feel like rape trials in a setting outside a proper courtroom we enter into a netherworld where nobody seems to know what rules actually apply and what justice actually looks like.

We are nowhere near to resolving any of this.

Los Alamos Spying

Still working my way through American Prometheus, a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. The Manhattan Project stirred up a lot of debate about security, and I find reading these chapters very frustrating. The US Army and the FBI devoted quite a lot of effort to policing the scientists involved in the project, wiretapping phones (illegally), installing microphones in people's offices (illegally), reading everyone's mail, and so on. But they did not find any of the four (at least) Soviet agents working at Los Alamos. (The VENONA decrypts suggest that there was at least one more, but that person has never been identified.) The known spies were:

Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who had emigrated to Britain, joined the British atomic program, and then was sent to Los Alamos with a whole batch of British physicists;

Theodore Hall, a New York Jewish physics student who joined the program at the age of 18;

David Greenglass, an army machinist; 

Oscar Seborer, an electrical engineer from New York.

None of the actual spies was ever identified during the war as a particular risk or given any special attention.

One of the reasons that the actual spies were not identified during the war was that the Army and FBI devoted a huge part of their energy to the Bay Area leftists who came into the program with Oppenheimer, and indeed to Oppenheimer himself. Oppenheimer kept trying to tell the Army that these men may have been communists but they were loyal Americans, but the FBI and some Army counterintelligence agents continued to believe throughout the war that intellectual leftists from Berkeley were the biggest security threat. So they spent their time doing things like bugging the phone of Oppenheimer's old girlfriend Jean Tatlock, flagged as a "likely Comintern agent," while the real spies worked right under their noses. It makes for depressing reading.

Tom Friedman in Kyiv

In the NY Times:

Nearly every Ukrainian I spoke to in Kyiv was at once exhausted by the war and passionately determined to recover every inch of their Russian-occupied territory — but no one had clear answers about the road ahead, the painful trade-offs that await, only certainty that defeat would mean an end to Ukraine’s democratic dream and a smashing of the post-World War II era that had produced a Europe more whole and free than ever before in its history.

What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil. He has trumped up any number of shifting justifications — one day it was removing a Nazi regime in power in Kyiv, the next it was preventing NATO expansion, the next it was fending off a Western cultural invasion of Russia — for what ultimately was a personal flight of fancy. . . .

Putin lately has stopped even bothering to justify the war — maybe because even he is too embarrassed to utter aloud the nihilism that his actions scream: If I can’t have Ukraine, I’ll make sure Ukrainians can’t have it, either.

“This is not a war in which the aggressor has some vision, some outline of the future. Rather, on the contrary, for them, everything is black, formless, and the only thing that matters is force,” Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, remarked on a panel we did together at a conference in Kyiv last weekend.

Being in the city has been clarifying for me in three regards. I understand even better just how sick and disruptive this Russian invasion is. I understand even better just how hard, maybe even impossible, it will be for Ukrainians to evict Putin’s army from every inch of their soil.

Perhaps most of all, I understand even better something that the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed almost 30 years ago: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

Most Americans don’t know a lot about Ukraine, but I say this without any hyperbole: Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West, for better or for worse depending on the war’s outcome. Its integration into the European Union and NATO someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Ukraine is a country with impressive human capital, agricultural resources and natural resources — “hands, brains and grains,” as Western investors in Kyiv like to say. Its full-fledged integration into Europe’s democratic security and economic architecture would be felt in Moscow and Beijing.

There have been, in my adult lifetime, two wars that I have supported with absolute enthusiasm and determination. The first was the first Gulf war, reversing Sadam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait, and the second is the war in Ukraine. To me the point in both cases in the same: I do not wish to live in a world where evil dictators can wreck nations and lives on a whim while the rest of the world looks away. The world should come together to stop that. That much of the world does not see the adhorrent evil of what Putin is doing disgusts me, and the cautious hedgers who are looking to limit the conflict and find some kind of compromise make me mad. Yes, it will probably end in some kind of negotiated settlement, but that is no excuse to weaken Ukraine now.

What is at stake is this: can humans come together to build a better world, or not? If we cannot fight the most obvious, horrific, blatant, soulless evil, what chance to do we have of achieving anytihng?

