Comedy Bang Bang

In other words, the longer a game of chance continues the larger are the spells and runs of luck in themselves,
but the less their relative proportions to the whole amounts involved.
—John Venn. The Logic of Chance. (1888). 

 

“A probability that is very small for a single operation,” reads the RAND Corporation paper mentioned in journalist Sharon McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die, “say one in a million, can become significant if this operation will occur 10,000 times in the next five years.” The paper, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” was just what it says on the label: a description of the chances of an unplanned atomic explosion. Previously, American military planners had assumed “that an accident involving an H-bomb could never occur,” but the insight of this paper was that overall risk changes depending upon volume—an insight that ultimately depended upon a discovery first described by mathematician Jacob Bernoulli in 1713. Now called the “Law of Large Numbers,” Bernoulli’s thought was that “it is not enough to take one or another observation … but that a large number of them are needed”—it’s what allows us to conclude, Bernoulli wrote, that “someone who intends to throw at once three sixes with three dice, should be considered reckless even if winning by chance.” Yet, while recognizing the law—which predicted that even low-probability events become likely if there are many of them—considerably changed how the United States handled nuclear weapons, it has had essentially no impact on how the United States handles certain conventional weapons: the estimated 300 million guns held by its citizens. One possible reason why that may be, suggests the work of Vox.com founder Ezra Klein, is that arguments advanced by departments of literature, women’s studies, African-American studies and other such academic “disciplines” more or less openly collude with the National Rifle Association to prevent sensible gun control laws.

The inaugural “issue” of Vox contained Klein’s article “How Politics Makes Us Stupid”—an article that asked the question, “why isn’t good evidence more effective in resolving political debates?” According to the consensus wisdom, Klein says, “many of our most bitter political battles are mere misunderstandings” caused by a lack of information—in this view, all that’s required to resolve disputes is more and better data. But, Klein also writes, current research shows that “the more information partisans get, the deeper their disagreements become”—because there are some disagreements “where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument.” In other words, while some disagreements can be resolved by considering new evidence—like the Strategic Air Command changed how it handled nuclear weapons in light of a statistician’s recall of Bernoulli’s work—some disagreements, like gun control, cannot.

The work Klein cites was conducted by Yale Law School professor Daniel Kahan, along with several co-authors, and it began—Klein says—by collecting 1,000 Americans and then surveying both their political views and their mathematical skills. At that point, Kahan’s group gave participants a puzzle, which asked them to judge an experiment designed to show whether a new skin cream was more or less likely to make a skin condition worse or better, based on the data presented. The puzzle, however, was jiggered: although many more people got better using the skin cream than got worse using the skin cream, the percentage of people who got worse using the skin cream against those who did not use it was actually higher. In other words, if you paid attention merely to numbers, the data might appear to indicate one thing, while a calculation of percentages showed something else. As it turns out, most people relied on the raw numbers—and were wrong; meanwhile, people with higher mathematical skill were able to work through the problem to the right answer.

Interestingly, however, the results of this study did not demonstrate to Kahan that perhaps it is necessary to increase scientific and mathematical education. Instead, Kahan argues that the attempt by “economists and other empirical social scientists” to shear the “emotional trappings” from the debate about gun control in order to make it “a straightforward question of fact: do guns make society less safe or more” is misguided. Rather, because guns are “not just ‘weapons or pieces of sporting equipment,’” but “are also symbols,” the proper terrain to contest is not the grounds of empirical fact, but the symbolic: “academics and others who want to help resolve the gun controversy should dedicate themselves to identifying with as much precision as possible the cultural visions that animate this dispute.” In other words, what ought to structure this debate is not science, but culture.

To many on what’s known as the “cultural left,” of course, this must be welcome news: it amounts to a recognition of “academic” disciplines like “cultural studies” and the like that have argued for decades that cultural meanings trump scientific understanding. As Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking put it some years ago in The Social Construction of What?, a great deal of work in those fields of “study” have made claims that approach saying “that scientific results, even in fundamental physics, are social constructs.” Yet though the point has, as I can speak from personal experience, become virtual commonsense in departments of the humanities, there are several means of understanding the phrase “social construct.”

