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Saturday 29 December 2018

The Chaos Theory of International Trade, or How Canada Arrested a Chinese Executive on a US Warrant in Order to Protect Israel from Iran

I heard it from every economics professor I ever had, at both Oregon and Stanford, and everything I saw and read thereafter backed it up. International trade always, always benefits both trading nations. Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.

 Phil Knight. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (p. 374). Scribner. Kindle Edition. 

A Few Facts

Huawei holds 4% of the cellphone market in Israel. In the UK, which is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, Huawei has 14% of the market.  Huawei Canada is a major contributor to Canadian business and research.  These facts matter. 

Why Conspiracy Theories Exist

Reading about the arrest of Huawei’s CFO Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder, at the Vancouver airport, I had the same question everyone was asking:  why?  Attempts to answer the question have spawned a number of conspiracy theories.  Conspiracy theories flourish when the information available in the public domain never quite makes sense or at least never comes close to explaining who did what, how, with what motives and intended outcomes.  The explanations for why and how never satisfy the parameters of what has happened, and we live in suspense,  forced to speculated about behind-the-scenes, cloak-and-dagger black ops in search of explicable motives for unexplained or inexplicable events.   

Just Because It's a Conspiracy Theory . . .

Once established, conspiracy theories take on a life of their own.  They thrive and spread and become better known than the mundane facts because they tell a better, more dramatic and coherent story.  All this being said, to cannibalize a better-known expression:  just because it’s a conspiracy theory doesn’t mean that it isn't true.

Chaos Theory Is the Opposite of a Conspiracy Theory

The opposite of a conspiracy theory is “chaos theory”—the theory that explains how very small causes can precipitate very large effects.  Science tells us that if we want to know the answers to big questions like  “how did we get here?” or “where did that hurricane come from?”  the answer requires “chaos theory.”  No one caused it; a lot of small things happened and as a result that big thing happened.  The butterfly in Brazil may have intended something but she did not intend to set off a tornado in Texas.  Unlike conspiracy theories, chaos theory is no fun at all. Reviewing the explanations, analysis, speculation and theories emerging from Sabrina Meng Wanzhou’s detainment in Vancouver, chaos may be the only answer.


What We've Been Told

Based on media reports, sometime in 2014 (and/or earlier) Sabrina Meng Wanzhou did a presentation in front of HSBC executives in New York (HSBC is the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) in which she is alleged to have misrepresented the ownership of a company called Skycom which was doing business in Iran in contravention of US and United Nations sanctions.  The physical evidence against her as an individual is, allegedly, a powerpoint presentation and a paper trail showing that Skycom is owned by a Huawei shell company. As a result, a warrant for her arrest was issued (22 August 2018) by the Eastern District Court of New York.  After various people had been informed, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and John Bolton, National Security Advisor to the White House, the RCMP exercised the American warrant and detained Sabrina Meng Wanzhou as she was changing planes at Vancouver airport en route from Hong Kong to Mexico.  She was jailed on December 1 pending a bail hearing.   She was released on bail on December 5.  Friends and family posted the 10-million-dollar bail, and she remains under house arrest in Vancouver, pending an extradition hearing in which American authorities must present evidence that her extradition is justified, meaning that there is compelling evidence that she has committed a crime which would be recognized as a crime according to Canadian as well as American law, and that the motives of her extradition are justified.

Mr. Chaos and the Conspiracy Theories

Not surprisingly, the immediate conspiracy theories make Mr. Chaos himself, President Donald Trump, the central antagonist.  Theory number one is that Meng’s arrest was a Trump gambit to gain leverage in trade talks with China, attempting to bully and cower China by showing how far he is willing to go playing hardball.  Theory number two is the exact opposite.  Meng’s arrest on December 1, the same day Trump was having one-on-one trade talks with China’s President Xi, was a deliberate attempt by an anti-Trump Washington faction to embarrass and undermine the American President. 

