Where is the vanguard?

If there is something that stands out in the present theatrical season in London it is the huge proportion of classical plays and successes that have been running for decades which are being staged or re-staged.

To mention but a few: Pygmalion, Journey’s End (based on a classic book first published in 1928), The Wizard of Oz, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, Chicago, Legally Blonde - the Musical, Mamma Mia, Billy Eliot - the Musical and Priscilla - Queen of the Desert as well as shows based on the memory of Freddie Mercury’s Queen (We will Rock You) or Michael Jackson’s shows. Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; Emperor and Galilean – an Ibsen play from 1873, and several Shakespeare plays add to the menu of sure-fire hits on offer.

Where are the experimental works, the risks, the provocation, the novelty?

We seem to be left with War Horse, a play first performed on Broadway and which was the theme of a Stephen Spielberg movie. Pardon my scepticism.

It seems that photography and art galleries (the new hobbies of the British jeunesse dorée) are more promising this season. I’m waiting to finish my course to have time to check for  myself.

London, July/August, 2011

ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN

Paulo Renato was my brother-in-law (the husband of my sister). I've allways admired and loved him for his good character, his intelligence and the important work he did for the improvement of education in Brazil. I quote below the words of Graham Howells, my husband, on the occasion of Paulo's death.

From  http://graham-graysworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html

I’m going back to John Donne to reflect on the sudden death recently of a man for whom I had greatest respect.  When I heard the shocking news Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 10 came to mind (I’ve included a modern ‘translation’ after it).

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die

Do not be proud, Death, even though some people have called you powerful and fearsome, because you are neither of those things. Because, poor Death, the people you think you kill do not die, nor can you kill me.  Since we take great pleasure in rest and sleep, which are imitations of you, then we shall have even more pleasure from you yourself, and our best men go to you before anyone else, to enjoy peace for their bodies and the delivery of their souls [to God].  You are a slave to destiny, to fortune, to kings and to desperate men and live with poison, war and sickness.  And if opium or magic can make us sleep as well or better than your actions, why do you swell with pride?  After a brief period of sleep we shall wake up to enjoy eternal life where there will be no more death and Death, you will die.

 A few days ago we lost a very good man.  Paulo Renato Souza, Brazil’s Minister of Education for eight years during the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, died of a heart attack at the appallingly early age of 65. I was not a close friend of Paulo but we were friendly enough to have sailed together in his boat, which I later sold for him as he had rather more important things to do, trying to reform and modernise the educational system of a country the size of half a continent where social conditions range from the wealthiest of suburbs to riverside communities reachable only by boat, via some of the largest and most violent slums in the world. The technical details of his innovations, the most important of which involved objective assessment of educational attainment both within Brazil and measured against other countries through the PISA system, together with schemes for extending access to schooling, providing books to the furthest outposts of the country and encouraging distance learning, are matters of official record. What the record does not show is the manner in which the man approached the immense problems put before him, a manner I can only describe as ‘graceful toughness’.

Looking objectively at Mediterranean cultures such as that of Brazil, the outsider is struck by the savage selfishness of their citizens when personal privileges are questioned.  Shaking up the complacent lives of teachers and educational bureaucracies is a short route to attracting vituperative criticism (we are seeing a version of it in Britain today, and this is a society where people are used to making personal sacrifice for the general good), yet Paulo Renato rode over these petty attacks with the self-confidence of strong man doing what was right – in contrast to the hysteria of weak men clinging to dogma which characterised his critics.

Paulo Renato was a Renaissance man in a shabby world of specialists – he enjoyed his sailing, though when I knew him work prevented him from doing it as often as he would have liked; when he visited a relative who had just had a baby I watched him give an informal lecture on how the bones of the infant skull knit together; he enjoyed his wine and his cigars and his house had good paintings.  We read his career path and it seems to have been an uninterrupted rise from one post of immense responsibility to another and yet this was not achieved by crawling to authority: he was working for a United Nations agency Chile when Pinochet seized power and he and his wife Giovanna took into their own house refugees from Brazil whose position in this new dictatorship had become perilous – at one time hosting 17 of them.  He and Giovanna also housed for a year a family member branded a ‘dissident’ by the Brazilian dictators, but they never boasted of these acts nor sought to gain personal or political capital from them.

In life Paulo was an inspiration to those of us working in education at a far lower level and even his death reminds of another of John Donne’s reflections: “Do not ask who the funeral bell is ringing for – it’s ringing for you”.  The best thing those of us can do who are lucky enough to still be in the world and have the chance to do something useful in life is to take a lesson from Paulo and keep trying to make the world a better place.

