Monday, October 25, 2010

Unasked Anwers, Unanswered Questions



"Unser Kopf ist ein Kübel. Er hat Löcher, und bei den Löchern fließt die Information von der Welt hinein. Das ist auch die Grundtheorie der Pädagogik. Die Trichtertheorie ist dann die Theorie des Lehrprozesses. Der Kübel bekommt noch extra einen Trichter aufgesetzt, und dort gießt man dann das Wissen hinein. Das ist die übliche Theorie. Tatsache ist, daß unsere Pädagogik darin besteht, daß man die Kinder mit Antworten überhäuft, ohne daß sie Fragen gestellt haben, und auf die Fragen, die sie stellen, hört man nicht. [...] Das ist die gewöhnliche Pädagogik: Ungefragte Antworten und unbeantwortete Fragen. (Zustimmung im Auditorium.) Darin besteht im wesentlichen unsere Pädagogik. Es ist aber so, daß alle Organismen, nicht nur der Mensch, sondern alle Organismen, dauernd an die Welt Fragen stellen und dauernd Probleme zu lösen versuchen."

Karl Popper, Vienna, May 1983 (cf. Popper/Lorenz [1985], p. 52f)


Unasked Anwers, Unanswered Questions

Our head is a bucket. It has holes and through the holes information from the world flows into it. That is the basic theory of education. Accordingly, the cone theory is the theory of the learning process. In addition, the bucket gets a cone put on top and then knowledge is poured into it. That's the usual theory. It's a fact that our education consists in bombarding children with answers without them having asked questions, but not in listening to their questions. [...] That's ordinary education: unasked answers and unanswered questions. (Affirmation in the audience.) That's what our education essentially consists of. Nevertheless, all organisms, not humans only, but all organisms pose questions to the world all the time and all the time they try to solve problems. (tranlation by base2014)

Sunday, October 24, 2010

The Modest Gardener

"Ich möchte zuletzt noch einmal sagen: Versuchen Sie, die Welt als das anzusehen, als was man sie sicher ansehen kann: als einen wunderschönen Platz, den wir wie einen Garten noch verbessern und kultivieren können. Versuchen Sie dabei die Bescheidenheit eines erfahrenen Gärtners anzuwenden, eines erfahrenen Gärtners, der weiß, daß ihm viele seiner Versuche mißglücken werden."
Karl Popper, Vienna, May 1983 (cf. Popper/Lorenz [1985], p. 134)

Kaprun, 2009

"Finally I want to repeat: Try to look at the world as something as which one certainly can see it: as a lovely place which we still can improve and cultivate. Try to apply the modesty of an experienced gardener thereby, an experienced gardener who knows that many of his approaches will fail." (translation by base2014)

Saturday, October 23, 2010

German Criminal Code § 166

Deutsches Strafgesetzbuch § 166

Beschimpfung von Bekenntnissen, Religionsgesellschaften und Weltanschauungsvereinigungen


(1) Wer öffentlich oder durch Verbreiten von Schriften (§ 11 Abs. 3) den Inhalt des religiösen oder weltanschaulichen Bekenntnisses anderer in einer Weise beschimpft, die geeignet ist, den öffentlichen Frieden zu stören, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu drei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft.

(2) Ebenso wird bestraft, wer öffentlich oder durch Verbreiten von Schriften  (§ 11 Abs. 3) eine im Inland bestehende Kirche oder andere Religionsgesellschaft oder Weltanschauungsvereinigung, ihre Einrichtungen oder Gebräuche in einer Weise beschimpft, die geeignet ist, den öffentlichen Frieden zu stören.



Slander of religious denominations, religious communities and conviction (Weltanschauung) groups


(1) Who publicly or by distribution of writings (§ 11(3)) slanders the content of a religious denomination or conviction of others and if these act are capable of disturbing the public order, shall be imprisoned for the term of up to 3 years or subjected to a monetary fine.