September Garden

Links 15 September 2023

Sketch of a Swallow, Thebes, Egypt, 1479-1458 BC

Awesome digital recreation of Tenochtitlan before the Spanish conquest. The most baffling change to me is still the disappearance of Lake Texcoco, which was mostly achieved before 1800.

Spectacular hoard of early medieval gold found in Norway.

Lithium Americas reports that the Lithium deposits in the McDermitt Caldera, on the Oregon-Nevada border, are much larger and richer than previously thought and may be the largest in the world. GM recently invested $650 million in Lithium Americas to insure preferential access to this supply. (The Verge, Yahoo, technical paper)

There's No Such Thing as a Tree: "treeness" has evolved many, many times from plants of diverse kinds.

Kevin Drum on why he opposes cash reparations for black Americans.

Ted Gioia on pop music getting sadder. Another facet of the weirdly depressed mood in America.

Bayard Rustin's very interesting 1965 essay, "From Protest to Politics," projecting a new future for the Civil Rights movement, from which this: "There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts."

When the statue of Soviety secret policeman Felix Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters in Moscow was taken down in 1991, it seemed like a sign of a free future. It was just replaced.

At the NY Times, Thomas Edsall argues that one reason for the ongoing troubles of second-tier cities (St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland) is the collapse of local business elites, hollowed out by the concentration of banks and corporate headquarters in the biggest metro areas. I have read similar complaints about France, where many regional firms have been consolidated into big companies run from Paris.

Interesting article at Reason on "pirate preservationists," the people who (often illegally) keep their own copies of music or video the makers wish to withdraw or destroy. Even stuff like early Dr. Who episodes and the CBS radio broadcast from Normandy on D-Day only survive in illegal copies.

Bronze canon found in the sea off Sweden yielded a radiocarbon date of 635 +/- 40, which works out to 1285 to 1399 AD, midpoint around 1345, making it the oldest European shipboard canon. The scientists who studied it say it was cast all wrong, which they say means nobody really knew how to cast canons yet.

Via Tyler Cowen, a claim that 80% of the AI lovers created so far have been made by women. The author compares creating AI boyfriends to fan fiction, which is also female dominated.

Video of UFOs that were shown in hearings held by the Mexican Congress: X, X, Youtube. Note that they do not originate with the government, but with outside witnesses. If you think that is really an alien body, please seek professional psychiatric help.

Artifacts found on the "Pilgrimage Road" from Egypt to Mecca appear to have been used by professional sorcerers around 400 years ago.

Australia declares war on cats, again (NY Times, ABC)

NY Times feature on the smugglers who help people through the Darien Gap, the only land route from South America to el Norte. The flow of people hasn't been stopped because local officials are getting a cut of the profits, which amounts to millions of dollars. On the one hand, this is destabilizing our politics, but on the other, people are so desperate to get to the US that this fuels an industry big enough to corrupt governments in Colombia and Panama. How bad can it be here?

Two impressive gold torcs found in Spain.

This week's random past post is Kowloon Walled City.

Bonkers London Times obituary of Major Iain Grahame, British colonial eccentric of the old school.

Ukraine Links

Two minute video on X showing the burned landscape around Klishchiivka.

Ukraine retakes the Bokyo natural gas platforms off Crimea. Video on X, and at YouTube. Russia's Black Sea Fleet has been effectively neutralized for anything but launching long-range missiles.

On the night of September 13 to 14, Ukraine carried out an attack at Yevpatioria in Crimea; several explosions were videotaped by locals. Ukraine claims that the target was an S-400 SAM system, and that the attack was achieved by first using drones to knock out the battery's radars and then Ukrainian Neptune missiles to hit the launchers; Ukraine claims the equipment destroyed was worth $1.2 billion. (UPravda, X, Kyiv Independent) Military experts see a concerted plan to strip Crimea of air defenses so that its network of bases and logistics hubs can be eviscerated by drones and missiles.

Article arguing that Ukraine is waging a "deep battle" with attacks on rear areas designed to hamper Russian logistics and break their morale, and that this may lead to success at the front.

