Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase

Posted on 28 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1887, the great French artist Marcel Duchamp was born. He is hard to talk about though. Because I use the term “artist” in its widest possible sense. He worked in most mediums, but he was also a writer and eventually a chess player. In his early 30s, after a very successful artistic career, he decided he wanted to play chess. He went on to be a Master level player—for those of you who do not know, that means he was better than you can possibly imagine. But he is better know for his writing about chess theory.

Duchamp was born into a rich family. This allowed four of his parents six surviving children to go on to be successful artists. The family was very much into culture, so it isn’t surprising. It does make me wonder about what I see as the modern American rich who seem only to be interested in creating a new kind of aristocracy. The Koch brothers looked at their lucky fate and said, “I want to just make more money and influence politics so that even more comes to me.” The Duchamp children used their lucky fate to do something interesting. And all the Duchamp children did compelling work. What will the Koch children leave us? Oh, that’s right: a potentially catastrophically changed climate. I guess I’m forced to admit that the Koch’s legacy will be more profound than that of the Duchamps, even if it is a tragic legacy.

When I was a kid, I was never that much into modern art. The painting that really turned me onto it was Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. I love the use of line, the movement (not surprisingly from the early days of film), and the limited palette. It works as well for me today as it did 35 years ago:

Most of his other work is more conceptual in nature and not as interesting to me. Part of the problem is that once he started playing chess, he didn’t pursue art all that much. Still, he was still very much part of the art world. There is a great quote from him, however, “I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.” I understand the feeling, although as a sport it has managed to be commercialized. But it certainly indicates that his love of art was pure and he didn’t like the way it became commodity.

There is an interesting story about his personal life. He married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor, but couldn’t stand the confinement of marriage, so they divorced six months later. But Duchamp and Sarazin-Lavassor continued their relationship for the next two decades until she died. That’s right out of Scenes from a Marriage. And very sweet.

Happy birthday Marcel Duchamp!

Most Racists Are Good People

Posted on 27 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

Ian Heney Lopez In Namibia, then under South African control and also an apartheid state, the towns were widely spaced in a desert of sere geologic beauty. A farmer who gave me a lift lived some hundred-plus kilometers outside of the next town, but recognizing that there would be little traffic and so virtually no chance that I could secure an onward ride, he drove on past his homestead in the fading sunlight. This generous act added hours of needless driving to an already long day for the farmer. As we got close to town, though, he apologized and explained he would have to drop me off several hundred meters from the outskirts. He had killed a “kaffir”—the local equivalent of “nigger”—for poaching, and the constable had asked him to stay out of town for a few weeks until pressure for his arrest subsided. I was stunned speechless. Then the routines of normal etiquette kicked in and carried me through a ritual of thanks, goodbye, good luck with your travels.

Like most, I have been conditioned to think of racism as hatred, and racists as pathologically disturbed individuals. To be sure, sadistic racists exist, and racism is frequently bound up with the emotional heat of fear and hatred. But as I began to intuit while hitchhiking through the landscape of apartheid, most racists are good people. That bears emphasizing, since it runs so profoundly contrary to the dominant conception. Even the farmer who killed another human being for the petty act of poaching, I came to understand, was not a homicidal lunatic but a complex person capable of both brutal violence and real generosity.

—Ian Haney Lopez
Dog Whistle Politics

Carl Jung

Posted on 26 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1875, the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was born. When I was kid, I loved Jung. His work was so interesting. Freud seemed so bizarre to me, although there were things I liked about his work. But what I liked most about Jung was that he didn’t focus on dysfunction. He provided a description of why people were the way they were without necessarily labeling it as abnormal.

My favorite work, of course, was Psychological Types. Not only does it cover his whole system, but it provides a great deal of background information. He looked at other writers who had classified people into different types, “There are two kinds of people in the world…” What was especially nice about his system was that he didn’t classify types as normal and abnormal. That was especially important regarding introversion and extroversion, because introverts had long been labeled as damaged.

Now, of course, with the Myers-Briggs test books on the subject are everywhere. But they’ve also changed the theory somewhat. I don’t mind that, but it is interesting. Jung wasn’t some kind of oracle. And Jung thought that women were always (or nearly so) feeling types and mean thinking. That’s clearly not the case, although there does seem to be a strong tendency in that direction. I just took the HumanMetrics test and it said I was an INFP, although I am just as likely to come out as an INTP. Not that this necessarily means anything. I know the types are a model of how people are, but I’m not that sure of how fundamental they are. But it does explain to me why many (even most) perfectly nice people see the world so differently than I do.

