30 Dec 2018

The Art of Logic

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction, Personal | 0

It’s not just that both are right in this case. Both are right in every case. 

Even as “hard” a science as physics tells us light is both a particle and a wave. Quantum mechanics tells us electrons can be both here and millions of miles away at the same time. How can we be so hubristic to think that only higher taxes (or lower taxes) will save the economy, only a Democrat (or Republican) can save the country.

It’s not just that both are right in this case. Both are right in every case. 

So I have told myself within the confines of my own brain when considering two sides of an issue. Even as I have articulated the thought, though, I have been forced to acknowledge that, logically, the assertion cannot be wholly true. Indeed, it might well be wrong.

It was in this spirit of radical doubt that I approached Eugenia Cheng‘s new book, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World. I was cheered by sentences such as the following: “Admitting the possibility of being wrong and having ways of detecting it is an important part of being a rational human being, I am sure. (But I could be wrong.)” And these two, a few pages later: “In reality, most people do some good things and some bad things. In fact, most things are themselves partly good and partly bad.” (The final sentence being, probably, a more convincing way of stating my italicized assertion above.)

Where did my radical doubt come from? By nature, surely, in the first instance. That is: I am my father’s child. We called him “middle-of-the-road” for never being able to commit to a position. He was by disposition unable to state a preference for either the steak or the potatoes. Instead, he would struggle to extol the virtues of both and express reluctance to deny either its due. In short: I came by my moderation honestly. (For the record, my mother was inveterately black-and-white. Gray did not exist for her, and she showed little patience for her husband’s affinity for it.)

Yet my moderation comes by nurture, too. Or, perhaps better, by the contingent byways of my intellectual development: books. William Damon’s Greater Expectations helped my thirty-three-year-old self collapse the false dichotomies that plagued my chosen profession (education). Child-centered vs. adult-led, progressive vs. traditional, whole language vs. phonics: these were all false dichotomies, Damon assured me. He gave me permission to give up either-or thinking for a more accommodating and mentally healthy both-and way of seeing. It was liberating.

It was not news to me to read in Cheng’s book, “A false dichotomy is when you think the options are perfectly cleanly split between A and B, but in reality they are not.” On the other hand, her formal rendering of the topic extended my thinking. She admonishes against arguing that “A is equivalent to ‘not B’ and B is equivalent to ‘not A.'” The truth could be found in the overlapped section of circles A and B in the Venn diagram. On the other hand, the truth might be outside both circles: neither A nor B is correct. (There goes my italicized assertion at the top!)

In my early-to-mid forties, I discovered Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History. The book gave religious/philosophical doubt/skepticism a respect (not to mention an acknowledgement) that it had previously been denied. It gave my natural predilection toward moderation, inherited from my father, some intellectual heft.  Epicurus, Lucretius, Montaigne, Hume: doubt comes from an esteemed line of thinkers. I was becoming sure of myself, intellectually as well as psychologically. Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul extended the importance of doubt to the political realm for me.  (Which is not to say I became a conservative, but I became more comfortable in my claim to being “independent.”)

Cheng is a mathematician, not a scientist. Evidence is less integral to her skepticism than logic. Yet it is one of the central aims of her book to show the limits of logic. The Law of the Excluded Middle may state that ‘true’ and ‘not true’ are the only options under consideration, but Cheng understands this will not help us solve problem in the real world? Gray areas are all around us, inhabiting every issue under discussion, whether it be sexual preference or the percentage of cocoa needed to make chocolate. Where do we draw the line? Between black and not-black? White and not-white? White, black, and the lost middle? White(ish) and black(ish)? White, gray, and black? In life, “really we’re all living somewhere on that gray bridge.” Cheng encourages us to make our line-drawing choices explicit. She acknowledges that “for some people it feels unsettling to take positions of nuanced uncertainty,” but she spends a good portion of her book encouraging readers to get comfortable with it.

Nuanced uncertainty.  In my mid-to-late forties, I performed an in depth study of Keynes, inspired by the world recession that was being compared to the earlier depression his seminal work sprang from. Keynes was obsessed with the idea of uncertainty. It was central to his Treatise on Probability of 1921, his General Theory on Employment, Interest, and Money of 1936, and probably everything in between. I added “uncertainty” (in economics and all human affairs) as another form of doubt.

