The evil of evolutionism

What I am attacking here - I suspect I shall do so repeatedly in this blog - are a group of related doctrines of social development. They are all fatalistic, and nearly all optimistic: "History" is regarded as tending unstoppably to improvement. The most vulgar version is a confusion of Left Hegelianism, misunderstood Darwinism, wishful thinking and the reification of observed tendencies.

C.S. Lewis discusses the phenomenon at length in the essay "The Funeral of a Great Myth", under the names "evolutionism", "development" and "emergence". Others have spoken of "progress" and "perfectibility". He carefully distinguishes it from any valid biological hypothesis. Indeed, he traces it to at least as far back as Wagner and Keats' "Hyperion", 40 years before the publication of the Origin of the Species.

For my purposes, the most interesting things he concludes about the myth are these:

1. The imaginative impulse came before, and legitimated, the scientific evidence. In other words, confirmation bias was (in part of society, at least) on the side of Darwinism when it appeared. (Don't worry, I'm not turning into a creationist...)
2. In modernist fashion, 19th-century "evolutionism" turned "progress" into a universal principle. I would wager that liberal theology showed this tendency pretty early.
3. It was artistically counterbalanced by the notion of the universe dying with a whimper through entropy ("true to the Elizabethan Tragedy" according to Lewis).

Unfortunately Lewis was wrong about the lifetime of this myth. It is with us today. One can still hear people praising something because "it is historically inevitable", "the way of the future" and so forth - as if there were no Roman Empire before the Dark Ages (another can of worms, for another post). Likewise, certain beliefs are denigrated as "obscolescent", "outmoded" etc. Chesterton rightly compares such nonsense with saying, "You can't believe X - this is the second Tuesday of August!" Elsewhere, Lewis warns that barbarism is not "behind us" - it is below us. We should tread carefully.

That's all I want to say on this particular topic for now. But you should soon start noticing something that looks suspiciously like a coherent view of the history of ideas. It is no coincidence that Feyerabend speaks like Chesterton on this point...

Afrikaans as a difficult language - part 1

Those of us who have lived in a partly Afrikaans environment for most of our lives are used to characterizing it as easy and even simplistic. My observations of some Australian children trying to learn it, and my encounters with Afrikaans grammars written for non-native speakers, suggest that this is partly a myth. Bruce Donaldson's grammar is probably the most complete available to those who do not speak German, Dutch or Afrikaans, and is an invaluable resource. However, it should be noted that the book contains many errors. Example (page 150): "Die twee staatshoofde sal erens in Duitsland ontmoet". I believe "mekaar" is required in this sentence. This could be a trivial oversight, since it occurs in a section illustrating the use of "mekaar", but unfortunately it is far from isolated. He may also have been relying on newspapers to use standard Afrikaans - a critical error, as those who are familiar both with Afrikaans and Die Burger can testify.

Here are a few of the most obvious points to remember:

1. The phonetic system is rather more complex than appears in mother-tongue textbooks. The so-called "short e" has three different pronunciations. The "long o" and "long e" are most commonly pronounced as diphthongs (see for example Bruce Donaldson's book, pages 8 and 9) and not simply long vowels as books for teaching Afrikaans children claim. Vowel reduction is extensive and there are no guides or textbooks that deal with this phenomenon extensively at a lay level.
   
2. The system of pluralization is highly complex. There as many as 16 rules that determine whether a plural will end in -s or in -e. Even these admit of exceptions, and the total system cannot be perfectly understood without a knowledge of Dutch. The evidence suggests that even Afrikaans-speaking children have not yet assimilated the pluralization rules by the age of six (See Southwood in Per Linguam 2006:22(2): pp. 29-39). This problem will only worsen in an increasingly anglicized and politically hostile environment.
3. The negation system is notoriously difficult for foreign learners. Native speakers usually characterize it in the simplistic way they were taught at school: you need two "nie's", replacing the first "nie" with a different negative where necessary. In fact, some sentences require a single negation: consider "Hy eet nie". Some are borderline cases: "Hy eet dit nie" and "Hy eet nie dit nie" are both heard, but have different implications.
   