The "Let's Put Canada in Its Place" Conspiracy

Conspiracy theory number three is distinctly Canadian.  On June 1, 2018, the USA imposed a 25% tariff on Canadian steel on the grounds that Canadian steel imports were “a threat to US national security.”  Suddenly all the rhetoric about Canada and the USA being the greatest of trading partners, the best of friends and the closest of allies evaporated, and we were just another potential enemy.  Nonetheless the USA still didn’t want us to go around acting like a sovereign nation.  As part of the recent trade deal replacing NAFTA, the US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement, the American’s insisted on what is known as the “China clause” requiring three-months notice before Canada could sign a trade agreement with  “non-market countries.”  (The list of “non-market countries” includes China, Vietnam, North Korea and 11 others.)  In other words, if Canada approaches a trade agreement with China, we will be putting at risk our trade with the USA to whom we export nearly 70% of our goods and services, accounting for 20% of our Gross Domestic Product.  Having Meng arrested in Canada had the effect, which would be desirable from an American perspective, of blocking friendly relations and future trade between China and Canada.  

The Paradox of China's Getting Tough with Canada

Ostensibly as a consequence of the Meng detention, two Canadians—Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor—were arrested in China.  As I try to imagine the strategic value of these arrests from a Chinese perspective, my conclusion is that they must be a gesture for domestic consumption in China.  In other words, Chinese politicians needed to show their Chinese compatriots that they are doing something about Meng’s arrest.  However, I would surmise that these Chinese politicians are more than sophisticated enough to realize that Canada, in contradiction to its own best interests, has been trapped in the middle of this affair by the American warrant.  The Chinese leadership have made Canada the target of their ire rather than focussing on the USA.  The rational conclusion is that Canada just doesn’t matter enough to either China or the USA.  Both countries are at ease making Canada a patsy and the detained Canadians collateral damage, but the real game—where the big money and power are at stake—is China-US trade.  Paradoxically, the more China puts pressure on Canada to release Meng, the more it will be in Canada’s interest to extradite her to the USA, thereby forcing the Chinese to address their true antagonist the USA, leaving Canada out of the US-China trade war. 

The Chinese Global Domination Conspiracy

In casual conversation with my fellow Canadians, this is the conspiracy theory that is least understood but is the most readily and stubbornly accepted.  Arresting Meng has nothing to do with protecting Israel.  From this point of view, the claim that she was arrested for contravening trade sanctions with Iran becomes a bogus pretext, smoke and mirrors.  From this point of view even the allegations that Meng committed bank fraud by failing to reveal a Huawei/Skycom/ Iran connection, are a pretext, accusations that are not intended to pursue justice and discourage crime, but simply to undermine a large and successful Chinese technology company.  If this is the case, the crime being perpetrated against Meng seems much more significant than the crime she is being accused of.

What exactly is this conspiracy theory?  Huawei is in the process of developing 5G technology in Canada and around the world which will provide the next generation of wifi and internet applications.    Huawei is believed to have close ties to the Chinese government and the MSS (Ministry of State Security).  Huawei's presence in and even control of cyberspace in other nations will give them the potential to access state secrets and the possibility of disrupting any industry connected to the internet (aka The Internet of Things).

As evidence of this conspiracy my fellow Canadians point out that three--USA, Australia, New Zealand--of the five members of the Five Eyes have "banned" Huawei's 5G technology.  The USA's decision to go with an American company for its 5G technology is hardly surprising.  We might wonder why Australia and New Zealand have decided not to go with Huawei.  The counter to this conspiracy theory is that so far two Five Eyes members--Canada and the UK--have not banned Huawei, but we can imagine that they are both under enormous American pressure to do so. 

The Chinese counter to this conspiracy theory is that if Huawei's 5G technology is a gateway to global domination, then any of its three major competitors in 5G development--Verizon, IBM, AT&T--also threaten global domination.  The USA's use of its secret services and intelligence networks in conjunction with private contractors and businesses to promote American economic interests has a long and publicly acknowledged history.  "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA" may once have been considered somewhat ironic, but history has shown that the slogan can be taken literally as representative of American attitudes and practices.

Once again, the great paradoxical, Chinese miscalculation is that the arrest of two Canadians in retaliation for the Meng arrest is the strongest evidence that the choice of Chinese 5G technology might prove dangerous for foreign nations.

