purple motes

Offer Comments

In the modern imagination, civilization's antithesis is enemy tribes, intensely concerned for honor and vengeance, perpetuating endless cycles of physical violence.  A civilized world means peace and global friendship, with the doings of state courts and state prisons being of little relevance or salience to most persons.  Synetic Theater's Host and Guest, adapted from Georgian poet Vazha Pshavela's epic poem, takes this latter sensibility back to a stark, mythical world of the former.

The opening scene of Host and Guest occurs "deep in the forests of the Caucasus Mountains."   Two hunters stalk an antlered prey on a dark set.  The hunters are from rival, enemy tribes -- one Muslim, one Christian.  Discovering each other, they aim their guns at each other in a beautifully symmetric pose.  Then they cautiously lower their guns, mysteriously infused with some recognition of each other's humanity.  However, before their society can develop any further, they are both shot by unseen others.

The play's main section elaborates on the opening scene's template.  Zviadauri (Ben Cunis), from the Christian Khevsuri tribe, and Joqola (Dan Istrate), from the Muslim Kisti tribe, are hunting in the forest.  Zviadauri discovers Joqola dressing the antlered prey that he had also been hunting.  They mysteriously become friends, sharing the prey.  Joqola, inexplicably not recognizing Zviadauri, invites Zviadauri to his home.   Recognition, tribal conflict, and disaster subsequently ensues.

The acting in the play is superb.  Dan Istrate as Joqola covers an enormous range of attitudes and emotions.  He shows responsibility of a host, loyalty to his tribe, friendship with a fellow hunter, and an ability to say convincingly, "do whatever you want with him when he leaves my house."  As Aghaza, Joqola's wife, Irina Tsikurishvili provides an emotionally powerful center for the play, despite some wooden lines (one log was roughly "if I weren't a woman, I would kill you!").  Irakli Kavsadze is a massive, menacing presence as Musa, a village elder.  The stormy mountain forest that the ensemble creates is one of those memorable vision-movements particularly characteristic of Synetic Theater.  The major battle, enacted with shifting viewpoints, is a dramatic masterpiece.

That battle and other fight scenes, however, incongruously seem to represent modern ideas of war and fighting.   An endless cycle of tribal violence necessarily includes limits that make violence not apocalyptic but sustainable.  In early seventh-century Kent, King Æthelberht issued laws describing in detail compensation for wounds.  Among these laws:

45. If an ear is gashed, compensate with 6 shillings.
50. He who shatters a chinbone will pay 20 shillings.
53. He who stabs through an arm shall compensate with 6 shillings.[1]

Njáls saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandic epic describing a series of blood feuds, shows acute calculation in the midst of violence:

"Let us follow them up now," says Kolskegg "and take thou thy bow and arrows, and thou wilt come within bowshot of Thorgeir Starkad's son."

Then Gunnar sang a song:

"Reaver of rich river-treasure,
Plundered will our purses be,
Though to-day we wound no other
Warriors wight in play of spears
Aye, if I for all these sailors
Lowly lying, fines must pay --
This is why I hold my hand,
Hearken, brother dear, to me."_

"Our purses will be emptied," says Gunnar, "by the time that these are atoned for who now lie here dead." [2]

Gunnar, looking forward, recognizes that he incurs a cost for each of the enemy he kills. In a different, violent encounter in the Njáls saga, another character proposes a battle plan based on a similar calculation:

when you have slain out of their band about as many as I think ye will be able to pay blood-fines for, and yet keep your priesthoods and abodes, then I will run up with all my men and part you. Then ye shall promise to do as I bid you, and stop the battle, if I on my part do what I have now promised. [3]

Today's terrorism is violence with an abstractly imagined context of injury and vengeance.  The form of war that rose to global prominence in the twentieth century is total war seeking annihilation or unconditional surrender.  Both these forms of violence are much different from endless cycles of tribal violence.  Host and Guest might have shown this important historical truth, rather than obscured it.

