Bill Baird, Unsung Hero

by Edd Doerr

While I gave Bill Baird a mention in my Nov 9, 2011, post I did not follow up with a longer piece. Let me remedy that by quoting in its entirety Bill's wife Joni's letter to the editor in the Dec 12, 2011, New Yorker ---

"Jill Lepore, in her article on Planned Parenthood, mentions that the Griswold v Connecticut case 'placed contraception under the protection of a constitutional right to privacy' ("Birthright." Nov 14). She also says that the case meant that the 'last legal obstacles to contraception were overcome.' It is important to note, however, that the Griswold decision, rendered in 1965, legalized birth control for married couples only; it was illegal for unmarried people to use contraception until 1972, when my husband, Bill Baird, helped win the Supreme Court case Eisenstadt v Baird. That case supplanted Griswold and legalized birth control for all citizens. In 1965, my husband was arrested in New York under the same statute that Margaret Sanger was arrested under in 1916. Two years later, he was charged with a felony for giving contraceptives to an unmarried young woman after a speech to Boston University students - a violation of the Massachusetts laws covering Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order. He spent 37 days in the Charles Street Jail before he was released on appeal. Over the years, my husband has been arrested eight times in five states and has been involved in five US Supreme Court victories on behalf of reproductive freedom. He picked up where Sanger left off.

"Joni Baird, Huntington, NY"

Joni left out the fact that Eisenstadt v Baird actually made an indispensable contribution to the Roe v Wade ruling, allowing Justice William Brennan to expand the ruling well beyond merely the freedom of physicians to perform abortions to include the privacy right of women to follow their consciences.

I first heard Bill speak at Trinity College, a Catholic women's college in Washington, about 40 years ago. He had the large audience of young Catholic women agreeing with him. When one student got up to disagree with him, the other students told her to sit down and shut up. When a male student got up and threatened to beat Bill up, Bill just reamed him out verbally until he turned around amd slunk away.

Bill Baird has always been a fearless champion of women's reproductive choice. He never backs down. He is a hero.

Rationalizing Irrational Choices: That $45 entree and presidential choices

By Gary Berg-Cross

The size of the Sunday supplement is one sign that officially holiday shopping season. Modern day products and their ads presents us many choices of conflicting quality, quantity and various extras (such as free delivery, insurance, return policy.) Cognitive Psychology & Decision Science tells us quite a bit about human choice behavior and it is in part a story of irrational decisions and inadequate knowledge employed in the service of “shopping”, but also with such things as political choices.

To be sure there is an external element of advertizing manipulation and demand characteristics of over stimulating, shopping environments that pump us full of misleading facts. Something similar might be said of political choices and their campaigns. The combo of exploding stimuli and controlled circumstances sometimes leads us to hasty decisions. Both commercial and political interests want this to be the case. But these type of manipulations works because there are cognitive biases built into the human info processing system by evolution. We are a mix of lofty reasoning layered on top of some tendencies for hasty, impression-based decisions that makes us prone to error.

The basic understanding of this comes from psychological theory, but there is a big, applied area of work done is other areas of Social Science. Economists investigate cognitive biases in a sub-area they call Behavioral Economics which uses experiments to study what people actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, date, marry and make other real-life decisions such as what gifts to buy. (I find the behavioral term a bit of a misnomer since the behavior they observe is based on a thinking process, but it does get the point across that we are looking at realistic behavior, often scaled down a bit to be studied. Dan Ariely, formerly of MIT and now a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics is one of the many researcher in this area. An overview of his findings on human quirks is in his book “Predictably Irrational as well as in an entertaining TED video here . Ariely studied,” which is a captivating read for those curious about the oddities of human nature starting with the role that relative choices have on our decisions.

The starting point for Ariely’s work, now a famous example in his book, came to him while browsing the Web he contemplated an ad, on the Web site of the Economist. A portion of his discussion of this is described below.

There were 3 subscription options:

1. Internet subscription for $59 seemed reasonable.
2. $125 print subscription-seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable.
3. a print and Internet subscription for $125 – expensive, but no more than print only????

Ariely wondered would want to buy the print option alone since both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price. Reasoning through this he realized that the Economist folks, like political advisers, were actually manipulating readers using an important aspect of human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much such things as a magazine subscription is worth. The same is sort of true in judging the value of candidates. How bad is it for a candidate to be extreme on immigration, but good on the environment? Such situations amount to a cognitive dilemma so we use a simplifying strategy. We focus on the relative values. We often ask how does one thing compare to another?