The "Business as Usual" Conspiracy

In 1953 the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected President, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in order to support BP and prevent the nationalization of the Iranian oil fields.  The USA installed and maintained the Shah of Iran as dictator, for the benefit of Anglo-American oil companies, until he was overthrown in 1979.  In 1954, the CIA arranged a coup in Guatemala, overthrowing the democratically elected President, Jacobo Arbenz, thereby preserving the monopoly of the United Fruit Company.  In 1973 a US-backed military coup overthrew the government of Salvador Allende and installed Augusto Pinochet as dictator thereby protecting the assets of the Anaconda Copper Company and Kennecott Utah Copper from Allende's plans to nationalize the copper industry.  These covert operations may strike you as distant in time (which is why we now know about them) but they establish a pattern of collusion between American business and American intelligence and secret services that has grown stronger not weaker over the years.  Of all the things we have heard about Edward Snowden over the years, the one I find most striking that usually goes by without comment was that he was working for a private company, Booz Allen Hamilton, when he copied and leaked classified NSA (National Security Agency) files. Snowden's previous employers were Dell technologies and the CIA. 

The warrant for Meng's extradition issued by the Eastern District Court of New York was a collaboration among the US Attorney, the secret service and American business interests on the grounds of national security.  "National security" in the USA means "for the perseverance and profit of American businesses."  From this perspective Meng's arrest was just "business as usual" as the various American agencies collaborated in undermining a Chinese company.

The Chaos Theory of International Trade

While none of these conspiracy theories tells the whole story, each has some degree of truth, which is why I think that chaos rather than conspiracy offers the better answer to the question "why?".  One particular butterfly has been flapping his wings vociferously enough to cause turbulence in Canada and around the world.  His name is Richard P. Donoghue.  He is a US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.  His name is on the letter released to the public asking that Meng not be given bail, and presumably, he is the attorney who signed the original warrant for her arrest.  Remarkably little attention has been paid to who exactly Richard P. Donoghue is.




Richard Donoghue, until recently (I.e. 4 January 2018), was an employee of CA Technologies.  Does it matter that the man who caused Meng's arrest and detention was, until less than a year ago, the Chief Litigator of CA Technologies, a competitor of Huawei in the Internet of Things?  Logically, this is at least a question that should be asked.  Why isn't the Canadian media asking this question? 



Did someone from CA Technologies suggest, last January, that it would be useful if one of their litigators became a US Attorney?  I'm going to guess that Donoghue took a pay cut to become a US Attorney.  Does he maintain contact with colleagues in CA Technologies?  Have any of his buddies from CA suggested that it would be really helpful if "someone" went after Huawei?  Is Donoghue receiving any kind of compensation from CA?  Did Donoghue receive financial compensation from CA in 2018--after he became US Attorney and before he issued the warrant for Meng's arrest in August?  Does Donoghue have close friends and family employed by or receiving benefit from CA Technologies which would put him in a conflict of interest in demanding the arrest of Huawei's CFO?


Let's be clear:  I have no inside knowledge of Richard Donoghue's motivations, but his situation and the circumstances are obviously something that the Canadian media should be investigating in the first instance and the Canadian judiciary considering Meng's extradition and continued detention must thoroughly consider.  If the request for Meng's extradition is just a ploy to undermine a business competitor, then the detention of Huawei's CFO for years of extradition hearings will accomplish that goal and a travesty will have been perpetrated on and by the Canadian judiciary.


I consider the Donoghue warrant more chaos than conspiracy because I cannot imagine that Richard P. is a singular agent in this case or that he sat down and said to himself, "I think today I will embarrass Canada, cause a trade war between the USA and China, provoke the arrests of innocent bystanders in China, destabilize the global economy, and broach the possibility of a war which could drag every country in the world into the conflict."  Oh, I know this has to sound farfetched, but Meng's arrest and all of its potential ramifications could not have happened or be happening without Donoghue.  These days whenever I think about Richard P. Donoghue and the mess he's unleashed, I can't help thinking, at the same time, about a 19-year-old named Gavrilo Princip.