(2) The same punishment follows for the one who publicly or by distribution of writings (§ 11(3)) slanders an inland church or another religious society or conviction association or their institutions or customs in such a manner, which is capable of disturbing the public order.




In 1998, a German Punk-Rock group was found guilty on the basis of § 166 for the commercial online offering of a T-shirt displaying a pig nailed on a cross. All in all, there did not happen many convictions based on § 166. Religious groups bringing in charges against German blasphemers is normal though - 18 charges alone and 175 complaints sent to the German Press Council in the recent case of the satirical Magazine "Titanic" because of the cover of its April edition (during the last series of abuse scandals in Europe/Germany this year).  But this tolerant criminal prosecution may easily change some day. § 166 contains kind of useful mechanism for religious pressure groups. Suppose some religious fanatics gain more and more power in Germany - like for instance the evangelicals in the U.S. - then they just need to organize violent riots, create heated sentiment, whenever somebody says something provocating against their metaphysical belief. There you are the offense against the public order. And by manufacturing attacks against the public  order - given some half-way provocating statement - they themselves fulfill the preconditions for applying  § 166 . The original provocation turns out not only to be capable of disturbing the public order, it did already.

Friday, October 22, 2010

To Put Something Out of Your Body

"Alle Organismen stellen und lösen dauernd Probleme; und daher ist die Wissenschaft eigentlich nichts als eine Fortsetzung der Tätigkeit der niederen Organismen. Es gibt einen großen Unterschied zwischen der Amöbe und Einstein, und das ist, daß Einstein seinen eigenen Problemlösungen kritisch gegenübersteht. Und das kann er nur, weil es eine Sprache gibt, eine menschliche Sprache, in der wir unsere Problemlösungen formulieren können. Damit stellen wir sie außerhalb unseres Körpers hin. So wie andere Werkzeuge, die wir geschaffen haben. Statt daß wir uns eine Drüse an die Fingerspitze wachsen lassen - eine Tintendrüse - und damit schreiben, schaffen wir eine Feder. Das ist es, was die Menschen von den Tieren unterscheidet." (emphasis by base2014)
Karl Popper, Vienna, May 1983 (cf. Popper/Lorenz [1985], p.53)


"All organisms constantly pose questions and solve problems; and that's why sience is actually nothing but a continuation of activities of the lower organisms. There is a big difference between the amoeba and Einstein, and that is that Einstein faces critically his problem solutions. And he only can do that because there is language, human language, in which we can formulate our problem solutions. Thereby we put them outside of our body. Just like other tools which we created. Instead of letting grow a gland on the tip of our finger - an ink gland - and writing with it, we create a pen. This is what man distinguishes from animal." (emphasis by base2014)

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Unhappy Teachers

Die Schule verbessern: Unglückliche Lehrer loswerden

"Ich war unter den ersten Studenten im Wiener Pädagogischen Institut. Es war der erste Jahrgang, 1925-1927. [...] Ich war [...] ein begeisterter Schulreformer. Im Gegensatz zur Praxis der Schulreformer habe ich aber den Theorien der Schulreform immer mistraut und bin ihnen kritisch gegenübergestanden. Ich habe damals darüber nachgedacht, was das Wichtigste an der Schulreform wäre. Wie kann man wirklich die Schule reformieren? Indem ich damals über meine eigenen Erfahrungen als junger Lehrer an schlechten Schulen nachgedacht habe, bin ich draufgekommen, daß es das Wichtigste ist, schlechten Lehrern in der Schule die Möglichkeit zu schaffen, die Schule zu verlassen. (Zustimmung im Auditorium.) Ich habe gesehen, daß nur Menschen, die eine gewisse Begabung haben - es ist keine eigentlich intellektuelle Begabung, es ist eine innere Beziehung zu Kindern -, gute Lehrer sein können. Und sehr viele Lehrer werden sozusagen von der Schule eingefangen, sind dort unglücklich und können nicht heraus. Ich habe einen ganz einfachen Vorschlag gemacht: Man muß diesen Menschen, die auch nicht schlechter sind als andere, goldene Brücken bauen, damit sie herauskönnen; dann kommen an ihrer Stelle wieder junge Leute, die zum Teil geborene Lehrer sind. Solange viele Lehrer verbitterte Lehrer sind, verbittern sie die Kinder und machen die Kinder unglücklich. Sie bleiben in der Schule bis zu ihrer Pensionierung und atmen auf, wenn sie eine Pension bekommen. Solange in der Schule verbitterte Lehrer sind, und zwar viele verbitterte Lehrer, die aus begreiflichen Gründen die Kinder terrorisieren, auch deshalb, weil sie von ihren Vorgesetzten, zum Beispiel von Schulinspektoren, eingeschüchtert werden, solange kann die Schule nicht besser werden."