Synetic Theater's production of Host and Guest emphasizes an ideal of sympathetic friendship.  Human nature includes an important capacity to make sense of the presence of another human being.  In English arts and literature, human sympathy and friendship began to be a prominent imaginative basis for society late in the eighteenth century.  Vazha Pshavela's Host and Guest was written in Georgian in 1893.  I don't know the extent to which it emphasized a similar ideal, which tends to be associated with Romanticism.  But with its opening and closing framing scenes, and in its balancing of the aspects of Joqola and Zviadauri's relationship, Synetic Theater's Host and Guest gives much weight to sympathetic friendship.  Too much, it seems to me.   In a play that explores the origins of social order, sympathetic friendship offers an appealing ideal.  But if not dramatically well-balanced, it provides a dulling escape from the drama.

Synetic Theater's Host and Guest is well-worth seeing.   It's not Synetic Theater at its best.  But the great acting, inspired choreography, moving music, and important concerns of this play more than repay attending.

* * *

Synetic Theater's Host and Guest, directed by Paata Tsikurishvili, showing at the Rosslyn Spectrum through Nov. 9, 2008.

Notes:

[1] Translation from William Ian Miller (2006), Eye for an Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press) p. 114.

[2] For insightful discussion of this passage, see Miller (2006), Ch. 8.  The Njal's Saga text is from the translation of George W. DaSent (1861), Ch. 71.

[3] Njal's Saga, trans. DaSent (1861), Ch. 138.

Offer Comments

Bureaucracy is always there. The paperwork never ages, it never changes, it never disappoints. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, you might as well love and cherish it because it will be with you until death. The final part your heirs are required to do for you.

Love bureaucracy. Work late. Marry your job. Let bureaucracy father your children and they will never know that they want.

The world sadly lacks love for bureaucrats. At the fascinating Parking Today's Blog, John Van Horn declares, "Bureaucrats just don’t get it." Of course not. How, after all, would they get it? As for the parking office that refused to accept 30,000 pennies in payment for parking tickets, the parking office made the correct decision. I suspect that this situation was not covered in the parking office's business operations manual. If a situation is not covered in the business operations manual, then it must be rejected.

In a post entitled The Exciting Life of Bureaucrats, David Boswell notes that he recently finished reading Life of a European Mandarin. Mr. Boswell states that he is interested in reading books "where people started looking to the government as a positive influence instead of something that worked poorly and should stay out of people’s way." We encourage everyone to follow Mr. Boswell's reading program.

Christopher Hayes, in a post entitled In Praise of Red Tape, observes:

At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

Lowly and anonymous bureaucrats are the heart and soul of a great country. Mr. Hayes should have developed this important point further. We regret his invoking of caricatures and calumnies, as well as mis-attributing a scurrilous quote to Cicero.

Norman Leahy at Tertium Quids ridicules Arlington County bureaucrats for riding tricycles. This is a typical superficial criticism of bureaucrats. Bicycles are an exceptionally good means of transportation. Moreover, that the county spent $490 for a "fully loaded" tricycle is a great deal. Most of the guys on my bike team have two-wheeled bikes that cost about ten times that amount. Tricycles handle much better than two-wheeled bikes in snow and ice conditions, so they are an excellent choice for year-round transportation.

Economist John Cochrane at the University of Chicago sharply criticizes the work of 101 bureaucrats in writing a letter. He declares, "As usual, academics need to waste two paragraphs before getting to the point..." The letter he criticizes has a total of five paragraphs. Projecting to the economy as a whole, Mr. Cochrane's proposed cuts would imply a 40% fall in output. Employment would probably fall by 15-20%. That's a major recession. Economist should assist bureaucrats in boosting output, not reducing it.

Winterspeak discusses the recent financial crisis. He observes:

Given that the financial system has revealed itself to be one enormous Government Sponsored Enterprise, I'm amused to hear that the solution is "more regulation". I assume that that's the solution to FEMA as well.

A new independent regulatory agency should be formed to regulate FEMA. That new agency might begin by setting out detailed time schedules for administering hurricane relief.

That's all for this month's Carnival of Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival's regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival's category page.

Offer Comments

My lover's soft eyes
shine through the dark.
She won't stop crying
‘til that old cart
is placed back behind
the weary mules
that truly don't mind
pulling a home.
We'll come to the top
of the mountain.
It can't be doubted.
There I'll rest and
love my big-hearted
watermelon.