As rigorous and rule-bound as logic is, Cheng argues, it cannot (and must not) be used to erase uncertainty. Two people can both be logical and reach different conclusions. This usually happens when they start from different places. For no matter how exacting one’s logic it has to start from somewhere, else another could, like a four-year-old, keep asking “but why?” farther and farther back. At some point the logician as much as the everyday person must say, for example, “Because I believe humans are obliged to treat each other as we wish to be treated.”  For this person, the Golden Rule is axiomatic. Again, Cheng encourages us to be clear about our axioms and to push them far enough back they can be truly universal principles. (Not just, “Because the Bible says so,” but perhaps, “I believe humans were made to follow the word of God.”)

Cheng applies the tools of her trade–category theory, fuzzy logic, paradoxes, analogies–to real world issues, quandaries, and dilemmas. After three hundred pages, it becomes apparent that the material for this book came as much from discussions with friends over coffee as it did from lessons with her students at the Art Institute of Chicago. Cheng’s struggle against the allure of treats and the insidiousness of weight gain serves as an ongoing context for explaining the principles of logic.

As often, Cheng dips into more divisive political issues we all face: race, gender and sexual preference, social services and the role of government. To her credit, Cheng states clearly that many of the arguments she examined “come down to tensions between the idea of individuals and the idea of groups.” Certain readers might dismiss her as overly group-oriented and biased toward a multiculturalist worldview. But Cheng is not seeking to win arguments; she is showing how they break down. She gives her readers, whatever their political beliefs, critical logical tools to debate with her, or anyone, on equal footing: to understand their differences, to find bridges of disagreement, and to feel comfortable agreeing to disagree.

For explanations of those tools: go to the source.

Sources:

19 Dec 2018

A Mooch, a Tirade, an Assault–and Historical Memory

by | posted in: Eddie Rickenbacker | 0

William Rickenbacher, apparently, had a keen sense of history. He told his son, Eddie, future race car driver, World War I flying ace, and Eastern Airlines CEO, “You’re a lucky boy to be born when you were. There are a lot of new things in the making, and you ought to be ready to have a hand in them.”

For his part, Eddie had a strong sense of the dramatic. In his autobiography, he claimed these were his father’s last word to him. “That very night, while operating the pile driver, he was struck by a swinging timber. The blow fractured his skull.” He was in a coma for six weeks until he finally succumbed. Suddenly, thirteen-year-old-Eddie was fatherless.

Eddie ought to know what happened. He was there. Wasn’t he?

Yet the Columbus Dispatch reported the death differently: “Laborer’s Skull Fractured by Two Blows with a Level” (July 18, 1904) and “Charge of Murder Will Probably Be Put Against Negro” (July 19)

Murder? Negro?

Eddie’s father did not work the night shift operating a pile driver on county bridges, as Eddie would have us believe. He was a common laborer, laying pavement for roads and sidewalks. On that July day in 1904, he and his crew had broken for lunch. W. A. Gaines (much later identified as William) wandered up to different workmen asking for handouts: “None of you fellows want to share your dinners with a fellow, do you?” He was rebuffed by each until he came to William Rickenbacher.

“If I had any dinner to share with any person I would share it with my children,” Rickenbacher said and let loose a string of profanity. To this point, according to the newspaper, all witnesses agreed. Gaines’s account is quoted at length, giving the report a veneer of objectivity and thoroughness. Oddly, no other witnesses are quoted, not even indirectly. What gives?

Gaines said he began to walk away but was followed by Rickenbacher, who pulled a knife on him. Unnamed others alleged Rickenbacher made no move. In either case, everyone agreed Gaines picked up a level and swung it at Rickenbacher. The first blow fractured his arm, the next his skull. Rickenbacher went down and out. Gaines fled, saying later he feared the other men “would follow me.”

Rickenbacher was described as a “hard-working man” with a “family of six children.” Illness in the family as well as the current injury had placed them in “destitute circumstances.” A “lawn fete” was to be given the next Friday as a fundraiser. (Understand: they’re hard up, but not through any fault of their own. This family deserves your pity and your generosity.)