In the case of the Economist, we may not be certain that a $59 Internet- only subscription was a better deal than the $125 print- only option. But he could believe that:

“the print and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print- only option at $125. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “

We might say that our choice in the print-only option slants us towards a different. The print-only choice is a phony choice because it makes us think relatively that the print-and-internet option is a better deal because it has something ‘free’, when in fact , this impression is just created because we’ve just been presented with a fake, worse deal.

Something similar happens with restaurant choices. A few years ago people noted a sudden rise of $40 entrees. It wasn’t just a price creep, but the result of sophisticated calculation by a new breed of menu “engineers” using what we know of relative choice. Research had proved that highly priced menu entrees increase revenue even if no one orders them. Why? Because a $45 steak entree makes a $36 lamb choice seem like “a deal.” As one of the menu consultant put it:

“Just putting one high price on the menu will take your average check up, …. “My mom taught me to never order the most expensive thing on the menu, but you’ll order the second.”

And looking at some of the political candidates it occurred to me that political engineers are counting of similar 'entree" strategies. It’s much more complicated than a restaurant situation, but I get the impression that the presence of some candidates slants voters towards other candidates as the reasonable choice. If there were not, for example, so many extreme conservative candidates in the Republican field than other candidates would seem too conservative to “independent voters.” If there were not so many choices on the right Obama would look more like the centrist politician he is and couldn't be portrayed as a socialist.

The political issues are too complex for most people to know exactly what they want in a candidate. But seeing them and reading about them in a particular context gives a hasty impression of who is extreme and who is moderate. Of course if candidates were like cars we could test drive one, but the closest we get to this is in these very artificial candidate debates with talking point sound bites. Not much rationality and knowledge of the facts shown there. It’s a sorry state for political shopping. A problem is that we can't easily exit this restaurant of inadequate choices for an old fashion political diner down the road serving better entrees.

The Insidious Librarian

By Luis Granados

The world of 80 years ago this month: Adolf Hitler remained in a deep depression over the recent death of his niece and alleged lover, Geli Raubal, who was officially ruled to have committed suicide inside Hitler’s Munich apartment. In Albany, New York, legendary gangster Legs Diamond was gunned down after crossing one rival too many. In Washington, Congress approved a moratorium on the payment of European debts to help address a credit crunch threatening the stability of the entire continent. (Sound familiar?) And in Ireland, a librarian was transferred from her post in County Mayo to a position in Dublin.

That last item doesn’t sound so exciting, does it? Well, it was, especially for those of us interested in the power that God experts have wielded over the centuries (and still do today). For the librarian in question was a Protestant, County Mayo was mostly Catholic, and the war of wills between politicians who thought that librarians ought to be hired on their library skills versus those who thought they ought to be hired based on which band of God experts they followed was fought all the way to the national parliament.

Ireland had only been independent for a decade in December, 1931; the Anglo-Irish Treaty that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State was signed 90 years ago this Tuesday. The southern portion of the island was overwhelmingly Catholic, and one of the great obstacles to Irish independence from Great Britain ever since the Wolfe Tone uprising of 1798 had been a fear for what would happen to Ireland’s Protestant minority if the Catholics ever took the upper hand.

Post-independence events proved that this concern was not just British propaganda. Witness the case of Miss Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, a Protestant from Dublin, and an honors graduate of Trinity College. In July, 1930, she was assigned by the central government to the post of chief librarian of the Carnegie Library in Castlebar, with advisory functions covering the whole of County Mayo.

Being Protestant was bad enough; attending Trinity College, the bastion of Irish Protestantism, was even worse. Ireland’s bishops had pronounced doing so to be a mortal sin, growling that “The prohibition is not a mere arbitrary one. It is based on the natural divine law itself. … Subjects should not oppose their bishops’ teaching by word, by act, or in any other way.”

The local branch of Catholic Action, the political arm of the Catholic Church, sprang into action to protest the outrage. Rev. Denis O’Connor, chairman of the library committee, took the lead:

A Protestant young lady … has been appointed as our library adviser. Her culture and philosophy are, on many vital questions, diametrically opposed to Catholic principles and Catholic ideas, and therefore we, as Catholics, cannot be guided by her in selecting the literature that we need.

The tactic used was a tax strike: Catholics were commanded to stop paying local rates until the outrage was resolved. Archbishop Gilmartin encouraged the boycott:

It is gratifying to see how the representatives of our Catholic people are unwilling to subsidize libraries not under Catholic control. Not to speak of those who are alien to our faith, it is not every Catholic who is fit to be in charge of a public library for Catholic readers. Such an onerous position should be assigned to an educated Catholic who would be as remarkable for his loyalty to his religion as for his literary and intellectual attainments.

