The Many-Splendored Society. Book 4. "Knowledge and Beauty" by Hans L Zetterberg.

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Volume 4.
THE MANY-SPLENDORED SOCIETY:
KNOWLEDGE AND BEAUTY

by Hans L Zetterberg

Table of Content.

Current Book shown in bold text.

Chapters with links are ready for citation and for vetting and comments by email to the author

Preface

Surrounded by Symbols
Volume 1: Published in August 2009.

Introduction: Layman's Society and Beyond

1. The Spell of Augustus

2. The Proper Study of Mankind

3. Language and Its Distortions

4. Vibrations in Symbolic Environments

5. Linguistic Forms and Usages

Book 2:

An Edifice of Symbols

Introduction: Finding the Social Order

5. Encounters and their Structuration

6. Organizations, Networks, and Media

7. Cardinal Values and their Societal Realms

8. Societal Realms and their Functions

9. Stratification, Rationality, and Spontaneous Orders in Societal Realms

Book 3:

Fuelled by Symbols

Introduction: Do it with Justifying and Impelling Words

10. Vocabularies of Justification

11. Vocabularies of Regulation

12. Vocabularies of Likes and Dislikes

13. Vocabularies of Identities

14. Vocabularies of Honor

15. Vocabularies Supporting Self-Images and Order

16. Vocabularies Coping with Degrading

17. Justifying and Impelling Vocabularies Writ Large: Conscience, Religion, and Non-Violence

Book 4:

Knowledge and Beauty

18. The Realm of Science: A Search for Knowledge
19. The Realm of Art: A Search for Beauty

Book 5:
Wealth and Sacredness
20. The Realm of Economy: A Search for Riches
21. The Realm of Religion: A Search for the Sacred

Book6:

Order and Virtue

22. The Realm of the Body Politic: A Search for Order

23. The Realm of Morality: A Search for Virtue

24. On the Dynamics of Realms: Ambitions for National Hegemony and Global Reach

Book 7:

Life and the Good Life

Introduction: Society's Coping

25. Household and Family

26. Age and Life Stages

Appendices:

A. Methodological Notes

B. A Schema Evolves

C. Some Terms and Propositions

Bibliography

Introduction: Societal Realms as Units of Analysis and Co-Authors of History

The main division of social reality is not class as Karl Marx thought but six societal realms. They are science, art, economy, religion, polity, and morality. Class is important enough as a division within the economy dividing rich and poor and all what that implies. But so are divisions in scientific competence, artistic taste, political power, religious sanctities, and moral rectitude. If and when all the latter and class are given equal sway and honor, we would live in a ‘many-splendored society.’

The six societal realms of science, art, economy, religion, polity, and morality are products of mankind's language brain. They have become units of analysis in social science and co-authors of history. In a chapter on “The Spell of Augustus” that opened our work on The Many-Splendored Society, we showed that their independence emerged in Western European history. But it is our assumption that these realms are found in all other civilizations since their roots are in the language brain, not in any specific culture. Human beings in all civilizations are born with a language brain. It is a universal fact; we are mistaken to believe that everything about human social life is relative.

We shall use three full volumes of this multi-volume work to make portraits of six grand societal realms. Historians, philosophers, and social scientists have already done so, and political science and economics have thorough knowledge of their realms. So why, make still another presentation of them? It isn’t so we can improve on existing presentations and find new facts. Historians of art or science, economists or political scientists, theologians or moral philosophers will always know more than I do about their fields. Furthermore, in this work I will make an effort to refer to parts of art and literature that is already familiar to most readers, refer to economic and political events and processes that they have experienced or heard of, cite religious and ethical notions that may have crossed their minds. So what is the purpose?

The answer lies in the theory of social reality that we have presented in the first three volumes of The Many-Splendored Society and which we want to use and improve.

Consider these categories:

Critical symbols

Lifestyles

Cardinal values

Stratification

Reward system

Rationality
Freedom

Spontaneous order

Organizations

Networks

Mass media

Netorgs

Makers

Keepers

Brokers

Takers

Providers

Procurers

These categories are rows in The Periodic Table of Social Reality found in The Many-Splendored Society: An Edifice of Symbols on pages 404-405. We will test their generality by using them in our sketches of the six societal realms of science, art, economy, religion, polity, and morality. In the process we explore what old and new Propositions we may need to understand them.

Such is the intention behind the three volumes of The Many-Splendored Society with the subtitles Knowledge and Beauty, Wealth and Sacredness, and Order and Virtue. Each volume can be read on its own. Each one is full of exciting discoveries in social science. Each is also a part of a larger story, a general social theory.

We end these volumes with reviews of how societal realms seek expansion and sometimes hegemony within their own society, and how some of them also seek and obtain a cosmopolitan reach. The latter opens a view with the intriguing perspective that the main actors in the history of globalizations are nothing but the societal realms!

As co-authors of history, the elites of the various societal realms — be they professors, great artists and critics, captains of financeand industry, priests, statesmen, or moralist — behave in somewhat predicable ways to expand and consolidate their respective realms and to monopolize the realm rewards.

However, when any one societal realm develops hegemonyover other realms, contentious social movements emerge to seek and protect the autonomy of the subjugated realms; typically by defending and promoting their special liberties, i.e. academic freedom, free trade, civic liberties, artistic freedom, religious freedom, or freedom of conscience.

The present volume will deal with science in Chapter 18 and art in Chapter 19. (The chapters are numbered from the beginning of the first volume of the Many-Splendored Society.) A hundred years ago, progressive thought held that mankind could use reasonand art to change or transcend its unsatisfactory circumstances. Two World Warsand one Great Depression in the 20th century undermined many such hopes. The promising development of science and technology was met by public suspicionof the institution that created the atomic bomb and the technologies that brought us global climate change. At the same time, not surprisingly, art turned from a focus on harmony and balance to a focus on more chaotic depths of life.

The students interested in the taxonomy of social science may note that the content of the six societal realms is summarized in separate tables with identical layout (Figures 17.1, 18.1, 19.1 20.1, 21.2, and 22.1) with the identical layout as our Periodic Table of Societal Realms in Book 2, An Edifice of Symbols. The categories from the Periodic Table point out what we think are relevant knowledge about these realms.

Chapter 18.

The Realm of Science:
A Search for Knowledge

The Heritage of Aristotle

Properties of the Science Realm

      Figure 18:1. Science in Society
The Cardinal Value of Knowledge
    Knowledge, Ignorance, Illusion, and Secret
      Figure 18.2. Semiotics of Knowledge

    Illusions of Knowledge
    Secret Knowledge
    Key Social Norms in the Realm of Science

Stratification and Rewards in Science

A Self-Correcting Spontaneous Order
Comparisons with Journalists

Universities as Spindles of Organizations, Networks, and Media for Knowledge
The Organization of Research
Providing Classical Learning and Science in Schools
Providing Knowledge to Functionaries of Other Realms
  Natural and Social Science; The Place of Mathematics

     An Illustrative Interpenetration

Technological Aids to Science
Rationalities in Science

On Analysis
On Systems
    Systems of Social Science

Applied Science

Procurers of Science

"Learning Buffs" have developed the search for knowledge into a lifestyle. They have dedicated their lives to learning ever more. Their self-image is shaped by how much they know. We find them in laboratories, in study groups, at the bookstore shelf for non-fiction, in archives, and in libraries. For them, learning is not a phase in life: it is a lifelong mission. They are exceptionally eager to uncover facts and connections between them. Technical vocabularies, foreign languages, or mathematics are their advanced instruments. Non-professional Learning Buffs subscribe to journals such as Scientific American and National Geographic or their counterparts in other countries. On the Internet they frequently consult the Wikipedia. In their reading they prefer non-fiction to fiction, and in their viewing they prefer documentaries to plays. They are very attracted to education and the realm of science.

The Heritage of Aristotle

Aristotle is the greatest all-round scholar of antiquity. He is more than a philosopher; he is an explorer of nature and society using scientific methods. He systematized and preserved his knowledge in books. He conveyed his knowledge in his lessons with students and consultations with the Macedonian prince who was to become Alexander the Great. (Unfortunately his notes from the latter activity have been lost.)

Aristotle, a genius, shows that the popular vision of a scientist as a lone genius is wrong. Even in his day science had to be organized as a part of society. Aristotle founded an Academy, the second in Athens. The first one was founded by Plato. These two academies were the foundation for Athens as a university town, a function it had for centuries after its commercial and military might had faded. The academy held seminars and disputations for students from near and far, young and old.

The books that Aristotle wrote were copied and distributed in small numbers in the Hellenic world, the nearest thing to a mass-medium of those days. Many of his writings were later translated into Arabic. In this form his ideas became known to medieval Europe. Previously European scholars had read Plato in Greek, and some Stoic philosophers from pre-Christian antiquity had been available in Latin. Until then Aristotle's efforts to publish had had only indirect consequences for European thinking.

The modern scholarly enterprise also rests on organizations such as universities and on the same four activities that Aristotle pursued. First and foremost is the scientific method, the accepted rules for the development and formalization of knowledge. Second, there is publishing and librarianship, i.e. methods for the orderly distribution and storage of this knowledge in scholarly journals, books, and databases. Third, there is pedagogy, methods to mediate knowledge in a series of lessons, explorations, audiovisual aids, exercises, and tests. This includes the task of popularizing science for the general public. Fourth, there is practice, applying established knowledge to concrete problems, for example in engineering and medicine.

Using the various functions in our schema for analyzing societal realms we can say that Aristotle, in one person, was a Maker of knowledge in his research on nature, man, and society, a Keeper of knowledge in his books, a Broker of knowledge to students in his Academy, and a Provider of knowledge to the elites of other realms of his society. He is rightly celebrated as a model in the societal realm of science.

One secret of Aristotle's success rests in the fact that all these functions had one aspect in common, a kategoriai. A basic categorical schema allows a scientist to ask the most profound questions, a librarian to provide the most efficient organization of research findings, a teacher to cover an entire field without the bias of omission, and a practitioner to be relevant and stop wandering all over the place in search of solutions.

Contributions to categorical schemes are not only made by professors. Critics, librarians and other data base operators such as officials in a patent office, journalists, teachers, and consultants have also contributed.

Properties of the Science Realm

A scholarly study of science and its place in society does not differ from the scholarly study of the economy, or of the body politic, or, of any other realm. We may in all these cases use categories developed in chapters 6 through 9 and summarized in our Periodic Table of Grand Societal Realms. In science we find specific lifestyles, stratifications, reward systems, types of rationality, types of freedoms, spontaneous orders, organizations, networks, media, and here we meet Makers, Keepers, Brokers, Takers, Providers, and Procurers.

Figure 18.1. Science and Other Societal Realms

		1	2	3	4	5	6
A	*Societal Realm*	Science	Economy	Polity	Art	Religion	Morality
B	Type of Symbol	Executive description	Executive evaluation	Executive prescription	Emotive description	Emotive evaluation	Emotive prescription
C	Lifestyle	Learning Buffs	Money- Centered	Civic- Minded	Aesthetes	Believers	Welfare- Minded
D	Cardinal Value	Knowledge	Wealth	Order	Beauty	Sacredness	Virtue
E	Stratification	Competence	Class	Power	Taste	Piety	Rectitude
F	Reward System	Honor of discovery	Monetary rewards	Positions Tributes	Artistic fame	Reverence	Testimonials
G	Rationality	Scientific method	Market economy	Democracy diplomacy	Balance Congruency	Salvation rituals	Ethics
H	Type of Freedom	Academic freedom	Free trade	Civic liberties	Artistic license	Religious freedom	Freedom of conscience
I	Spontaneous order	Self- corrections	Market prices	Public opinions	Art improvi- sations	Non-ritual prayers	Unplanned civilities
J	Organizations	Laboratory Academy	Firms Unions	Bureaucracy Legislatures	Theatres Museums	Temples Cloisters	Humanitarian civil society
K	Networks	Learned societies	Bazaars Markets	Electorates > Rallies	“La vie de Bohème”	Sects	Moral movements
L	Mass media	Lectures Monographs	Marketing Advertising	Tribunes Propaganda	Stages Exhibits	Holy texts Cults	Appeals to idealism
M	Makersof cardinal value	Scholarly researchers	Innovators Entrepreneur	Legislators Civic leaders	Creative artists	Prophets	Creators of high norms
N	Keepers of cardinal value	Librarians “Educated”	Bankers Insurers	Judges Persecutors	Critics Performers	Clergy Monks nuns	Ethicists
O	Brokers of cardinal values	Technocrats Teachers	Tradesmen Freighters	Officials Civic workers	Entertainers Exhibitors	Preachers Missionaries	Moralists
P	Takers of cardinal values	Research students	Consumers Customers	Subjects Citizens	Fans of culture	Believers Seekers	Decent people
Q	Providers of cardinal values	Physicians Engineers	Central bankers	Legal advisors	Esthetics guides	Chaplains to other realms	Ethics counselors
R	Procurers of values from other realms	Research applicants	Tax men	Lobbyists	Persons and organizations on the outlook to other realms for something beneficial to the realm of art

The letters marking the rows and columns are those introduced in Book 2 An Edifice of Symbols. They are also found in our summary of various language-products in The Table of Societal Realms in Chapter 9 of which the present table is a replica with the column of Science given emphasis. Note that Rows C though G help define social phenomena, while the phenomena mentioned in Columns 1 though 6 rows J through R provide illustrations of social phenomena, not their definitions.