Video posted by a Russian reserve squad stationed near Bakhmut reveals that none of them are in standard Russian uniforms and that they are equipped with a hodgepodge of weapons and gear, some fifty years old.

Thread on X about a new Russian EW system used to jam drones.

What is Conservatism?

Via Tyler Cowen, a weird study that intended to investigate whether large language model AIs could "replicate the diversity of human thought." They tried to train various runs with an AI as either conservative or liberal, and got the AI to identify as such. However, when they analyzed the answers, they found little difference. In particular, they found that "both self-reported ‘GPT conservatives’ and ‘GPT liberals’ showed rightleaning moral foundations."

The authors think this shows a weakness with AI, but I agree with Cowen that this actually shows a weakness in the human investigators. Cowen:

In my view many “liberals” (not my preferred term) actually have pretty conservative moral foundations in the Jon Haidt sense, namely, in spite of what they may say the liberals prioritize “in-group, authority, and purity,” rather than worrying so much about actual “harm and fairness.” Just like so many conservatives.

I would start from a somewhat different place, and ask what it means to be on the Left. If your model is, say, hippies, or the original Romantics with their free-love circles and revolutionary fantasies, then it might seem that the Left is all about rejecting social conformity and regimented labor in favor of a wilder and freer state of being. But if your model is, say, V.I. Lenin, well, he hired American efficiency experts to bring greater discipline to Soviet factories.

It is famously true these days that in America, middle clas liberals – in this sense, people on the moderate left – are the group most likely to get married, stay married, have children in wedlock, work in big institutions, and generally model a life of middle class discipline. It is liberals who say, "trust the science" and conservatives who quote Foucault on networks of power and knowledge. Ever since the Reagan/Thatcher anti-government revolution liberals have been more focused on preserving the government as it is, while many conservatives demand radical reform. Over the past 30 years there have been at least as many "insurrectionists" on the right as on the left. 

So who is conservative? It all depends, I would say, on what issues you care about. There is a very important sense in which all middle class Americans with instutional jobs are profoundly conservative, whatever party they support.

Right now one of the biggest issues on the American left is opposition to what they consider Fascism, that is, a violent, insurrectionary, burn-it-down rightism. I agree that this is an important fight, but I do not think the Proud Boys are particularly conservative, and Donal Trump is at the least a very strange sort of conservative leader. 

Right now the biggest hot-button issues have to do with sexuality and identity, but if you ask me that is mainly a distraction. Personally I have been pro-gay marriage and gay acceptance since I was old enough to have political ideas, but I think that like many members of my class I actually have pretty conservative ideas about sexuality. And having raised five teenagers, I am extremely dubious about letting anyone under 18 make important decisions about their future lives.

Some of you may be thinking that it is liberals or progressives who stand up for working people, and that is often true; I have occasionally thought of imposing maximum salaries on CEOs, expressed in terms like "no more than ten times the median corporate salary," and I doubt many conservatives would sign on to that. But it is liberals who are working to throw all the coal miners and oil field roustabouts out of work; less than fifty years ago American liberals were putting huge energy into keeping coal mining jobs in depressed areas, just like German socialists still do today.

I consider myself a moderate on immigration issues, in that while I personally favor lots of immigration on the grounds that it makes this a more exciting, vibrant, and productive country, I think every nation absolutely has the right to determine how many and what type of immigrants to receive. I do not think any nation has an obligation to admit so many refugees that this profoundly changes its culture and politics. These days you can hear Trumpist Republicans saying "Democrats believe in open borders!" but I certainly don't, and the only people I know who do are actually libertarians. The flood of people trying to reach America and Europe is just a very hard problem, and I don't claim to know how to solve it.

I guess what I am saying is that I do not think our contemporary politics map very well onto any deep, long-term definitions of "conservative," "liberal," or "progressive." It does not surprise me at all that an AI trained on the contemporary internet has trouble sorting our political and social factions into conservative and liberal; I certainly do.

Bots and Readers

One of the more interesting things about Musk's purchase of Twitter was the question of how many Twitter accounts are run by actual people and how many are bots. At one point Musk tried to get out of the deal by saying he had been lied to about how many actual users Twittter has. This didn't work, and the question of how many Twitter (now X) accounts are bots remains open. One of the military guys I follow recently complained that when he posted something snarky about North Korea he got deluged with protests from more than 500 accounts, none with more than five followers, most of which sent him exactly the same message.