As English professor Michael Bérubé has remarked, much of that work can be traced as  “following the argument Heidegger develops at the end of the first section of Being and Time,” where the German philosopher (and member of the Nazi Party) argued that “we could also say that the discovery of Neptune in 1846 cold plausibly be described, from a strictly human vantage point, as the ‘invention’ of Neptune.” In more general terms New York University professor Andrew Ross—the same Ross later burned in what’s become known as the “Sokal Affair”—described one fashion in which such an argument could go: by tracing how a “scientific theory was advanced through power, authority, persuasion and responsiveness to commercial interests.” Of course, as a journalistic piece by Joy Pullmann—writing in the conservative Federalist—described recently, as such views have filtered throughout the academy they have led at least one doctoral student to claim in her dissertation at the education department of the University of North Dakota that “language used in the syllabi” of eight science classes she reviewed

reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women.

The language of this description, interestingly, equivocates between the claim that some, or most, scientists are discriminatory (a relatively safe claim) and the notion that there is something inherent about science itself (the radical claim)—which itself indicates something of the “cultural” view. Yet although, as in this latter example, claims regarding the status of science are often advanced on the grounds of discrimination, it seems to escape those making such claims just what sort of ground is conceded politically by taking science as one’s adversary.

For example, here is the problem with Kahan’s argument over gun control: by agreeing to contest on cultural grounds pro-gun control advocates would be conceding their very strongest argument: the Law of Large Numbers is not an incidental feature of science, but one of its very foundations. (It could perhaps even be the foundation, because science proceeds on the basis of replicability.) Kahan’s recommendation, in other words, might not appear so much as a change in tactics as an outright surrender: it’s only in the light of the Law of Large Numbers that the pro gun-control argument is even conceivable. Hence, it is very difficult to understand how an argument can be won if one’s best weapon is, I don’t know, controlled. In effect, conceding the argument made in the RAND paper quoted above is more or less to give up on the very idea of reducing the numbers of firearms, so that American streets could perhaps be safer—and American lives protected.

Yet another, and even larger-scale problem with taking the so-called “cultural turn,” as Kahan advises, however, is that abandoning the tools of the Law of Large Numbers does not merely concede ground on the gun control issue alone. It also does so on a host of other issues—perhaps foremost of them on matters of political representation itself. For example, it prevents an examination of the Electoral College from a scientific, mathematically-knowledgable point of view—as I attempted to do in my piece, “Size Matters,” from last month. It may help to explain what Congressman Steve Israel of New York meant when journalist David Daley, author of a recent book on gerrymandering, interviewed him on the practical effects of gerrymandering in the House of Representatives (a subject that requires strong mathematical knowledge to understand): “‘The Republicans have always been better than Democrats at playing the long game.’” And there are other issues also—all of which is to say that, by attacking science itself, the “cultural left” may literally be preventing government from interceding on the part of the very people for whom they claim to speak.

Some academics involved in such fields have, in fact, begun to recognize this very point: all the way back in 2004, one of the chiefs of this type of specialist, Bruno Latour, dared to ask himself “Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?” The very idea of questioning the institution of that field can, however, seem preposterous: even now, as Latour also wrote then, there are

entire Ph.D. programs … still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.

Indeed. It’s actually to the point, in fact, that it would be pretty easy to think that the supposed “left” doesn’t really want to win these arguments at all—that, perhaps, they just wish to go out …

With a bang.

Of Pale Kings and Paris

 

I saw pale kings and princes too …
—John Keats.
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819).

… and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle, but no man was moving there …
—Alfred Tennyson.
Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur (1871).

 

“It’s difficult,” the lady from Boston was saying a few days after the attacks in Paris, “to play other courses when your handicap is established at an easy course like this one.” She was referring to the golf course to which I have repaired following an excellent autumn season at Medinah Country Club: the Chechessee Creek Club, just south of Beaufort, South Carolina—a course that, to some, might indeed appear to be an easy course. Chechessee measures just barely more than 6000 yards from the member tees and, like all courses in the Lowcountry, it is virtually tabletop flat—but appearances are deceptive. For starters, the course is short on the card because it has five par-three holes, not the usual four, and the often-humid and wet conditions of the seacoast mean that golf shots don’t travel as they do in drier and more elevated locations. So in one sense, the lady was right—in precisely the same sense, as I suspect the lady was not aware, that Martin Heidegger, writing at an earlier moment of terror and the movements of peoples, was right.

Golf course architecture of course might be viewed as remote from the preoccupations of Continental theory as the greens of the Myopia Hunt Club, the lady’s home golf course, are from, say, the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Yet, just as Martin Heidegger is known as an exceptionally, even historically, difficult writer, Myopia Hunt Club is justly known to the elect as an exceptionally, even historically, difficult golf course. At the seventh U.S. Open in 1901—the only Open in which no competitor managed to break 80—the course established the record for highest winning score of a U.S. Open: a 331 shot by both Willie Anderson (who died tragically young) and Alex Smith that was resolved by the first playoff in the Open’s history. (Anderson’s 85 just edged Smith’s 86). So the club earned its reputation for difficulty.