If you read the all words in italics, in Figure 18.1 you encounter categories of elements found in any societal realm. If you read the bold text you find their counterparts in the societal realm of science. Some examples in the same style are added in the center of the diagram to illustrate the structures and functions of science in a modern society.

Spuma consists of confabulations, language governed by biological spontaneities, and not controlled by the language brain. This babble is not admissible in constructing scholarly definitions and propositions, nor in the reporting of research findings.

Defensive Bilge is verbiage of excuses, including projections and sour grapes. When used by scientists, journalists and others it distorts reality and is unacceptable in scholarly discourses.

Magic is based on five principles that are not admissible in scientific discourse:

1. In time, all events that happen simultaneously belong together in some way.

2. In space, all things that have once touched each other thereafter hang together in some way.

3. What holds true for the part always also holds for the whole, and vice versa.

4. All happenings and creations are willed by some being.

5. One can find a special verbal formula that produces a quick change from anything evil to something good, and vice versa.

These conceptions of causality belong in pre-scientific thinking.

Secret Knowledge

Another concept that a semiotic analysis of knowledge delivers is the secret. Secrets may or may not be true, but generally speaking they are unusable in the societal realm of science where all relevant discoveries are published.

Secret knowledge has always been found in the military, about weapons, resources, and plans. The United States Atomic Energy Act of 1954 goes beyond the normal range of classifying military secrets. It makes parts of the science of physics and its calculations forbidden knowledge. However, it is difficult for a government to to sue a professor who lectures about the forbidden part or a blogger who reveals them. A trial would have to make at least some parts public what the law intended to keep forbidden (Laughlin 2009).

Industrial secrets abound, as is evident by the prevalence of industrial espionage. Secret agendas are found in corporate planning. Findings and methods of market, medical and industrial research with secret elements are often labeled "proprietary," that is owned by someone. This is not compatible with a norm in the societal realm of science that a scientist shall give up any property rights to his findings in return for the honor of being cited as the one who made the discovery.

There are business secrets helpful in a competition. Some of them are produced by "market research" based on scientific canons. But most findings in market research are not published and thus cannot be cited or checked by outsiders, nor used by outsiders in building the cumulative knowledge base of a science. It is, however, in the nature of markets to overflow with public information about prices, volumes and specifications. Researchers (and journalists) can combine this in published reports. My experiences in market research tells that marketers who put an effort in understanding and use of publicly available knowledge, for example in the form of branch statistics, do quite well in the competition for customers. Joint and common efforts by competitors to provide good branch statistics is almost always worthwhile to them; they win by being good at using public knowledge. Proprietary market research is essential when launching new products or services, or when old ones need repositioning, and also when branch statistics no longer correspond to the actual market.

In advanced countries it is possible to patent genuinely new industrial advances of production, products, or processes. A patent gives the owner control of the use of the innovation during a period of time, usually 20 years. When the time runs out the knowledge lodged in the patent is free for all to use. During the patent period the owner enjoys all established property rights. He can keep the discovery for himself, license it to be used by others for a fee, or sell it on the market where patents can be bought and sold, pass it on to heirs, or simply give it away to anyone. The copyright is a similar intellectual property right that gives control for a stated period of time to the creators of written or artistic works.

It was long an established praxis that no patent office can grant such exclusive rights on two phenomena, laws of nature and mathematical equations. It is a sign of intrusion from the realm of economy and its business interests into the realm of science when patents are issued to the composition of genes and to computer programs of mathematical algorithms (Laughlin 2009).

Legislation about engineering patent and artistic copyright is a great achievement of Western jurisprudence, a genuine contribution of the body politic to the realms of science, art, and economy. Unfortunately it is about to go haywire by an attack by the economy on science that lets the rules of trade invade the realm of science. The invaders assume that scientific discoveries and regularities, such as the genetic code, can be patented, and that such "property right" can be defended in courts. This turns the bold spirit of discovery into an anxious watch not to use immaterial rights of powerful patent holders. It pushes normal university teachings into a criminal activity. Needless to say, it is incompatible with a many-splendored society. It breaks the first key norm of science that discoveries are offered for free to the scientific community.

Key Social Norms in the Realm of Science

The realm in search for knowledge is not just an arena for a bunch of learning buffs and masterminds like Newton and Einstein. It is an enterprise with all the attributes of a full-fledged societal realm. The one who perhaps more that others has brought this to the fore is Robert K Merton, the American sociologist. From an immigrant family without much education he entered Harvard as graduate student who became an astute sociological observer of a campus with great science and scholarship at work. Here he came into contact with one of the pioneering historians of science, George Sarton, and with a learned giant in sociology, Pitirim A Sorokin, whose assistant he became for the preparation of a chapter on science in the latter's Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937-41). His doctoral thesis had these two advisors and dealt with this emerging realm: Science, Technology and Society in 17th-Century England (1938). By 1942 he had some main generalizations ready about the constitution of the scientific realm. Its key norms are Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Organized Skepticism, or more specifically:

Communism: the property rights to scientific discoveries are published and offered for free to the scientific community.
Universalism: contributions by scientists are not dependent on their race or nationality or on any other ascribed attribute
Disinterestedness: scientific work is carried out in the same way without regard to the scientist's religious faith, political, or other persuasions.
Organized Skepticism: claims to novelties in science must be subject to scrutiny by other scientists before being accepted and credited to the scientist.

Merton called these norms CUDOS because their initial letters formed this word, which also is Greek for honor given to an achievement. (This kind of cuteness appears now and then in Merton's writings.) Off and on during his life he returned to the field of sociology of science with new insights, for example, in On the Shoulders of Giants (1965), and a general summary in The Sociology of Science (1973). His Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (with Elinor Barber) was long in the making and published posthumously in 2004.

Stratification and Rewards in Science

All scientific research is subject to scrutiny by other scientists. First and foremost, a scientist must publish his methodology, and, secondly, if asked, also make the sources on which his publication is based available to other scientists. (If the information is sensitive and threatening to personal integrity there are usually ways of making it anonymous to all except the original researchers.) Scientific discoveries must be replicable (nachvollziehbar). Experiments in physics and chemistry can always be replicated, but historical events cannot. A variation of the above German term, such as "aftercontrolable," is perhaps more adequate to convey the credo in the humanities and social science. References are made in the published research to all archival sources. All original data, if any, collected specifically for the research, should, if possible, be saved. Statistical or other choices of methods of data summaries and analyses should be accessible to inspection.

In science, a firmly established pattern ties the name of the scientist to his published contributions to knowledge. Scientific articles and monographs get into print only if they contain some new knowledge. Anonymous peer reviews have a decisive say when an editor of a scientific journal publishes an article. Some journals are more read and cited than others, and to publish in them is a particular achievement. English, even somewhat broken English, is the language of science, and to publish in English has become a near-must for an aspiring scientist with a non-English background.

In the main and in the long run, the publications cited establish a scientist's competence. Not to perish in science you must publish. Oral publications at scientific conferences help, but written ones count higher. Any new scientific report is expected to recognize in text or footnotes the authors of the more relevant ideas that form parts of a new discovery, technique, or argument. A scientist’s own publications can become dearer to him than his worldly possessions, but they are never a substitute for regular pay to fund the activities of needs and lusts in daily living in a market economy.

The originality of a scientific work can be rated, but only approximately, by counting the number of citations by other scientists. The success of a scientist is an accomplished fact when some of his or her publications find their way into the bibliographies of the papers by the authorities in a field. There are statistical indices available of such rankings of scientific work. Unfortunately, the common indices of citation are mechanically calculated on the basis of unanalyzed data in which positive citations are counted as much as negative ones, and no rating is made of their informative content. It is a peculiar lack of rationality in science that such data can make or break careers in science. A helpful practice enters when a scientist's standing in the opinion among his or her colleagues is used to modify and round off the messages from indices of publications and citations.

Scientists who have achieved a high level of competence attract job offers from more prestigious universities or research organizations, for they have a policy of hiring the best they can get. This is the way they stay ahead. Heads of departments with research activities are supposed to keep track of the yearly increments in competence among their staff and promote and raise salaries accordingly. Otherwise they lose staff to competing institutions. When a scientist who has a attractive job offer from another institution tells his boss about it, the latter has the choice of saying "Congratulations" or "We will certainly match and improve on this offer, if you stay with us." The experienced science administrator has prepared for such events, and his response is well considered. By saying "Congratulations" to some with outside offers he hopes to increment the competence of his own institution by finding a still more competent replacement. In this way scientific institutions stay dynamic without tampering with reasonable tenure rights of its staff.

At universities, publishing scholarly and scientific papers and monographs is the main avenue to recognition as a scientist and a good career with a good income. Most scientists, it must be emphasized, are satisfied with modest recognition, or the mirrored recognition that comes from the achievements and reputations of the laboratory or research organization where they work (Glazer 1964).

The quality of a professor's teaching is also considered for his standing, particularly if they have developed a new and popular course for their department. A published textbook has its own rewards in the form of royalty, and is often considered a very minor merit. Popularizations of research for the general public, and participation from a professional perspective in the public debate on current issues are encouraged at many universities, but they are not given much weight in evaluating competence. To be able to attract research grants to your university, however, is rewarded. Such grants are not given without proven competence, so here is a win-win situation for a professor with a bent on being a research entrepreneur.

As we have repeatedly underlined, the scientist gives up all rights to his work when it is published in a scientific journal. In return, the honor of authorship is given to the scientist, or to the joint authors in the order in which they appear at the head of the paper. The order in which joint authors of a scholarly paper is given normally indicates their relative contribution to the research. Nobel laureates, however, tend to put their names last, once they have won the prize, that is.

We are dealing here with a unique aspect of the scientific endeavor without counterpart in any other realm. To immediately put your cardinal value into a public domain is a pattern that makes science different from engineering with its patent rights, different from art with the sale by a painter or the royalty to a novelist, and is different from the rewards of politics that can garner a paid seat in an assembly and power to rule. It is also different from market transactions, for in these both buyers and sellers are satisfied that they got the best of deals, given their circumstances. The scientist gets nothing of this. Therefore, it becomes essential to a scientist that all the above described contextual rewards of position and salary are in place, for no one in the modern world can live on honor alone, at least not in the style that behooves a successful researcher.

A Self-Correcting Spontaneous Order

The number of journals devoted to science and scholarship is one of the measures used to measure the growth of the societal realm of science. The Royal Society in London started the first one in the 1660s. In the first decade of the 21st century there were over 300,000 active scientific and professional periodicals in the world, and libraries held an additional large number of defunct scholarly journals.

In the beginning, scientific journals had an editor or a board of editors as gatekeepers; such periodicals are now usually called "professional journals." Later the role of gatekeepers was extended. Anonymous colleagues to the authors review each manuscript. When their judgments determine what appears in print or on line we have "peer review journals." For scholarly books the publishing companies also employ anonymous readers, but the process is not as formalized as for contributions to journals. Here an economic restriction enters: each book must have a fair chance to recover its publishing costs. There is no such requirement for each journal article.

To publish is essential for the accumulation of knowledge in science. As a principle, no article with research results shall be published unless it contains some new knowledge. However, replications that confirm claims to important discoveries by others are publishable, as are corrections and amendments to previously published discoveries. These confirmations, corrections, and rejections of scientific results constitute a spontaneous order; they are not ordered by any authority. This spontaneous order is effective and makes science self-correcting.