Tuesday 16 October 2018

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." What's Not to Understand?

Writers and Company

Listening to Anne Carson and Eleanor Wachtel on Writers & Company discussing Keats's famous aphorism, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," I was taken aback to hear both women reveal how little they appreciated what it might mean.

Wachtel: And you quote a passage from Keats before each tango or section, and it was Keats of course who wrote famously, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” How does beauty speak of truth?

Carson: I don’t think it does. I think that’s all a big mistake, but there’s so much power in believing it, and so many of the decisions of life, especially early life—with the adolescent emotions—identify those two, and think that the person who’s beautiful is also true and the feelings that come from beauty lead you to truth. I don’t believe it works out usually.

What's not to understand?

Wachtel and Carson are, of course, two of the most well-read, articulate people on the planet.  Nonetheless, this was an expression I typically taught to first-year undergrads in "Introduction to Literature"  and I struggled to understand how Carson/Wachtel's exchange could go so far astray from Keats's meaning.

Opposition to "beauty is truth"

As I re-researched the expression, I came across quite a phalanx of opposition to Keats, including T.S Eliot's claim that the lines were "meaningless" and "a serious blemish on a beautiful poem." (This from the poet who left us wondering what tahell does "Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow" mean?)

What does "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" mean?

So, what does "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" mean? Beneath this aphorism is the unspoken, sub-textual question, "What is truth?" The search for an answer has gone on for as long as Sapiens have had the wherewithal to ask questions and no agreed-upon, final answer has ever been reached. The knee-jerk response to the question is the "correspondence theory." Something is true if it corresponds to reality. The problem is that there is no agreement on what constitutes "reality." We are left with the coherence theory. Something is true because it is coherent with what we already know. (For further elaboration see Does Knowledge Require Truth?) Descriptions of this theory tend to reduce it to statements which are coherent in relation to other statements; however, I adhere to an expanded notion of coherence which subsumes correspondence. For example: "John loves Mary." This statement is true if it is coherent with other statements (like John saying so) but also if it is coherent with how John behaves (he sacrifices himself for Mary's benefit, etc).

The Truth about truth

What is coherent today isn't necessarily coherent tomorrow. Truth, like beauty, is temporal, temporary, even ephemeral. We only judge as true (or false) those things that have meaning. We judge as true whatever fits with what we know. Our knowledge of truth is always limited and fragile. When we see something that has a meaning, and that meaning connects coherently with other meanings, we see it as true. We will also see it as beautiful. In this moment, beauty and truth are one, just as Keats concluded.


"Ode on a Grecian Urn"

The line is a conclusion in Keat's poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn. (Once upon a time, every junior high-school student was expected to know this poem.  Hence, the pubescent joke/pun:  Q: "What's a Greek urn?"  A: "About a buck, fifty an hour.")  

If you read the poem, about the urn's telling of an ancient story of love, faith, and art, against the idea of coherent truth, you will discover the logic of Keats's claim that, given our limitations, beauty is a good--maybe even the best--way to judge truth.


Afterthought

If you've read this far and are still not getting it.  Here's the argument in the form of a straightforward syllogism.  Bearing in mind that we are talking about things that have meaning:

1. We judge as beautiful those things that fit together.

2. We judge as true those things that fit together.

3. What is beautiful is true, and vice versa.


Addendum

Among the opponents of "beauty is truth" we must now include the theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.  See, for example, "Physics Isn't Pretty."

Wednesday 3 October 2018

Why Are the Poor Always with Us? "Moral Hazard."

The Poor Are Always with Us

“The poor are always with us.”  What a discouraging declaration!  More disturbing still, it is attributed to Jesus Christ.  Although the details vary from one gospel to another, Mary of Bethany (some say Mary Magdalene) was pouring expensive oil on Jesus’s feet (in some versions on his head) when his disciples complained  (some say Judas specifically) that the money could have been used to feed the poor.  (The Gospel of Matthew suggests that this incident is what caused Judas to betray Jesus.)

