Wednesday’s flowers

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 25, 2012, filed in category awake

changes in forms of interpersonal competition over millennia

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 22, 2012, filed in category social networks

About 172 GC, the physician-scholar Galen deplored the quality of intellectual life about him in Rome. He described intellectuals’ activities thus:

They indulge in salutation in the morning, then they go their separate ways: a not inconsiderable part of the tribe repairs to the forum and the lawcourts, more still frequent dance-shows and chariot-races, while another sizeable section busies itself with dicing, sexual encounters, bathing, drinking, carousing, and other sensual pleasures. Finally in the evening they reunite once more for symposia; and when they have drunk their fill of wine, they do not pass around the lyre or kithara, or any of the other musical instruments, proficiency in which in the olden times was considered appropriate at such gatherings (and whose absence was likewise grossly shameful); nor do they engage in mutual exchange of those sorts of argument which our elders record as occurring at their symposia, or in any other noble thing. Rather they drink toasts to one another, competing to see who can down the largest draughts. And the best of them is not the one most gifted musically or in philosophical argument, but the one who can down the greatest number of the largest wine-bowls.[1]

By the mid-eleventh century in the vibrant intellectual culture of the ancient Islamic world, these remarks had been translated from Greek into Arabic and distilled into the Galenic saying:

Formerly when men met for drinking and music, they vied in discussing the benefits of various liquors for the humors and of music for the peace of the soul, and also the means of counteracting either. Today when men meet, they vie in the size of the cups from which they drink.[2]

Galen idealized classical Greek physicians, philosophers, and literary figures.[3] His remarks evoked the golden intellectual age of the Platonic symposium in fourth-century Greece. Competition like that at the Platonic symposium advanced knowledge and the art of medicine. Competition like college fraternities’ drinking contests generate drunkenness. While both forms of competition generate individual prestige and a social status hierarchy, their other effects obviously differ greatly.[4]

Sayings associated with ancient revered figures were highly valued as knowledge in Europe through the Middle Ages. The above Galenic saying was translated from Arabic into Spanish in the first half of the thirteenth-century, then from the Spanish into Latin near the end of the thirteenth century. Near the end of the fourteenth century, the Latin text was translated into French, and then in the middle of the fifteenth century, the French text into English.[5] Known in English as The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, this text was extremely popular in fifteenth-century England. Under the press of William Caxton in 1477, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers became the first book printed in England.

Change in the form of competition seems to have colored the translation of Galen’s saying from Spanish to Latin to French to Middle English. Here’s the Galenic saying from Middle English, literally translated to modern English:

Once they that drank the least wine and were most temperate in daily life were most honored and praised, and now they that are the most gluttonous and drink most frequently are placed highest in the Master’s household so as to provide an example to others to act the same.[6]

Lost in the translation is the image of the Platonic symposium and its connection to developing knowledge.[7] Competition to develop knowledge through free discussion was neither an elite ideal nor common practice in the European Middle Ages. The Middle English saying concentrates on temperance, imitation, and personal advancement in the Master’s household. That shift in focus corresponds to the predominate orientation of symbolic competition in the European Middle Ages: competition for favor in royal courts.

* * * * *

Relevant work: The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project promises to collect, analyze, and make available online historical collections of ancient wisdom sayings.

Notes:

[1] Galen, On the Therapeutic Method, I.3, trans. from Greek, Hankinson (1991) pp. 3-4. Id. p. xxxiv indicates that Galen wrote this work about 172 GC. More on Roman dance shows (pantomime) and Roman entertainment. Hankinson (1991) p. 83 notes: “nostalgia for a vanished and better past … is commonplace throughout [Galen's] works; but here it takes the unusual form of comparing modern forms of symposiastic entertainment unfavourably with their distant ancestors.”

[2] English translation from HP p. 171, quoting the saying recorded in Arabic in Abū al-Wafā’ al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik, Choice Maxims and Best Sayings, written 1048-9 GC. See Rosenthal (1960) p. 133. The reference to music and the soul suggests influence from Plato’s Timaeus, which described music as harmonizing the soul. Galen wrote an influential commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. The only Arabic author who frequently and extensively quotes al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik’s book by name and title is Ibn Abi Usaibia in HP. Rosenthal (1960) p. 145. Ibn Abi Usaibia also quotes explicitly from Hunyan‘s collection or collections of authoritative sayings. See HP pp. 55, 91, 99. 113, 168.