Public libraries were a particular sore spot for the Church, because they were the principal source of ideas in competition with God’s truth. There was no internet, no television, and no radio; there was the pulpit and little else. In Catholic-controlled Quebec, there was no library donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie corresponding to the one in County Mayo, because the local government was successful in keeping it out. As a Catholic pamphleteer in Quebec put it in 1890, a public library is “a pestilential spot … where the public goes to poison itself.” It wasn’t until 1959, when Catholic strongman Maurice Duplessis finally died, that Quebec enacted a law establishing public libraries.

Catholic Ireland rivaled the Soviet Union as the censorship capital of the world. The Irish Constitution itself proclaimed that “The State recognizes the special position of the Holy Catholic and Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens … The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

Paul Blanshard’s book The Irish and Catholic Power devotes several pages to listing books and movies banned in Ireland, including works as innocuous as Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The Irish Times characterized the official censorship list as “a concise index to modern literature.” At one Catholic college, even books by priests condemning contraception were kept under lock and key, lest the arguments they were refuting somehow pollute innocent minds. But censors couldn’t screen every single publication; imagine the damage a wrong-thinking librarian might do to the souls of County Mayo’s young readers.

The County Mayo authorities defied the central government by refusing to pay the new librarian’s salary. The “local rights” issue was used in exactly the same way that “states’ rights” was used in America to deny justice to black people for decades. Soon the Irish parliament got involved, with a bitter debate that nearly brought down the government. The battle lines were the same as on so many issues in so many places: religious vs. secular, rural vs. urban, local nabobs vs. federal authorities. Eamon de Valera, the fiercely Catholic independence fighter who was then part of the not-so-loyal opposition, played it for all it was worth:

If there were two qualified people who had to deal with a Catholic community, and if one was a Catholic and the other a Protestant, I would unhesitatingly vote for the Catholic. Let us be clear and let us know where we are. … Do not try to force upon a Catholic community a librarian in the quality, so to speak, of a teacher to whom they object. You have the result that the whole library system has been nullified and rendered naught as far as Mayo is concerned. … It is a fundamental teaching, a fundamental matter for Catholics. Every Catholic Deputy in the House knows I am speaking the truth.

After a lot more histrionics, the Catholics prevailed. Eighty years ago this month, the government offered Miss Dunbar-Harrison a transfer to the Military Library in Dublin, which she accepted. She changed her first name as well as her last when she married a Protestant minister, and later gave up on fighting the bigotry of the Republic of Ireland altogether by moving to Ulster. She was far from alone in this decision: approximately half of Ireland’s Protestants fled the country, mostly to the north, by 1950.

As for librarians, when Blanshard wrote in 1953, the Irish Republic did not have a single Protestant county librarian. Today, of course, God expert pressure on librarians is a thing of the past. Or is it? Just what books was Mayor Sarah Palin concerned about when she tried to fire the librarian back in Wasilla?

Callimachus - Father of Bibliography and Organizer of Library Knowledge

By Gary Berg-Cross

The other day while listening to a talk about finding things on the Web I learned about Callimachus/ Kallimachus. He was born in Cyrene , Africa (c. 305-240 BC) which today is part of Libya. He was a noted poet and hymn maker, critic & elite scholar who taught in Eleusina near Athens. He was one of those polymaths it is fascinating to read about at the beginnings of modern culture. He was known then for elite, erudite wit claiming to "abhor all common things." Callimachus is apparently well known for his short poems and epigrams rejecting the larger and heavy epics that were modeled after Homer’s work - Big book, big evil". Instead Callimachus urged poets to "drive their wagons on untrodden fields," and off the rutted paths of Homer. His resulting poetry was elegiac, brief, and carefully formed and worded perhaps like Emily Dickinson.

This was all new to me but I ran into a reference to him as the Father of Bibliography. This is based on his cataloging work as the scholar (some say Chief Librarian) at the Great Secular Library in Alexandria. As discussed in Wikipedia Callimachus' most famous prose work is the Pinakes (Tablets or Lists for short, but the full title is List of those who distinguished themselves in all branches of learning, and their writings). It was not simple and comprised 120 books. This is a bibliographical survey of authors of the 500,000 or so works held in the Library of Alexandria at that time. Most notably the Pinakes is apparently one of the first known card catalog attempts. Obviously a great library needs a meta-document to list, identify, and categorize holdings. Facing the task of classifying the scrolls, Callimachus sighed: "Mega biblion, mega kakon" (many writings equals many worries). So the question was how to organize a scholar’s fondest fantasy in the place where all human knowledge, all the books of the world, were being collected? Zenodotus, the 1^st Library had inventoried the Library’s holdings and tried organized them into three major categories. The first category included history books, edited and standardized literary works, and new works of Ptolemaic literature. This was just not detailed enough. Callimachus' applied his genius around 250 BCE to developing a good catalog and he seemed to invent it all by himself without having workable models to base it on. Certainly the Alexandrian holdings were different in depth and scope but also reflected the new work of the Greeks. Aristotle had developed a scheme to systematize and organize knowledge as part of his development of ontology. But these taxonomic schemes were somewhat arbitrary.