Moral Hazard

Why are the poor always with us?  Consider  “moral hazard.”  “Moral hazard,” according to Alan Blinder in After the Music Stopped:  The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, “has nothing to do with morality.”  The concept originated in the 18th century in the insurance industry and suggests that having insurance might encourage risky (and therefore immoral?) behaviour.  

Today the concept is very much with us as insurers worry aloud  that house insurance will encourage us to smoke in bed, car insurance will promote real-life Gand Theft Auto, and medical insurance will cause all of the above.   In fact, “moral hazard” is pervasive because it underpins all the “self reliance,” “free market” arguments of, in particular, American capitalism.

The concept arose in Blinder’s book because “moral hazard” also applies to making risky investments.  In 2008, super wealthy financiers and bankers, who were typically the defenders and upholders of “moral hazard,” found themselves in a situation where they needed hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts because they had made risky, losing investments.  To accept government money instead of facing the consequences of their behaviour was to repudiate “moral hazard”—which is what they ended up doing.  However, “moral hazard” when applied to the holders of underwater sub-prime mortgages was kept in tact when TARP (the bailout program) was implemented.

Social Spending and Moral Hazard

Though you may never before have heard of “moral hazard,” you have undoubtedly heard one or more of the “common sense” claims based on “moral hazard.”  “Moral hazard” is the idea behind arguments against the guaranteed income, free day care, tuition-free university education, family planning, and the decriminalization of drugs, to name but a few.  Despite arguing the case in favour of “enlightenment,” in  Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Steve Pinker claims that “Social spending, like everything, has downsides. As with all insurance, it can create a 'moral hazard' in which the insured slack off or take foolish risks, counting on the insurer to bail them out if they fail.”

Poverty Versus Wealth Inequality

If not through social spending how can poverty be addressed? Pinker argues, quite rightly I would say, that it is a  mistake to confuse poverty and wealth inequality.  Some Americans may be disgruntled, may even think of themselves as poor, not because they are poor in any real sense but because they are struggling to "keep up with the Joneses."

"The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy— the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially."

True enough, but it takes a lot of poor people to create one billionaire.  Pinker's use of J.K. Rowling as his example of a billionaire is disingenuous.  Sure, it's hard to get a hate on for the welfare mom whose Harry Potter stories have made her the wealthiest writer on the planet, but even in her case if we consider the copy editors, bookstore clerks, theme-park employees and printers at the bottom of the pyramid we can begin to see signs of the poverty which supports her wealth.  Pinker's graph correlating wealth inequality with everyone getting richer is cutesy and confusing, but his conclusion that "the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class" who would in turn elect Donald Trump President seems clear enough.

Does Wealth Inequality Make Us Richer or Poorer?

Much of the world may have been pulled out of dire poverty over the last 200 years, as Pinker claims, but extreme wealth inequality is a destabilizing force in any society.  Pinker's graph notwithstanding, wealth inequality also produces an inefficient and wasteful economy.  The purchasing power of the haves puts pressure on both the have-nots and those who have less. For example, London, England has some of the most expensive real estate in the world, but it is also known for the number of homes and mansions which are left empty by the super wealthy. Take note the next time you are watching a a premiere sports event on television:  how many of the best seats are left empty because someone is wealthy enough to buy them and then not bother to attend?  Is the economy really being served by one man owning a dozen houses or fifty cars or paying tens of millions of dollars for a painting?



The Financial System Depends on Moral Hazard ...

Money, as we have seen, is just a measuring system for debt (see What Is Money?) or what  Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind, calls "imaginary" and "a psychological construct." Money is created every time someone signs a mortgage, takes out a loan or uses a credit card.  It is therefore limitless and infinite--definitely not a a zero-sum game.  Since money is "imaginary," nothing real or tangible, why can't we put Santa Claus and Tinker Bell in charge and just give poor people the money they need?


And Moral Hazard Depends on Poverty

The answer is, of course, "moral hazard,"  . . . and I'l bet you're thinking "and the whole financial system would collapse."  Conclusion:  the whole financial system is based on moral hazard.  Why are the poor always with us?  Because without them "moral hazard" would disappear.