[3] Galen promoted Hippocrates and Plato as the most important medical and philosophic authorities. He cited frequently Euripides and Aristophanes, but rarely mentioned Hellenistic literature. Galen’s longest work, consisting of forty-eight books, was a dictionary of words in Attic writers.

[4] Galen’s On the Therapeutic Method goes on to discuss “that beneficial strife that Hesiod praised.” I.6-I.8. Here’s some discussion of Hesiod on different types of strife, and an application to recent communications policy.

[5] ibn Fātik’s Choice Maxims and Best Sayings was translated into Spanish as Bocados de Oro. That Spanish text was translated into Latin as Liber Philosophorum Moralium Antiquorum. Guillamume de Tignonville translated the Latin text into French as Dits Moraulx. Many manuscripts of all these texts have survived. See Rosenthal (1960).

[6] From the Chapter on Galen, Helmingham MS, Sutton (2006) p. 104 (my translation into modern English). The Scrope MS has a similar English version. See Buhler (1941) pp. 260-1.

[7] The Spanish translation occurred in the thirteenth century before 1257 under the intellectually vibrant reign of Alphonso X. Christian Spain was then engaged in intense political and cultural competition with the intellectually advanced Muslim culture of Al-Andalus. The Spanish translation preserves the image of symposiastic competition:

En otro tienpo, quando los omes se allegavan a bever e a cantar, presciavan más al que más sabie lo que obran los vinos en las conplisiones e los sonos en las virtudes. E agora, quando se allegan, non prescian más si non quien beve major vaso de vino.

Crombach (1971) p. 166. The Galenic saying evidently was transformed along the translation chain from Spanish to English.

References:

Bühler, Curt F., Mubashshir ibn Fātik, Abū al-Wafā, Guillaume, Stephen Scrope, and William Worcester. 1941. The dicts and sayings of the philosophers; the translations. London: Published for the Early English text society by H. Milford, Oxford University Press.

Crombach, Mechthild, ed., Mubashshir ibn Fātik, Abū al-Wafā. 1971. Bocados de oro. Bonn: Romanisches Seminar der Universität Bonn.

Hankinson, R. J., trans. Galen. 1991. On the therapeutic method. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

Rosenthal, Franz. 1960. “Al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik. Prolegomena to an Abortive Edition.” Oriens, vol. 13/14 (1960/1961) pp. 132-158.

Sutton, John William. 2006. The dicts and sayings of the philosophers. Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University (online text).

Tagged: Galen

how the great Library of Alexander was destroyed

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 22, 2012, filed in category economics of attention

The great Library of Alexandria‘s destruction stands for the myth of violent assault on the intellectual world. For those today with an unfashionable concern for truth, the reality of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction is more important and mundane. Irrespective of the villains in the conflicting stories of when and how it was destroyed, the Library of Alexandria would not have survived antiquity. Alexandria has a Mediterranean climate. In those conditions, papyrus rolls in active use do not last longer than a few centuries. The great Library of Alexandria lacked:

sustained management and maintenance that would have seen it through successive transitions in the physical media by means of which the texts could have been transmitted. … authorities both east and west lacked the will and means to maintain a great library. An unburned building full of decaying books would not have made a particle’s worth of difference.[*]

A great intellectual culture thrives only with support for day-to-day, unheralded efforts.

* * * * *

Note:

[*] From p. 359 in Bagnall, Roger S. 2002. “Alexandria: Library of Dreams”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 146 (4): 348-362.

Tagged: libraries

Wednesday’s flowers

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 18, 2012, filed in category awake

God’s poetic effects according to Galen and Longinus

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 16, 2012, filed in category big ideas

In the second century, the physician Galen vigorously proclaimed true medical knowledge. He studied mathematics, logic, philosophy, anatomy, and pharmacy. He engaged in dissections and vivisections, treated patients with substances and surgery, and wrote many technical books. An early Greek school of medicine, called the Dogmatists, downplayed the importance of factual observation and experience. Galen harshly criticized the Dogmatists. Early Greek philosophers had pondered the causes of existence and change. Galen described material nature appropriate to purpose as circumscribing possibilities for existence and change.