Gaines, the paper reported, “showed fight” when apprehended. He had “been in Columbus but a short time.” (Understand: he’s not from around here.) He had come from Indianapolis where police “think he is wanted there for assault to kill.” (Yeah, we think he did the same thing before. We think.) A month later, August 26, when Rickenbacher actually died, the paper added new information. Gaines was from Springboro but, since coming to Columbus, had been living with a colored woman “who is understood by the police to be of a very bad disposition.” (They’re pretty sure she’s a prostitute. Yeah, pretty sure.) The Dispatch was reporting, still, that the assault, “so far as has been shown, was without provocation.” (And did we mention he was a Negro?)

The jury might have been “shown” a few more details. Despite the fact that a black man had killed a white man, they convicted him of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced him to ten years behind bars, not death. There must have been some “provocation” after all.

Eddie kept these facts at arms’ length his entire life. He did not just lie to the public. (His swinging-timber-to-the-head story was repeated in all the “life stories” published about him in the popular press.) He lied to himself. Eddie Rickenbacker didn’t want to know the truth. He certainly didn’t want to consider its full implications.

The historian is left to hypothesize from disparate pieces of evidence the fuller story. William Rickenbacher may well have been a frustrated man. He probably was quick to anger.  William had not achieved his dream of establishing his own construction business in America but remained a common laborer. William Gaines’s presumption, especially coming from a black man, was intolerable to him. Where others let the matter pass, William could not. His obstinacy cost him his life.

Sources:

Rickenbacker, Edward V. Rickenbacker. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967: 29.

Lewis, W. David. Eddie Rickenbacker: an American hero in the twentieth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005: 15.

“Laborer’s Skull Fractured by Two Blows with a Level,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, July 18, 1904.

“Charge of Murder will Probably Be Put against Negro,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, July 19, 1904.

“Wm Rickenbacher Takes Nourishment,” Columbus Dispatch, July 23, 1904.

“To Aid Rickenbacher’s Family,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, August 2, 1904.

“Assault to Kill,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, August 5, 1904.

“Victim of Assault Dies of Injuries,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, August 26, 1904.

11 Dec 2018

The Roof, the Bike, the Umbrella–and Historical Memory

by | posted in: Eddie Rickenbacker | 0

Looking back across the bulk of the twentieth century, Eddie Rickenbacker said he got the idea for his umbrella bike after (or perhaps during) the barnstorming tour of Roy Knabenshue in his dirigible. “Everyone turned out to watch,” the seventy-five-year-old wrote, which says to me pretty clearly that Eddie wasn’t one of them. He was otherwise occupied, but more on that later.

Umbrella bike? According to Eddie, he was so determined to fly that he tied an over-size umbrella to a used bike and rode it off a barn roof hoping to fly. The umbrella inverted, and he landed in the sand pile he had wisely dumped below the eaves. (He wasn’t that foolish.) He walked away, just shaken and bruised. It would take eleven years for him to get airborne in a real flying machine.

In 1904, Ohioans were talking aviation, but it was just talk. The Wright brothers had made history with their first heavier-than-air, powered flight, but no one outside of a few Kitty Hawk residents had witnessed it. Dirigibles offered more drama at this early stage of aviation. They could be flown over cities. Also known as airships (and more familiarly as gasbags), dirigibles were not hot air balloons. They were navigable (at least to a certain extent), as implied by their name, from the French diriger, to steer.

Roy Knabenshue first took flight in another man’s dirigible at the St. Louis World’s Fair in November of that year. He knew nothing about flight, but he possessed an even more important virtue: fearlessness. Once in the air, Knabenshue caught the bug. He returned to Toledo, designed and built his own airships, and took them on tour.

He reached Columbus by Labor Day, 1905. The next day, beginning just after 7:00 am, he flew his Toledo II from the Ohio State Fairgrounds into downtown Columbus, over the Statehouse, and back. The Columbus Evening Dispatch reported “thousands of children” running to see. “From every building heads were projected, and eager eyes tried to pierce the fog and the smoke to gain the first glimpse of the ship.” It is unlikely that Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s future Ace of Aces and chief executive of Eastern Airlines was one of them. Alas.