It might be noted that the Internet began as a medium for exchange of scientific information. As always in science, the information exchanged have no ownership and do not bring royalties; therefore, all files with scientific information transmitted over the net were freely shared as a matter of course. This situation changed when the Internet grew and became a major medium for other than scientific communications. The conflicts over file sharing of copyrighted songs, pictures, and literary products on the Internet is not due to ill will of the parties, but is caused by the different reward systems in science and the arts. The controversy is also infected by the tradition in countries with full freedom of speech, which implies that political messages on the Internet are freely shared. Other countries filter and censor political messages on the Internet

Comparisons with Journalists

The great advantage of journalism over science is its speed, broad coverage, and its accessible and entertaining presentation, even of difficult topics. In science, also everyday topics tend to be complex, as is well documented in the present text. The competition for discovery in science, however, is as severe as the journalistic competition for news, but it is a marathon race compared to the 100-yard dash for daily news.

It is interesting to contrast the reward pattern of science with that of journalism. Both scientific knowledge and journalistic information are public and has to be open for public scrutiny. Journalism is ideally based on facts, but its methods of controlling facts are not those of science, not even notoriously loose social and cultural science. Journalists in the Western tradition do not have to tell or show anybody how their information was obtained, or who their sources are, or what work notes they have. Only an editor-in-chief or a legally responsible publisher can ask for this information, a privilege they rarely exercise. The credibility of journalists is therefore rightly seen as more precarious than that of scientists and scholars who must document their methodology and make their source material available.

There is a big market for news and features, unknown to most readers and viewers. This makes for a second difference between the rewards systems of journalism and science. Journalists can claim intellectual property rights, copyrights, for their products. Free-lance journalists survive on this market. The copyrights of employed journalists may be routinely assigned to their employer-media in return for salary and support, but they may be activated when texts or photos are sold to other media. With a good employment contract, the employed journalist then shares in the proceeds.

As we have noted, a scientist, by contrast, gives up economic gains from his discoveries and analyses in return for the honor of being formally remembered as the first who found out and understood their importance. When using previously published material of a discovery, it is not a required routine in journalism as in science to give credit to the original authors by name and reference. Journalists may have bylines so that they can build personal reputations, but they are not normally cited by other journalists who build on their stories. There is a greater willingness to mention the name of the original medium that first reported a news item, but not the name of the journalist. An informal honorific reward system does exist among the staff in an editorial office. Honor to a journalist comes from having many contributions flashed on the front page or in the introduction of a newscast. Such things are unknown in the reward system of science.

Journalistic practice has within its power to seduce and corrupt science and scientists. It does make a difference to a scientist when major media publish his findings and when small peer-reviewed journals of his specialty publish them. The latter is most prestigious in the scientific community, but the former attracts more attention and fills the minds of many people and of the scientist himself. One should be routinely skeptical of scientists who spill findings on threats to health and the environment to big media before they have been accepted for publication by their own journals.

Universities as Organizations in Networks of Knowledge

Karl Jaspers taught philosophy at Heidelberg University until he was suspended by the Nazis in 1937. After the defeat of Hitler in 1945, German universities found themselves in shambles in intellectual terms and in many places also physically. Jaspers was reinstated in 1946 as President of his university, which had not been damaged by bombs but by persecutions and gross violations of academic freedom. Jaspers inspired and led the intellectual renaissance of his own and other German universities by publishing a new edition of a book he had written in 1923, The Idea of the University. This book opens with these words:

The university is a community of scholars and students engaged in the task of seeking truth. It is a body which administers its own affairs .... it derives its autonomy — respected even by the state — from an imperishable idea of supranational, world-wide character: academic freedom. This is what the university demands and what it is granted. Academic freedom is a privilege which entails the obligation to teach truth, in defiance of anyone outside or inside the university who wishes to curtail it.

– – –

The university is a school — but of a very special sort. It is intended not merely as a place for instruction; rather, the student is to participate actively in research and from this experience he is to acquire the intellectual discipline and education which will remain with him throughout his life. (Jaspers 1959, p. 1)

Several traditional universities in continental Europe were closed in the wake of the French revolution; they were seen as belonging to an earlier aristocratic era. In France, Napoleon recreated and transformed the French universities into merit-based schools to educate students for the professions. The privileges of the aristocracy to the higher positions in society had been eliminated by the Revolution. Just as a capable corporal could become general in Napoleon's army, so could a clever pupil in a youth school become a man of distinction in the state administration and judicial system. The youth schools for advanced education had the role of sorting out the students who had talent and ambition as candidates for university.

When the University of Berlin was to be formed in 1810, Wilhelm von Humboldt started a campaign against the then rather popular French transformation of universities. In a memorandum Über die innere und äussere Organisation der höherenwissenschaftlichen Anstalt zu Berlin he linked up with the organization of the best in the long tradition of European teaching universities — those in Bologna, Paris, Leiden, Utrecht, Göttingen, and Halle. But, like Napoleon's higher professional schools, the new German university was clearly to be a meritocracy, not an institution already reserved for established elites. As in France, the German students were to be prepared and screened by selected youth schools (Gymnasium) with an academic orientation. In contrast to the centrally controlled French system, a professor at the new German university was to have unlimited freedom to pursue research and teaching in any direction his inquiring mind took him. In practice, the professors also were given considerable autonomy in administrating their university. Freedom of thought and academic self-management were von Humboldt's ideals.

In Humboldt's university, professors were to do research and teach. Thus they functioned as both Makers and Brokers of knowledge. This had not always been the norm. Since the Middle Ages, European universities had been institutions for teaching. The first generations in modern times of great research scientists also had other bases in society. Neither Galileo, Kepler, Faraday, Lavoisier, Darwin nor Mendel were professors in universities, although some of them had appeared at universities on occasions. Among the great pioneers of natural science, Newton and Linnaeus are the exceptions. Newton became professor in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been a student. Linneaus cut short his start as a practicing physician and became attached to Uppsala University, the base for all his research in botany. But in Humboldt's university professors would advance by virtue of their merits in research, not because of their ability to teach, which one simply presupposed that they mastered. Within a few decades, this priority came to attract most researchers in modern societies to the universities.

Almost all universities subsequently founded were deeply influenced by the University of Berlin. And almost all universities already in existence were changed by ideas inspired by Humboldt and the example of the University of Berlin (Shils 1997).

The self-management of universities in Humboldt's time usually meant that the faculties created one institution with one professor in one subject. The professors were no better than other elites, and they used their freedom to govern their universities by monopolizing the realm rewards, a regularity we know as Proposition 7:4 from Book 2. They created monopolies for themselves.

7:4. "Monopolization of Cardinal Values"

In any society, people who have a large amount of a cardinal value (knowledge, wealth, power, beauty, sacredness, virtue) tend to act to preserve this situation.

So long as he kept to his specialty, a Humboldtian professor was protected from challenges from inside his own uni¬versity. Also, in his own institution he single-handedly controlled the academic rewards of its personnel and students. Against this background one can understand the saying "what is truth in Berlin and Jena is merely a poor joke in Heidelberg."

It was not until the scholarly networks of learned and professional societies and their journals first got into cross-country scope (type “The German Association xx Research”) and then grew into multi-national “invisible colleges” (type “The international Association of XX Study) that the authority of the local professor that the local authority of a Humboldtian professor could be challenged.

7:7. "The Netorg System of Realm Expansion"

A cardinal value and its societal realm extend their reach
(a) when networks dominate over organizations in the realm, and
(b) primarily when networking organizations dominate.

This development of scholarly networks and journals is the untold but necessary complement to the success of the Humboldtian universities. They became organizations in networks of science, combination of Row J and Row K in our Periodic Table reproduced as Figure 18.1 above. As such they also obtained the force of a Netorg System of Realm Expansion presented in Chapter 7.

Schools in which the curriculum included the advancements of skills to evaluate research done by others, and in which qualified students received training for their own research. A growing number of academic (and semi-academic) units have been linked with these institutions and their backyards. Today, under the same umbrella, there are many research institutes, professional schools, centers for applied science, centers for advanced studies, etc. In addition to allocations in the state budgets, they have diverse financing, including student fees, grants from foundations, and big contracts to do research for business and government.

The University of California, which became one of the leaders, had a visionary president, Clark Kerr, who aptly called his creation a "multiversity." It was an untidy collection of establishments in which traditional university departments were a minority. It was also a multi-campus structure. And it became a miracle of scholarly creativity. By obtaining their financing from many sources, not only from student fees and taxes in the state of California, Kerr and his faculties could successfully resist both excessive demands from student revolts in the 1960s and from Governor Ronald Reagan's attempt to restrict academic freedom. In general, it is true that the diversity of financial support in American universities has increased their chances to live and survive as independent institutions.

More mass education of undergraduates and less research training and discoveries in science and humanities became the fate of most universities in the latter half of the 20th century. European universities depend overly on state financing, and few have the level of protection in getting public money without political interference in university missions, as is the long privilege of Oxford and Cambridge. At the time of this writing, many Mediterranean universities are shadows of their former selves. The German university system, to name only one, is grossly underfinanced. Few European universities have been able to resist government interference in areas to be taught or not taught. Most state-financed universities have been forced by governments to cater to local and regional policy and often also to pet partisan projects in the fields of energy, the environment, state welfare, and gender studies. The old image of universities as the epicenter of European culture (as the Germans conceived it) and European civilization (as the French said it) is still good rhetoric, but has poor contact with reality.

The ethos of the university is the search for the truth in the humanities and science. This thesis of Jaspers about the truth mission of universities also has a negating part that is their last line of defense against intrusion: "Don't believe anything for which there is no reason or no evidence, and, above all, avoid stating it with conviction!" A campus of a modern multiversity, in spite of its meandering and bewildering content, will retain Jaspers' idea of university so long as staff and students test the quality of their presentations and conversations against this criterion.

The Organization of Research

The idea of a professor as a man with unchallenged learning living in solitude and freedom, however, was an image that would soon change. With the expansion of science, this form of organization would have to be modified. Research proved to be an activity that was very amenable to teamwork. A special breed of professors emerged, the research administrators.

No administrator of research can guarantee scientifically interesting and sound discoveries. The best one can do is to organize work in a laboratory to make possible discoveries of the kind that are of particular interest and to ensure that discoveries that lie outside this particular area are not lost due to over-efficiency or negligence. The latter really means that — in the spirit of a many-splendored society — we ought to cultivate a much freer work environment for researchers than the one that exists in business and in public administrations. A research institute should not be organized like a copy of a state bureaucracy, or like a business on the market, nor like a hospital in a welfare state. This was the experience of the many Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaften that were founded in the first half the 20th century to conduct research independently of universities and government departments in Germany. They made Germany a world leader in advanced research. After World War II they were reorganized as Max Planck Institutes.

During and after the Second World War an increasing number of big and small research institutes emerged outside the university campuses. Some were related to the defense effort, for example Rand Corporation, sponsored by the US Air Force; others like Bell Laboratories, the research and development arm of American Telephone and Telegraph Company had a commercial base. A Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences was established in Palo Alto, California, financed by the Ford Foundation. It got a counterpart in Europe in Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) financed by Stiftung Volkswagenwerk and German taxes.

Other research missions called "think tanks," such as the Brookings Institute and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, began systematic delivery of social science research of political relevance. Of the government-financed think tanks in Europe, the Adenauer, Ebert and Neumann foundations in Germany are outright partisan in their use of applied social science, each serving a major party. The governments of the richest countries have sponsored a common think tank in Paris, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD.

The examples cited signal that Humboldt's design to draw most research and all major researchers into universities has became a by-gone chapter in the history of science. The universities must now admit that there is as much research done outside their campuses as within. The ranks of university professors, however, still provide most of the peer reviewers and most of the leadership in learned societies, most of the editors of scientific journals, most of the chairmanships at scientific conferences. The downside of this is that ranking professors spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing and evaluating the research of others. And, of course, they also have students to teach. As educators they have one of the most important functions in a society as Providers of competent people to all realms of society.