Karl R. Popper, Vienna, May 1983 (cf. Popper/Lorenz [1985])


Sir Karl Popper


Improve School: Get Rid of Unhappy Teachers

"I was among the first students of the Vienna Pädagogisches Institut (University of Education), the first two years 1925-1927 of the school. [...] I was an enthusiastic  school reformer. But in contrast to the praxis of the school reform I have always  taken a critical stance towards the theories of the school reform and have distrusted them. At that time I was thinking about what would be the most important thing about the school reform. How can you really reform school? By thinking about my own experiences as young teacher on bad schools, I realized that it would be the most important thing to give bad teachers in school the possibility to leave school. (Affirmation from the audience). I noticed that only persons with a certain talent - it's not a genuine intellectual talent, it's about having a good rapport to children - can be good teachers. And many teachers are - so to say - caught by school and feel miserable there and cannot get out. I made a very simpe suggestion: We have to smooth the way for these people which are not worse than others either, so that they can get out; subsequently other young people will come and take their place, some of them born teachers. As long as many teachers are embittered teachers, they will embitter the children and make them unhappy. They stay in school until their retirement and breathe a sigh of relief when they start receiving their retirement pay. As long as there are embittered teachers in school, in fact many embittered teachers, which - due to comprehensible reasons -  terrorize children, also because they are intimidated by their supervisors, school inspectors for example, school cannot get better." (translation by base2014)

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Democracy & Propaganda (1)

Let me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. If you look up democracy in the dictionary you'll get a definition something like that.
 An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing of their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. That may sound like an odd conception of democracy, but it's important to understand that it is the prevailing conception. In fact, it has long been, not just in operation, but even in theory. There's a long history that goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolutions in seventeenth century England which largely expresses this point of view.




Noam Chomsky [1991]


According to Chomsky, a democracy must fulfill at least the following three, vaguely formulated, conditions: (i) citizens have "the means to participate in some meaningful way" in the decision-making process and (ii) citizens have free access to information concerning this process and (iii) this information is "open" (true, uncensored, unfiltered). One might call in question whether the denial of (ii) and (iii) still leave the possibility of (i) but the latter is too indefinite to be tested and has to be further specified.
A clear representative of the „alternative“ conception of democracy is Edward L. Bernays – the godfather of the Public Relations industry. In 1928 he put forward his „invisible government“ theory of democracy by deniying each of these three „conventional“ conditions. In the first chapter of his book „Propaganda“, tellingly entitled „Organizing Chaos“, he maintains that it is practically impossible to match conditions (ii) and (iii) and therefore we should forget about (i) and/or be content with leaving decisions to our invisible leaders:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
Edward L. Bernays
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four. In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite assayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time. 
In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.
Edward L. Bernays [1928]