Galen had contempt for practitioners merely of verbal arts. Galen called such persons sophists. They had little interest in facts and truth. They sought public acclaim and personal wealth through appealing rhetoric:

The ubiquitous, fashionable, shameless sophists, according to Galen, try to contradict experience, they deny that which is evident, they dishonour phenomena and disregard clear observations, they reject anatomical facts, they give little heed to the probable, they even ignore evidence that has led to a universal consensus, and they transgress against the two things that constitute the whole medical art, viz. experience and reason.[1]

A Jewish scholar living in Alexandria two centuries before Galen described Moses as declaring, “What is impossible to every created being is possible and easy to {God} above.”[2] Galen, who believed in a prime-mover God, forcefully rejected Moses’s knowledge of God:

it would not have been possible for {God} to make a man out of a stone in an instant, by simply wishing so. It is precisely this point in which our own opinion and that of Plato and of the other Greeks who follow the right method in natural science differs from the position taken up by Moses. For the latter it seems enough to say that God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should He wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes. We however do not hold this; we say that certain things are impossible by nature and that God does not even attempt such things at all [3]

Dogmatic physicians dismissed empirical facts and emphasized pure reason. Galen considered Dogmatic physicians to be similar to Moses:

physicians of the kind mentioned are comparable to Moses, who gave laws to the Jewish people, for he wrote his books without adducing proofs, he merely said: God has ordered, or, God has said. [4]

An important idea in early Greek thought was that nothing comes from nothing. The contrary position, creatio ex nihilo, was by Galen’s time associated with Jewish belief. From Galen’s perspective, Moses’s description of God’s creatio ex nihilo was analogous to sophists’ creation of material wealth and public acclaim from nothing but words.

Celebrating verbal arts implied a much different valuation of Moses’s position. About Galen’s time, a book instructing readers on how to be verbally noble, great, and impressive (attributed to Longinus) observed:

the lawgiver of the Jews {Moses}, a man who did not just happen, since he made room for the power of the divine and made it appear in accordance with its worthiness, says in the introduction to his Rules, “God said” — what? — “Let there be light, and there was; let there be earth, and there was.” [5]

This observation occurs in the midst of discussing Homer’s sublime expressions. Homer’s writings in the ancient Greek world were, among the learned elite, much like the Bible was among the Jews. The quotation from Moses’s “introduction to his Rules” measures up to the sublimity of the quotations from Homer. That makes Moses very good, indeed. Longinus’s reference to Moses as “a man who did not just happen” differentiates Moses from Galen’s image of a man made in an instant from a stone.[6] The subsequent clause in Longinus’s observation “since he made room for the power of the divine and made it appear in accordance with its worthiness” is best read as explaining Moses’ authorship of the quoted words. Moses, according to Longinus, represented God with sublime verbal technique.

Under Galen and Longinus’s contrasting evaluations of Genesis is their common interest in created beauty. In the ancient world, differences between physicians, sorcerers, philosophers, sophists, mythic figures and historical persons were blurry. Elite intellectuals, from a prominent Roman statesmen c. 75 GC to a prominent Islamic scholar in twelfth-century Damascus, associated Moses with magic.[7] Galen complained of similar cross identification:

when a good man makes a sound prediction on the basis of methodical understanding, proper training, long experience, precise observation and rational deduction, far from receiving the acclaim he deserves he is suspected of sorcery (which is a good deal worse than the mere slur that scientific prognosis is nothing but fortune-telling) [8]

While attempting to reveal through anatomical facts a beautiful rational order, Galen competed aggressively with sophists in sophistic ways:

Galen’s audiences, moving back and forth between sophistic and Galenic epideixis, probably brought similar rhetorical, theatrical, and affective expectations to both kinds of performances. If Galen’s accounts are to be trusted, he did not disappoint their expectations: they found in him a superbly staged, historically aware, highly cultured, rhetorically informed, self-promoting, expert performer whose technical virtuosity amazed, delighted, and instructed a largely admiring public. In his keen rivalry with the sophists, and with those who, in his view, resembled them, Galen tried to secure victory by becoming a skilful performer in the very traditions represented by the ‘Second Sophistic’. [9]

Jews’ biblical study and their taking of Moses’s rules into their daily lives did not emphasize sophists’ rhetorical concerns. Yet an ancient rhetorician could hardly fail to recognize the stunning power of the Bible in Jews’ lives and their love for their God. Moreover, the Jews’ Hebrew Bible gained wide distribution in Greek from before the end of the second century BGC. That the surviving literature of non-Jewish rhetoricians doesn’t show much appreciation for the Hebrew Bible may reflect primarily the history of political and cultural hostility toward the Jews.