Providing Classical Learning and Science in Schools

Around the middle of the 1700s and for more than a century thereafter, the so-called new humanism guided the philosophy of education in the German-speaking areas of Europe. The concept “humanism” was introduced into the school debate in 1808 by the pedagogical reformer F.J. Niethammer. The new humanists believed that the key to bringing up good citizens lay in antiquity, in the legacy from Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Bracing quotations from the Romans would steer youth toward that which is right, true, and beautiful:

Whoever, in the manner prescribed, reads the classical authors and also studies the foundations of mathematics, acquires a disposition to differentiate the true from the false, the beautiful from the distorted; his memory is receptive to pleasant thoughts, he becomes adept at grasping the intents of others and at skillfully expressing his own, he acquires many good maxims to improve his reasoning and will.

Thus wrote the pioneer of pedagogy, Johannes Mattias Gesner (1691-1761), as quoted by Sjöstrand (1954, p. 186). Professors in the new discipline pedagogy wrote learned volumes and encyclopedias about classical heroes and events, and the wisdom that youth could obtain from studying them. These professors were themselves “learned,” and wanted their students — at least those who continued their education beyond the elementary level — to be “learned,” with an ability to read Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the original. The model for the virtues of citizenship was to be found in antiquity, not in the present, in antique heroes and Christian saints.

The attempt to offer generations of youth significant others from the classics ran out in the sand. Wilhelm I, the nationalistic German emperor, declared in 1890 at a school conference he himself had initiated: “It is our duty to educate young men (sic) to become young Germans, not Greeks or Romans.” But already the Enlightenment had ushered in the idea that schools ought to be in the service of the new scientific knowledge, not merely classical learning. Their main purpose was not the inculcation of classical virtues, religious beliefs, artistic taste, political or administrative skills or the practices of commerce. Their duty was the dissemination the positions of science on current issues. By the middle of the 1700s, the perspective of education in Europe was shifting from an emphasis on the concerns of religion and the state toward a fast-growing, increasingly autonomous pursuit of knowledge on scientific grounds.

In the spirit of the Enlightenment’s view of education, the job of schools — irrespective of the subject — was not only to impart knowledge but also training in seeking the truth and understanding the approach to life of the subject matter. Schooling should not be dependent on the prospects of getting a good paying job or prestigious position after graduation, even if they were welcome and viewed as natural results. The ideal was that schools would provide an exciting place for serious young people to develop their intellects. Without personal intellectual development, a pupil or student or teacher would find life rather boring. An insight or a discovery can turn a gray day or sleepless night into a joyful experience.

After World War II, educational systems in many countries favored early specialization. That which is called studium generale, (“general studies”) and precedes occupationally geared studies or research has accordingly been cut back.

In the United States a heroic attempt to re-establish general studies with a new (or rediscovered) pedagogy was made at the University of Chicago, a private university. Its studium generale was a set of courses in certain subjects with a tradition of basic research. In small, compulsory seminars, all freshmen read, discussed, and analyzed the most important original works in philosophy, physics, history, and social studies. The aim was not that the students should learn the whole series of “Great Books” chosen by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. The goal of the seminars was to develop critical thinking, not only through exchanges with fellow students and teachers, but also with the pre-eminent thinkers of the Western world.

Different and sometimes watered-down versions of the Chicago model soon came to Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other ambitious undergraduate colleges in the United States. Most have been met with a declining interest, and waned in importance. They suffered from some students’ desire to choose easier courses, and their contents are subject to criticism by Marxists, ecologists, feminists, and multiculturalists.

Realization of the Enlightenment’s educational ideal has been frustrating and difficult. During the two hundred years that the Enlightenment has been with us, the world has seen many highly educated individuals — some even well-known participants in the public debate and in public service — who have been charlatans or almost charlatans. Without incurring personal risk, they have mixed proven and unproven ideas, without clarifying the difference.

Providing Knowledge to Functionaries of Other Realms

Napoleon's, Humboldt's, and later Kerr's type of university assumed the privilege of educating leaders for the various realms in modern society.

During the time of feudalism in Europe, the political elite had been educated through the practice of letting selected men attend the court. During the time of the guilds the economic elite was recruited by the practice of selecting men to serve as apprentices to a master. It was characteristic for the universities that were reformed or created in Napoleon's and Humboldt's spirit; their open admissions not only reproduced and renewed the academic elite, but also educated almost all other leaders of society. In the twentieth century a university education remained of little or no significance only for the recruitment of good trade union leaders, stockbrokers, and pop singers. In all probability, however, a central zone of a modern society functions best when its members are educated and share a similar symbolic environment with roots in university campuses.

University researchers would probably become more effective scientists if they did not also have their teaching function, but then the universities would lose in the balance of power in society. As long as an academic meritocracy is accepted for the recruitment of political, economic, and other elites, the professors can assert themselves, not only within their own territory, but also in relation to politicians, entrepreneurs, and other elites they may have educated.

My forecast is that the universities as we know them will eventually lose their position as spindles in the societal realm of knowledge. As knowledge grows, the pressure for a division of labor will be too great. The research university was an efficient structure when less than three or four percent of young men and women of each generation attended. When 30 or 40 percent attended, as happened in many countries after World War II, it became an inefficient structure, less appropriate for both research and teaching. In the United States volumes of teaching take place in community colleges where faculties have little or no pressures to continuously publish research. In Germany volumes of advanced research are located in Max Planck Institutes. A bifurcation of universities into colleges for advanced mass teaching with scientific outlook and research centers of excellence is emerging in the 21st century.

There are also other ways besides neglecting teaching for the benefit of research that can cause universities to lose in the balance of power. Max Horkheimer (1937) had observed that students and professors had a simple choice as scholars: either to search for an understanding of things as they were or to be critical of them. He argued forcefully for "critical theory" in philosophy and the social sciences. When some university institutions in practice became outposts for radical political movements — as was the case in much of the Western world around 1968 — a number of talented students bypassed them. Fed up with the radicalization of campuses, they dropped out of their universities.

When, in Sweden in the 1990s, I first wrote down these thoughts about universities, some of the conservative dropouts from those universities with campuses and later faculties steeped in the 1968 mentality were recruited to become prime minister, minister of education, and editor-in-chief of the country's largest conservative newspaper. The lesson for the universities may be: if you want to be relevant for the total society you should stick to the search for truth, critical or not, and leave the running of the realms of power and money to others.

Natural and Social Science; The Place of Mathematics

The difference between natural and social scientists is shaped by the properties of their respective subject matter and how they are recorded. In modern natural science the subject matters of both microcosmos and macrocosmos are taken as given, and the main task of scientists is to record the differences between various objects. These differences and their relations are recorded as mathematical expressions. Physicists are less comfortable in telling us the "nature" of their subject matter. So we are left with the impression that the very nature of physical nature is mathematical. At any rate it is apparent that physical science cannot rely entirely on the language brain. It needs the use of the mathematical platform of human intelligence. Often natural science also needs the skills of geometry found in the spatial brain to analyze and present its knowledge.

We have seen in Book 1 how classifications summarized as Tri- and Bisections of Language Usages provide main building blocks of social reality. Here the subject matter of both macro- and micro-social science are not mathematical but grammatical expressions. In accounting for the grammatical expressions of the human drama social scientists cannot avoid the use of logic, some mathematical notions, and some basic statistical measurements, i.e. standard tools of natural science. In that sense social science is quite similar to natural science. Modern economics and demography are obvious cases in point. But social scientists are by no means obliged to translate everything into mathematics. In many instances in economic history, anthropology, sociology, and political science it would actually be more meaningful to translate the findings into Latin than into mathematics. For their subject matter is grammatical, not mathematical.

The point of view we take is a modified version of the old divide between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften that the German philosopher William Dilthey explored in 1883. He cemented a gulf between the two. This led to the breakdown of communication between the sciences and the humanities that C.P. Snow (1956) diagnosed as The Two Cultures. With our formulation the gulf is not insurmountable, nor incomprehensible.

Natural science must always use the mathematical brain in addition to the language brain. Creativity in natural science is in large measure a product of the scientist's mathematical brain. Social science and the humanities have in the main products of the language brain as raw data. In coping with these data a social scholar can also make good use of mathematics, particularly statistics. But in the social sciences a rule that everything fit a mathematical model would be an unbearable straitjacket on creativity and reality.

When scientists give attention to the human beings who, with the help of their tools, overcome biological and physical exigencies and manage to enact human society, they enter an area of interpenetration between the social and biological and physical worlds. Social science meets natural science. In this process they are no longer just social scientists but are also more or less dependent on natural sciences, nor are they just natural scientists but also more or less dependent on social sciences. For example, if you by using natural science happen to discover a climate change that is due to mankind's social activity you may need knowledge from political science and communication research to do something about this activity.

An Illustrative Interpenetration

Any interpenetration of natural and social science requires more than professional courtesies to colleagues in other fields. They may involve surprising discoveries, unanticipated by either field.

BIO TECH Consider designs to cope with human stress. Our ancestors evolved into the present species over millions of years, when the conditions for survival were entirely different. They adapted gradually to an environment which changed very slowly. And it was the slowness of the change that made adaptation possible. With the industrial revolution, about two centuries ago, the rate of change began to increase drastically. And in the electronic era, that counts its age in decades rather than centuries, the rate of change keeps accelerating.

In striking contrast, the human brain and body have remained essentially the same over several thousand years. Bodily spontaneities are adaptive in Darwin's sense. Or, they were adaptive in an earlier era or another environment. For example, in eating, the urge for fat was a hedge against famine and the urge for sugar built up the ability to run away from predators. Such spontaneities, as we now know, are less adaptive for healthy living in a rich modern city. In a society in the main based on language brains adaptations in food habits spread rapidly through networks and mass media.

Today's demands for the workplace and communal life, which may be both psychological and physical in nature, trigger the same bodily stress responses that served our ancestors by making them "fit for fight" or "fit for flight." Any situation perceived as a threat or challenge requiring effort, takes signals from the brain to the adrenal medulla, which responds with an output of adrenaline and noradrenalin. These "stress hormones" make the body fit for fight or flight. In the event that the situation induces feelings of distress and helplessness the brain sends messages also to the adrenal cortex, which secretes another stress hormone, cortisol, which plays an important part in the body's defense.

Jobs for human beings should be designed to reduce not stress per se but distress the feelings of helplessness and of "giving up" that are likely to occur when people experience that events and outcomes are independent of their actions. Helplessness is accompanied by an outflow of stress hormones, particularly cortisol.

A number of studies of working life support the view that personal control and influence over the work process are important "buffering" factors, helping workers to achieve a state of effort without distress. Demands are experienced as a stimulus rather than a burden. Under such conditions, the balance between stress hormones is changed: adrenaline increases whereas the cortisol-producing system remains at rest. This means that the total load on the body, the "biological cost of achievement," will be lower.

When we design modern jobs that enhance positive challenge, effort, determination, and involvement, we use medical theories of stress and social theories of leadership in organizations as well as the knowledge of production engineering in which speed and energy efficiency are paramount. It seems meaningless to say that one of these three specialties is more important than the others in solving the problem. We need them all.

In many instances of interpenetration, social scientists have tipped their hats in respect and allowed, say, medical science, to dominate the interpretations made. For example, we have let our understanding of old age be dominated by medical diagnoses of failing bodily functions, deteriorating memory, and dimming of the senses. In other cases social scientists have chosen to ignore any biological interpretation and treated underachievement in schools, crime, poverty, and any social disorder as being socially caused, and something that could be ameliorated by counseling or governmental welfare programs. The results have often been more misleading than illuminating.

This monopolization of knowledge and particularly the applications of knowledge by one or the other of the interpenetrating fields is unwise. We had better let the evidence decide which discourse — biology, physics, or social sciences — is most informative, and search for a synthesis that explains more than each can do by itself.

Technological Aids to Science TECH

Albert Einstein came from a family of skilled instrument makers. Scientific progress thrives on closeness to instruments and other opportunities for observation.

TEXT TO COME

Rationalities in Science

In both the natural and social science we find two modes of rationality. The world, nature, life, technology, culture are, as always, a complicated diversity, into which the scholarly mind has tried to bring some order. But the ways that have been devised to bring order out of this chaos have varied throughout the history of knowledge. We distinguish two major varieties of scientific rationality: analyses and systems.

The different eras in the history of science can be distinguished by bringing together those that were used to wrest order out of chaos during the same periods of time. We have had a somewhat homogeneous period from the time of Francs Bacon (1561-1626) to Albert Einstein (1879-1955). During this era, “modern times,” the sharpest thinkers were of the opinion that man was capable of fully understanding the world, and that the method to attain that understanding was analytical thinking. Max Weber, who has inspired many of our categories used in this book, was a man of those times. But he also created bridges and ushered in emerging systems thinking. Russell Ackhoff (1999) has successfully applied systems thinking to management theory and practice. I will follow some of his views on the difference between the analytical and the systems approaches.