Offer Comments

Offer Comments

About 2360 years ago, an influential Athenian got a law passed to help some of his friends avoid being imprisoned for not paying a debt to the city.  Other Athenians subsequently charged him with legislative corruption.   This case would fit easily into a twenty-first century struggle for a well-functioning republic.

In support of this indictment, an Athenian speech described another city's legislative mechanism.  The Greeks living in Locris reportedly proposed laws while wearing a noose:

if any one wishes to enact a new statute, he proposes it with his neck in a noose, and if the statute is judged to be good and useful, the proposer goes away alive, but, if not, the noose is drawn and he dies. ... [in more than two hundred years] they had only one new statute passed.[1]

This description highlights the sufficiency of old laws and punishment for proposing new, bad laws.  Those points, not surprisingly, are fundamental to this particular case's indictment.

The noose makes the democratic legislative process unlikely to be used except in extraordinary circumstances.   The benefit to a proposer of a new statute would have to be large to compensate him for even a small risk of death for having the proposed law rejected.   Only special-interest legislation, with a high level of special interest, or legislation addressing a community emergency in which all had a high interest, would be proposed.

The one new statute passed was of the special-interest type.  A one-eyed man reportedly feared that his enemy would blind him.  The one-eyed man successfully proposed a  new law stating that a person knocking out the eye of a one-eyed man would be punished with loss of both eyes.[2]  The offender and the formerly one-eyed victim would then both suffer blindness.  This law may have significantly lessened the one-eyed man's risk of blindness.   But undoubtedly it was of little interest to most of the city's citizens.

Another ancient account describes the noose being used to regulate legal appeals.  In this account, a young man challenged a legal judgment of the Locris' highest legal official, the Cosmopolis:

Thereupon the Cosmopolis summoned him to discuss the interpretation in accordance with the law of Zaleucus; that is, to argue on the interpretation of the law with him before the court of the one thousand, and with a halter [noose] round the neck of each: whichever should be shown to be wrong in his interpretation was to lose his life in the sight of the thousand. But the young man asserted that the compact was not a fair one, for the Cosmopolis, who happened to be nearly ninety, had only two or three years of life left, while in all reasonable probability he had not yet lived half his life. By this adroit rejoinder the young man turned off the affair as a jest: but the magistrates adjudged the question of abduction in accordance with the interpretation of the Cosmopolis. [3]

The young man's concern is his relatively high cost of losing.  But the Cosmopolis and the young man also have much different benefits of winning. The probability of the court supporting the young man's interpretation is also relevant.   Given the large, even if unequal, penalties for the Cosmpolis and the young man, both would be willing to go forward with the appeal only with a small set of dual potential benefits and of dual probability estimates of winning.  Just as for the legislative process, the noose makes the appeal process a formality rarely rational in practice.

The institutions of Locris apparently were well-regarded in the ancient world.   The Athenian speaker probably would not have invoked the Locrian example if Locrian institutions were widely despised.  An influential Greek philsopher described Locris as "a most well-governed [city]."[3]  An ancient Greek historian stated that the people of Locris "are believed to have been the first people to use written laws" and that Zaleucus, Locris' law-giver, was the first to define penalties within laws so as to reduce penal disparities.[4]  Locrian sophistication in regulating civic communication is also underscored in other reported Locrian laws:

[a free-born woman] may not wear gold jewelry or a garment with a purple border, unless she is a courtesan; and a husband may not wear a gold-studded ring or a cloak of Milesian [luxurious] fashion unless he is bent upon prostitution or adultery.[5]

These laws craftily stigmatize flashy dressing.  A hereditary aristocracy is thought to have dominated Locris' government.  Perhaps aristocrats enacted these laws to lessen opportunities for public resentment toward fellow aristocrats' ostentatious displays of wealth.

From its beginning, law has had complex motives, meanings, and effects.  Recent study has emphasized the accessibility of ancient Greek law to ordinary Greeks.[6]  While procedures of legislating and appealing were formally accessible to the citizens of Locris, Locrians could use those institutions only at the risk of their necks.  Civic institutions that appeared to be accessible seem to have been more valued than civic institutions that were actually accessible.  At least in Locris, constructing the republic was as much a matter of making good poetry as it was building a sturdy house.