Jung’s greatest work is undoubtedly The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. But it is overwhelming. Again, I don’t necessarily accept it. In particular, I don’t acception the notion of a collective unconscious. But we do share archetypes that are ingrained from our evolution. I have no doubt that the other great apes share some of the same ones, and probably also sparrows and frogs. The book itself is very interesting in the the way that Jung uses eclectic knowledge to pull the theory all together. But one must be very careful with Jung, because he was very good at that kind of thing, regardless of the truth. But there is no doubt that there is at least a core truth to it.

When I was young and fearful of death, I took a great deal of comfort in Jung’s answer to whether he believed in God, “I know.” At this point, I’m not even sure what he meant. He was a mystic. And as a fellow mystic, I could easily answer that question in the same way, without it being in the least bit comforting to my frightened young self. The question is too vague. What is meant by “God”? I would be interested in hearing Jung’s answer to the question, “Do you believe a God that loves you?” That’s where we would potentially part company. But it is regardless a very good answer to the question, because he took a very boring question and made it interesting.

Happy birthday Carl Jung!

Diffracting Rosalind Franklin

Posted on 25 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1920, the great British physical chemist Rosalind Franklin was born. If you haven’t heard of her, it is simply because she’s a woman. Really. The sexism against her was unbelievable. Although Francis Crick said that her X-ray diffraction work was critical to his Nobel Prize winning discovery of the structure of DNA, the Nobel committee didn’t even mention her. What’s more, Crick’s partner Watson made repeated attacks on her as a scientist and generally minimized her contributions to the science—after she had died, of course.

Born to an extremely influential Jewish family in Britain, she showed academic greatness at an early age. Then she went to Cambridge where she received Second Class Honors. She did not receive a Bachelor’s degree, because at that time, Cambridge didn’t give them to women. It did allow her to go on and do more advanced work. She eventually got her PhD for work on the physical chemistry (especially porosity) of coal. This was during World War II, and the work had special military applications like coal’s use in gas masks. What’s perhaps most interesting about this, is that it had nothing much to do with her later work.

After the war, she got a job working with X-ray crystallographer Jacques Mering in France. She applied the new techniques to coal and published a number of significant papers. But the main thing was that she became an expert in the use of X-ray diffraction on complex organic compounds. So in 1951, she was brought to King’s College London where she started her work on the structure of DNA. Also working there was Maurice Wilkins, who would go on to share the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick. Wilkins and Franklin did not get along, partly because of the usual academic politics, but also because they were such different people.

I wish that I could explain to you the work these people were doing. Sadly, I can’t. To begin with, organic chemistry is still very much a mystery to me. And embarrassingly, even though I’ve done some work with X-ray crystallography, I never really understood it. Basically, you bombard an object with X-rays and look at how the object changes the X-rays’ directions. This allows you to infer the structure of the object. But really, stuff like this has always felt very much like black magic to me. So I have a great respect (and awe) for those who pioneered the work.

But about that sexism. The truth is that by all accounts, Franklin was a difficult person. But this is hardly unusual. I’ve met more than my fair share of great scientists and as a group they are arrogant and impatient—generally not the kind of people you want at cocktail parties. But had Franklin been a man, everyone would have just accepted this. But she was a woman and as a result, she wasn’t seen as just another difficult genius, but someone with “problems.” And in addition to everything else, Watson minimized her work. Still, had she lived, even Watson admitted that she should have shared the Nobel Prize with the three men.

Unfortunately, at the age of 35, she was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer. She got treatment for it and continued to work right up to two weeks before her death at the age of 37. At that point, she was working on the polio virus. She did an amazing amount of outstanding work in her short lifetime.

Happy birthday Rosalind Franklin!

Scholarship, Infidelity, and Robert Graves

Posted on 24 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1895, the great British scholar and writer Robert Graves was born. The volume and diversity of his work is overwhelming. He probably thought of himself as a poet. But he did an enormous amount of pure scholarship: critical analysis and translation. But I believe he paid the bills by writing the historical fiction that he is most remembered for, I, Claudius, Claudius the God, and other books like Wife to Mr Milton: the Story of Marie Powell, which is about the wife of John Milton.