We have grown accustomed to go around pricing – most of us do to some extent. We choose among the products offered in supermarkets or real estate agencies, or search for the cheapest flight to our envisaged holiday destination. We have grown accustomed to competition (and we are not surprised about the similarity of prices for similar products because we believe that competition is often not real). This is only possible because pricing is (in most cases) tranparent. If it would be not (and we know such cases), then we would really end up hopelessly lost as Bernays said. Instead, independent institutions for consumer protection have shown great impact to ensure half-way fair competition and free flow of useful information in the marketplace. None of these institutions, in Western Europe mostly set up in the 50s and 60, may be perfectly objective or independent. But this shows only that the independent intitutions monitoring/controlling the actions in a democratic system are always improvable. What Bernays had in mind, when he formulated his „invisible government“ theory in 1928, was a totally uncontrolled marketplace which was, at that time, reality. It was indeed dangerous for the consumer then, just think of German pharmaceutical groups promoting aspirin, heroin and cocain in cough syrup.


Friday, October 8, 2010

Our Aphasiac Friends

Oliver Sacks
Aphasia, roughly, is a disorder caused by damage to the portions of the brain that control language. Among the many types of this acquired disorder there are those where the aphasiac lacks literal understanding of words and phrases when uttered unemotionally, unexpressively. A pure digital voice without "feeling-tone", speech melody, gestures, grimace cannot be be grasped. On the other hand, an emotional speech is understood by aphasiacs without remembering the (any) words.

When British neurogist Oliver Sacks once during the eighies of the last century passed an aphasia ward, hearing laughter from the room where the aphasiacs were watching a Reagen speech, he found them umused, bewildered and partly outraged. Because, what the sequence of expressions of the old actor's TV speech told them was nonsense. The aphasiacs' deficit may evolve to an increased sensitivity in grasping the whole of communicative actions:


"To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one—this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs—they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give—or remove—verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice.
In this, then, lies their power of understanding—understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words."

In the same room present that day, there were also persons suffering the flip-side of the aphasic diagnosis: being able to understand the meaning of words and complicated grammatical structures, but unable to tell an angry from a sad voice: tonal agnosia. Grammitically incorrect phrases, slang or untypical usage of words may confuse tonal agnosiacs. They would probably love Stephen W. Hawking's voice.

Sacks reports of one of the female agnosiacs:

"[she] also listened, stony-faced, to the President’s speech, bringing to it a strange mixture of enhanced and defective perceptions — precisely the opposite mixture to those of our aphasiacs. It did not move her — no speech now moved her — and all that was evocative, genuine or false completely passed her by. [...] ‘He is not cogent,’ she said. ‘He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain-damaged, or he has something to conceal.’ Thus the President’s speech did not work for [her] either, due to her enhanced sense of formal language use, propriety as prose, any more than it worked for our aphasiacs, with their word-deafness but enhanced sense of tone."

In some European parliaments speeches are simultaneously translated into sign language. TV news sometimes display a small portion of the screen reserved for a sign language interpreter. One may well wish that the interpreters would be joined by one of Sacks' patients to mirror all the lies. Or let every president hold his new year's eve speech accompanied by an aphasiac smiling into the camera. In times of a happy revival of torture, one may well wish for a trained, hyper-sensitive aphasiac interrogator as a more elegant solution to the ticking bomb scenario than Alan Dershowitz midieval suggestion.


Oliver Sacks' clinical tale "The President's Speech" can be read online. It is entailed in Sacks [1985].

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The True Culprits of War

"The true culprits are those who mislead public opinion and take advantage of the people's ignorance to raise disquieting rumors and sound the alarm bell, inciting their country and consequently other countries into enmity. The real culprits are those who by interest or inclination, declaring constantly that war is inevitable, end by making it so, asserting that they are powerless to prevent it. The real culprits are those who sacrifice the general interest to their own personal interest which they so little understand, and who hold up to their country a sterile policy of conflict and reprisals. In reality there is no salvation, no way out either for small states or for great countries except by union and conciliation."
Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant de Rebecque, Senator of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, introduction to the Report to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, 1914.


