Timeless Woman with Something to Teach

Today is the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. To mark the day, here's Kareem Salama's "Lady Mary":



The song is interesting in part because Salama is Muslim. Due to certain ahadith (stories from oral tradition about the Prophet Mohammad) and to the mentions of her in the Qur'an, Muslims have a very high regard for the Virgin Mary -- Muslim tradition about her is very similar to Catholic and Orthodox tradition. One very notable difference, however, is that the Qur'an does not mention Joseph, nor does any respected hadith. Because of this, it is a very common Muslim view that Mary lived her entire life without marrying. This view is not completely universal, and there are Muslims who accept the Christian tradition that there was a Joseph, but even then almost none of them believe that Joseph was actually husband to Mary (it's far more common to regard him as an older cousin who took care of her), and he has no real importance -- after all, if God did not see fit to reveal to the Prophet, how could he be important for understanding anything about Mary or Jesus or submission to God? So Mary is often thought of as an unwed mother, bearing all the burdens and opprobrium that an unwed mother might, but bearing it nonetheless out of submission to, and love for, God, making her an example for all Muslims. And this comes out indirectly in the song here.

Hermann Cohen

The problem of philosophy arises as soon as one begins to think of a relation to the world. Religion is not philosophy. However, the religion of reason, by virtue of its share in reason, has at least some kinship with philosophy. It is therefore not surprising that this share in reason, akin to that of philosophy, begins to stir within religion, starting, it would seem, with its concept of God.

Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, Simon Kaplan, tr. Scholars Press (Atlanta, GA: 1995) p. 36. I am only just now getting the chance to read through Cohen's classic of Jewish philosophy from cover to cover; very interesting so far. Cohen, despite not being read much in the English-speaking world today, was a major German Neo-Kantian, one of the most important philosophers in the world in the lead-up to World War I, and certainly the most important Jewish philosopher between Mendelssohn and our day. Religion of Reason presents a Kantian interpretation of Judaism, in which Judaism provides a relatively pure vocabulary for talking about ethical monotheism and its implications. One of Cohen's most important arguments is that ethical monotheism requires a form of messianism, in terms of postulating the possibility of a Messianic Age, a future ethical community of humanity united by a moral ideal.

Poem a Day VIII

Highlands

No promise are we given
of a gentler time to come;
already in the highlands
can be heard the beating drum.
It calls to war and heartache,
and it calls to beating heart
to rise up, sword uncovered,
to defend the better part.
The smoke on the horizon
with malice darkly grows:
the flames of homes on fire
and of townships that we know
trampled by marauders,
the youths and maidens slain,
the massing of an enemy
across an endless plain.
The world is set against us
but we must rise to the fight
with no hope of any winning
to save our claim and right,
and I must journey with them
to march this path of gloom,
our children with our swords
to save from coming doom.
So may I save another
if myself I cannot save!
And when I die with honor,
lay a rose upon my grave.

Plagiarisms

I have been following with some interest the recent Jonah Lehrer events. Lehrer, a bright young man who was doing much too much, much too fast, for much too long, originally got into trouble blogging at The New Yorker when it was discovered that material from his posts there was recycled fairly directly from previously material he had previously published, leading him to resign; further inquiry unveiled that this was quite common throughout Lehrer's oeuvre, leading publishers to pull his most recent book and begin investigating others; and more recently Wired.com had a full-scale inquiry about Lehrer's work with them, concluding that he had engaged in multiple accounts of journalistic misconduct, including recycling, plagiarism, and repeated sloppiness with quotation, ending with Wired.com firing him. The Wired.com investigator recently published a summary of the results of his investigation, which is one of the more interesting pieces in the saga to read, since unlike most of the hue and cry it's published by someone who at least has some idea why plagiarism and recycling are problems in a journalistic context.

Plagiarism was not on the stone tablets at Sinai, and it is not a sufficiently well-defined offense to be anything intrinsically wrong. Indeed, contrary to the way it is often presented, there is nothing morally wrong with plagiarism as such; rather, it's a social role violation. It gets its moral wrongness because in a particular context it is a failure to fulfill our responsibilities to others. The 'in a particular context' qualification is quite important: if you look at issues of plagiarism across a wide variety of fields, it becomes clear that the standards are not stable, and that things that would be counted as plagiarism in one field are often not in another, and for good reason. Plagiarism becomes an issue when money or reputation are on the line. Nobody cares if lawyers, hired to write a contract, recycle parts of old contracts, whether their own or another's, because people don't pay lawyers for writing new kinds of contracts, even when a contract does happen to be of a new kind, but for writing contracts that do what they're supposed to do; and legal reputations are built not on finding new contract language, even when lawyers do, but on finding contract language that works in a given situation. Likewise, oral storytelling and much folksinging is an area in which using other people's material is not a big thing: it's the performance that matters. (Contrast that with stand-up comedy, in which distinguishable material is extremely important, and in which using someone else's material is regarded as a very bad thing.) In academia, on the other hand, reputation depends on having a body of work distinguishable from anyone else's, and there is a great deal of pressure on reputation as a way of sorting out who gets the nicer things -- academia is a reputation market, and the reputations are built on standing out from other people in one's contributions. Contrary to the way this is often presented, this does not mean that academia puts a premium on originality in any robust sense; but it does mean that academia puts a premium on doing something distinguishable. Plagiarism is a threat to this, and whether you view academic life as a pursuit of truth or as a political interaction, the result is the same: if it were to spread, it would make this particular kind of pursuit or interaction impossible. (There is variation, of course, across the disciplines: witness the differences between the sciences and the humanities on authorship of papers. In the sciences, everyone who makes a notable contribution to the substance of the paper is usually listed as an author; but in the humanities, most of these people would usually be given credit in a footnote, at best, and even that involves judgment calls about just how important they were in the development of the paper. This, as with everything else, is due to differences in how reputations are built up in the different fields.)