I don’t have a great deal to say about Graves beyond relating my intense jealousy of him. My standard line about my own education is that if I had it all to do over again, I would study mathematics and not physics; but if I were starting now, I would study classics. I remember reading in a biography of Christopher Marlowe that originally, the term “illiterate” meant that one could not read Latin. And that a basic college education at that time (late 16th century) meant you were fluent in Latin. When Marlowe got his Master’s degree, that meant he was fluent in Greek as well. Graves did quite a lot of Greek and Latin translating, although I don’t think anyone was paying him, which makes it all the more cool.

The first thirty years of his life were something of a muddle where he went to school, then to war, got married, went back to school, was unsuccessful at business and then abandoned his wife and children for poet Laura Riding. His career kind of started there with the two of them publishing poetry and academic works. Things really got going when Graves published his autobiography, Good-bye to All That. Much of it was about his experiences in World War I, which was not laudatory and even discussed the murder of German prisoners of war. He also managed to offend a lot of people with the book, but I get the impression that Graves was generally rather good at that.

In 1934, he published I, Claudius, which has hugely successful and probably set him for life. Five years later, his turbulent relationship with Riding ended. Then he took up with Beryl Hodge, the wife of his collaborator Alan Hodge. They married and Graves went on to have a more boring life befitting a successful writer. But it is hard not to think that Graves was kind of jerk to many of the people in his life. Not that it matters. And none of us are perfect.

The gods, it would seem, did punish Graves. In his mid-70s, he began suffering from severe memory loss and for the last ten years of his life, he was able to do no work at all. It is a sad way to go, although actually rather typical. The mind tends to see a distinct diminution in its abilities in the early 70s, although it doesn’t seem to get notably worse even if you live to be 124 (which seems to be about the maximum possible age for humans). But it must have been particularly hard on a great mind like Graves. It is one of the reasons that I think it is best for me to die at around 75, even if I don’t have a great mind like Graves. What I do have is my mind and when that starts to go, what will be the point? Moving on…

Happy birthday Robert Graves!

Cause of Every Israel-Palestine War

Posted on 23 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

Gershom Gorenberg The war isn’t a hurricane; it didn’t happen by itself. Leaders on both sides made choices. In Israel, despite an unusual number of protests so early in a war, most of the public seems to think the government is doing the right thing, perhaps too timidly. I doubt anyone can judge public opinion accurately amid the chaos and fear in Gaza, but credible estimations are that support for the Hamas government rises in proportion to Israeli attacks.

Maybe just to keep my own sanity, I have to ask: How do leaders believe that such flawed decisions were the only reasonable choices? How can masses of people keep supporting those policies even as they prove disastrous? What’s wrong with our heads? By that I mean not just the heads of Israelis and Palestinians but of human beings, since I don’t have any cause to think that the sides in this conflict are being uniquely irrational.

In a 2007 article that now reads as if written to explain the 2014 Gaza war, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and fellow psychologist Jonathan Renshon succinctly gave some answers. Human minds, they said, have hard-wired biases that favor hawks. People are too optimistic about their own strengths, including the strength of their armies. They prefer to double down rather than to cut their losses. They’re sure that other people can read their thoughts and understand their good intentions—even while they misread their opponents’ intent.

You can go down this list and find painful proofs in the events of recent weeks: Hamas appeared absurdly overconfident that rocket fire would force Israel to stop air attacks and loosen its siege on Gaza. When that didn’t work, rather than accept a ceasefire, it upped the ante by sending gunmen through tunnels to surface in Israeli territory. Israel thought Hamas would surely fold in the face of air strikes. When that didn’t happen, it quintupled its bet with the ground invasion. The Israeli government thinks the world has to understand that it’s acting in self-defense, even as whole families die in Gaza. This isn’t just a PR ploy Or rather, the PR is sincere, which doesn’t make it more convincing outside Israel.

—Gershom Gorenberg
This Is Your Brain on War: A Dispatch From Jerusalem (I recommend reading the whole article.)

H/T: Ed Kilgore

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Raw Emotion

Posted on 23 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

Philip Seymour Hoffman There are a lot of good birthdays today. Last year, my way of doing the birthday posts was to do a whole bunch of people, but to “give” the day to a certain person. Last year today, it was Raymond Chandler. It’s kind of interesting, because a couple of night ago, I was going back over as much of my second novel as I have written. I was trying to convince myself to burn it. And reading it, I realized that much of it is straight out of Chandler. Of course, the whole point is that the novel pretends to be one of those kind of books without actually being one of those kind of books. And it also tries to be Moby-Dick. And this may, in the end, be the problem. I should probably aim lower. I am neither a Chandler nor a Melville—even a pretend one.