On Induction and the Empirical Sciences

The epistemological core of the discussion on induction and its role in the methodology of the empirical sciences may be summarised in a very simple question: is the principle of induction the basis of modern empirical sciences, and should it be or, having been questioned since the time of Hume in the 18th century, is it practically discredited today, having been defeated by the criticisms of Popper and by Hempel’s paradox?

The concept of induction (the kind of reasoning that leads us to draw general conclusions or make predictions concerning unobserved cases based on cases we have observed) has a long tradition in philosophy, which is worth revisiting.

Aristotle was the first to concern himself systematically with induction and he gave it a foundation based on the whole of his metaphysics, that is, what he thought concerning the nature of reality and knowledge. For Aristotle, scientific knowledge was essentially a system of classification. In a world of beings which organise themselves and rank themselves according to unchangeable forms or essences, a scientific statement confirms that an individual belongs to a certain species or that a certain species belongs to a genus. The individual is the specific case, the particular; stating that he belongs to a species defines his essence and shows what is universal in him.

According to Aristotle, the universal elements, the essences, exist in things, in particulars. Induction (in-ducere, to lead inward) consists precisely in this recognition of the concept (the universal) within the sensible (the particular). As we observe the behaviour of a phenomenon in various particular cases and recognize a regular pattern, we are naturally led to infer that this regular behaviour is a sign of the essence of the phenomenon and to forecast that the same behaviour will be shown in cases which will be observed in the future. This is basically the way in which Aristotle understands and justifies induction. 

After 2000 years of almost complete dominance, Aristotle’s metaphysical ideas were challenged by modern philosophy. Hume, in particular, rejected Aristotelian essentialism, thus undermining the basis of induction. The link between particular cases and general law no longer depends on the presence of the universal within the thing and comes to be seen as simply the result of subjective expectation based on habit. This does not imply that Hume rejects or undervalues induction as a resource to be used in daily life or in empirical science: he simply removes the claim that knowledge obtained through it has an absolute, unquestionable metaphysical truth.

Hume’s criticism of Aristotle’s theory of induction did not prevent logical empiricism, the dominant concept in the philosophy of science until the 1950s, from defending an inductivist view of scientific method. It was felt that the general laws of empirical sciences were obtained through induction from the observation of specific cases, thus consisting in a simple summary or ‘condensation’ of concrete experience. As well as being acquired by induction, for the logical empiricists general laws could also be proved inductively. The greater the number of positive examples (specific cases conforming to the law) that could be observed, the greater would be the level of confirmation of the law or hypothesis. Actually, laws were only hypotheses with a sufficiently high degree of confirmation. The idea of the degree of confirmation led to attempts to apply calculations of probability to this discussion, but without any great success.

The discrediting of the inductive conception of scientific method was to a great extent the work of Popper. Proper claimed to have solved the problem of induction in a new and radical way: simply showing that the problem of induction does not exist in empirical science for the good reason that empirical science is not inductive. Scientific hypotheses are not obtained by inductive generalisation nor are they proved by the repetition of positive cases. Science moves forward by conjecture (bold generalisations with no logical support from experience) and refutations. What strengthens our hypotheses is their resistance to the clever and honest attempts to refute them to which they are subjected and that they manage to survive. Popper calls this process corroboration. 

Searle on university education

This text of the Berkeley philosopher John Searle, written 21 years ago, is still totally up to date - alas!

http://www.ditext.com/searle/searle1.html

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)

The New York Review of Books

I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a "crisis." We have lived through Sputnik (when we were "falling behind the Russians"), through the era of "Johnny can't read," and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.

-        The student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social history, on the one hand, as well as the mastery of some of the great philosophical and literary texts of the culture on the other. It involves reading not only texts that are of great value, like those of Plato, but many less valuable that have been influential, such as the works of Marx. For the United States, the dominant tradition is, and for the foreseeable future, will remain the European tradition. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However, you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.

-        You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

-        You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

-        You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

-        Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.

-        Just acquiring this amount of "education" will not, by itself, make you an educated person, even less will it give you what Oakeshott calls "judgment." But if the manner of instruction is adequate, the student should be able to acquire this much knowledge in a way that combines intellectual openness, critical scrutiny, and logical clarity. If so, learning will not stop when the student leaves the university.

See also: The Campus War (1971)

Promise or Terror?