Journalists, on the other hand, are required always to be doing something new; it's what they're paid for. The New Yorker, no doubt, was shocked that it was paying Lehrer not to write new and distinctive material that would be exclusive to The New Yorker but to say again what he had already said in several other places. Popular young authors being paid well to write new things is a good deal for a periodic publication; popular young authors being paid well to repeat themselves, not so much. Newspapers, magazines, and other outlets are themselves competing in a reputation market; they need to stand out as a constant source of accurate new information, and this is as much true on the opinion side as on the reporting side. Journalists working for them are hired precisely in order to contribute to this, and they are certainly not doing this if they are recycling old material and plagiarizing other people, actions that could reflect very badly on the reputation of the people they work for (and with). This is, incidentally, one reason why the author of the article is right about one journalistic gray area, repeating press release material. As Seife notes, when journalists simply repeat material in a press release, they aren't harming the people they are copying at all (quite the opposite); but they are still violating the same professional responsibilities to other people in the profession of journalism, in exactly the same way they are when they engage in any other plagiarism. The same social role expectations are violated, and for the same reason. As with academia, robust originality is not really what journalists are after here: it's distinguishability. The conventions are radically different. An academic who sourced things the way journalists source things would soon be in hot water, since by most academic publishing standards sourcing in journalistic publishing even at its best is extremely haphazard and defective, while there are probably things many academics will happily do that would horrify a journalist; but this is precisely because the two professions face different reputational issues, and therefore what counts as bad copying is not going to be the same.

Poem a Day VII

Le Petit Potager

A row of pots upon the sill:
a little thyme, a touch of dill,
a peppermint, Saint Joseph's wort
or basil, if our names are short,
and anthos fair, called rosmarine,
like misty sea with dewy sheen,
which grows wherever lady rules,
and marjoram both dry and cool
with country kin, oregano,
and sage, and savory, here will grow;
all Lamiaceae, each in place,
with whorls of five like all their race,
or lemon beebrush spiking high
and other cousins growing nigh --
all souvenirs from paradise,
an Eden rich beyond all price.

Poem a Day VI

I Will Not Fall in Love Today

Bright-eyed angel, pure of heart,
Somehow Cupid's burning dart
has missed me; though it's sad to say,
I will not fall in love today.

Precious girl with skin of cream
and eyes like something out of dream,
it will not work; though you may stay,
I will not fall in love today.

Fish are leaping in the stream,
sun pours on the lake a gleam
that tells me I should stop and play;
I will not fall in love today.

Green are trees with happy leaf,
flowers cast aside all grief,
the rainbows burst from morning rays;
I will not fall in love today.

The world is turning with a whirl,
and though you are a pretty girl
with smile to take one's breath away,
I will not fall in love today.

Plato and Context

For my Intro philosophy class this term, I've been somewhat reorganizing the way we approach the Gorgias (which we start out with), so as to try to emphasize the importance of context. Reading out of context is a common problem, but I think Plato especially suffers from a failure of people to read him with sufficient regard to context. No argument in any Platonic dialogue is freestanding, for instance; every single one is addressed to a person or group of people, and this sometimes affects how we should take them. In the Gorgias, for instance, people often say that Socrates has not actually caught Gorgias in the contradiction he claims to have caught him, but if you look closely at all their middle positions, it quickly becomes clear that none of them are things Gorgias himself (who does not have citizenship rights in Athens, and is trying to sell his services as a teacher of rhetoric, the art of persuading people to do what you want them to do) can say. This is actually important for the structure of the dialogue: most of the dialogue is Socrates talking with people who are not Gorgias -- people who are either willing or capable of committing themselves to things to which Gorgias himself is too clever or too cautious to commit himself. Sometimes the context is not a who but a goal. For instance, some people make a great deal about Socrates in the Republic banishing poets from the City, but this overlooks the fact that Socrates actually makes an exception for two kinds of poetry (eulogies of virtuous people and hymns to the gods, neither of which, incidentally, are rare kinds of poetry), and that the City itself is being proposed as a solution to a very specific problem: what kind of society can you have in which people are allowed to pursue luxuries but justice is impossible, or at least as impossible as you can make it? And given the importance of poetry to Greek education, the banishing of the poets is really a banishing of educators whose educational discourses could conflict with the need of such a City for education always to teach that justice is always and above all other things necessary and valuable. To make justice impossible, you must make injustice seem utterly foreign and repulsive, and you can't do that if people are also taught that injustice is sometimes acceptable or admirable. It's not about poetry as such but about education, and to the extent it is about poetry it is not about some inconsistency between poetry and philosophy, or between poetry and justice, but about the fact that not all kinds of poetry are equally good at contributing to the life of wisdom and justice. (The connection between the way one teaches and injustice is a big issue in the Gorgias, as well.) Likewise, I think Socrates' interest in definitions is exaggerated; he actually shows little sign of caring about definitions as such. Perhaps this is not so surprising given that he rejects virtually every definition that anyone proposes to him, and the fact that Xenophon has Socrates tell Hippias that he declares what justice is by doing it, not by talking about it. Talking about definitions is a means to an end, and Socrates is often quite clear that the real lesson to be taken away is not what the definition of (say) justice is, but what you should do upon realizing that your definition of justice doesn't do it justice.

I don't talk about all of this; but I do try to emphasize the importance of context. When you find an argument in one of the Socratic dialogues, you should always ask, "Why is Socrates making this argument to this person?" and "Why is Socrates raising this argument at this point in the discussion?" Sometimes it's not very easy to tell, and sometimes the real key lies in some other question entirely, but sometimes figuring out the answers to these questions illuminates the meaning of whole sections of the dialogue.