Galen’s demonstrations of biological purpose and his references to the demiurge make most sense in relation to intellectual beauty. To scholars today, Galen’s ultimate explanations look like merely teleological claims that function like Moses’s words creating laws. Galen was not interested in arguing about creatio ex nihilo or eternal existence of the world.[10] He sought to direct intellectual attention to the material surface — how biological parts fit together and work together to serve a particular purpose. He saw within the material surface of the world an order supporting good reasoning and in turn revealing splendid truth. Why did Galen refer to a demiurge at all?[11] The right answer seems to me to be: as a subject for praise for the beauty that Galen’s system of reasoning revealed, at least to him.

I loved her and sought her from my youth,
and I desired to take her for my bride,
and I became enamored of her beauty.

You know modern, rigorous science through signs of bodies bored to death. Understanding creation can be more lively. Galen’s work, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Comedy, combined words and deeds to reveal and transform worlds.[12] The way is poetry engaged with matter.

Notes:

[1] Staden (1997) p. 34 (Greek terms in parentheses omitted above).

[2] Philo of Alexandria, On the Life of Moses, I, XXXI.174.

[3] From Galen, De usu partium, book 11, chapter 14. See Reference 2 in Roger Pearse’s excellent compilation, Galen on Jews and Christians.

[4] From Galen, On Hippocrates’ Anatomy. This work is lost, but the quoted text (reference 2 in Galen on Jews and Christians) has been preserved in HP p. 151.

[5] Longinus, On the Sublime, 9.9, trans. Arieti and Crossett (1985) pp. 57-8. The Pentateuch was known as the Books of Moses, and ancient scholars considered Moses to have written Genesis. See, e.g. Philo, On the Life of Moses, II, VIII.47. Longinus’s quotation from Genesis is not from the Septuagint text (Arieti and Crossett (1985) p. 57, note). Other Greek translations of Hebrew scripture are documented in the second century GC . Others probably existed even earlier.

[6] The apparent intertextuality between Longinus and Galen favors dating On the Sublime after Galen, rather than before. Some have questioned whether Longinus’s observation on Moses is a later interpolation. The analysis above supports that observation’s integrity in On the Sublime.

[7] Pliny the Elder, in Natural History, 30.2, states: “There is another sect, also, of adepts in the magic art, who derive their origin from Moses, Jannes, and Lotapea, Jews by birth, but many thousand years posterior to Zoroaster.” In twelfth-century Damascus, the scholar `Abd al-Latif al-Baghdādi noted:

Al-Shaqani asserted that Yāsīn could perform miracles which even Moses, the son of Amrām, would have been unable to perform, that he could produce gold coins whenever he wanted and in any quantity and any mintage he desired, and that he could turn the waters of the Nile into a tent, under which he and his colleagues would be able to sit.

HP p. 858. Moses also figures in the Greek Magical Papyri. For relevant discussion see Gager (1972), Ch. 4.

[8] Hankinson (2008) p. 7 (describing Galen’s view, not directly quoting Galen). Galen frequently motivates his works as writing at the request of friends. König (2009) sees in that motif:

a good example of why we should be more ready to view the relationship between literary and technical writing in the ancient world more as a relationship of continuum and cross-fertilization than of contrast.

Id. pp. 43-4. The less diverse and less dynamic institutions of scholarly study in our contemporary world support more rigid professional and generic boundaries.

[9] Staden (1997) p. 54.

[10] Chiaradonna (2009) pp. 244-52.

[11] Flemming (2009), p. 82, insightfully poses this question. Her answer seems to tend in the direction of praise for the Emperor. That seems to me too narrow of an understanding of the impulse to praise within Galen’s demonstrations and writings.

[12] The quote above is Wisdom of Solomon 8:2. On Galen’s interest in transforming radically socio-intellectual practices, see König (2009) pp. 56-58, and Elliott (2005) Chs. 9 and 10.

References:

Arieti, James A., John M. Crossett, and Cassius Longinus. 1985. On the sublime. New York: E. Mellen Press.

Chiaradonna, Riccardo. 2009. “Galen and Middle Platonism.” Ch. 11 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds), Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

Elliott, Christopher Jon. 2005. Galen, Rome and the Second Sophistic. Dissertation: The Australian National University, School of Social Sciences, Department of History.