More importantly when you looked at the knowledge being captured in the Great Library holding they didn’t seem to work. Callimachus’ particular quandary was that he could not categorize his own works using Aristotle’s hierarchy for knowledge! That's a motivator.

In response Callimachus' came up with his own system that divided works into 6 genres and 5 sections of prose. These were rhetoric, law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science and miscellanies. Authors within each were listed alphabetically so there was a 2nd organization scheme, which now seems obvious but was new. But he went further by also annotated his catalog in ways that we now call “metadata”. Callimachus liked things brief and the info on a modern card catalog maybe is too brief. Callimachus added short biographical notes on authors, which prefaced that author’s entry within his catalog. We have only tanatalizing scraps of his notes remaining (as shown on the side picture), but we know his system was useful and used.

“This helped avoid confusion in the works of authors with similar or identical names, but separating works of the original author and works of namesakes was often extremely difficult. In addition, Callimachus noted the first words of the work, and the total number of lines in the document. Later librarians were to make marginal notations in the pinakes, which provided even more information on the nature of the cataloged document.” From The Great Library of Alexandria?

By consulting the Pinakes catalog, a library patron could find out if the library contained a work by a particular author, how it was categorized, and where it might be found. It’s still an ininfluence on the way we organize library material since it affected later organizational approaches by Jefferson and Dewey. And there remains the parallel efforts to organize large collection of books using some idea of how knowledge is organized. The challenge these days is to organize knowledge on the Web where there are no natural librarians. Each posting person has an opportunity to tag information in some way but these can be arbitrary. It's one reason that the deluge of mostly unstructured digital data, documents, e-mail, and instant messages raises serious organizational issues.

We could use a combination of Callimachus and Aristotle for updated ideas to organize human knowledge which grows dramatically each day.

For more on the dream of the Great Library see The Ancient Library of Alexandria.

A Model for Classical Scholarship in the Age of Million Book Libraries and Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)

'Public Rejects School Vouchers'

by Edd Doerr

This letter was published in the Washington Examiner on 12/2/11.

"Public overwhelmingly rejects school vouchers"

"Marcus Winters is wrong about 2011 being the 'Year of the School Voucher' (Nov 17). This year's Gallup poll on education, released in August, registered opposition to school vouchers nationally at 65% to 34%. That is almost exactly the same percentage by which vouchers or their variants have been voted down by millions of Americans in over two dozen statewide referenda from conservative Utah to liberal Massachusetts.

"Voucher plans exist in only those states -- such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana -- where taxpayers were not given the chance to vote on them. Just this year, the Wisconsin Department of Education found that kids in Milwaukee voucher schools, the oldest voucher plan in existence, are not doing as well as kids in the city's public schools.

"Simply put, most Americans think that tax aid to sectarian private schools violates their religious freedom and harms their publixc schools/

"Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty, Silver Spring, Md"

Strong, Steady, and, of course, Secular!

By Naima Cabelle Washington

I believe that it was the African American poet, Sterling Brown who wrote that “the strong men keep on coming!” During a recent visit to Houston, Texas for the 4th Annual Texas Freethought Convention, I was privileged to meet Glenn Ellison, Jr., a man with a gentle smile and a friendly easy-going approach. I'm not a real fan of poetry but the words of that poem came to mind..."the strong men keep on coming," each time I spoke with Glenn. Perhaps, that because he's built like a Sherman tank, and when it comes down to foolish talk and religious nonsense, he easily shifts gears and uses an intellectual steamroller approach to effortlessly flatten every bit of superstitious claptrap which dares to raise its head around him. Born in Woodland, Georgia in 1942, Mr. Ellison is the eldest son in his family; there were eight children including a stepsister. According to Glenn, his initial rebellion against religion came at an early age. "It was all her fault," he tells me, referring to an aunt. One Sunday, she saw him with a math book and told him he had no business reading it; he should have been reading the Bible. Glenn wanted to know, "Why?" Still sounding very much like a mischievous nephew, and still sticking to his story, he says, "It’s all her fault! She started it!"