A billionaire asking for millions of dollars in subsidies, grants and tax breaks is so common that we hardly notice.  An indigent standing on a street corner asking for twenties would have to be out of his mind.  The richer you are the less moral hazard applies.  The burden of moral hazard falls most heavily on the poor; in fact, poverty and moral hazard are inseparable.  The threat of poverty is what keeps the rest of us from stepping out of line.


Monday 12 March 2018

The Truth about English Verb Tenses: There Is Only One!

Tense versus aspect

Some languages do not have verb tenses.  The English language has only one tense:  the simple past tense, also known as the preterite tense, which signals that an action was completed at a specific time in the past.  ESL teachers, like me once upon a time, confuse students by saying that English verb tenses refer to the past, the present or the future, but they don't really.  Once you start teaching verbs in detail you realize that we use modal auxiliaries like "will" and "going to" to refer to the future.  What we traditionally call "the present tense" refers to the present, past and future, as in the examples "I live in Canada" or "The population of Sao Paulo is 10 million."  The more difficult and significant distinction among English verbs are aspects like habitual (I study), continuous (I am studying), perfect (I have studied) and perfect continuous (I have been studying), which usually get taught as being different tenses.



Twelve tenses or four aspects?

The truth is that when I was teaching issues like verb tense I, like everyone else, always instructed my students that there were twelve different “tenses” in English.  In hindsight I recognize that by identifying the various forms of verb as referring to the past, the present or the future, I was mislabelling what the various forms indicated and necessarily misleading and confusing my students.  The crucial concept is not “tense” but “aspect” and most grammar books destined to instruct students learning English don’t even mention the concept of “aspect.”

Tenses do not correspond to the time frames which give them their names

Describing verbs as being “past,” present” or “future” is (with the exception of the past) meaningless and misleading.  The fact that English verbs can be “simple” (or habitual/repeated), “continuous” (or progressive, the French “imperfect” is sensible), “perfect” and “perfect continuous” is much more significant and meaningful.  Teaching “aspect” is a much more promising approach for getting the variations across to students than the self contradictory tradition of referring to every form of the verb as a “tense.”  The only way to prove my point is to consider each of the so-called “verb tenses.” 


Grammar and usage:  no point in one without the other

One caveat:  when teaching it was my ambition to teach grammar and usage together.  In other words, if I found myself teaching a sentence that was grammatically correct but I could never imagine anyone ever saying it in a meaningful context I would take a step back and reconsider what I was teaching.

Present

Present tense.  “He eats spaghetti.”  Not very meaningful.  In context: “He loves spaghetti.  He eats spaghetti every chance he gets.”  We call it the “present tense” but obviously it refers to the past and the future.  The one time period “eats” does not refer to is the present.  The aspect can be described as habitual, repeated, factual or stative.

Present continuous

Present continuous.  “He is eating spaghetti.”  No obvious meaningful context.  Maybe Mom calls home to the nanny to ask what little Johnny is having for lunch.  “Is eating” does refer to the present, but it also refers to the past and the future.  In fact, in the real world we most typically use the “present continuous” to indicate the future:  “I’m seeing the doctor tomorrow.” The important issue is it’s aspect:  it signals something continuing or in progress.   The concept that students will eventually have to grasp is the difference between a “repeated” or “habitual” action and a “continuous” action.  It is difficult to come up with an absolute, teachable distinction between these aspects, but the most obvious distinction is that a continuous action can be interrupted.  (Think about it.  We all think we know the difference between a liquid and a solid but physicists have yet to come up with an absolute distinction.  Exactly at what point is a solid ice cube considered liquid water?  Same problem with continuous versus repeated.)