On this day in 1967 the fine American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was born. Normally, I wouldn’t pick him, but he just died. I was never an especially big fan, but he was a good actor. And unlike a lot of actors, I actually saw him get better over time. But this is probably just because I saw him act from a pretty young age. A lot of actors are very serious. However, it is hard to look at Joseph Gordon-Levitt and think anything but that he doesn’t have any depth. Hoffman, even from his earliest roles seemed like he was on the edge, emotionally.

I first saw him in Scent of a Woman, where he perfectly captured the fear and silliness of the privileged class. Next I saw him in Twister, doing a role that he could easily have become type cast into. It was his portrayal of Lester Bangs in Almost Famous that really made me take notice of him. For one thing, I had been a huge fan of Bangs since I was a teenager. But Hoffman added an emotional layer that I never got from Bangs’ writing. But I think it was right. I think that’s how Bangs probably was. I think people make the same mistake reading me. On the page, I’m downright bombastic, but in person I’m shy with a dread of conflict. (Admittedly, Cameron Crowe actually knew Bangs and so that is in the script.)

The high point of Hoffman’s career was undoubtedly Capote, even though I think that Toby Jones was better in Infamous. It was, however, interesting to see Hoffman play a part that I would have thought him completely unsuitable for. But any time an American actor can hold his own against a well trained British actor, you know you are dealing with a great talent.

But what I liked most about Hoffman was his raw and honest emotionalism. I’ve never seen him better than in A Late Quartet, a film I only managed to see a week before he died. Another good one is The Savages.

When he died recently, I was very upset with the coverage and wrote, Leave Philip Seymour Hoffman Alone! Perhaps the worst thing that people do to drug users is to define them by that one activity. Even though Hoffman’s fame pushed against that narrative, that didn’t stop all kinds of people from trying to define him as a drug addict. It’s no less ridiculous than had he been hit by a train, creating a narrative where being hit by a train explained the arc of his life. It is sad that he’s dead, because he did good work. Of course, we aren’t exactly suffering from a lack of fine actors. But Hoffman was special in that he was overweight and not terribly attractive. And we do have far too few ugly and fat people in the movies.

Happy birthday Philip Seymour Hoffman!

Hopper Painting

Posted on 22 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1882, the great American painter Edward Hopper was born. When I was younger, I wasn’t that impressed by him. But over time, he’s become one of my favorite artists. It’s mostly his compositions that I find stunning. Over the years, that’s what I’ve come to see as most important. Especially looking at art on a computer screen, it is hard to appreciate the micro-artistic elements. But mediocre painters have a poor sense of composition and drama. Hopper is especially interesting because he created great drama with so little.

He was raised in an upper-middle class family with a mild-mannered father in what seems to have been a matriarchal household. They did not ever seem to have to worry about money, although Hopper’s first instruction in art was via a correspondence course at the age of 17. He did eventually go the New York Institute of Art and Design for six years. For twenty years after that, he was forced to work as an illustrator for an advertising agency. I suspect that he also had some kind of trust fund, because he only worked part time. He was also able to make three trips to Paris, to check out the new trends in art there. He managed not to notice much, though. How does a young painter go to Paris three times between 1906 and 1910 and never even hear of Picasso? Well, Hopper was rather shy and I think he spent the time mostly soaking up the atmosphere and painting.

During that period, he was already doing notable work. In 1913, he sold his first painting, Sailing (painted in 1911). I’m not that fond of it, but you can definitely see how it fits into his artistic development. It was not really the beginning of a new career, however; more a one-off. He continued his freelance advertising work.

At around this time, he started to do etching, which until today I had no knowledge of. Much of it is really good. Here is Night Shadows from 1921. I think it shows the development of his compositional skill. I love the extreme perspective:

Clearly, at this point in his life he was grasping for anything that worked. As he was perfecting his etching skills, he started to work in watercolors. This work is excellent as well. By 1920, he was clearly doing great work, but no one had really noticed. He became involved with fellow painter Josephine Nivison in 1923. Being outgoing, she was able to get Hopper more attention, leading eventually to his first solo commercial exhibit 1924 (the same year he and Nivison married), where all the paintings sold. And the rest, as they say, is history.