Goya - O sono da Razão

Can it be that what seems to be happening in Brazil and in much of the world – the so-called ‘crisis of representation’, the distrust of institutions – may be a sign that ‘the masses’ are feeling that within the political rationality of capitalism and the rules of representative democracy they do not have and will not find their opportunity?

In his study of religions Max Weber notes existence in societies of a cycle that revolves between two basic forms of religion: religions of salvation - which aim at a transcendental goal by means of prophecies and charismatic leaders - and religions of acceptance, which encourage man to adapt to the world by means of rules and rituals.  The first type have the potential to cause revolution insofar as they aim at changing the world, or at least not accepting its reality and laws as supreme values. 

According to Weber a similar pattern is found in terms of the Law: a progression from traditional societies ruled by the sacred to the law of lawyers which is rational and impersonal.

Equally, in economics the universal rules of the marketplace have come to take precedence over previous economic regulations based on custom or religion.  We cannot say that the laws of the marketplace are unfair: the ‘injustices’ (acts of partiality or exclusion) that mark the differences between ‘classes’ arise out of rational rules (that are general and valid for all) and not from tradition such as the privileges of ‘castes’.

Television: a danger to democracy?

Rejane Xavier 

Television has come to threaten democracy through the excessive power it has gained and because, according to Popper, it corrodes the basic foundation of the rule of law, which is the rejection of violence.

The exaggerated proportion of scenes of sex and violence on television at times when children and teenagers form a large part of the audience has aroused in increasingly wider sectors of society a call for some kind of control measures on the part of some kind of responsible authority.

A similar situation in the USA has brought about a strong social reaction fuelled by a broad-reaching discussion on the code of ethics of the culture industry, the authority of parents to choose the type of psychological and moral influence they consider suitable in bringing up their children, and the most effective ways of ensuring the freedom of choice of everyone within a society that recognises and accepts ethical and cultural pluralism.

In Brazil the topic unleashes two opposing but converging types of reaction. On the one hand the unbending paladins of free enterprise feel it is absurd to impose any kind of interference, whatever its origin, with the "freedom of creativity and information" exercised by telecommunications companies. On the other hand, genuinely democratic and well-intentioned intellectuals and artists, scarred by the experience of the dictatorship, tremble before anything that seems to them to evoke the odious ghost of censorship, and rise up with one voice against the faintest shadow of a "threat to freedom of expression". In the face of this double, solid barrier, rational discussion on the influence and role of the mass media becomes an extremely delicate matter.

Economics and Culture - Production and Circulation of Values

SÃO PAULO - WORLD CULTURAL FORUM

2nd JULY, 2004

LECTURE 5 – LARGE AUDITORIUM

REJANE XAVIER

---

(Representing the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP))

Prada shoes, with Burberry pattern

According to the old rule (‘the cultural good is that in which meaning is more important than usefulness’) today nearly all goods are ‘cultural goods’: the brand is worth more than the training shoe or the pair of jeans, the label is worth more than the spectacles, the design is worth more than the chair.

 The first question that we face when considering the title of this lecture is really to define what values we are talking about.  Economic value and cultural value are frequently placed in opposition to each other and the ‘mercantilization’ of culture has been seen as a threat in these times of accelerated globalization, when cultural production is increasingly thought of as merchandise that has to fit the same rules that apply to the international trade in goods and services.

The growing importance of cultural industries in an increasingly globalized marketplace is an unquestionable fact although it still creates doubts and conflicts of interest.  On the one hand the ability of these industries to generate value, work and income is celebrated; on the other, fears are generated concerning their effects on traditional cultures and the pressures they exert on the creativity and freedom of artists.  

Writers, musicians, cinematographers and painters justifiably aspire to seeing their work exhibited, recognized and well paid, and see in the cultural industry a chance of achieving these aspirations.  However, they either refuse or are reluctant to make their art conform to the ‘rules of the marketplace’: producing a new record album every year, even when they have no new work ready; making films that the follow the dazzling action sequences of American cinema (we may consider here those wonderful Iranian films that the public often feels are ‘slow’ and ‘tedious’ because their ways of seeing and appreciating films have been moulded by Hollywood productions); producing paintings and sculptures adapted to western decorative taste, and writing novels following publishers’ models of  best sellers.

It is about this tension between market value and cultural value that I would like to reflect, if possible broadening the scope of the analysis in order to bridge the contradiction between them without ignoring the differences and even the points at which occasionally their differences cannot be avoided.