Present Perfect

Present perfect.  “He has eaten spaghetti.”  Can you imagine yourself saying this in the real world?  Here you would really have to stretch your imagination to come up with a meaningful context.  How about:  “He has eaten the spaghetti, but there is some lasagna left.”  This “verb tense” drives Francophones crazy because there is no equivalent tense in French, but the structure (verb “to have” + past participle) is exactly the same as the simple past in French—but it’s not the simple past in English. Again, we call it the “present perfect” but it refers to an action that has taken place in the past.  The concept that needs to be gotten across to students is the answer to "what does 'perfect' mean?"  The perfect aspect implies a time frame within which the action happens (not the action itself) that is “perfect” or “complete” or like a circle or at least has a beginning point and an end point.  The implied time frame extends from some time in the past to the moment of speaking, and the action occurs at some unspecified time within that  “perfect,”  completed time frame. 
I have presented the following scenario to try to get across the meaning of the “present perfect”:  John wants to ask Mary out, but she wants to politely, indirectly decline.  John asks “Would you like to see Star Wars with me tonight?”  Should Mary say: a) “I saw it.”  or b) “I’ve seen it.”? Native speakers will recognize “b” (the present perfect) as the correct answer but will likely be at a loss to explain that the present perfect is used to signal an action in the past (Mary’s seeing the movie) which touches the present (Mary’s declining John’s invitation).  Adverb phrases like “so far,” “already,” and “up until now” are the strongest signals that the present perfect is required.

Present perfect continuous

Present perfect continuous.  “He has been eating spaghetti.”  In this case the context is easy to imagine:  something you would say because Johnny has spaghetti sauce all over his face.  Take note that the action of this supposed “present” tense is in the past. In terms of aspect it’s “perfect” because the implied period of time extends to the present, but it’s continuous because some consequence (sauce on face) of the past action has spilled over and is continuing into the present.

Past tense

Past tense.  “He ate spaghetti.” This is a verb tense.  The one tense in English that it makes sense to describe as a tense.  The action takes place at a specific time in the past or it was repeated in the past.  It’s past tense because  the action takes  place in the past.  The past tense uses all four aspects:  simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous.

Past continuous

Past continuous.  “He was eating spaghetti.” The important distinction to be learned is between the simple past aspect and the continuous aspect—exactly the same concept necessary to grasp the difference between the simple present and the present continuous; i.e., the continuous can be interrupted.

Past perfect

Past perfect.  “He had eaten spaghetti.” This usage seems a bit off.  When might you say this?  More likely, the context would demand “some spaghetti” or “the spaghetti” as in “His sister was angry because he had eaten the spaghetti” or “He got sick after he had eaten some spaghetti.”   The context needs to make the “spaghetti” more specific in order for the action of eating it to have been completed in a past time frame. The action took place in the past, but the important distinction is the implied, “perfect,” “completed” time frame within which the action took place.

Past perfect continuous

Past perfect continuous.  “He had been eating spaghetti.”  Here an imagined context jumps out at you.  It’s “perfect” (in the sense of completed, defined,  limited, or full-circle) because the action happened within an implied (or expressed) time frame, but “continuous” because some consequence passed or spilled over the implied limit—“ . . . and had noodles on his shirt” or “ garlic on his breath” or “he had to stop when someone knocked on the door.”

Future

Future.  “He will eat spaghetti.”  Unless prefaced by something Biblical like “God said . . . ,” I find it hard to imagine how this might be a statement about the future.  In general, I don’t see this as being a tense.  “Will” + the root infinitive seems more like all the other modals—“can,” “should,” “may,” “must,” “might,” “would”—than a verb tense.   Our sample only makes sense to me as a conditional sentence:  “If there is nothing else available, he will eat spaghetti.” Anglophones typically express the future by using the expression “going to.”

Future continuous

Future continuous:  “He will be eating spaghetti.”  Same argument as above—not a verb tense.  Still seems a modal to me.  Again, the important distinction is aspect:  continuous versus habitual.

Future perfect

Future perfect:  “He will have eaten spaghetti.”  Ditto the argument.  This is a modal verb + the perfect aspect, not a verb tense. 

Future perfect continuous

Future perfect continuous:  “He will have been eating.” Ditto previous claims about “will” as a modal and aspect.

Wednesday 24 January 2018

Understanding Romanticism

Romance: that form of literature where desires can be fulfilled unencumbered

To understand Romanticism it is useful to begin with the traditional cliché image of a man and a woman gazing deeply into one another’s eyes over a candle-light dinner.