"Die wahren Schuldigen sind jene, die die öffentliche Meinung in die Irre führen, Vorteil aus der Unwissenheit ihrer Landsleute ziehen, Gerüchte streuen und falschen Alarm schlagen, ihr Land in Aufruhr bringen und als Folge davon Feindseligkeiten in anderen Ländern schüren. Die wahren Schuldigen sind jene, die aus Interesse oder weil es ihr Naturell ist, den Krieg ständig für unvermeidbar erklären, und indem sie dafür sorgen, daß er tatsächlich unausweichlich wird, zugleich behaupten, es stünde nicht in ihrer Macht, ihn zu verhindern. Die wahren Schuldigen sind jene, die das allgemeine Wohl ihrem persönlichen Wohl opfern, das sie gar nicht wirklich kennen, und ihr Land mit einer unproduktiven, auf Konflikt und Unterdrückung bauenden Politik führen. In Wirklichkeit gibt es aber kein anderes Heil, keinen anderen Ausweg für kleine noch für große Länder als das Bündnis und die Versöhnung."

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Who Should Rule?




Karl R. Popper
"It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy. It is indeed analogous to the confusion he created in the field of moral philosophy by his identification, discussed in the last chapter, of collectivism and altruism. It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General Will’ or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a reply, convincing as it may sound—for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’?—is, as I shall try to show, quite useless. First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that some fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?"






Karl Raimund Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies,
  [1945], Vol.1, Chapter 7: The Principle Of Leadership





One might not get Popper's idea at first reading. A democrat might easily object that there is no problem with this question „who should rule?“, because the answer is straight forward: „the one, who gets the majority of votes“. But with this naive answer the democrat just does not get out of the trouble. The whole point in Popper's arguments against the question „Who should rule?“ is that it does not even mention control of the souvereign. That the souvereign is not controlled or even should not be controlled – this is what Popper calls the theory of (unchecked) sovereign. According to Popper, each instance of this principle leads to an inconsistency. E.g. if the answer is „the wisest man“, then it might happen that this wisest man wisely decides the majority should rule, thereby giving up his own sovereign. The same holds for the naive democrat.

"[…] there is also a kind of logical argument which can be used to show the inconsistency of any of the particular forms of the theory of sovereignty; more precisely, the logical argument can be given different but analogous forms to combat the theory that the wisest should rule, or else the theories that the best, or the law, majority, etc., should rule. One particular form of this logical argument is directed against a too naive version of liberalism, of democracy, and of the principle that the majority should rule; and it is somewhat similar to the well-known ‘paradox of freedom’ which has been used first, and with success, by Plato. In his criticism of democracy, and in his story of the rise of the tyrant, Plato raises implicitly the following question: What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead? The free man, Plato suggests, may exercise his absolute freedom, first by defying the laws and ultimately by defying freedom itself and by clamouring for a tyrant. This is not just a far-fetched possibility; it has happened a number of times; and every time it has happened, it has put in a hopeless intellectual position all those democrats who adopt, as the ultimate basis of their political creed, the principle of the majority rule or a similar form of the principle of sovereignty. On the one hand, the principle they have adopted demands from them that they should oppose any but the majority rule, and therefore the new tyranny; on the other hand, the same principle demands from them that they should accept any decision reached by the majority, and thus the rule of the new tyrant. The inconsistency of their theory must, of course, paralyse their actions. Those of us democrats who demand the institutional control of the rulers by the ruled, and especially the right of dismissing the government by a majority vote, must therefore base these demands upon better grounds than a self-contradictory theory of sovereignty."


Note that the theories of sovereignity only destroy themselves under certain conditions. It does not follow with necessity that the majority will finally vote for a tyrant. But uncontrolled sovereign might always end up this way (as we know).






Just for the record, what if the answer is that the capitalists should rule? Under which conditions would the capitalists decide to abolish the sovereign of capitalism?