Flemming, Rebecca. 2009. “Demiurge and Emperor in Galen’s world of knowledge.” Ch. 3 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds), Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

Gager, John G. 1972. Moses in Greco-Roman paganism. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

König, Jason. 2009. ‘Conventions of prefatory self-presentation in Galen’s On the Order of my Own Books‘, Ch. 2 in Gill, C., Wilkins, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds) Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

Hankinson, Robert J. 2008. “The Man and His Work.” Ch. 1 in Hankinson, Robert J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Galen. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr.

Staden, Heinrich von. 1997. ‘Galen and the “Second Sophistic.”‘ Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 41: 33–54. doi: 10.1111/j.2041-5370.1997.tb02261.x

Tagged: Galen

sexism in the World Values Survey

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 16, 2012, filed in category social networks

Studies of sexism published in leading scholarly journals draw upon the World Values Survey to measure sexism. The World Values Survey is a series of surveys of values in societies around the world. A network of social scientists at leading universities around the world design and supervise the surveys. The resulting data have shaped scholarship and prominent public reporting:

This data have been used in thousands of scholarly publications and the findings have been reported in leading media such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Economist, the World Development Report and the UN Human Development Report. [1]

So how does the World Values Survey generate data for measuring sexism?

The journal Psychological Science recently published a study that used two questions from the World Values Survey to measure sexism.[2] Those questions were:

V61. On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.
V63. On the whole, men make better business executives than women do.

These questions measure education about sexism that universities currently provide. Consider these alternative questions for measuring sexism:

alt. V61. On the whole, women are more virtuous and peaceful than men.
alt. V63 On the whole, women take better care of children than men do.

These alternative questions could provide insight into sexist military service requirements, such as sexist selective service registration, and sexism in child support and child custody rulings. Such sexism is so deeply ingrained that many social scientists at leading universities around the world aren’t even aware of it.

Other questions in the World Values Survey might also be examined to better understand sexist values. Here are relevant World Values Survey questions, paired with insightful alternative questions:

V44. When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.
alt. V44. In times of war, men are more needed as soldiers than women are.

V60. Being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay.
alt. V60. More important than a husband’s personal fulfillment is his providing money for his family.

V62. A university education is more important for a boy than for a girl.
alt. V62. Dirty and dangerous jobs are more appropriate for men than for women.

V59. If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn’t want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?
alt. V59. If a man wants to have casual sex with a woman, but he doesn’t want the government to force him to be financially responsible for any child that the woman’s might have, do you approve or disapprove?

V161. Women have the same rights as men.
alt. V161. Men have the same rights as women.[3]

Because biological evolution has shaped human capabilities for social communication, don’t expect any socially influential group to consider these alternative questions except in the most extreme circumstances.

Notes:

[1] From the World Values Survey’s brochure, Values Change the World, p. 4. The World Values Survey’s webpage, Introduction to the World Values Survey, states that the survey has “given rise to more than 400 publications, in more than 20 languages.”

[2] See Brandt (2011) p. 2. The abstract of Brandt (2011) begins:

Theory predicts that individuals’ sexism serves to exacerbate inequality in their society’s gender hierarchy.

Theory here refers to the contemporary social-scientific practice of giving a general assertion a technical name and then calling it a theory. If other scholars refer to it, claim to test it, and argue about it, then it is a successful theory in academic terms.

Psychological Science’s press release (yes, press release) for this study begins:

Individual beliefs don’t stay confined to the person who has them; they can affect how a society functions.

That sentence’s substance is the scholarly construction of the concepts “individual beliefs” and “society.” The value of such scholarly work is apparent from the Brandt (2011)’s first sentence:

Sexist ideologies have been classified as hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths that justify the creation of inequality (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

Note the passive sentence construction, the scholarly jargon, the impressive abstractions, and the concluding scholarly reference — classic features of contemporary social-scientific sophism.

Brandt (2011)’s actual technical analysis deserves no intellectual credibility. The article reports finding “consistent with [the author's] prediction” (what a chance occurrence that such a result would be reported and published!) showing that “greater sexism predicts decreases in gender equality over time.” Careful reading of the article reveals that this effect was found over a period of two to four years. Do you really believe that changes in gender equality can be meaningfully measured across the relatively short time of two to four years? Since Brandt (2011)’s analysis is quantitatively symmetric, its finding could also be stated as “lesser sexism predicts increases in gender equality over time.” In a cross section, some country will always have lesser sexism. Norway has long been regarded as a country with relatively little sexism. Can gender equality in Norway continue to increase over time? How does gender equality continue to increase once the genders are measured as equal?