At the time, the fifteen-year-old was working full-time to help support his family, his father having died unexpectedly the year before. Eddie might have been at one of several different work sites, but most likely either Gardman’s Shoes or Zinker’s Monument Works. Both were south and west of the capitol. Eddie would have had his eyes focused down on strips of shoe leather or slabs of granite, not toward the sky and dreams of flight. The closest Eddie came to Roy Knabenshue would have been to the buzz his visit created.

Eddie implied that the buzz got him dreaming of flight. In fact, in his autobiography he just put the two thoughts together and allowed the reader to assume the cause-and-effect. Oddly, Rickenbacker’s biographer denies the sequence as much as the causation. He says–in the very first sentence of his book!–that the umbrella bike  attempt happened “almost certainly before December 1903.” That is, before the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Certainly, such a foolhardy enterprise seems the work of a ten-year-old more than a fifteen-year-old, already hardened by full-time shop work among grown men. But that’s not the way Eddie remembered it. Or have us think of it.

There is, too, the curious case of Cromwell Dixon. Just a year after Knabenshue, in 1906, this fourteen-year-old Columbus boy designed and flew his own “Sky-cycle” in Olentangy Park. His pedal-powered dirigible so impressed park management it became a regular attraction at the park. This was the same park that had provided Eddie rare moments of childhood amusement just a few years earlier. Was the umbrella bike story Eddie’s attempt to put himself, at least partially, in the same light with Dixon and Knabenshue–and the fictional Tom Swift? We don’t know.

We do know that he worked as many as seven different jobs in the time between his father’s death in 1904 and the summer of 1906. He started at the Federal Glass Company, working the night shift, six to six. To save nickels, he forewent the street car and walked to and from work, three miles each way. Three and four jobs later, at Gardman’s Shoes and Zinker’s Monument Works, his commute grew closer to five miles. How could Eddie keep walking so far, sometimes in rain and snow? How could this ambitious young man afford such a large opportunity cost? Eddie gave a clue in the transcripts of his “Life Story” interviews when he said, simply: “Eventually, I did get a bicycle, which took that problem off my hands.”

If you wonder–Why would he sacrifice this valuable transportation, purchased dearly from many hours of hard labor, to make a fool’s attempt at flying an umbrella bike off a barn roof?–you wouldn’t be alone. Still, Eddie did name his accomplice, the boy who, he said, held the bike for him as he mounted it atop the roof. If only someone had thought to ask Sam Wareham for corroboration. Except: by 1967 good old Sam was likely already in his grave. Eddie’s story, if there was one, was already buried there with him.

[See comment below for correction.]

Sources:

 

 

 

 

25 Nov 2018

WWI Armistice Centennial, Part II

by | posted in: WWI Nurses | 0

Privilege.

I was also privileged to spend an academic year, plus another summer, abroad during my college years.  The influence of that summer in France on my World War quasi-obsession cannot be overstated.  Like the young ambulance drivers of the AAFS, I had “roughed it” in France, if not nearly so rough. While rehabbing a centuries-old maison, clearing brush and constructing fencing for sheep pastures, gutting a likewise centuries-old bâtiment, I, too, had become a bit more of a man in a foreign country; had worked with my hands, not my brain, for once, and thrived.

The pre-1917 American war volunteers were, for the most part, privileged men (and women) who felt a need to be needed for more than academic tasks.  Yes, they were drawn by ideologically-tinged appeals to Freedom and Democracy.  Yes, they responded to tribal attachments to British and French cultural “superiority.”  But they also compelled by the desire to see action, or at least get close to it.  Indeed, getting close but not-too-close was key to their experience.  Nurses, drivers, aviators, and Legionnaires all lived with hardship and privation and psychological trauma, but only aviators and Legionnaires put their lives at a high degree of risk.  Only Legionnaires lived with and in the soul-killing trenches.

Non-combatant service in France was to be this urbanized, industrialized generation’s “great adventure.”  Ella Mae Bongard felt it, as did Maud Mortimer and her fellow nurses: “War makes one conscious of a tremor of excitement tingeing the undertone of our quietest moments,–…the fascination of possible danger about which we have been told so much about.” Charles Codman, a recent Harvard graduate, was exhilarated to be “taking part in the greatest battle of history, in a front row seat, so to speak.”  He added, “Those who declare there is nothing picturesque about modern warfare are all off.  It is gorgeous.”  William Yorke Stevenson agreed.  The thrill of a nighttime artillery bombardment was “worth crossing the ocean to see.”  Despite the death and destruction, Yorke assured his readers, “It’s a great life. I wouldn’t miss it for worlds.”