I mention this because the bots seem to be coming to this blog in a big way. Last year I got about 1,000 page views a day, varying between 500 and 2,500, divided about evenly between visits to the main page and visits to individual posts. Google claims to have a system that recognizes bots and excludes them from those counts, but I always assumed that some percentage of those visits were bots; I mean, I've only heard from about 30 of you. This year the bots seem to have gained the upper hand. As you can see, the number of "visitors" has soared, and the blog set a record yesterday with 24,000 logged page views.

As to what the bots are doing here, I have no idea. Randomly searching for addresses and the like? Anybody have another guess?

Leonora Carrington's Tarot

Images from the Tarot Deck created by Surrealist painter and sculptor Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Carrington was much influenced by Jungian psychology, so it makes sense that she would have been interested in the Tarot. 

There are a ton of images of these online right now because the whole deck was recently published in book form. Only two of the cards have been securely dated, to 1954 and 1955, but it seems that all were made in the 1950s.

Carrington often used Tarot cards to "access her subconscious" and she put Tarot images in many of her paintings, especially the Hanged Man, who appeares in at least four.

More on Carrington: paintings, sculpture, and some thoughts on her lifelong rebellion against "conformism."

Ukrainian Attack in Sevastopol, and a Status Update on the War

On Sunday, Ukrainian special forces occupied the Bokyo natural gas platforms off Crimea, among other things removing radars that the Russians were using to track ship movements in the Black Sea. (Video on X, and at YouTube). 

Last night Ukraine launched a major attack on the Sevmorzavod shipyard in Sevastopol, badly damaging a large landing ship and a diesel-electric Kilo-class submarine and setting buildings on the shore on fire. The Russians reported that ten cruise missilies and three naval drones were used, and that they destroyed all the drones and shot down seven cruise missiles. Which might even be true, but just emphasizes the deadliness of modern cruise missiles. Shooting down 70 percent isn't good enough.

This may explain what the attack on the gas platforms was all about: creating a temporary hole in the Russians' radar network to enable this attack.

Still from a bystander video in Sevastopol

It's another small victory that will boost Ukrainian morale and another blow to Russia's war machine. Ukraine has made other clever attacks on Russian military bases in recent months, destroying a couple of strategic bombers and four large transport planes, besides making showy drone attacks on Moscow. If Russians thought they would be safe at home during this war, as they were when they fought in Afghanistan, Ukraine is showing them otherwise.

But none of this is likely to make any difference. The war has been in a grim, grinding stage for months, both sides taking heavy losses as the front line moves a little bit here and there. Despite its awful losses Russia remains determined to fight it out. Their diplomatic position has not changed in the slightest in over a year: they demand all of four Ukrainian states, including Kherson City and other areas they do not occupy, and for Ukraine to divest itself of all weaponry capable of attacking Russia (aircraft, helicopters, missiles, etc.) This is not a basis for negotiations. Russia has found ways around the western sanctions that did definitely hurt its armaments production for a while, and I am now reading that production of missiles and artillery shells is higher than before the war. They are trying to raise 500,000 more troops. They are obviously still planning on a long war, and there is no sign of any real opposition within Russia.

Most of the military attention lately has been focused on this small area in Zaporizhia. Here Ukraine has advanced about 10 km since the offensive started in June, overruning the first line of Russian defenses and breaching the main line – the Surovikin Line – in at least one place. The fighting has been bitter and both sides have thrown in reserves; Russia committed the 76th Airborne Division, which they had been using as an attack force, to shore up their defenses here. If you're wondering why the front line is all straight lines and right angles its because this is agricultural country and all the defenses are in tree lines between the large, rectangular fields.

Now, this is a tiny advance; see this bigger map for scale. Some pro-Ukraine military types think it is nonetheless important. For one thing, Ukraine has breached the immense minefields that halted their June-July attempts at an armored breakthrough, and the thinking is that it might get easier moving forward. But of course Russia is continuing to build more defenses farther back, and opinions differ as to whether they will be formidable.