The article’s quantitative analysis is largely meaningless. Its findings relate to statistical significance, which may be totally unrelated to quantitative significance. Moreover, the quantitative significance of a given change in any of the variables used in the study is very difficult to judge, because all three variables used (sexism measure, gender inequality measure (GEM), and human development index (HDI)) are transformed aggregations far removed from meaningful, observable quantities. Nonetheless, the article appears to take pride in using “full-information maximum-likelihood estimation” applied to these transformed aggregations. The article doesn’t mention that the gender inequality measure (GEM) is constructed from sub-indices measuring the share of seats in parliament held by women; the share of women legislators, senior officials, and managers; the share of women professional and technical workers; and the ratio of estimated female to male earned income. Responses to the questions measuring sexism are likely to be shaped by respondents’ observing facts included in the GEM. What such correlations imply for interpreting Brandt (2011)’s findings is far from clear.

Brandt (2011) provides meager reporting of quantitative analysis. Details of the regressions supporting the article’s findings aren’t reported. Also not reported are specification tests of the specification chosen. Brandt (2011) seems oblivious to the large critical literature on Granger Causality. That literature directly relates to Brandt (2011)’s analytical claim. The article shows no serious evaluation of its own technical claims.

A person with econometric experience and some knowledge of Granger Causality tests might suspect that, with a few hours of econometric work, she could produce the opposite of Brandt (2011)’s findings. I believe that I could do that. However, such an exercise strikes me as tedious and a complete waste of time. Informed readers should recognize within a few minutes that Brandt (2011) is intellectually hollow.

Despite Brandt (2011)’s grave intellectual weaknesses, the press release issued announcing its findings seems to me to suggest a need for totalitarian re-education camps:

“You could get the impression that having sexist beliefs, or prejudiced beliefs more generally, is just an individual thing—‘my beliefs don’t impact you,’” Brandt says. But this study shows that isn’t true. If individual people in a society are sexist, men and women in that society become less equal.

“Gender inequality is such a tough beast to crack because there are so many contributing factors,” Brandt says. Policies can contribute to inequality—and some countries have insured some measure of equality by mandating that some number of seats in the legislature be reserved for women. But this study suggests that if the goal is increased equality, individual attitudes have to change.

Beastly totalitarian re-education camps painfully mar human history. Cracking human skulls like eggs to make an omelet has occurred. Scholars, particularly those working in “psychological science,” should study and understand that history.

The Association of Psychological Science had membership as of 2008 numbering more than 20,000 psychologists. It describes its journal Psychological Science as “the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology.” That a leading scholarly journal would publish Brandt (2011) and the associated press release is a shameful intellectual failure.

[3] Here are the World Values Survey’s questionnaires. All the World Values Survey questions above are from the 2005 questionnaire (fourth wave).

Reference:

Brandt, Mark J. 2011. “Sexism and gender inequality across 57 societies”. Psychological Science. 22 (11): 1413-1418 (press release).

Tagged: sexism

Galen dominates Greeks in Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 16, 2012, filed in category social networks

In the thirteenth century GC, Damascus-based physician Ibn Abi Usaibia wrote a book on “classes of physicians.” It consisted of “essential information” concerning the lives and writings of physicians, as well as “some savants and philosophers who studied and practiced medicine,” from the origin of medicine to Ibn Abi Usaibia’s present.[*] While by modern convention Ibn Abi Usaibia’s book is called History of Physicians, that book in its time seems to have been understood to help constitute the present profession of physicians. History of Physicians is a trans-historical record of medical profession membership and status.

Galen of Pergamon dominates among Greek figures in History of Physicians. References to Galen measure 0.55 on an authority index in which references to Allāh / God measure one. The three next most frequently referenced Greek figures are Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Plato. They have authority indices of 0.26, 0.22, and 0.10, respectively. Galen himself emphasized the authority of Hippocrates. Hence the relatively frequent references to Hippocrates are partly an effect of Galen’s authority. Aristotle, who wrote extensively on anatomy, taxonomy, and philosophy, is a much bigger figure than Galen in modern Western classical studies. But references to Aristotle in History of Physicians are less than half as frequent as references to Galen. Other Greek physicians who achieved prominence in their days, such Plistonicus, Heraclides, Pedanius Dioscorides, Rufus of Ephesus, and Oribasius, are very infrequently mentioned.