The nature of those difficulties are, in fact, the very same ones those who like the Chechessee Creek Club trumpet: the deeper mysteries of angles, of trompe l’oiel, the various artifices by which the architects of golf’s Golden Age created the golf courses still revered today and whose art Coore and Crenshaw, Chechesee’s designers, have devoted their careers to recapture. Like Chechessee, Myopia Hunt isn’t, and never was, especially long: for most of its history, it has played around 6500 yards, which even at the beginning of the twentieth century wasn’t remarkable. Myopia Hunt is a difficult golf course for reasons entirely different than difficult golf courses like Medinah or Butler National are difficult: they are not easily apparent.

Take, for example, the 390-yard fourth: the contemporary golf architect Tom Doak once wrote that it “might be the best hole of its length in the free world.” A dogleg around a wetland, the fourth is, it seems, the only dogleg on a course of straight holes—in other words, slightly but not extraordinarily different from the other holes. However the hole’s green, it seems, is so pitched that a golfer in one of the course’s Opens (there have been four; the last in 1908) actually putted off the green—and into the wetland, where he lost the ball. (This might qualify as the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to a U.S. Open player.) The dangers at Myopia are not those of a Medinah or a Butler National—tight tee shots to far distant greens, mainly—but are instead seemingly-minor but potentially much more catastrophic.

At the seventh hole, according to a review at Golf Club Atlas, the “members know full well to land the ball some twenty yards short of the putting surface and allow for it to bumble on”—presumably, players who opt differently will suffer an apocalyptic fate. In the words of one reviewer, “one of the charms of the course” is that “understanding how best to play Myopia Hunt is not immediately revealed.” Whereas the hazards of a Butler or Medinah are readily known, those at Myopia Hunt are, it seems, only revealed when it is too late.

It’s for that reason, the reviewer goes on to say, that the club had such an impact on American golf course design: the famed Donald Ross arrived in America the same year Myopia Hunt held its first Open, in 1898, and spent many years designing nearby courses while drawing inspiration by visiting the four-time Open site. Other famous Golden Age architects also drew upon Myopia Hunt for their own work. As the reviewer above notes, George Thomas and A.W. Tillinghast—builders of some of the greatest American courses—“were influenced by the abundant placement and penal nature of the hazards” (like the wetland next to the fourth’s green) at Myopia Hunt. Some of America’s greatest golf courses were built by architects with first-hand knowledge of the design style pioneered and given definition by Myopia Hunt.

Coore and Crenshaw—the pale kings of American golf architecture—like to advertise themselves as champions of this kind of design: a difficulty derived from the subtle and the non-obvious, rather than simply by requiring the golfer to hit the ball really far and straight. “Theirs,” says the Coore and Crenshaw website, “is an architectural firm based upon the shared philosophy that traditional, strategic golf is the most rewarding.” Chechessee, in turn, is meant to be a triumph of their view: according to their statement on Chechesee’s website, Coore and Crenshaw’s goal when constructing it “was to create a golf course of traditional character that would reward thoughtful, imaginative, and precise play,” and above all to build a course—like a book?—whose “nuances … will reveal themselves over time.” In other words, to build a contemporary Myopia Hunt.

Yet in the view of this Myopia Hunt member, Coore and Crenshaw failed: Chechessee is, for this lady, far easier than her nineteenth-century home course. Why is that? My speculation, without having seen Myopia Hunt, is that whereas Coore and Crenshaw design in a world that has seemingly passed by the virtues of the past, the Massachusetts course was designed on its own terms. That is, Coore and Crenshaw work within an industry where much of their audience has internalized standards that were developed by golf architects who themselves were reacting against the Golden Age architects like Tillinghast or Ross. Whereas Myopia Hunt Club can have a hole—the ninth—whose green is only nine yards wide and forty yards deep, the following generation of architects (and golfers) rejected such designs as “unfair,” and worked to make golf courses less “odd” or “unique.” So when Coore and Crenshaw come to design, they must work against expectations that the designer of Myopia Hunt Club did not.

Thus, the Golden Age designers were in the same position that, according to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the Pre-Socratic philosophers were: in a “brief period of authentic openness to being,” as the Wikipedia article about Heidegger says. That is, according to Heidegger the Pre-Socratics (the Greek philosophers, like Anaximander and Heraclitus and Parmenides, all of whom predated Socrates) had a relationship to the world, and philosophizing about it, that was unavailable to those who would come afterwards: they were able, Heidegger insinuates, to confront the world itself in a way different from those who came afterwards—after all, the latecomers unavoidably had to encounter the works of those very philosophers first.