His style stayed much the same throughout his career, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s, his work is more finished. Consider, for example, New York Restaurant from 1923:

And Hotel Lobby from 1943:

I’m actually rather fond of his less finished work. In fact, I most like that aspect of his work early on, right after leaving school. But he hadn’t perfected his compositional style at that point, so I didn’t present any. Regardless, all of his work is interesting and worth checking out.

Happy birthday Edward Hopper!

Afterword

Here is one of my favor Janis Ian songs, “Hopper Painting”:

Pretty to Think What We Might Have Seen From the Old Hemingway

Posted on 21 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1899, one of the greatest American novelist Ernest Hemingway was born. When I was younger, I was quite fond of his work. To my young boy mind, he seemed to establish what it was to be a man. That’s most especially true of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. There was something very poignant his sexual dysfunction along with his drive to still be around women. But looking back on the book now, it seems a very immature view of men, which doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true. But it certainly doesn’t present anything like the male ideals that Homer provided for the ancient Greeks.

What still moves me as much today as it ever did is his style. I still remember this one sentence from A Farewell to Arms that is so simple and yet evocative, “I looked back and saw the three cars all climbing, spaced by the interval of their dust.” That’s like poetry and Hemingway’s fiction is probably the most lyrical of the 20th century writers. There’s no doubt that Gertrude Stein was a master of language, far exceeding Hemingway. But she is such a master that I find her difficult to read most of the time. And based upon pure writing, I think Hemingway was better than both Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.

But here I am at 50 and I still read Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. I even occasionally read Stein. But Hemingway: never. Part of that is having read a good too much of Hemingway when I was younger, but the same could be said of Steinbeck. What Hemingway always lacked, and this became clearer and clearer as I got older, was what Fitzgerald and Steinbeck had in abundance: great characters and a humane worldview.

Hemingway’s work seemed to be limited by his own personal demons. He was afraid to allow his own humanity to be shown in his work. That’s why I think his mostly solitary The Old Man and the Sea works the best of his fiction—because it is more mythic and even spiritual. The me, it is an allegory for life. It doesn’t really matter that he got the marlin back safely. The essence of life is the journey, not the destination or the trophies. It would have been interesting to see him have developed in that direction, but instead, it stands like Orson Welles’ F for Fake: a great work never built upon.

The last couple years of his life, Hemingway seems to have suffered from hemochromatosis—the accumulation of iron in the body. This caused him to deteriorate mentally, if not physically. It led to him twice being “treated” with electroshock therapy, which made his mental state even worse. Regardless, he eventually killed himself. It’s sad, because I think he had a lot to offer as an older writer. With his clarity of vision and careful style combined with wisdom, he might have done really great things. Then again, it might just have been a lot more gossipy trash like A Moveable Feast. But he could have had more important things to say. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Happy birthday Ernest Hemingway!

Max Liebermann

Posted on 20 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1847, the great German painter Max Liebermann was born. I’m actually not that fond of his work. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I’m not that fond of his impressionism, which often strikes me as bad Manet. His portraits are rather interesting. And his one religious painting indicates that he really should have done more historical painting, although it wasn’t really the thing at the time.

If you want to be an artist, it really does help to have rich parents. I’m not talking Fred Koch rich, of course; that seems to just create spoiled brats who think the world ought to kneel down before them like David and Charles Koch. But high bourgeoisie, which gives you a good and worldly education, decent connections, and not so much money that you think it is all that matters. That’s exactly what Liebermann got, and perhaps somewhat more. He also had the advantage of being born in Berlin and not Texas.

Below is Liebermann’s one religious painting, The 12-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple With the Scholars. It caused quite a stir at the time. I guess it was blasphemy for a Jew to paint Jesus? Regardless, he didn’t like the uproar and never again did anything terribly exciting—and he had over 50 years to go.

The 12-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple With the Scholars - Liebermann

Liebermann died at the age of 87 in 1935. By that time, the Nazis were in power. So even though he was quite famous, no mention of his death was made in the media. Over a hundred people came to his funeral, even though it was apparently illegal. It was only 1935, after all. The Nazis hadn’t fully systematized their hate. So Liebermann died at the right time.

Happy birthday Max Liebermann!