On Analysis

Analytical thinking passes through several steps.

Reductionism. We “go to the bottom,” pulverize and divide complicated phenomena into their components. We can carry this step of the analysis as far as it will go and reach components that do not seem useful to break down further. These were the elements in chemistry, the cells in biology, the particles in physics, the phonemes in linguistics, the genes in the study of heredity, natural laws in certain judicial systems, “one man, one vote” in the tenets of democracy.

Determinism. We seek the underlying causes behind the elements. Analytical thinking holds that everything happens for a reason, and that nothing occurs by pure chance. The causal chain may be complicated, but it can be unraveled and mapped. One must be absolutely definite when describing reality, and the ultimate goal is to uncover rules that do not allow for exceptions.

Causes that have been charted in the study of the elements are held to be necessary and sufficient to explain everything. There is no need to turn to circumstantial factors as causes. The purest illustration of cause and effect is a laboratory situation, an innovation of modern times where all factors can be controlled. Randomization in assigning objects to experimental and control groups control both known and unknown factors; all recorded effects come from the independent variable. Laboratory experiments let us study how one variable at a time can affect the result.

Deduction. The understanding of complicated phenomena can be attained by assembling what we have learned about their component parts. The aim is to find a pattern in the causal chains between the elements in order that we may construct a general explanation, a theory, about the components. A theory captures the most important characteristics of the components and summarizes all the instances of cause and effect that we have observed into the most general and informative propositions, i.e. laws of nature. Such laws describe future observations as well as those already made. The theory is usually constructed and reported as a hierarchy of propositions.

During the modern era, the patterns of thought described here were applied, more or less consciously, not only to science but also to forms of government, legislation and constitutional issues, organizations and business, and even to the fine arts. Their success was formidable.

A certain distrust of analytical thought has emerged in today’s cultural climate. It is nourished by ideas from Gödel, Heisenberg and quantum physics, ideas to be found in hermeneutics and ecology, among other sources. Eastern intellectuals, who have seen Western analytical thought make inroads into their culture as well, would like to see alternatives that are more congenial to Eastern traditions.

On Systems

Analytical thinking aims to shape order out of chaos. An alternative with the same aim is usually called systems approach, but other names are also in use, for example, holism.

A category is normally defined by at least two attributes. It shares one element with a larger class; another element is peculiar to the category defined. This way of organizing knowledge by genus proximum and differentia specifica is an old-fashioned one. It was once the only standard qualifying as scientific. It is still a cornerstone in any "analysis."

The concept of "system" is more recent. It is used rather loosely in most social science, merely signaling that some elements are interconnected. Terminology varies somewhat between different systems theorists, but they all agree that a system is a way of organizing knowledge of elements and wholes.

· The behavior of each element has an effect on the behavior of the whole.

· No element has an effect on the whole that is independent of other elements.

· The elements are so connected that no subgroup of them has an independent effect on the whole.

Systems with an environment – usually consisting of other systems – are said to be "open" while systems without an environment are "closed," i.e. self-contained. A living system has "autopoiesis," meaning that its whole and subgroups are maintained while their constituent elements are periodically consumed and reproduced, disassembled and reconstructed, discarded and invented in new forms.

System thinking can be formalized in equations like analytical thinking. But it need not be. Computer modeling and simulations can often more easily than equations represent a complex system.

Holism. The whole has characteristics that cannot be found in the parts. This thesis debunks what we called the third principle of magical thinking which says that what holds for the part also holds for the whole, and vice versa. The whole, says the systems theorist, acquires unique characteristics through the interaction of its parts, not by the influence that each part has on the whole. No discrete part can do the job of the whole.

If not overloaded, the hull of a sailboat floats on water. If the sail has not been hoisted we cannot be transported over the water, nor does the hull without the sail suffice for the task. The characteristics of a sailboat are not the sum of the characteristics of the hull plus the characteristics of the sail plus the characteristics of the water. The characteristics are created by the interaction of sail and hull, not by the action of the sail and hull taken separately. Moreover, the wind does not only transfer its force to the sail, but also to the water when creating waves. And waves affect the way the hull floats. As a system, a sailboat cannot be understood – or at least cannot be defined in an understandable way – by an analysis of the conventional method of deconstruction. A good understanding of a sailboat begins with the whole, not its component parts.

Teleology. Events are governed not only by cause and effect but also by means and ends. Aristotle identified three causal connections in analytic thinking: a material one (“there is a sail”), a formal one (“the sail is turned toward the wind”), and the effective cause (“the wind transfers its force to the sail”). He then included a cause that was contingent on purpose (“we sail because we want to come to a point in another part of the water”). The latter was banned from analytical thinking, but has returned in holistic thinking. Even in respect to machines — and machines are the triumph of analytic thinking — it has been difficult to exclude teleological ideas (Cf. Rosenblueth & Wiener 1950).

Unique historical and geographic circumstances. Sailing requires a specific environment: water of a certain depth and wind of a certain force. Control of the environment, which is so obvious in laboratory situations, is replaced in system thinking by a full appreciation of the unique situation that makes some things possible and others not.

There are many other things to be said about contemporary systemic and holistic thought, some of which reveal rather fuzzy thinking. The above account will be sufficient here.

A basic claim of the system thinkers is that analytic thinking does not help us to understand systems that actually exist, for example the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems of our bodies, or the climate system of our planets. Since analysis starts by taking things apart and studying each part one by one, it destroys the essentials of a system.

In practice, however, this has not turned out to be a serious drawback. It has forced scientists in the analytic tradition to search for, not only the main effect of Factor A on Factor B, but also all the side effects, a routine, for example, in medical research. Interventions in economic and political and other societal systems, even those that have been carefully analyzed in advance, also produce side effects. Human history is full of unplanned consequences of planned events. Reliance on good intentions is far from sufficient for planning or predictions; it is only one factor among many.

Systems in the Social Sciences

The problem of teleology in social science is tied to human intentions. Max Weber, as mentioned, was a scholar of the era of analytical thinking, but he accepted some parts of what we now call systems thought. He saw areas of social science that cannot be studied without paying attention to the teleological considerations found in human intentions. In fact Weber included intentions (subjective meanings) in his very definition of "social action" (Handlung) i.e. behavior invested with intention.

If the intention of an action is to use effective means to reach a rationally chosen goal, Weber called the action "instrumentally rational (zweckrational); for example, a young person who intends to become a judge and he (or she) starts by the rational choice of going through law school. If the intention is to use rational means to reach an uncompromisable goal Weber called the resulting actions "rationally committed to a value" (wertrational); for example, a young person gets a fixed idea that meat is bad for mankind and she or he buys vegetarian food and chooses vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants with vegetarian menus. If an action is a conscious outflow to cope with a person's emotional state Weber calls it "affective"; for example, a young couple are in love and act accordingly. If the action is not consciously new in any of its ways of dealing with means and ends Weber calls it "traditional"; here young and old intend to do and choose to do what they did yesterday and before. This classification of Weber’s has proven useful in the social sciences in many different contexts.

Full-fledged system thinking in the social sciences belongs to the latter half of the twentieth century. The anthropologists then talk about the cultural system, sociologists about the social system, and psychologists about the personality system. Titles of some of important books in social sciences now include the word system, for example, The Social System (Parsons 1952), A Systems Analysis of Political Life (Easton 1965), Soziale Systeme (Luhmann1984), and Social Rule System Theory (Burns & Flam 1987), Comparative Economic Systems (Conklin 1991). It must be said, however, that these books rarely attempt to empirically show that their topics have the strict properties of systems that we have presented above.

For nearly a century the mainstream of social science has broken up human life into four areas, a corporal, a psychological, social, and a cultural level. Or, in the words of Clifford Geertz:

Attempts to locate man amid the body of his customs have taken several directions, adopted diverse tactics; but they have all, or virtually all, proceeded in terms of a single overall intellectual strategy: what I will call, so as to have a stick to beat it with, the "stratigraphic" conception of the relations between biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors in human life. In this conception, man is a composite of "levels," each superimposed upon those beneath it and underpinning those above it. As one analyzes man, one peels off layer after layer, each such layer being complete and irreducible in itself, revealing another, quite different sort of layer underneath. Strip off the motley forms of culture and one finds the structural and functional regularities of social organization. Peel off these in turn and one finds the underlying psychological factors — "basic needs" or what-have-you — that support and make them possible. Peel off psychological factors and one is left with the biological foundations—anatomical, physiological, neurological—of the whole edifice of human life. (Geertz 2000, p. 37.)

Social scientists have usually assumed that these layers, in addition to being separate, are systems. I believe it is time to question both their separateness and their universal possession of strict system properties. By old-fashioned analysis starting from a few products of the language brain we have sketched in this work on The Many-Splendored Society the whole edifice of social life. The totality may have some or all attributes of a system — this should be empirically tested — but many of the systems that fill the social science literature are probably branches of the tree of delusion. This position, of course, will not be popular among those who work in universities organized in departments based on established disciplines, and among those who have investments in academic degrees based on specialties believed to have unique subject matter both in content and as systems.

Providers of Knowledge; Applied Science

The applied scientists dominate over the researchers in the societal realm of science . There are legions of physicians, nurses, engineers, ecologists and many others. Social sciences are applied by social workers, social relation therapists, PR consultants, and others, including many political scientists and economists.

Knowledge becomes more permanently integrated into the social structure through courses that lead to a written recognition of competence or certification. Such certified know-how has becomes a pre-requisite for an ever increasing number of jobs. Most students seek to qualify for such recognition after completing compulsory school, in order to enter a wide range of occupations. The old academic professions, such as priests, jurists, accountants, physicians, engineers and teachers, always carry certification.

An increasing number of new and old non-academic jobs are certified in the advanced countries, be it cooks, electricians, welders, pediatricians, animal wardens, security guards. The certification is done by the state, or by branch organizations. Lacking that, some independent schools provide special diplomas.

The certified are technocrats, a word that is not synonymous with engineer. Technocrats have specialized knowledge; they have become the group in society that administers production, the caring professions, teaching, and communication. They have taken over more and more from the bureaucrats, who are the agents of the leadership’s ubiquitous desire to govern and control. Among the latter we find the officials of the state and local authorities, the ombudsmen of organizations, and the head linemen in companies. They ground their thinking in the instructions of the powers-that-be, or in resolutions passed at a congress or similar authorities. The technocrats, on the other hand, justify their positions on the grounds of reason and facts acquired as a result of their special competence and schooling.

A technocrat wants to be able to question whatever he considers to be superstition within his area and therefore requires freedom of expression. Bureaucrats in administration, on the other hand, argue only in terms of the goals that their superiors have set up; moreover, they are apt to regard freedom of expression to be but an annoying factor at the workplace.

In many areas in democratic states, liberation of the technocrats from the bureaucracy of the powers-that-be has been evident. However, in authoritarian and totalitarian states, the process is constantly threatened by one of the characteristics of Stalinism: the subordination of technocrats to the bureaucrats of the political administration.

Are the schools for young people certifying technocrats steered to a greater or lesser extent by bureaucrats (school authorities) than by technocrats (teachers)? The answer suggests a paradox. The very system of education that has transformed larger segments of the total society from bureaucratic rule to technocratic rule is itself often ruled in painful detail by a bureaucracy!

Engineers TECH

In earlier days engineering tasks – weaving cloths, building fireplaces, making cooking utensils, providing weapons for the hunt and the wars – were not very formalized. Also, at the first schools of engineering in the modern era one would study construction, road building, shipbuilding, mining, and other practical trades. Only later did science proper enter, and engineering became organized under headings such as mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, outer space engineering, et cetera, i.e. disciplines defined by the areas of scientific knowledge as they applied to practical ends.