Unlike his teacher then, Edmund Husserl—who “argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience”—Heidegger himself however thought that the Pre-Socratic moment was impossible to return to: hence, Heidegger claimed that “experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being.” So while such a direct confrontation with the world as Husserl demands may have been possible for the Pre-Socratics, Heidegger is seemingly willing to allow, he also argues that history has long since closed off such a possibility, and thus forbade the kind of direct experience of the world Husserl thought of as philosophy’s object. In the same way, whereas the Golden Age architects confronted golf architecture in a raw state, no such head-on confrontation is now possible.

What’s interesting about Heidegger’s view, as people like Penn State professor Michael Berubé has pointed out, is that it has had consequences for such things as our understanding of, say, astronomical objects. As Berubé says in an essay entitled “The Return of Realism,” at the end of Heidegger’s massive Being and Time—the kind encyclopedic book that really emphasizes the “German” in “German philosophy”—Heidegger’s argument that we are “always already” implicated within previous thoughts implies that, for instance, it could be said that “the discovery of Neptune in 1846 could plausibly be described, from a strictly human vantage point, as the ‘invention’ of Neptune.” Or, to put it as Heidegger does: “Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand already were.” Before Myopia Hunt Club and other courses like it were built, there were no “rules” of golf architecture—afterwards, however, sayings like “No blind shots” came to have the weight of edicts from the Almighty.

For academic leftists like Berubé, Heidegger’s insight has proven useful, in a perhaps-paradoxical way. Although the historical Heidegger himself was a member of the Nazi Party, according to Berubé his work has furthered the project of arguing “the proposition that although humans may not be infinitely malleable, human variety and human plasticity can in principle and in practice exceed any specific form of human social organization.” Heidegger’s work, in other words, aims to demonstrate just how contingent a lot of what we think of as necessary is—which is to say that his work can help us to re-view what we have taken for granted, and perhaps see it with a glimpse of what the Pre-Socratics, or the Golden Age golf architects, saw. Even if Heidegger would also deny that such would ever be possible for us, here and now.

Yet, as the example of the lady from Myopia Hunt demonstrates, such a view has also its downside: having seen the original newness, she denies the possibility that the new could return. To her, golf architecture ended sometime around 1930: just as Heidegger thought that, some time around the time of Socrates, philosophy became not just philosophy, but also the history of philosophy, so too does this lady think that golf architecture has also become the history of golf architecture.

Among the “literary people” of his own day, the novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe once complained, could be found a similar snobbishness: “it is one of the unconscious assumptions of modern criticism,” Wolfe wrote, “that the raw material is simply ‘there,’” and from such minds the only worthy question is “Given such-and-such a body of material, what has the artist done with it?” What mattered to these critics, in other words, wasn’t the investigatory reporting done by such artists as Balzac or Dickens, Tolstoy or Gogol, but rather the techniques each artist applied to that material. The human misery each of those writers witnessed and reported, this view holds Wolfe says, is irrelevant to their work; rather, what matters is how artfully that misery is arranged.

It’s a conflict familiar both to literary people and the people that invented golf. The English poets, like Keats and Tennyson, who invented the figure of the Pale King were presumably drawing upon a verse well-known to King James’ translators; literary folk who feared the cost of seeing anew. The relevant verse, imaginably the source of both Keats and Tennyson, is from the James translation of the Book of Revelations (chapter 6, verse 8):

And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him.

But opponents of the Auld Enemy saw the new differently; as novelist John Updike once reported, according the “the old Scots adage,”

We should be conscious of no more grass …
than will cover our own graves.

To the English, both heirs to and inventors of a literary tradition, the Pale King was a terrible symbol of the New, the Young, and the Unknown. But to their ancient opponents, the Scots, the true fear was to be overly aware of the past, at the expense of welcoming in the coming age. As another Celt from across the sea, W. B. Yeats, once put the same point:

Be not inhospitable to strangers,
lest they be angels in disguise.

Parisians put the same point in the aftermath of the shootings and bombings that Friday evening on Twitter by using the hashtag “#PorteOuverte”—a slogan by which, in the aftermath of the horror, thousands of Parisians offered shelter to strangers from whatever was still lurking in the darkness. To Parisians, like the Scots before them, what matters is not whether the Pale King arrives, but our reaction when he does.