Did these men (and women, though less so) think they were on a lark? The ambulance driver memoirs sometimes give that impression. Julien Bryan, who, after the war, would go on to Princeton and Union Theological Seminary and produce important documentary films, failed to appreciate the tragedy until a chance encounter that took place well back of the lines.  Bryan was billeted in an abandoned house in which he and his comrades had made themselves comfortable.  They had broken up the furniture for firewood and pilfered personal belongings for souvenirs.  But one day a young French couple appeared at the door, the original occupants of the house, it became clear.  The woman broke down, and the man tried to reassure her.

Bryan wrote, “War becomes a little sadder, a little more real now, after we see what the civilian population has suffered.”  As if hauling moaning, shell-torn poilus hadn’t been sad enough.

Kate Norman Derr was studying art in Lausanne, chaperoned by her great aunt, when war first broke out.  She did not hesitate to drop her studies and go to France. She took a Red Cross nursing class, passed an exam, and was inducted into the French medical corps as a second lieutenant. Over the subsequent months and years this child of the American elite dirtied her clothes and calloused her hands for probably the first time. Derr wrote just two weeks into her stint at an Epernay hospital: “It is a marvelous life, and strangely enough, despite all the tragedy, I call it a healthy one.”  She thrilled to be learning from “experience” rather than “books and masters.”  During three years of war service, all for the French, Derr never shied away from hard, physical work and late nights caring for patients.

Many of Derr’s American counterparts did not reach the front until the final months of the war.  Elizabeth Lewis did not reach her post until August, less than three months before the signing of the armistice.  Furthermore, Lewis’s family background was in no way privileged, though neither was it dispossessed.  Lewis was firmly middle class, as were most of the ten thousand professional nurses who served in France with the Army Nurse Corps and Red Cross.  Fewer of these women, as a percentage, left written accounts of their war experiences, but Elizabeth Lewis did, in the form of letters home that were saved for posterity.  Like her predecessors from before 1917, Lewis was “crazy” to see action and “glad of the opportunity to go” to France.  Unlike them, she was not above grousing about discomforts along the way: about the food (margarine, no butter), the flies (“thick as hasty pudding”), and the weather (“I wouldn’t give thirty cents for the whole of this air [sic] country.”)

Still, as the casualties rolled in during the final push, Lewis put aside petty complaints and worked all-out to care for the American wounded. The pride in her accomplishment was evident in one of her last letters to her mother: “Now really aren’t you glad I insisted on coming over? …When you think of the people that have all kinds of money who would give anything to be just where I have been.  Haw!”

To these Americans on their Great Adventure, the Armistice came as joy and relief. One ambulance driver described the exuberance, using an analogy all his college-buddy readers would appreciate: “If you could imagine the jam after a Harvard-Yale game multiplied by about a million, you might have some idea of what we saw down the boulevard as far as the eye could reach.”

Yet the armistice ushered in a letdown, too, a “decline in enthusiasm and morale,” as Chief Nurse Julia Stimson described it. “Something broke inside of us,” Glenna Bigelow wrote, “but all we could say was, ‘The War is over,’ calmly, unemotionally.”  Helen Dore Boylston uttered the question that was on the minds of so many: “What are we all to do now?”

Each nurse had to answer it for herself; each ambulance volunteer and pilot had to answer it for himself.  For the most part, the privileged young people I read about had much to return to.  Their education and family connections would lead to jobs or a good marriage.  Their experiences in France which had made them both more worldly and empathetic could open up possibilities for a deeper, richer life. Yet not all were privileged; not all were young.

Esther Hasson, a fifty-year-old Nurse Corps nurse and administrator, enlisted to serve her country as a field hospital ward nurse.  She believed those twenty-two months in France were the most important in her life. They were “indeed ‘The great adventure’,” she wrote to Julia Stimson, adding, “I shall ever feel that it was a very great privilege to have served in France with the A.E.F. during the momentous and stirring days of the World War.”

Privilege, indeed.

Sources:

Images from Wikimedia Commons, except