In a study like ours that looks at society through the window of language, the most relevant technologies concern transmissions of symbols. The development at the turn of the century of handheld communicators combining cellular phones (oral) with input by hand (written), SMS messaging, email (printable), voice mail (audible) and cameras (pictorial) gave a person of the new century an easily used device with all symbol-carrying modes in one handy tool. (In Britain it was actually called "a handy.") This device may also include a computer with a memory more exact than the human one. Here you can store or download your archive of writings, your catalogue of relatives, friends, and contacts, your calendar, your favorite music, books to be read by you — or to you by an artificial voice. The facilities include the downloading of your newspaper, and live radio and television. The device may also include a GPS so that you know where you are and can find the way to where you want to go. You may also use such a device as a remote control to open your doors and to run your home theater, etc. It may also be used instead of a credit card for purchases or bank transactions. Such a super-handy helper in mass production in the 2010s may change everyday life to make it seem almost magic by earlier standards. The amazing fact is that the devices will be cheap and simple. So-called "cloud computing" stores programs and databases on the network to be available in your device only when you need them, thus cutting down its size and market price. The old advertising slogan "the network is the computer" becomes a reality when networks become practically as fast as computers. The once unsurpassable difference between the small world of private encounters and the global world is shrinking dramatically.

Physicians Bio

Hippocrates of Kos (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) created a practice of medicine void of magic for the ancient Greeks. (More)

The bodily spontaneity of mankind can be suppressed by Freudian Unbehagen norms. They can also be enhanced by different social designs. A most remarkable such design is the system of modern medicine. It is modifying the most fundamental spontaneous bodily sequence of birth, growth, decay, and death.

more to come

On Books Organizing Applied Knowledge

As professions based on applied science develop, there emerges a need to organize knowledge as manuals, which differ from both the analytic and the systemic paradigm. The engineer's handbook differs from a textbook in physics. A manual for teaching is different from a book on psychological theory. Manuals for ecologists are still rare, and may look much like an old-fashioned flora of botany. This may be due to the fact that ecology only recently has developed into a major profession. In medicine the last hundred years have seen a drastic reorganization of its knowledge to better serve a physician at work.

”Definition,” ”History of Knowledge,” ”Incidence,” ”Etiology,” ”Symptoms,” ”Prognosis,” ”Diagnosis,” ”Treatment,” and ”Prevention” are the subheads used by Sir William Osler in his classical work Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) to organize medical knowledge for fingertip use by physicians. This format proved superior to both the analytical and systemic presentations in anatomy, histology, physiology, etc. Rather it is centered on the needs of the situation in which a physician examines a patient. In a standardized fashion Osler tells the physician where to look, what to look for, and, depending on what he finds, how to treat the patient. At the same time, the author reminds the physician of the relevant knowledge acquired in the systematic study of anatomy, histology, physiology, etc., and also points out where knowledge is missing. He often gives a reference to the history of knowledge about a disease. For half a century new medical knowledge could easily be fitted into this schema and Osler's textbook enjoyed numerous editions.

A main task of physicians is to relieve mankind of deceases. However, they have also another task: To provide excuse that relieve sick people from work and other demanding obligations. Instead, the excused are expected to follow their doctor's orders. Since this is a book on social science, not medical science, we have, as the reader soon will see, something to say about the latter task. In writing out sick certificates in welfare states the doctors do not seem to have much formal training in medical school, nor any binding handbooks!

In a book dealing with societal realms such as the one you now read, it is of considerable interest to look at the sciences that specialize in particular realms, for example, economics and political science. To a considerable extent economics is an applied science centered on the goal of a sustainable maximization of the cardinal value of riches. Looking at the micro-level of encounters, the economists who are followers of Leon Walras' general equilibrium show how prices transplant and travel through networks of markets, accumulating increasing wealth. Looking at the macro-level of total societies, Keynesian economists show how riches grow by investments.

Political science has few theories with the formal elegance of economics, but it has a good body of non-mathematical theories. On balance, they assume with Locke that consent of the governed is the most efficient way of achieving and maintaining order.

There is basic research and confirmed theories in both economics and political science. But most research in these fields is applied; the vision of economists and political scientists is narrowed to concerns with wealth and order, respectively. Economics and political science cannot fully account for a many-splendored society that has other cardinal values in addition to riches and order.

Procurers of Science

The American business community is slowly coming to realize that you cannot buy research findings the same way as you buy other goods for your enterprise. The American polity has slowly come to realize that research findings do not follow any politically approved plans. The failed attempt to squelch stem cell research by the Bush administration is a case in point.

Such insights are not so common in Europe. Europe's (in Gaullist fashion) micromanaged research policies cannot provide Europe with a more creative research environment than the American one. Politicians and businessmen can, of course, desire to investigate a certain subject and pay for the work, but they cannot control how researchers work. There exist many false hopes about the relation between science and politics and other realms; some altogether too smart science entrepreneurs play on these false expectations, and make extravagant promises in return for big appropriations.

In a many-splendored society, knowledge that is politically steered is as much an anathema as is politically dictated art, religion, or ethics.

The role of Procurer of resources from other realms of society to the realm of science is not standardized. We have some fragile mechanisms that permit politicians to determine an overall scope of allocations of tax money for scientific research but not how they should be used. A research council is such a mechanism. There are also research foundations with private (non-government) funds that operate like research councils. An example is Stiftung Volkswagenwerk in Germany. The core of the research council model is the work of groups of scientists, usually called "panels," that rank projects proposed by other researchers in terms of scientific merits. It is the voice of the research community that is heard in a research council, not that of politicians, of businessmen, or of council administrators.

The panel system of research councils can be made ineffective by monopolizing the realm's rewards (Proposition 7:4 cited above). Most councils I have encountered have too many panels, as many as there are scientific specialties. This is actually what professors usually favor in order to monopolize their real rewards, as we noticed also in the organization of the Humboltian universities. Then dead-end specialties survive and new specialties may be blocked from the support they deserve. Research councils with few panels manned by scholars who have a broad view and who have expertise in several fields deliver the best decisions of support to research.

A research council is not a perfect system for financing research. Research done in non-university hospitals, private-sector institutes, and museums seems by and large unrepresented in existing councils, which is an unnecessary limitation. European research councils, in particular, have obvious difficulties to adjust to the fact that the lion's share of research takes place outside the universities. If you attended a meeting or read the minutes of the Nordic research councils around the millennium you would think that all research is university research.

Self-censure, favoritism and fashion may certainly affect the work on a research council, and their presence suggests that professors are not altogether the independent thinkers they believe they are. But it is the best system we have. It is a system that gives chances to individual projects that cannot fit into the big, politically approved research programs. And it is clearly better than the rigid and centralized system of sponsoring research practiced by the European Union under the Lisbon accord that shall harness the realm of science to make Europe competitive with North America and the Far East.

Please send your comments after reading this chapter by email to the author.

Chapter 19

The Realm of Art: A Search for Beauty

Properties of the Artistc Realm

      Figure 19.1. Art in Society
Organizations, Networks, and Media in the Realm of Art

Makers, Keepers, Broker, and Takers in Art

The Pre-dominance of Emotive Symbolism in Art
Beauty as the Cardinal Value of Art
      Figure 19.2. Semiotics of Beauty

    Kitsch
    Beauty and Beast
Accumulation of Beauty
Art and Brain Functions
Stratification and Rewards in Art
Order and Leadership in Art
Spontaneous Order In Art
Rationality in Art
Debunking Magic in Art
Technology in the Creation of Art
Providing Art Education in Schools
Embedding Beauty
A Coda on Science and Art

Aesthetes have a lifestyle that constantly makes them look for opportunities to stop and contemplate something beautiful or artistic. Aesthetes need beauty in order to feel good about themselves and life, to reveal and tolerate the drabness and imperfections of everyday living. An aesthetics lifestyle can permeate all aspects of living. In many ways it is true that most anything – food, pots and pans, furniture, housing, sewing, boxing, sex, conversations, ice hockey, marching, military battles, and what have you – can be more or less artistic. It can also be totally inartistic, or kitsch. Aesthetes may themselves be practicing artists, but need not be, and most are not. If available to them, they visit art galleries and museums, frequent concerts, the theatre and the ballets, read the recipients of the Nobel Prize for literature, and have an eye for interesting architecture. They keep informed about dramas on TV and on video, or of recent pieces of fiction, have an eye for interesting architecture and for beauty in the home. When choosing a vacation destination they prefer Florence to a beach resort.

The Western history of art has broody three phases. In the long classical phase from antiquity to end second half of the 18th century art was seen as a mirror, usually a beatifying mirror, showing objects, persons, or ideals. In the following romantic period art became lamp producing a new light radiating as artistic reality (Abrams 1971, Chap 2-3). In a third period, from the end of the 19th century through the 20th century, modernist art not only radiates but shapes its objects into new-fangled gestalts.

Properties of the Artistic Realm

The image of the arts as a place for lone geniuses is as wrong as is the image of science as a playground for solitary whiz kids. Artists are embedded in a community with all the attributes of a full-fledged realm, as seen in Figure 19.1. Today we accept the varieties of art, not only as individual showpieces, but as social products (Becker 1982). As such they are part of and also shaped by the structuration of the total society, an idea that many have touched upon and that was entered into cumulative sociology by Loewenthal (1963).

Figure 19.1. Art in Society

		1	2	3	4	5	6
A	*Societal Realm*	Science	Economy	Polity	Art	Religion	Morality
B	Type of Symbol	Executive description	Executive evaluation	Executive prescription	Emotive description	Emotive evaluation	Emotive prescription
C	Lifestyle	Learning Buffs	Money- Centered	Civic- Minded	Aesthetes	Believers	Welfare- Minded
D	Cardinal Value	Knowledge	Wealth	Order	Beauty	Sacredness	Virtue
E	Stratification	Competence	Class	Power	Taste	Piety	Rectitude
F	Reward System	Honor of discovery	Monetary rewards	Positions Tributes	Artistic fame	Reverence	Testimonials
G	Rationality	Scientific method	Market economy	Democracy diplomacy	Balance Congruency	Salvation rituals	Ethics
H	Type of Freedom	Academic freedom	Free trade	Civic liberties	Artistic license	Religious freedom	Freedom of conscience
I	Spontaneous order	Self- corrections	Market prices	Public opinions	Art improvi- sations	Non-ritual prayers	Unplanned civilities
J	Organizations	Laboratory Academy	Firms Unions	Bureaucracy Legislatures	Theatres Museums	Temples Cloisters	Humanitarian civil society
K	Networks	Learned societies	Bazaars Markets	Electorates > Rallies	“La vie de Bohème”	Sects	Moral movements
L	Mass media	Lectures Monographs	Marketing Advertising	Tribunes Propaganda	Stages Exhibits	Holy texts Cults	Appeals to idealism
M	Makersof cardinal value	Scholarly researchers	Innovators Entrepreneur	Legislators Civic leaders	Creative artists	Prophets	Creators of high norms
N	Keepers of cardinal value	Librarians “Educated”	Bankers Insurers	Judges Persecutors	Critics Performers	Clergy Monks nuns	Ethicists
O	Brokers of cardinal values	Technocrats Teachers	Tradesmen Freighters	Officials Civic workers	Entertainers Exhibitors	Preachers Missionaries	Moralists
P	Takers of cardinal values	Research students	Consumers Customers	Subjects Citizens	Fans of culture	Believers Seekers	Decent people
Q	Providers of cardinal values	Physicians Engineers	Central bankers	Legal advisors	Esthetics guides	Chaplains to other realms	Ethics counselors
R	Procurers of values from other realms	Research applicants	Tax men	Lobbyists	Persons and organizations on the outlook to other realms for something beneficial to the realm of art

The letters marking the rows and columns are those introduced in Book 2 An Edifice of Symbols. They are also found in The Table of Societal Realms in Chapter 9 as a summary of various language-products that are constituent of social reality. The present table is a replica with the column of Art given emphasis. Note that Rows C though G help define social phenomena, while the phenomena mentioned in Columns 1 though 6 rows J through R provide illustrations of social phenomena, not their definitions.

Organizations, Networks, and Media in the Realm of Art

Art is not something aloft in society. Like other societal realms, art has a community of organizations, networks, and media (Se Figure 17:2, Columns J-L). Walking in a city you find some art in he form of statues, monuments, and artful gardening in public places. In the streets you may pass art galleries selling paintings and bookstores carrying fiction and poetry. In some parts of a city, architecture may attract you as something artistic. In a metropolis, we find one or more opera house, theaters, concert halls, and museums and libraries. Cities such as Venice, Florence and Toledo may in themselves be beautiful, not just contain objects of beauty. In all, there are many organizations for art, public or private, in the societal realm of art, just as there are organizations for scientific research, business, politics, religion, and welfare in other societal realms.