As the saying goes, he's been around a while, including around the world a few times as a member of the United States Air Force. Just listen to Glenn and it won't take long to conclude that he's a man who lives according to his own conscience. While stationed in Vietnam he decided to read the Bible "...from beginning to end...and when I put it down, I said, 'this is all bullshit!'" He says that up until that point, "I played the game," but after reading the Bible he was finished with religion because according to him, "nothing matched." He saw through the Bible's many contradictions. His travels were so extensive that he's lost count of the many countries he's visited, but he's been on every continent. I've met many people who have traveled extensively and some seem to lack any interest in other people or their cultures. Not so with Mr. Ellison who is upbeat and seems to thrive on personal interaction and intellectual stimulus. He sat attentively through many of the presentations at the convention, soaking up every word; evaluating every idea, but at the same time, doesn't mind having a good laugh.

'The God Virus'

by Edd Doerr

The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture, by psychologist Darrel W. Ray (IPC Press, Bonner Springs, KS, 2009, 241 pp), presents a fascinating exploration of how most religions persist and spread, using throughout such biological metaphors as viruses, infections, vectors, natural selection, and competition. Ray writes from his personal experience as someone who grew up in a conservative Protestant milieu and evolved into a humanist, freethinker and psychologist. His analysis is quite persuasive, his warnings about the consequences of unchecked "God virus" infections useful and scary.

Ray tops off the book with a psychologist's sound guidance as to how to get along in a world infected by "god viruses" of various sorts.

Unfortunately, Ray's book stops short of acknowledging that "god viruses" can become attenuated and rendered less harmful (more benign?) or become "compartmentalized" and moved away from center stage. It is this attenuation and/or compartmentalization that makes it possible for humanists to work with a broad spectrum of people who bear assorted religious labels. Indeed, this broad working together across lines of religious/lifestance identification is the only hope for turning back the virulent drives to (in no special order) weaken women's rights of conscience on abortion and contraception; open pipelines between public treasuries and religious schools and other institutions; sabotage the religious neutrality of public education; undermine science; derail efforts to deal with climate change and global warming; ensconce fanatic theocrats in the seats of political power; return society to the neo-feudalism advocated today by whole phalanxes of aspirants to high office. I think that Darrel Ray would agree.

'Darwin the Writer'

by Edd Doerr

Darwin the Writer, by George Levine (Oxford University Press, 2011, 244 pp) is not just another book about evolution. Rather, it is a book about Darwin the man, Darwin the writer, Darwin the thinker, Darwin the scientist. In examining Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Levine, a professor of Victorian literature and an expert on the relations between science and literature, takes us on an extended tour through Darwin's head. Not only did Darwin produce the breakthrough and now well established theory of evolution through natural selection over vast expanses of time, but he did so in a book for ordinary readers of such transparency and step by step detail that put his ideas across in a way that no paper in a scientific journal could have.

Levine shows how Darwin takes the reader by the hand and walks him or her through Darwin's observations of geological and biological complexities during his long trip on the Beagle and subsequent studies of nature. We are shown "how" Darwin wrote sold his new theory to a broad Victorian audience. Let me quote one of Levine's sparkling paragraphs --

"The greatest paradox of Darwin's work ... is that the world's design is not designed -- it is the product of the absence of intelligence. It emerges (in an entangled way, of course) from the mindless movements of nature. The implication is ... that to account for the fact that all living things are adapted to their niches, we have invented the idea of a designer. That the world begins not with the fiat of an intelligent being but through the slow hit and miss movements of nature is a reversal of common sense; think about it for a moment and one realizes that such a reversal entails the view that it is the mind itself, not nature, that creates order. Darwin wasn't a philosopher and certainly not an idealist: but his prose regularly finds ways to dramatize the mind's power to make up order, all of which is almost burlesqued in the second chapter of the Origin, in which he discusses the reality of species. He talks of varieties that have been called species, species that have been seen as varieties, and of a Mr Babbington, who "gives us 251 species, whereas Mr Bentham gives only 112, -- a difference of 139 doubtful forms!" (p. 48), and the exclamation point is, of course, Darwin's own. ... His point here is not to provide a surer count of species and varieties but to lead us out of the idea that species is even a real category (it is merely a useful one, which allows us to impose an order on the world that does not correspond to its reality.)" (p. 118)

Moving on from the bare science of evolution, Levine shows how Darwin influenced such writers as Hardy, Conrad, Dreiser, Kipling, Wilde, Eliot and London.

I give this book five stars.