4. Dutch, German and Afrikaans speakers are used to the idea of separable verbs, but these verbs are a minefield for foreign learners. Understanding and using the separable verbs requires you to understand the morphology of the language and the semantics of the two elements. A casual native speaker is likely to say that it is a verb consisting of a prepositional and a verbal morpheme, e.g. "opklim", "nagaan", "aantrek", "namaak". But this is no sure guide. "Oopmaak" is a separable verb, "oorweeg" isn't ("Ek weeg dit oor"?)

There might be more to come.

You have heard it said: an eye for an eye...

Arvo Pärt's "Credo", posted on Youtube by the pianist. It's that wonderful work that gradually destroys and recreates Bach's First Prelude of the 48 using 12-tone procedures.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnD_B51hQJI
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTi-uTh4c80&feature=related

T.S. Eliot: Choruses from the Rock VI (extract)

Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World
And that lions no longer need keepers?
Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?
Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments
As you can boast in the way of polite society
Will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?
Men! polish your teeth on rising and retiring;
Women! polish your fingernails:
You polish the tooth of the dog and the talon of the cat.
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and all they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.

Whetting your appetite for Feyerabend

Striking while the iron is hot, I thought I'd say a bit about Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher of science. Among his works are the books "Against Method" and "Farewell to Reason". His essay "How to Defend Society against Science" is also well-known.

The back cover of our copy of "Farewell to Reason" says:

Whether discussing Greek art and thought, vindicating the Church's battle with Galileo, exploring the development of quantum physics or exposing the dogmatism of Karl Popper, Feyerabend defends a relativist and historicist notion of the sciences.

If that doesn't pique the interest of my regular audience, these bits from "How to Defend Society against Science" probably will. The essay is available from several websites; this being one:
http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43842

Practitioners of a strange trade, friends, enemies, ladies, and gentlemen:
. . . About a year ago I was short of funds. So I accepted an invitation to contribute to a book . . . To make the book sell I thought I should make my contribution a provocative one and the most provocative statement one can make about the relation between science and religion is that science is a religion. Having made the statement the core of my article I found that lots of reasons, lots of excellent reasons, could be found for it.
. . .
Next I was invited to a Conference. . . I accepted the invitation because it paid for my flight to Europe. . . I discovered that everyone though very highly of science and that everyone was very serious. So I decided to explain how one could defend culture from science [and] was rewarded with an outcry about my "dangerous and ill-conceived ideas" . . .
. . .
Put in a nutshell [an argument to defend the exceptional position of science] says (1) that science has finally found the correct method for achieving results and (2) that there are many results to prove the excellence of the method. The argument is mistaken - but most attempts to show this lead to a dead end. Methodology has by now become so crowded with empty sophistication that it is extremely difficult to perceive the simple errors at its basis. It is like fighting the hydra - cut off one ugly head, and eight formalizations take its place. In this situation the only answer is superficiality: when sophistication loses content then the only way of keeping in touch with reality is to be crude and superficial. This is what I intend to be.
. . .
Finally, Popper's standards eliminate competitors once and for all: theories that are either not falsifiable or falsifiable and falsified have no place in science. Popper's criteria are clear, unambiguous, precisely formulated; Mill's criteria are not. This would be an advantage if science itself were clear, unambiguous, and precisely formulated. Fortunately, it is not.

The lemony-fresh nerve of it all!

And Kyle Gann too

It turns out that Kyle Gann is quite a well-known figure in American musicology. Several of his books are in the university library. He was also the professor of the student who wrote that well-loved work, "One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

Tristan Perich again

In my previous post ("long, long ago...") I mentioned the composer Tristan Perich.
Having finally got around to my blog again, I've noticed a few things:

1.) The composer very kindly left a comment.
2.) His site was not accessible from the link I posted. This has been corrected.
3.) His music is again available.