Art also has its networks. There are coteries for dance, visual arts, theatre, music, literature, et cetera. There are colonies of artists. Some networks of artists join in what outsiders call la vie de bohème, networks with a mysterious mix of spontaneities and oddities. Some of their elements may be less welcome in polite society. But there are limits to an artistic, individualistic, and bohemian lifestyle. It is set by the stable organizations in the societal realm of art. In theatres, art galleries, publishing houses, et cetera there are staffs, rules, schedules, budgets, and bosses. La vie de bohème is also hard work.

Special mass media for art have developed in the form of stages, galleries, and publishing houses. More than other societal realms, however, the arts are their own media. Many works of art speak directly to its public. But they are helped by a clear view, and are also benefitting from an allowance of perspective. A copy of the original equestrian statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius from 176 DC stands 3.5 meters tall on its platform in the middle of Campidoglio, a square on the Capitolium hill in Rome, easily seen by all. For full effect, the square slopes somewhat against the edges; this gentle cone broadcasts the centerpiece.

A reverse and steeper cone-shape marks classical and modern theatres in which an audience is seated to focus on a limited stage. In another arrangement, the Guggenheim Museum in New York leads its public along a spiral path that allows you to see exhibited pictures from above and below, as well as from left and right as in other museums.

On balance, the arts need less booming advertising than other social realms to reach out with its cardinal value. It is usually helped by an environment conducive to contemplation by its audience.

Makers, Keepers, Broker, and Takers in Art

A division of labor in the realm of art separates central figures of the creative artists, who belong in the category of Makers (Row M in Figure 19.1). The most creative artists are on the same level in society as prophets in religions, famed researchers in science, great statesmen in political life, and the legendary business entrepreneurs. Makers of fiction and poetry are the natural examples in a book focused on language and society. All art, however, is not language in the usual sense. There is much more than literary pursuit under the umbrella of art: painting, sculpture, the dance, singing and music, architecture, are all non-language pursuits, wholly or in part. But with language we can talk about art in all its different forms. This is done by Keepers, such as critics, museum curators, and theatre producers. They guide Brokers such as actors, dancers, and other performing artists to bring art to the ultimate Takers, the fans of culture.

The leadership Keepers and Brokers of art is not quite the same as the discipline and leadership in the body politic or in business. In art, good leaders usually emphasize another style. Ingmar Bergman, the movie and theatre director knew the secret of stirring his co-workers to strive for excellence and to surmount conflicts in the interest of a common goal. How many men would even contemplate bringing together in the same project a number of their ex-wives and lovers on the premise that they will work in harmony and deliver optimal performances? What was his secret?

Bergman was not only an accomplished director of motion pictures; he was also an intuitive guide of human potential. Frictions that might plausibly be expected to arise on the set are dissipated by an even more compelling force. To each member of his cast Bergman seems able to give a unique gift: to gain access to the undiscovered and richest lodes within one’s being and be guided in mining them to one’s own delight. This is a reward of an entirely different quality and power than conventional praise or tangible compensations for performance. It spurs one to the highest level of accomplishment because of the sheer pleasure in growing as an adult, as a craftsman, as an artist, and as a professional. Unlike traditional incentives, the effects are long-lasting and cumulative. And so Bergman could orchestrate his players so that each strives to summon the finest tones out of his own instrument — himself — in the creation of the final total product (Frankel 198x).

Some Takers of art, often with much knowledge, money, and a critical bent, become collectors, a special brand of Keepers. Contrary of having a passion that has gone desperate or astray that people tend to attribute to collectors, the plain fact is that collectors love art and repeatedly fall in love with some object of art. They collect because it make them happy, others do it because they want to become rich in due time, still others collect to live out their big egos, or what have you. A well-known type is the art dealers who invest their profits in private collections.

The social role of modern art collectors has been vividly analyzed by James Stourton (2007). He finds that the collectors of paintings in the latter half of the Twentieth Century are less of private collectors than earlier generations. They usually print at least partial catalogs of their collections. They lend their most celebrated pieces to museums, or they show them in other ways to the public. The advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, for one, collects exclusively to exhibit. In this way the collectors are not only a sophisticated Takers of art products, but they join the Brokers of art to the general public, and also to budding and active artists, who may thus find new shoulders to stand on in their creative pursuits.

The Predominance of Emotive Symbolism in Art

Art has a special but limited place in a book focused on language and society. All art is not language in the usual sense. There is much more than literary pursuit under the umbrella of art: painting, sculpture, the dance, singing and music, architecture, all non-language pursuits, wholly or in part. But with language we can talk about art in all its different forms.

The arts of words, i.e. poetry, fiction, recitation, and theatre, remain our key concerns as students of society and language. These art forms make use of all the various usages of symbols that we have delineated – descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions. Their most typical form, as we have pointed out in Cell B4 in our Periodic Table of Societal Realms (Figure 9.6 and 19.1), is the emotive description, not any one, but those deemed worthy of contemplation. Not all describing, not even all emotive descriptions, is artistic. A big concentration of emotive portrayals is found in what we call entertainment, the artistic content of which varies a great deal.

Prose is the given form of language in fiction. Some novelists – Hemingway, for one – tell us about a series of events and the lines of speech of their personages. The readers have to infer their feelings. Most authors, however, also name feelings, thoughts, memories, thus presuming that the selves of the readers can respond. This is not self-evident; many grew up with a poor vocabulary of feelings containing mainly an abundance of swearwords.

James Joyce's autobiographical Finnegans Wake is an experiment in using speech rather than prose as the main vehicle of a novel. Speech, as we know, depends on understanding gestures and knowing a context that can fill in the missing words or sentences. It takes considerable effort to do this on the basis of the pages of the novel. The tongue spoken in the book is Dublin-English of the early twentieth century with many juicy sayings unknown to us. The difficulty is augmented by some hilarious mispronunciations and also some puns on words from other languages that Joyce commanded. But some connoisseurs swear that this has been the reading experience of their lifetime.

Poetry is language using words to peak far behind words. "Über allen Gipfeln / Ist Ruh" brings restful calm. "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright / In the forest of the night" brings fear and trembling. An amazing number of human experiences seem reachable by poetry and its tools of meters, rhythms, alliterations, rimes, et cetera.

Beauty as the Cardinal Value of Art

"Art is harmony," said Georges Seurat (cited in Gayford and Wright 2000 p 570), one of the last of the great artists to subscribe to this classical doctrine. Seurat was the neo-impressionist French painter who, like a scientist, explored how adjacent tiny brush strokes of different colors – later in the digital age called "pixels" – made paintings shimmer. The year was 1890 and Saurat's innovation was the last one in painted beauty before art swung away from naturalistic renditions. The new agenda of art became a search beyond the logic of the language and mathematical brains and beyond the infatuation of the spatial brain with symmetry, in short, beyond most everything that the old called "beauty." The daring of art should not stop at beautiful nudes.

"Beauty is a mess, a sinkhole, a trap." So starts Arthur Krystal (2005) his review in Harper's Magazine of the English translation of Storia della bellezza, a volume edited by Umberto Eco and Girolamo de Michele (2004). As we know, modern art can very well be a stinking sinkhole. For example, it may be installations of hanging meat, popular at the turn of the century and shown in Stockholm in 2004. After a few weeks in the museum the meat stinks and must be replaced by fresh meat. Well arranged, however, such an installation reaches into an old bodily spontaneity to acquire for human use the protein accumulated by animals. Also, it becomes a rendering of man's lust to slaughter his cattle and hunt and kill animals. We would agree, however, that the word "beauty," as most people know it, is too narrow to fit such art.

To begin to orient us in the complexities of beauty let us place it in a semiotic square, the device we use to tell what something is and what it is not. Greimas' Semiotic Square, we recall from Chapter 2, is an aid to make clarifications and innovations in social reality.

Figure 19.2. Semiotics of Beauty

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The main poles of this semiotic square have well-known attributes. Umberto Eco in a parallel volume on ugliness to the one about beauty has a long list:

If we examine the synonyms of beautiful and ugly, we see that while what is considered beautiful is: pretty, cute, pleasing, attractive, agreeable, lovely, delightful, fascinating, harmonious, marvellous, delicate, graceful, enchanting, magnificent, stupendous, sublime, exceptional, fabulous, wonderful, fantastic, magical, admirable, exquisite, spectacular, splendid, and superb; what is ugly is: repellent, horrible, horrendous, disgusting, disagreeable, grotesque, abominable, repulsive, odious, indecent, foul, dirty, obscene, repugnant, frightening, abject, monstrous, horrid, horrifying, unpleasant, terrible, terrifying, frightful, nightmarish, revolting, sickening, foetid, fearsome, ignoble, ungainly, displeasing, tiresome, offensive, deformed, and disfigured. (Eco 2007 p.10)

Pictures, sculptures, architectural structures, the ballet are art media that have what the Germans aesthetics call Erscheinung, something appearing from a surface that becomes emotively moving and inviting contemplation. $Description: C:\Users\Hans\Documents\My Web Sites\HLZ_web\InProgrs\The_Many-Splendored_Society\Images_Realms\RothkoGreenOnMaroon.jpg$ This is the core of spatial beauty. A picture or sculpture of an animal, such as a Temple Cat from ancient Egypt, may bring Erscheinung. A landscape painted in a certain season and in a certain light may likewise have special Erscheinung. (In most periods of human life, however, this piece of nature, our beautiful landscape, has merely been a dangerous territory.) The surface may be a human body in ancient Greece throwing a discus, as sculptured by Myron. Or, it may be 2711 cement blocks (Stelen) spread over 19 000 square meters in the memorial of the victims of the Holocaust erected close to The Brandenburg Tor in Berlin. Visitors walking through this area find themselves in a labyrinth with passages that can only be passed one person at a time, a walk that often lingers long in sorrow or anger in memory. Erscheinung is a common denominator in classical and modern art. Mark Rothko's "Green on Maroon" is a modern version of the classical sublime.

Kitsch

Most surfaces evoke no Erscheinung at all. To package such a surface as beauty or art is a sham and an illusion. We have called it Kitsch in the semiotic square. It is uninteresting and does not inspire contemplation.

There have been efforts by some famous critics to be profound about kitsch. I think the term serves us best as something superficial, a simple label of the considerable amount of tacky, uninteresting stuff and tastelessness that fills the planet. Non-art pretending to be art is kitsch.

Beauty and Beast

When the beautiful is spiced with something ugly we enter a fourth area in the semiotic square, here labeled Beauty & Beast. It is not kitsch, nor sheer ugliness, because it has elements of beauty. The element of beauty and the element of ugliness may be separate, as in illustrations of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. Or, they may be integrated. In his volume on Ugliness in art, Umberto Eco selected Rembrandt '"The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp," in which an ugly corpse is integrated in the lesson on anatomy. [This painting is reproduced in Chapter 1 where its significance for the development of the European realm of art was discussed.] X-rays have revealed that Rembrandt originally painted the corpse with a hand cut off, a punishment inflicted by criminal courts in his days. Later he reduced the ugliness by restoring a full hand. Apparently Rembrandt's instinct was that ugliness must be rationed if a painting in the category we call Beauty & Beast shall be worthy of contemplation.

Accumulation of Beauty

Beauty accumulates. In some sense, all generations of Makers of cardinal values such as knowledge and riches stand on the shoulders of predecessors. So do the artists in their creating beauty. New generations of painters, architects, and composers are inspired by bygone generations in exploring new angles and themes. The poets can explicitly relate to one another in the medium of their art. Virgil cites Homer, Dante brings in Virgil as guide in his Divine Comedy, and TS Eliot interacts unambiguously with both Virgil and Dante. Thus Makers of art stand in touch with one another over time and space.

In most cases we learn about how artists find inspiration from one another by studying comparative art, or the history of literature. The artists do not stand on each other's shoulders in the same erect and domineering positions as scientists of different generations assume when they nullify old knowledge by new knowledge. In the realm of art, old beauty survives. And the artists may be more dependent on the pursuit of beauty by predecessors than they usually admit.

Art and Brain Functions Bio

Art gets us in touch with older sites in the human brain than its language function. In our review of the image of the human brain (Chapter 1) we distinguished reptilian, spatial, gesturing, pictorial, musical, mathematical brains, in addition to the language brain. Art finds expressions of congruity with all these brains. The artists have secured a special freedom, artistic license, in this task.