More pedantically, the literary theorist Northrop Frye defined romance as that mode of literature in which the laws of nature and reality are somewhat suspended and a hero can therefore perform miraculous feats. Underlying both of these notions (Frye’s mode and what the rest of us describe as “romantic”) is Frye’s idea that all culture is about giving form to human desire. Our expectations of the chivalrous knight of Arthurian Legend and the courtly-love tradition have more in common with modern notions of romantic love than is at first apparent.





Though rarely acknowledged, the knight who slays a dragon and the perfect lovers are both examples of reality and nature overwhelmed by our imaginings of human desires being fulfilled.

The word "romance" refers to translating Latin texts into romance languages

Understanding Romanticism also involves understanding the origin of the word “romance”—the translation (also called “vulgarization”) of Latin texts into the romance languages:  Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.  Consequently “romance” first meant making literary texts available to the average person in a language she could understand.  When William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published The Lyrical Ballads in 1798, the event which marked the beginning of the Romantic period in English literary history, they emphasized in the preface that their intention was to write in a language of the people hitherto excluded from being the subjects or the readers of poetry.

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.

Romanticism and the "historical dialectic"

The understanding of Romanticism is also served by an awareness of the “historical dialectic,” a concept associated with the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, which theorizes that history progresses according to a movement of ideas following a pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  As an idea or web of ideas become dominant in a society or culture (a thesis), an opposing, contrary or contradicting collection of ideas develops at a sub-cultural level (the antithesis).  Eventually, the antithesis becomes dominant but at the same time, it incorporates ideas from earlier thesis and antithesis into a synthesis.  If we look at Romanticism according to this pattern we can see that first and foremost it is defined by its opposition to neoclassicism, but at the same time, it brings back and celebrates elements of the Middle Ages, the period that predated neoclassicism.

Romantic “nature” versus neoclassical “nature”

Both movements emphasized “nature” but each adopted a very different notion of its meaning.  For the neoclassicist, the artist should imitate the “forms” of nature.  In other words, nature was an abstract concept which supplied us with rules which we should attempt to imitate and follow.  When the Romantics spoke of nature they generally meant trees and birds and flowers, etc, and took communing with this nature as a source of inspiration.

Deism versus pantheism

Deism is a scientific answer to the religious question of the origin of the world.  The neoclassicists proposed a God the Creator but did not accept any of the versions of God supplied by the religious dogmas of the Middle Ages.  Romantics in contrast adopted pantheism, a religion of all things, in particular of nature which was the ultimate inspiration of the Romantic poet.

Neoclassical “man” versus Romantic “man”

In his poem, An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope declared that “The proper study of mankind was man.”  Pope was responding to the medieval notion that man could only be understood from the perspective of the Creator, of God.  However, Pope’s notion of “man” was a collection of universal properties that defined all men.  The poem is also a celebration of reason over passion. The Romantic notion of “man” in contrast was a living, breathing, passionate creature depending on nature for his existence. Not only did the Romantics celebrate the “common man” but Wordsworth in particular celebrated children.  His most famous line is that “The child is father to the man.”  The child is superior in the Romantic view because the child was thought to have a richer, uncontaminated imagination and a closer connection with nature.  

Neoclassical “rules” and Romantic liberalism

The neoclassical period was known for its attachment to a sense of rules, to decorum and propriety and, in particular, a rigid, slavish attachment to the “rules” elaborated by Aristotle in The Poetics. Empiricism and scientific development gave the neoclassicists a notion that underlying existence there were rules and laws that could be applied to all things, the individual and society as well as the natural world. In contrast, the Romantics celebrated the individual who broke free of the rules of social propriety and convention.

The individual versus society

The neoclassicists valued the individual as a reflection of his society, as a model of good behaviour according to social conventions.  The Romantic is profoundly focused on the individual as an individual, in particular the self, the "I" of the poem.  

Romanticism and Realism

Romanticism was ultimately displaced by Realism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  In many ways, however, Romanticism still tends to dominate or at least affect how most people view literature.    Both Modernism and Postmodernism continue the antithesis to Realism and show the lingering influence of Romanticism.


see also: http://www.thesourgrapevine.com/2014/02/how-to-make-love-to-logophile.html




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