Skirting antisemitism

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, prejudice, science, history, philosophy

I almost gave the book a pass when I saw it. The title implies prejudice: Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion, by Steven Gimbel. I reasoned that the book actually was, or included, a defense of Albert Einstein, and that turned out to be right. But there is much more.

In his introduction, Gimbel complains that our visceral dismissal of all things Nazi keeps us from engaging with the ideas themselves. He does so in this volume so he can disprove the Nazis' anti-Einstein polemics on their merits, rather than guilt by association. Thus he investigates just how Jewish Einstein was, to what extent any style of thinking he used is characteristically Jewish, and whether contemporary Jews considered the theories of Relativity themselves to be Jewish. He makes it quite clear that the opposition to Einstein was not just prejudice, but was nonsense.

A major element of the argument involves the contrasting styles of argument characteristic of Descartes and Newton. He writes of the "Catholic science" of Descartes and the "Protestant science" of Newton. René Descartes was faced with the requirement to reconcile his cosmological ideas with the Church's reliance on Aristotle's cosmology. The whirling, entrained aether Descartes propounded managed to satisfy both if you didn't look too hard. This is considered (by Gimbel) Catholic science. Newton, in reaction, based his work on fixed and unalterable space and time, the heavenly bodies and Earth moving within this infinitely rigid framework. The absolutist basis then resulted in Protestant science.

In his conclusion, Gimbel calls Einstein's work Cosmopolitan science. He points out that it is based on engaging and reconciling multiple viewpoints, and that the new world emerging in the early 1900s was a world in which scientists and philosophers were faced with a new diversity of social, religious and political trends. Surprisingly to me, certain influential voices continue to denigrate Einstein and his work, particularly the Special and General theories of Relativity. Their antisemitism is evident, and the charge of "Jewish science" is still made.

Gimbel does not go quite far enough. I am reminded that Paul, rebuking the Corinthians for exclusivism, wrote, "Each of you says, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ. Is Christ divided?" Even those seemingly more pure ones saying "I am of Christ", Paul declares to be in the wrong as excluding the others. While the terms Catholic science, Protestant science and Jewish science offend, so does Cosmopolitan science.

Science is just science. While we may speak or write of Earth science, Biological science, and even the oxymoronic Political science, the practice of science is just science. To speak of top-down methods, or bottom-up, and so forth, is to speak of portions of scientific activity. Scientific method requires all these practices working together. One may start with observations that include apparent anomalies. One must then think about the reason for the anomalies, and plan further observations (AKA experiments) to tease out the possible influences. As Richard Feynman wrote, once you say, "That's interesting," you start on the road to discovery. One may also start with an idea (formally, a hypothesis), a notion of how things might work. One must then do experiments or make observations to either support, modify or reject the hypothesis. There is a back-and-forth here.

In Einstein's case, many observations and experiments had been performed already and published, along with all kinds of speculation about what might be going on. His method resembled that of Sherlock Holmes (actually Joseph Bell): "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth." He performed thought experiments to refine his thinking, and learned the mathematical tools he would need to distinguish the possible from the impossible. The four papers Einstein published in 1905 were hypotheses, proposals of theory, with suggestions for observations to determine or refine their predictions. One of the four papers proposed Special relativity. He continued the process to propose General relativity nearly two decades later. He did not perform experiments, but others did. Based on those experiments, the hypotheses were confirmed and refined, later reaching the status of Theory.

Let us recall that no theory is "good" or "bad". A theory is a provisional description of how certain phenomena are produced. Theory is composed of multiple hypotheses, which are ideas that can be tested by experiments or observations (Astronomy, for example, does not lend itself to experiment, but to observation). If all such work supports the hypotheses, the theory is considered confirmed. Contradicting experimental or observational results discount or refute the hypotheses and thus the theory.

The "Catholic science" of Descartes is not science at all. It is a political statement of how things might work if Aristotle's cosmology must be satisfied. Most likely, Descartes knew Aristotle was wrong. But he'd lose his head to openly say so. In this environment, science is not possible. To call what Newton did "Protestant science" is nonsense. Newton was not really a Protestant; he professed loyalty to the English church, but was a secret Unitarian. Newton was a rigid, unsociable jerk, and he'd have been just as absolutist whether in Protestant England or Catholic France or Islamic Turkey or even in Jewish Israel, had it existed at the time. In his own way, Einstein, while a bit more sociable, was more like Newton, a kind of absolutist, one who thought in terms of a broader absolutism that did not include absolute time or space. But that same absolutism led him to reject the strange conclusions of quantum theories, saying "the Old One does not play dice."

