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~ An Antipodean View on Classical Greece, Rome & the Mediterranean.

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Category Archives: 20th Century History

Science is not the enemy

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by scot mcphee in 20th Century History, Academia, Humanties, Post-Classical History, Science & Tech

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scholarship, science

In general I would agree with this article by Steven Pinker in the New Republic: Science is not the enemy of the Humanities. I’m not going to address the broader philosophical issues that he unconsciously raises (e.g. in that he seems to assume a utilitarian ethics), however Pinker makes several mistakes of data:

By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale is sinking, students are staying away in droves.

There are actually relatively good indicators that generally, since a steep decline in proportion of students in 70s and 80s, since then the Humanities are not in decline (although here we find the perhaps typical American substitution of “English Majors” for the “Humanities”). And I think, that the crisis is one of higher education in general is one of ever-growing demands of an instrumentalist mangagerialism on Faculty: and this affects the Sciences (especially the hard physical sciences) as much as the Humanities. Universities tend to love their Commerce and Law faculties at the expense of the others.

Then Pinker went and asserted this:

The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness.

Now he shows he’s simply afraid of what he doesn’t understand, simply by asserting the standard labels of denigration and dismissal and hoping no-one notices. Post-modernism is not, central at it core, anything about “obscurantism”, “moral relativism” and “political correctness”; anyone who asserts so simply hasn’t read many so-called post-modernists (most of whom are properly defined as structuralists and post-structuralists anyway). It also overlooks the fact that in general, apart from a post-modernist style in architecture, it is actually a label applied to a human condition or age, not a methodology or a belief system. Pinker utterly confuses a label of description for one of methodology. What he’s done is just assume the worst examples he could find (which of course, are unquoted and unreferenced and just assumed) are the typical ones: it’s exactly what he accuses Humanities scholars of doing when they point to artefacts of the 20th century scientific revolution like the atomic bomb.

Actually and that’s an argument I don’t think he adequately deals with. Yes social darwinism is unscientific claptrap wrought by humans with the worst intentions, but how does Pinker account for the fact that one of the most revolutionary scientific discoveries of the 20th century (the discovery and quantification of the atomic forces of the atom’s nucleus) leads straight to the creation of the H-bomb? Not in a roundabout way either, but by the many of the very same scientists who helped make those same discoveries? From all accounts Teller was an immoral monster of the first order. I don’t make this point lightly, but nor do I make the point to condemn all science and scientific progress. I think this one example falsifies Pinker’s apparent belief (which I may be mistaken about) that all science automatically results in the morally good. The social good is defined only by science acting in concert with ethics, politics, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, literature, and art – in short by science, the social sciences, and the humanities: not by science alone.

This is the problem: just like physicists don’t like misguided lectures on the “hermeneutics of gravity” from half-baked social scientists, humanists would prefer not be lectured on their discipline from someone who wilfully misunderstands a large portion of their own discipline or wishes to assert their own discipline’s natural superiority.

CFP: Olympic Athletes: Ancient and Modern

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by scot mcphee in 20th Century History, 21st Century History, Ancient Religion, Greek Classics, Greek History, Post-Classical History, Reception

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call for papers, conference, olympics, sport

School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics
University of Queensland, Australia

A Conference on Olympic Athletes: Ancient and Modern
Date: (Friday-Sunday) 6-8 July 2012
Place: University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD. Australia. 4072.

Call for Papers

Papers are invited for a conference on ‘Olympic Athletes: Ancient and Modern’, which will be held at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Brisbane, Australia, from 6-8 July 2012.

The theme can be interpreted fairly broadly, but there is a particular desire to assemble papers which analyse the Olympic experience of athletes from the ancient and the modern games. What was / is special about Olympic competition and Olympic athletes? Who were / are the great Olympic athletes? Why?

All speaking slots will be 30 minutes in duration (20 for paper, 10 for questions). Please send offers of papers, plus a 100-word abstract, to the organizers by Friday 1 June 2012.

Further details will be available soon at http://www.uq.edu.au/hprc. In the meantime, anyone who would like to offer a paper or attend the conference should contact Tom Stevenson (t.stevenson@uq.edu.au) for the organizers.