Lizzie Borden: a Bad Columbo Episode

Posted on 19 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1860, Lizzie Borden was born. She is famous not so much for killing her father and step-mother, but for getting away with it. And, of course, the rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

The history of this rhyme is not known, but I’m rather fond of the belief that it was made up by a newspaper seller. You know, like those people you see in the old movies selling papers yelling, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” For the record, she gave her step-mother 19 whacks and her father only 11. Whatever else you can say about about Lizzie, she wasn’t excessive!

When I was younger, I really loved the television show Columbo. In those cases, the murderers take such great pains to provide themselves alibis. But in the case of Lizzie Borden, she didn’t much take any pains whatsoever. It was a frightfully planned murder plot. For example, two days after the murders, she was caught burning one of her dresses. Even still, as with the O J Simpson trial, the prosecution and police work was very bad. There are really only two reasons I feel certain she did it: she had a huge and multifaceted motive and she was pretty much the only person who could have done it.

There is one interesting aspect of the trial. They cut off the heads of the victims for use in the trial. Since the trial took place about a year later, the bodies had already been buried. So after the trial, the heads were buried at the foot of each grave. It just seems strange to me that they didn’t dig up the coffins and put the heads back in. I mean, these were extremely rich people.

They were also, not surprisingly, all a pretty vile bunch. Daddy, for example, killed all the pigeons in the barn with an ax, because they were attracting kids to hunt them. Lizzy apparently had built a roost for them and was very upset about him killing the birds. That may have been the ultimate cause (but there was lots of money as a sweetener). As Columbo would tell you, it is always the little things.

Regardless, I think people should stop fretting about whether she really did it. I like this line from Verbal in The Usual Suspects, “To a cop the explanation is never that complicated. It’s always simple. There’s no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you’re gonna find out you’re right.” Regardless, the only other person it could possibly have been would have been the maid and the best motive that anyone has had for her is that she was angry about being told to clean the windows on such a hot day. I’m sure that the maid was used to doing whatever the vile Borden family told her to.

Happy birthday Lizzie Borden—you got away with it!

Misunderstanding Thomas Kuhn

Posted on 18 Jul 2014 by Frank Moraes

The great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn was born on this day in 1922. He is best know, of course, for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he argued that science doesn’t so much evolve slowly but rather lurches from one paradigm to another. I think this is often misunderstood to mean that it is random, but that’s not it at all. Scientists create one paradigm like, “radiation is continuous like a river flowing rather than a rock slide.” And we learned much using this paradigm. But then we learned about the ultraviolet catastrophe, where increasing an objects temperature didn’t cause the frequency of light to just get higher and higher. And so, a scientific revolution took place and we moved to a new paradign, “radiation is not continuous; it is like a rock slide and not a flowing river.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything we learned in the old paradigm was now wrong. It all became a special case of the new paradigm. In my example, the truth is that the “rocks” are so small that they usually look like a river flowing. Unfortunately, a lot of people have used Kuhn and people who have followed him to argue for relativism. We see this in the worst excesses of postmodernism. A lot of that comes from a misunderstanding of what science itself is. And sadly, I see this misunderstanding in notable scientists all time. Science isn’t reality or even what causes reality. It is simply an endeavor to create models of how reality works.

I’m very interested in the uncertainty principle, which states that we can only know an object’s velocity and position to a certain level. It is named after Werner Heisenberg, because it falls out rather simply from his formalism of quantum mechanics. Does that mean that there is an inherent uncertainty in the universe? No! (But as far as we humans living inside the universe it probably does.) What it means is in the very best model we have of mechanics, there are limits to how accurately we can measure objects.

So Kuhn was not arguing for relativism. In fact, he argued just the opposite and pushed back against that reading of his work. It is funny, though. In the world of normal people who don’t deal with the philosophy of science, it was initially the liberals who were most interested in relativism. In the conservative Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s, he spends much time attacking relativism among liberals. (Johnson is also a Catholic.) But if you look at modern America, you will see that it is the conservative movement that has fully embraced relativism. The conservative argument against global warming is the same as The Dude’s in The Big Lebowski, “That’s just like, your opinion, man.”

What is perhaps most interesting about Thomas Kuhn’s work is that it created a revolution in the history of science. So it was an example of what it was talking about. It has done an enormous amount to increase our knowledge of how we advance intellectually. It has also had a bad effect on the way some people look at the whole intellectual endeavor. But I certainly don’t think that Kuhn can be blamed for people misunderstanding his work.

Happy birthday Thomas Kuhn!

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