One chapter is devoted to discussing Talmudic reasoning. This is considered prototypically Jewish. Yet it strongly resembles "buddy study" as I experienced it in my college years. In my experience, it is also the best method of Bible study, whether Jewish or Christian in intent. And the interplay of multiple viewpoints that I find called "Cosmopolitan science" is simply a further expression of the same practice. Perhaps Isaac Newton came the closest to being the solitary thinker, bringing forth new discoveries by the power of thought alone. Yet even Newton did experiments, and was also embedded in a social milieu that did affect his work.

I have had the privilege to work and worship among Christians of both Western and Eastern cultures. I find that the more explicitly corporate practices that are characteristic of the East are most conducive to learning what the Bible means. The Chinese out-Talmud the Talmudic scholars in their ability to dig into infinite detail. However, they tend not to codify every little thing in the same way. Such habits of thought also lead to a different way of "doing science". Yet this is not "Chinese science" or "Eastern science". Let us remember that the Chinese, Japanese, and even Indian and Arabic peoples are all supposed to be descended from Shem, and thus are Semites. They all tend to be less individualistic than Japhethites (mainly Europeans).

Science is just science. Nobody is all-inclusive, so of course we must specialize, but not too much. In an early job as an electronics technician, I sometimes worked with engineers from Jet Propulsion Labs. They were over-specialized; they had a resistor guy, a capacitor guy, and so forth (there were no women, this was 1967). Together, they could design wonderful circuits for spacecraft. But my supervisor was a ham radio hobbyist, who could design and build a whole circuit on his own, quicker, cheaper, and better. And while I am primarily a geologist, the publication of which I am proudest combines methods developed in astronomy and in civil engineering. Not a Jack of all trades, perhaps, but the master of two or three.

Science is carried on better and more effectively when it is in a cosmopolitan setting. But let us not call the result Cosmopolitan science. To apply any adjective to science is to make it non-science. There is no Jewish or Catholic or Aryan or Creation or any other "kind" of science. There is just Science. Einstein may have brought certain Jewish habits of thought to his scientific studies. Once the theory was crafted, however, that all fell away. You don't need to be Jewish to understand Relativity, you just need to be smart, mathematically trained, and diligent...it isn't easy! Dr. Gimbel has done valuable service to show that the charges the Nazis made were misdirected. We need to continue beyond the notion of Cosmopolitan science that he presents, to the understanding of science as science.

The Holocaust century

kw: politics, genocide, prejudice

How will the Twentieth Century be remembered in the distant future? It was certainly a century of amazing progress. Travel jumped from the rail to the air, such that millions now travel thousands or tens of thousands of miles per year, where a record-breaking traveler of the 1880s could scarcely accumulate 10,000 miles in a lifetime (Recently, Ron Akana retired after 64 years as a flight steward with United. He accumulated 20 million miles on the job). Telecommunications began with the telegraph and early telephones in 1900; it grew to nearly universal cell phone usage by the mid 1990s, plus video calling using Skype just "around the bend" in 2003. Food became more abundant in greater variety than anyone could have imagined. World population grew from 1.6 billion to about 7 billion; now about 1.5 billion are counted among the desperately poor! The other 5.5 billion are better off than nearly all those 1.6 billion of 1900.

While a lot is positive, the centralization of political power that accompanied vast improvements in technology has been primarily a negative factor. The century began with the Great War, now called World War I, was marred in its mid-to-late years by World War II and the Cold War, and closed with the first forays of a new kind of war, that has now morphed into the "War on Terror" (the American term; others call it Global Jihad). If you add up the deaths of all those killed in combat, both "soldiers" and "collateral damage", however, they are dwarfed by a different sum: what I call the Three Holocausts.