Notes:

[1] From Demosthenes' court speech, Against Timocrates (delivered in Athens, 353 B.G.C.) p. 37.   Epizephyrian Locris, to which Demosthenes probably refers, was a colony that the Locrians, a Greek tribe, founded about 680 B.G.C. on the coast of Italy.

[2] Id.  Josiah Ober, "Law and Political Theory," in Gagarin, Michael, and David Cohen (2005), The Cambridge companion to ancient Greek law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 408-10 considers Demosthenes' Locrian example.  Id. p. 409 states: "The theoretical premise behind Locrian lawmaking procedure is a settled preference for established law and a suspicion that, absent grave risk, would-be lawmakers will seek to benefit themselves rather than the community at large."   The second part of that statement seems to me to be a significant misinterpretation of the Locrian example.  See above.

[3] Polybius, Histories, 12.16, probably written about 140 B.G.C.  Zaleucus was a celebrated, archaic-era law-giver for the Epizephyrian Locrians.

[3] Socrates, in Plato, Timaeus, 20a.

[4] Strabo, Geography, 6.1.  Zaleucus thus anticipated the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.  The Guidelines reduced federal judges' sentencing discretion and increased the plea-bargaining power of prosecutors.  The Guidelines were overturned in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005).

[5] Diodorus Siculus, Library, 12.21.

[6] See Gagarin, Michael. 2008. Writing Greek Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1 Comment

Most humans and at least one parrot like to dance.  That involves extracting the tempo from a song and projecting that tempo onto a regular pattern of non-sound-generating movement.  That projection occurs at a low cortical level of perception-action cycles.  Projection works in the opposite direction, too.  Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray's Argument to Beethoven's 5'th is not just brilliant acting; it also shows a fundamental source for musical composition.

Note:

For serious, scientific analysis of the dancing of Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, see Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R., Bregman, M.R., Schulz, I., & Schulz, C. (2008). Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC10), August 2008, Sapporo, Japan. K. Miyazaki et al. (Eds.), Adelaide: Causal Productions, pp. 100-104, and Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R. Bregman, M.R. & Schulz, I. (in press). Studying synchronization to a musical beat in nonhuman animals. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Offer Comments

Ph.D.'s to be in a course on
the economics of transition -
boards of equations
occasionally quavering voice
of the professor
stopping
apologizing for the lack

of good theory in this area.
If I knew what he
thought that I
assumed that he
was thinking

I would have laughed.
The transition, to a Russian
the stage of primitive accumulation
that leads to capitalism.
Da, he concludes, and crosses himself
just as the wheels of the jet
leave the runway.

Offer Comments

Offer Comments

Stop into Robeks smoothie shop in Arlington, Virginia, and you can pick up a copy of DC Modern Luxury for free.  It's a large-format, about-200-page, glossy magazine (cover price $5.95 per issue) that helps you figure out what to do and what to buy if you're extremely wealthy.   I picked one up when I went into Robeks for a smoothie.  While I don't usually consider myself to be extremely wealthy, I am by profession cheap.   It was free!

Luxury magazines are becoming a new media battleground.  One observer of the burgeoning entry and competition in luxury magazines has expressed skepticism about the size of the market:

The luxury market and luxury magazines have been built on a myth: that there’s an endless supply of new jet-setters dying for glossy spreads telling them how to spend their millions.

This analysis neglects demand from cheapskates, fantasizers, voyeurs, and economists not otherwise specified.  At DC Modern Luxury's cover price of $5.95 per issue, demand from these groups is likely to be negligible.  But offering the magazine for free is a sure way to boost its circulation.

I bought a Pomegranate Passion Smoothie for about $6.   What a luxury!  More than 1.4 billion persons around the world live on less than the money equivalent of one such smoothie every five days.  I'm grateful that I'm so economically fortunate.   But I'm not in a good target demographic for advertisers in a luxury magazine.

Offering an expensive luxury magazine for free in a smoothie shop doesn't seem to me to be a propitious indicator for the future of its business.

Offer Comments