More important to some observers is that Ukraine has massed enough artillery and HIMARS missiles here to maintain a significant advantage, and they are inflicting serious damage on Russian material and men. To use an analogy from World War I, which seems appropriate, the Ukrainians are trying a plan like the initial German scheme at Verdun, attacking hard enough to force the Russians to keep bringing more men and weapons within range of their guns.

I noted here recently that US military intelligence has revised their estimate and now think Ukraine could make some kind of major breakthrough in this offensive, so they at least are impressed by what is happening here. I'm having trouble seeing it. It's great to destroy a lot of Russian artillery and tanks but they're not on the verge of running out, and it seems that as long as they have men to put in the trenches they can make this a bitter field by field slog.

Many people think Putin is betting that he can outlast Ukraine and its western backers, that western nations will get tired of providing aid and Ukrainians will get sick of war. There isn't much sign that this is happening yet, so I fear we are in for years of war.

Evan Mawarire on Freedom

Evan Mawarire is a Zimbabwean pastor and opponent of the Mugabe government:

When you are pressed hard by a dictator, you don't sit down. You stand up! You keep speaking, you keep rising, because the freedom we ask for is not what they give us, but what is inside us. . . .

We are freedom in every moment that we refuse to be silenced. We are freedom every time we refuse for the handcuffs convince us that we have lost hope. We are freedom every time we are arrested and we leave the jails and the courts and go right back to demanding the very thing that they arrested us for.

The Zbruch Idol

In 1848, the good people of the then-Polish village of  Liczkowce – now Lychkivtsi, Ukraine – were gazing sadly into their local river, nearly dried up because of a severe drought, when they saw that the muddy riverbed was staring back at them. 

They attached ropes to the thing that was staring at them and pulled out what is now called in English the Zbruch Idol, but sometimes in Polish the Światowid ze Zbrucza, the Zbruch Worldseer. It now resides at the archaeological museum in Krakow.

This four-sided pillar stands 8.8 feet (2.67 meters) in height and may once have been taller, since the bottom looks broken off. On each side there are three tiers; the lowest is 26 inches (67 centimeters), the middle tier is 16 inches (40 centimeters) and the top tier measures 66 inches (167 centimeters). 

The general idea is that this is a Slavic pagan idol carved in before 700 AD that was then discarded when the area was Christianized between 800 and 1000.

The idol ended up in the hands of a local landowner and antiquary called Count Mieczysław Potocki, who presented a paper about it to the Kraków Scientific Society in 1850. 

Potocki's theory, which is still one of the main theories about this object, is that it represents the Slavic god Svetovic  (Svantovic, Svetovit) who was the god of war but also of lots of other things and was often depicted with four faces. (As in this 18th-century illustration)

(The two things Svetovic was most commonly associated with were war and abundance, which makes you wonder about the ancient Slavs. Among the classical Greeks and Romans peace was the mother of abundance, as in this famous ancient statue. But maybe the ancient Slavs spoke, not of peace and plenty, but war and plenty.)

The other main theory about the idol is that it represents, not one god, but four. The best evidence for this view is that two of the personas depicted seem to be women. You might think that was a slam dunk case, but really Svetovic is such a protean figure, with so many guises, that appearing in drag would not be surprising. 

That's not a joke; the Irish Lug, one of the closest parallels, really does dress in women's clothes in some of the old stories, and changing sex is routine for Hindu deities. Deities also have a disconcerting habit of splitting: into three, into four, into male and female twins, the resulting beings having their own names and cults but remaining somehow connected. And that is a lesson against applying naive ideas about identity to ancient gods. Smart people then were as smart as smart people now, and some of them thought that imagining the gods as big people with distinct personalities was pretty silly. It is in the Hindu and Irish stories that you can most clearly see the "gods" as masks over a deeper and more profound reality, but I believe that idea was everywhere in the ancient world, so I wonder if the person responsible for this idol might have laughed at the question of whether it depicted one deity or four.