• The first of these began in 1938, when Josef Stalin began a series of "purges" that eventually led to 10-20 million deaths of Soviet citizens by 1954. The cause was primarily political paranoia.
• The second was the Nazi "final solution", in which about 17 million died. Six million of those were Jews, another about 6 million were Ukrainians, and the rest were various Slavs, Soviet POWs, Gypsies (Romanies), and smaller numbers ("only" thousands to tens of thousands) of leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics, and others considered "unfit", such as the mentally or physically handicapped, homosexuals, and political dissidents. The cause was rabid racism under the guise of Aryan eugenics.
• The third was a combination of two long disasters in China, the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" under Mao Zedong, with a death toll of at least 40 million, and perhaps as many as 100 million. The cause here was the hubris of an incompetent man. By the way, more than sixty years of failed harvests in the Soviet Union are attributed to central planning, a similar kind of incompetence. You can't centrally plan the agriculture of a continent: Mao failed, and the Russian leaders failed.

About 100 million dead, due to the insanity of a handful of improbably powerful men. The crucial social task of Western democracies and republics in the Twenty-First Century is to ensure that nobody gains such power, ever again. How can we accomplish this? Some are even now trying to spread "democracy" in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the "Arab Spring" coups (which aren't quite all over yet). This is misdirected.

It took more than 2,100 years to progress from the raw, imperfect and partial democracy of Greece to the Western constitutional governments of Europe and much of the New World today. The despotic governments of most of Asia and Africa are pre-Greek in outlook. It will take work just to get them to a social level comparable to the Athens of Solon and Cicero (minus the institutionalized slavery), and huge further effort to speed them on the way toward republican institutions that are the "atmosphere" of Western society. It will take decades if it is possible at all.

A core concept of Western civilization is social and religious tolerance. Many of the Eastern despotic governments (Pakistan is a prime example) have severe laws against religious heresy, blasphemy, and "alternative" lifestyles such as homosexuality or unmarried cohabitation. Compare: a misguided preacher in Georgia burns a Koran in public, and the Muslim world is immediately aflame. If an Imam were to burn a Bible in Times Square, most folks would say, "Oh, another Bible burner. Let's walk upwind to keep ashes off my jeans, please." Of course, there is a slight chance that a passerby would deck the guy, but that would be the extent of it.

You know what is crazy? That last scenario is touted by radical Muslims as a sign of our weakness. It actually indicates our strength. We are not threatened by theatrics. The kind of civilized attitude that underlies this tolerance is worth spreading everywhere. If that can be accomplished in this century, we just might approach the year 2100 with a more genuinely civilized human race than ever before.

The brutality of need

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, prejudice

It is like Earth but not Earth; they are called human and may be human, maybe not; their society is like semiurban America...usually. In a story told from the nonhuman viewpoint, Michael Blumlein, MD, presents in The Healer a narrative of a society wholly dependent for the health of its citizens on rare, gifted individuals from a despised race.

They are usually called "tesques," short for Grotesque. And grotesque they are, having misshapen skulls and an extra organ system—attached to an extra orifice on the rib cage—by which one tesque in ten can extract nearly any disease from a human, compact it into a grisly "concretion," and excrete it for disposal. This is the setting for a tragic novel of rare beauty.

Payne, perhaps the most gifted healer of his generation, or of all generations, finds healing easy and pleasurable. Indeed, it replaces all other passions, whether he is working on the roughshod miners in an isolated camp, the (temporarily) high-society denizens of a mirror of Las Vegas, or the hardest cases, near-moribund victims of "sixth level" illnesses. He is, like Orson Scott Card's overly-moral heroes, an innocent in a rough-and-tumble world that he never does understand.

Healers don't heal healers. Payne tries, once, and condemns a friend to an agonizing living death. At the instigation of his brother's human paramour—his brother Wyn was also a gifted healer—he tries once more, and succeeds in healing his brother. But at that point, the book departs into a full-fledged fantasy, having Payne re-live one of his people's creation myths. I found this ending profoundly disappointing. The author's point is clearly to provide a means to change from the outside a society that cannot be changed from within. The book closes with this hope plainly implied.

But I'd have preferred a less-mystical means of getting there. Ending with Payne in pursuit of his brother's snake-like 6^th-level concretion would have left Dr. Blumlein with the room needed to develop a more satisfying transition to a second society in a sequel.

That's the trouble with the triple-point boundary between Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction (where I place most of this novel), and Fantasy. Begin invoking magic, and it will run away with you.