On Christopher Hitchens

20 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by scot mcphee in 20th Century History, 21st Century History, News Items, Personal

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atheism, ideology, iraq, journalism, politics, war

WARNING: POLITICS AND RELIGION

There has been a lot of virtual ink spilt over the few days about Christopher Hitchens’ death. Much mourning of this supposed great warrior for atheist reason. However, much of that overlooks his articulation of a disgusting, triumphant, political ideology – namely, his obscene cheering for the Iraq war and his absolute support for the Bush/Cheney criminal gang, and the implications that his atheism has within the particularly repulsive world view that he held.

I thought Guy Rundle in Crikey put it best when he linked the atheist book (of “sociological interest” at best) to Hitchens’ support for the ultra-right-wing project of ever-escalating genocide against the bogey man of “Islamofascism”. Any level of body count was justified in Hitchens’ reasoning. The fact that the “post political” crowd cheered on his atheist ranting while completely ignoring the human and social implications of his actual political ideology shows up the paucity of depth in the approach of that particular project. At the mourning of him from that sector has deeply alienated me from their project. My atheism is simply not the central core of my political ideology. I’m not siding with fascism and fascists, especially lapsed Trotskites, just because some of them might be atheists! Like the hard Catholic Right of the ALP or the Protestant loonies of the conservative factions, Hitch shows that to make the issue of religion (for or against) a core part of one’s political articulation leads to the worst possible political ideologies.

Update: Glenn Greenwald making eminent sense on Hitchens.

How Gaddafi toppled a Roman emperor

29 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by scot mcphee in 20th Century History, 21st Century History, Archaeology, Reception, Roman History

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Libya, Septimius Severus

How Gaddafi toppled a Roman emperor | Culture | guardian.co.uk:

For years, said Walda, an antique bronze statue of the emperor had stood in Green Square, now Martyrs’ Square. “It witnessed all the major events there from the era of the kings, to the Italian period, to the Gaddafi period,” he said. In the late 1970s, as things got tougher under the dictator, the statue started to get used as a way of cloaking and depersonalising subversion. “Septimius Severus became the mouthpiece for opposition,” explained Walda. “People would ask each other, ‘What’s Septimius Severus saying today? So Gaddafi decided to topple him.” The statue was duly removed from Green Square.

(Via The Guardian.)

Libya’s historic treasures, unscathed

07 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by scot mcphee in 20th Century History, 21st Century History, Archaeology, Roman History

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damnatio memoriae, Gaddafi, Leptis Magna, Libya, museums, stolen antiquities

Another article about antiquities in Libya and how relatively unscathed they were, this one from the BBC. Interesting bit at the end, about the vandalism of Gaddafi-themed exhibits in the museum, as the dead tyrant now undergoes damnatio memoriae.

BBC News – Libya’s historic treasures survive the revolution:

One day, in the not too distant future, visitors may flock to see the giant white marble statues of the Roman emperors, Claudius and Augustus, that grace Tripoli’s National Museum. Today the galleries that house them, and the ornate mosaics from the vast Roman site of Leptis Magna 120 km (75 miles) east of Tripoli, are completely deserted.
Outside the museum, at the edge of Martyr’s Square, a stall sells revolutionary souvenirs – necklaces and wristbands in the black, red and green of the new Libya. But the arched wooden door to the museum, now festooned with graffiti proclaiming Libya “free”, is firmly shut. “We don’t feel it’s safe enough yet to re-open,” says Mustafa Turjman, head of research at the national department of archaeology, as he shows me around. “We prefer to be patient rather than to open early and expose our precious things to any risk. We are not sure if our borders are safe and professional criminals could take advantage of this instability,” he says.

November 1: the 100th anniversary of the air raid | This Blog Harms

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by admin in 20th Century History

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November 1: the 100th anniversary of the air raid | This Blog Harms:

“Today marks the 100th anniversary since the first air raid. Conducted during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, a young Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti was ordered to fly his plane into battle and drop numerous small one-and-a-half kilogram bombs.”

(Via Crikey.)

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