History of Physicians emphasizes written work. It nearly uniformly lists the written works of each physician. History of Physicians has relatively little information about specific medical treatments, techniques, and medicines. Symbolic competition with high social influence tends to produce highly concentrated popularity distributions (blockbusters / celebrities). The dominance of Galen among Greek figures suggests that competition for attention to written work within active social networks was a primary driver of physicians’ reputations.

* * * * *

Statistics and source:

Here are token frequency distributions for Ibn Abi Usaibai’s History of Physicians (Excel version). Those token distributions could not have been compiled without Roger Pearse‘s enormous labors to produce a machine-readable transcription of the English translation below.

Note:

[*] In the book’s preface, Ibn Abi Usaibia calls it “`Uyunu al-Anba fi Tabaquat al- Atibba.” Kopf translates this as “Essential Information Concerning the Classes of Physicians.” Regarding the term translated as “Essential Information,” Kopf notes, ‘Most scholars have wrongly translated this as “Sources of Information.”‘ See HP p. 3 and footnote 15 to HP Chapters 1-5. At HP p. 942, the title of the book is translated as “Important Information Concerning the Classes of Physicians.” Other thirteenth-century physicians refer to the book as Ibn Abi Usaibia’s book concerning the classes of physicians. See HP pp. 730, 763, 899. The book’s chapter titles echo the term “classes of physicians,” emphasizing its thematic importance.

Tagged: Galen, Ibn Abi Usaibia

Wednesday’s flowers

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 11, 2012, filed in category awake

reasoning against harsh punishment

Written by Douglas Galbi on January 8, 2012, filed in category prisoners

An anger-driven justice system doesn’t necessarily generate harsh punishment. In ancient, democratic Athens, anger made a citizen’s case for public action against a wrongdoer. Yet anger-driven justice seems not to have supported harsh punishment. Executions in democratic Athens were limited to means that did not draw blood; specifically, drinking hemlock and being crucified by being bound, not nailed, to a board. Athenian themselves considered their city to have mild, even too mild, punishments.[1] Anger was not a recognized impediment to a just public order.

Scholarly development set reason against emotion. The relation between reason and emotion became a key issue among teachers (philosophers) competing vigorously for students. Among most philosophers, the favored position was that reason should control emotion. That’s the idea underlying Plato’s famous image of reason as a charioteer controlling conflicting emotions.

In the vibrant intellectual circumstances of the ancient Islamic world, a leading physician counseled an emir to administer punishment based on reason, not anger. According to a history that the physician’s son wrote, the Emir said to the physician:

I want you to take care of my physical well-being and of something even more important to me, namely my morals, for I have faith in your intelligence, learning, piety and devotion. I am greatly distressed by the fact that anger often drives me to actions such as flogging and executions, which I regret when my wrath has subsided. I therefore request you to watch me, and if you detect any defect in my behavior, do not hesitate to tell me so and advise me how to rid myself of it. [2]

The physician reportedly replied:

I have heard the Emir’s order and shall obey it. The Emir will at once hear some general rules from me as to how to deal with the failings he is concerned about, while details will follow as the occasion arises. Remember, O Emir, that you occupy a position in which no man can gain the upper hand of you, that you are free to do whatever you please at any time you choose. … Bear in mind, therefore, that anger intoxicates a man much more powerfully than wine. A man drunk with wine is apt to do what he will neither understand nor even remember when he is sober again and will regret and be ashamed of when reminded of it, and the same applies, only more so, to a man drunk with anger. So, whenever you feel anger rising in you, then, before its effect becomes too heady and you are no longer master of yourself, make it a rule to defer punishment to the following day, since you may be sure that what you were about to do can be done just as well on the morrow. … If you behave in this way, the fit of anger will pass during the night. It will subside of itself and you will sober up. … When recovering from your intoxication, reflect upon the matter which aroused your anger.