Two-dimensional images in mosaics, tiles, frescos, paintings, or photos are recorded in our picture brains. Three-dimensional images such as sculptures or architectural structures are recorded in our spatial brain and interpreted in the picture brain. Images of ballet are recorded in our spatial and interpreted by our gesture brains.

Dance takes us into the brain of gestures. Music and singing activate their own special site of the human brain. In chansons they combine with the poetry produced by the language brain. In opera, music is combined with the libretto of the language brain, with the gesture brain in its ballet scenes, with the pictorial brain in the decor of the wings, and with the spatial brain in the design of the stage. The opera house itself is a product of architecture, the pursuit of beautifully engineered shelters for human activities. Other art forms that entirely depend on language, such as poetry, literary fiction, and theatre, can reach deeper sites in our brains. If they fail in that, they are only words, words, words.

$Description: C:\Users\Hans\Documents\My Web Sites\HLZ_web\InProgrs\The_Many-Splendored_Society\Images_Realms\Yawning.jpg$ An artist can thus take us to the level of biological spontaneities, be they sleep, awakening, sex , violence, and what have you. Hungarian children and adults and scores of tourists visit the National Gallery in Budapest in search of "The Yawning Journeyman" by Mihály Munkácsy. Sleep is a topic of all forms of art. "The Sleeping Beauty" is a fairy tale by Charles Perrault from 1697, a watercolor (guache) by Sir Edward Burne-Jones in 1871, a ballet by Tchaikovsky in 1890, a film by Walt Disney in 1959.

We recall that the music brain precedes the development of the language brain. Children meet art in lullabies that reassure them that the world is still there while they sleep. This one was dedicated by Johannes Brahms to a young attractive singer and her infant:

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And children also recognize the end of sleep, for example in their own beloved musical wake-up calls:

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Sex is a favorite topic in art. Pablo Picasso, with a teenage lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, presents her sensual curvilinear body in a red armchair. Her round face is painted white, intersected by a profile in blue. The profile can also be seen as a second figure leaning over to embrace the nude with his arms and a kiss, a gesture of closeness that has become a symbol of love. In this painting Picasso has turned common sex-related spuma into art and a message of love.

Successful artistic forays into the deep waters of human existence inevitably stir up our emotions. We are moved when encountering the spatial symmetry the figures present in ancient Greek sculptures. There is an aha in seeing the golden rule divide the surface of a wall in architecture. There is terror and a sting of fear in reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness or attending Shakespeare's King Lear, and fear and anger in seeing Goya's Execution of the Defenders of Madrid. There is amazement as Beethoven's overtures Egmont or Leonore mobilize our sphere of emotions of freedom. The Taj Mahal complex in Agra in India evokes more feelings than mere admiration: is this the dwelling of the dead?

Tolstoy (1901) was right in telling us that an emotional impulse is ever-present in artistic expressions. To share in this impulse widens our sensibilities. The strength of emotions may range from total stillness where also the shadows sleep to a total roar of unbearable pain or excitement. The latter extreme, however, may be counterproductive, at least in literature, as it is an obstacle to any verbalization and is unfit in poetry as we know it (Götlind 1961).

Spuma – words that come after our bodily spontaneities but have no part in guiding these spontaneities – in the hands of Shakespeare's genius may become great art, as in the familiar Sonnet XVIII:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The vocabulary of this poem is borrowed from meteorology, botany, and from gerontology, the knowledge of aging and death. But the meaning of the words is not the usual. A bodily spontaneity of observing a man — the poem may be assumed to be a male-to-male homage — produced this lovely spuma. A lust of forbidden love-making shines through, and there is also a deeply genuine and emotively engaging recounting of eternal love, and of course, an admirable play of words, as behooves a sonnet.

Stratification and Rewards in Art

Like knowledge, beauty cannot be achieved without an effort to learn. It is telling that the German word Kunst (art) has the same root as können (having knowledge and/or skills). There is a satisfaction in "knowing art" that adds to aesthetes' experience of art. The knowledgeable element in art — in making, keeping, and purveying to its consumers — is brought out in what is called "taste." Taste can be achieved, taught, and measured. It is reasonable to give grades in courses in art, and it is right to have academic degrees in arts. All depiction is not artistic painting. All stonework is not sculpturing. All body work is not ballet. All emotive descriptions are not literature. The difference between no art and art, and between bad art and good art, that is "taste."

An extensive interview survey in France by Pierre Bourdieu (1979) covers home decor and home architecture, leisure-time activities, literature, music, pictorial art, and theatre. It shows how class position is reinforced in everyday life by distinctions in taste. Traditionally defined good taste is dependent on a separation from the necessities of daily labor. This traditionally good taste is positively correlated with other forms of stratification, mostly economic class and political power. Working class taste and culture certainly exists, but it tends to define itself not on its own terms, but with reference to the taste of higher and more leisured classes.

Art critics are the arbiters of taste. To read a skilled critic is generally helpful, but no substitute for partaking of the real work of art. It takes openness to pre-language brains to create and appreciate art. The critics and commentators on art are stuck with using words when they review art. This is why their job is so special and difficult. It is not a main task of the artist to be articulate about art; it is the chore of the critic. Their counterparts in other realms, for example, judges in the court system, accountants in the economy, and professors of social science, have easier jobs; they use words to describe and analyze subject matters that are words or figures.

The main modern rewards in all realms of art seem to be five. First, billings at performances and exhibits, second, appreciation by critics and colleagues, third, big crowds of attendance giving loud and long applause when appropriate, fourth, medals, prizes, stipends, and fifth, good publicity in mass media. But the reward patterns in art seem less clear-cut to add up than in, say, business, science, or politics. For a contemporary painter, for example, they would include the number of his private shows, the number and kind of reviews by critics, the rating of the galleries in which his paintings have been exhibited, the number of solo exhibits, the prominence of the collectors who have acquired his paintings, the number of his paintings hanging in museums. Such credits are recounted at auctions and art sales and assist in setting market prices for the paintings. In art, however, the economic rewards are not all that matters; if so, all artists would seek work at advertising agencies or industrial design departments.

Order and Leadership in Art

The social order in art is not the same as the discipline and leadership in the body politic or in business. In art, good leaders have another style. Ingmar Bergman, the movie and theatre director, had the secret of stirring his co-workers to strive for excellence and to surmount conflicts in the interest of a common goal. How many men would even contemplate bringing together in the same project a number of their ex-wives and lovers on the premise that they will work in harmony and deliver optimal performances? What is his secret?

Bergman is not only an accomplished director of motion pictures; he is also an intuitive guide of human potential. Frictions that might plausibly be expected to arise on the set are dissipated by an even more compelling force. To each member of his cast Bergman seems able to give a unique gift: to gain access to the undiscovered and richest lodes within one’s being and be guided in mining them to one’s own delight. This is a reward of an entirely different quality and power than conventional praise or tangible compensations for performance. It spurs one to the highest level of accomplishment because of the sheer pleasure in growing as an adult, as a craftsman, as an artist, and as a professional. Unlike traditional incentives, the effects are long-lasting and cumulative. And so Bergman can orchestrate his players so t final total product (Frankel 198x)

Some Takers of art, often with much knowledge, money, and a critical bent, become collectors, a special brand of Keepers. This is another meaning of accumulation in art. Contrary to a passion that has gone desperate or astray that people attribute to collectors, the plain fact is that collectors love art and repeatedly fall in love with some object of art. They collect because it make them happy, others do it because they want to become rich in due time, still others collect to live out their big egos, or what have you. A well-known type is the art dealers who invest their profits in private collections.

The social role of modern collectors has been vividly analyzed by James Stourton (2007). He finds that the collectors of paintings in the latter half of the Twentieth Century are less of private collectors than earlier generations. They print at least partial catalogs of their collections. They lend their most celebrated pieces to museums, or they show them in other ways to the public. The advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, for one, collects only to exhibit. In this way the collectors are not only a sophisticated Takers of art products, but they join the Providers of art to the general public and also to budding and active artists, who may thus find new shoulders to stand on in their creative pursuits.

Spontaneous Order in Art

Improvising poets are known at ancient Greece festivals and celebrations. The great Sappho, a female poet, was one of them. Improvising master singers compete and inspire one another in Wager's 1868 opera from about them, set in Nürnberg. Graffiti is often improvisations. Susan Sontag (2001, p. 148) dates the acceptance of graffiti by modern artists to 1844 when Grandville (Jean-ignace-isidore Gérard), a French artist mostly remembered for his caricatures and cartoons, made a self-portrait showing himself drawing alongside a small child on a graffiti-covered wall. Its message is “we are in this together, inspiring one another.”

A full-fledged and successful spontaneous order of music came with the jazz band, an early twentieth-century American black music innovation. Improvising jazz players differ from members of a symphony orchestra since they have no common score and are much freer to express themselves as they please. When a jazz player takes the lead in a solo and shows musical articulacy the others wait him out, getting spurred to match him, but never to drown him out. Terry Eagelton, the British professor and critic, elevates this spontaneous order to the very meaning of life:

There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and — since there is a free fulfillment or realization of powers — there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life — both in the sense that it is what makes life meaningful, and — more controversially — in the sense that when we act in this way, we realize our natures at their finest. (Eagelton 2007, p. 172)

Rationality in Art

The rationality of classical art is its symmetry, harmony, and clarity. Its rationality combines those of the spatial, musical, gesture brains. The spatial brain contributes the beauty of geometry. The musical brain contributes the beauty of melody with its accords. Clarity is essential to both, but particularly to the gesture brain for which the ambiguous gesture is a mark of irrationality. But strangely enough, the Parthenon in Athens is not a geometrically square box: it tapers off ever so little. And Mona Lisa's face is not absolutely symmetrical. It is as if classical and great art winks to you with a message that there is something more to come.

The rationality of modern art is harder to grasp. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp, a member of a French family of artists who became an American, took a ready-made urinal, laid it on its back, added a graffiti signature "R. Mutt 1917," named it "Fountain," and sent it to be exhibited. Consciously or not, Duchamp brought not only a ready-made into art, but also a more trivial biological spontaneity than sleep, sex, and violence into art.

Eighty-eight years later "The Fountain" was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British critics. The motivations for Duchamp's fame are expressed in floods of fancy words. In the terminology used in these pages there is an Unbehagen norm in modern cities that you must not urinate in the streets. $Description: C:\Users\Hans\Documents\My Web Sites\HLZ_web\InProgrs\The_Many-Splendored_Society\Images_Realms\Fountain.jpg$ This prescription becomes a part of toilet training, and what we have learned from Freud applies. Duchamp's Fountain is a utensil from a public toilet, a place of relief for male city dwellers. The simplest motivation for the fame of "The Fountain" is that it signaled that art had found its congruence with a most basic bodily spontaneity, urinating.

But in the end it isn't quite as simple as that. Not any mass-produced utensil you see when you pass a torn-down house, a garbage dump, or a garage sale is art. Nor can it be turned into art by mailing it to a gallery. There is an esthetic selection in Duchamp's urinal, not unlike that of finding a most striking shell when walking on a beach full of shells. Duchamp picked up an unseemly shell. When brought into a collection, such a piece that is not art becomes a work of art, a work of Erscheinung inviting contemplation.

This was 1917 when Western society had not yet become so dependent on the language brain that the idea of male superiority has lost its base. Duchamp's Fountain is for the male standing urinating. The piece of art to be chosen as the most important for the twenty-first century will predictably be more gender neutral. At any rate, with his Fountain, the search for beauty, seen as the search for congruency with pre-language brains, won an important victory. I would suggest that the element of rationality of modern art is its congruency with pre-language brains of all kinds, including urinating guided by the reptilian brain.

Debunking Magic in Art

Rationality, as we know, implies the debunking of magic, Entzauberung, to use Max Weber's word. For better or worse, any rationalism, even that of art, causes the world to lose its mystery and magic. There is no magic left in Duchamp's Fountain; it is a mass-produced commodity known to all urban men in its days.

Many artists have argued that art should be exempted from any requirement to debunk magic. In 1922 the Finnish poet Edith Södergran, writing in Swedish, expressed her own use of rational simplicity in writing as a loss rather than a gain.

Min barndoms träd stå höga i gräset och skaka sina huvuden: vad har det blivit av dig? Pelarrader stå som förebråelser: ovärdig går du under oss!	The trees of my childhood stand high in the grass, And shake their heads: what has become of you? Colonnades stand like reproaches: Unworthy you walk beneath us!
Translated by Greta Frankel