Oppenheimer on Discipline

From a letter to his younger brother, written in 1932:

You put a hard question on the virtue of discipline. What you say is true: I do value it—and I think that you do too—more than for its earthly fruit, proficiency. I think that one can give only a metaphysical ground for this evaluation; but the variety of metaphysics which gave an answer to your question has been very great, the metaphysics themselves very disparate: the bhagavad gita, Ecclesiastes, the Stoa, the beginning of the Laws, Hugo of St Victor, St Thomas, John of the Cross, Spinoza. This very great disparity suggests that the fact that discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror—But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

Levan Songulashvili

Interesting Georgian artist, born 1991, now divides his time between Tbilisi and New York. All of this comes from his web site. Above is the work that has flown around the Internet, part of a series titled Idem et Idem. Has a real 1890s vibe.

The artist in his studio.

More of the Idem et Idem series

A lithograph titled Stone Nun.

From the Styx series.

Photo from an installation titled Triptychos.

Jellyfish.

And one from a series titled Stoicheion., a Greek word that refers to letters of the alphabet and symbols in general but also has the meaning of "fundamentals" or "first things."

The Ikom Monoliths

In the Cross River State of Nigeria, among a people now called the Ejagham, are 295 stone monoliths between 1 and 2 meters tall. They are carved of a basalt that is variously described as "hard" or "moderately hard," and while they resemble each other, each is unique. 

Most are arranged in circles, one circle to a village, and these circles are considered spiritually important places; in a book published in 1926, a colonial administrator described the "enormous veneration" accorded to the monliths. 

And that, right there, exhausts all certain knowledge about them.

These are not obscure; there are thousands of photographs online, and outsiders have been asking local people about them and writing down what they said for more than a century. That just hasn't led to much certain information, or even agreement about probabilities.

While the stones are quite important to the people in these villages, the locals do not agree on what they represent. "Oral traditions," the British Museum tells us,

associate numerous meanings with the stones. For example, stone circles are used as places of sacrifice and community meeting places. They were created as memorials of departed heroes or beloved family members and represent powerful ancestral spirits to whom offerings are still made. In addition local community leaders also ascribed religious significance of the stones whereby particular stone are dedicated to the god of harvest, the god of fertility and the god of war.

Via the magic of JSTOR – don't we live in an age of wonders? –I found an interesting 2015 paper by Sandy Onor, a Nigerian historian, published in the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, which notes that in one village the people say the monoliths represent past chiefs and can tell you the name of each chief.

Incidentally the most common word for these in Ejagham is Akwasnshi, which means "dead people in the ground." But there is no evidence that they are grave markers.

Just as with the Pictish symbol stones in Scotland, there is a strong suspicion that the various shapes carved on the stones are symbols, possibly a form of "symbolic communiciation," i.e., writing. But, if so, nobody has any idea what they mean.

How old are they? Nobody knows. The main point of the Nigerian paper I just mentioned was to try to date them by comparing the various possible methods and seeing if they could be lined up. The only archaeology the author could find was a single study that involved digging one trench, finding one hearth, and getting one radiocarbon date, which came out around 200 AD. Which is fine, so far as it goes, but there isn't any particular reason to think that hearth was associated with these stones, I mean, people often set up their stones in places that have long been considered spiritually potent. (e.g., Stonehenge)

Since people in one of the villages insist that their stones represent chiefs, he tried using lists of rulers as a chronology, using a figure of 13 +/- 5 years for the average reign that he says is widely used in west Africa. That got him to around 1500 to 1600 AD.

Then he tried using genealogies, which are particularly good for the Ejagham since they count by both mothers and fathers, giving two generation counts for each person. Those get you back to around 1800, and, he says, there is other evidence that the Ejagham people migrated to the Cross River region between 1740 and 1820. (The intense period of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1700s badly shook up west Africa, leading to many migrations.)

So, you know, good luck sorting that out. One possibility, which nobody I have found seems to have considered, would be that the Ejagham didn't make these at all, but found them in place when they came to this region. Certainly nobody ever observed an Ejagham man making one of these, so their manufacture had ceased by 1900.

In many of the online photographs, the stones are painted; it took me hours to find a reference explaining that this is done for the annual yam festival.

Like this.

Anyway, what a fascinating thing, a collection of marvelous stone statues still venerated, but by people who may not have made them and do not agree with each other about how old they are, what they represent, or what the symbols on them mean.