The physician encouraged the Emir to reason:

Think about God:”just as you would like God to forgive you, so other people hope for your clemency and forgiveness. … Great credit will accrue to you by being merciful. Remember the word of Allāh, the Most High: Let them pardon and overlook; do ye not like that Allāh should forgive you; Allāh is forgiving, compassionate {Qur’ān, XXIV, 22}”
Recognize that deterrence will continue to exist: “Neither the evildoer nor anyone else will think that you were too weak to mete out punishment or that you lacked power to do so.”
Think about proportionality: “mete out punishment commensurate with the crime, and no more otherwise you will be a wrongdoer and your prestige will suffer.”
Reason about your interests: “justice {is} much more profitable to the ruler than tyranny, as it leads to happiness in this world and the next.”

Such reasons have been continually discussed among scholars right through to present-day criminologists.

If emotions are recognized as an integral component of reasoned decision-making, then the Emir’s problem points to a different treatment. What events caused the Emir to get so angry that he would have persons flogged and executed? What could be done so that the Emir wouldn’t get so angry in response to those events? Discussion and particular training experiences could well be effective treatment.

Unfortunately, actual human decision-making is difficult matter for scholarly writing. Compared to abstract reasoning, actual human decision-making is much more contingent on persons and circumstances. Abstract reasoning, presented within actual or fictive history, can be much more easily marketed across an expert’s clients.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] On anger in relation to prosecution and punishment in democratic Athens, see Allen (2000) pp. 50-9, 148-51. The Athenian form of crucifixion was called apotympanismos. Archaeological evidence indicates that apotympanismos involved strap bindings around the neck, wrists, and ankles. It obviously was not a mild form of punishment. Other forms of punishment were fines, loss of political rights, and banishment. Citizens were not subject to corporal punishment, and imprisonment was rare. Given the limited evidence available, a good measure of the harshness of Athenian punishment doesn’t exist. Yet much more physically brutal punishments have been common across the world and throughout history. The Athenians apparently were proud of their mildness in punishment. See Hall (1996) pp. 73-4.

[2] All the above quotes are from HP pp. 425-8. The physician’s name was Abū Sa`īd Sinan ibn Thābit ibn Qurra. His son’s name (the author of the text) was Abū al-Hasan Thābit ibn Sinān ibn Thābit ibn Qurrah. The historical circumstances and the textual style suggest that the above and subsequent quotation are largely fictive. Sinan ibn Thābit (the father) served as physician to three successive caliphs: al-Muqtadir, al-Qāhir, and al-Rādī. The brutal behavior of rulers clearly was a important public issue in Sinan ibn Thābit’s time. Consider, for example, the behavior of the caliph al-Qāhir:

With an outward affectation of godliness, al-Qāhir went to every excess of cruelty and extortion. He even tortured the mother of al-Muqtadir and his sons and favorites, to squeeze from them the wealth built up throughout the late reign. Many fled from his grasp. Al-Qāhir had his nephew, who was to have followed him, walled up alive. Thus relieved from immediate threat, al-Qāhir broke out into such tyranny, even against friend and foe, as to make his rule unbearable.

In fear of al-Qāhir, Sinan ibn Thābit at one point fled from Baghdad to Khorāsān. HP p. 422. Al-Qāhir was subsequently disposed, imprisoned, and blinded. Under the next caliph, brutal punishments continued. For example, the wazir ordered a wealthy, elite public servant, Ibn Muqlah (father of Abū al-Husayn), to be harshly beaten. Thābit ibn Sinān recorded his first-person observations:

On entering his room I found him stretched out on a shabby mat with a dirty pillow under his head and wearing nothing but a pair of trousers. His whole body, from head to toe, was the color of eggplant, without a single clear spot.

Ibn Muqlah subsequently had his right hand cut off as further punishment. Then his tongue was cut out. He was left in prison and prevented from receiving care and help. Thābit ibn Sinān records:

I heard that he even had to draw his own water, pulling the rope with his left hand and holding it in his mouth. He continued in wretched misery until his death.

For the details of Ibn Muqlah’s punishment, see HP pp. 430-3. Thābit ibn Sinān also recorded a high official’s compassionate treatment of prisoners. That text seems much more stylized than Thābit ibn Sinān’s first-person observations of Ibn Muqlah’s punishment.

References:

Allen, Danielle S. 2000. The world of Prometheus: the politics of punishing in democratic Athens. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Hall, Margaretha Debrunner. 1996. “Even Dogs have Erinyes: Sanctions in Athenian Practice and Thinking.” Ch. 5 in Foxhall, Lin, and A. D. E. Lewis. 1996. Greek law in its political setting: justifications not justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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