Like a large number of people, I read and enjoy wikipedia. For many subjects on which I need to quickly get a primer, it’s good enough, at least for my purposes. I also just read it to see the ways the articles on some topics expand (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but mostly to see how some issues cease to be disputed over time and congeal (the entries on Noam Chomsky are a case in point), and to witness the institutionalization of what was initially envisioned to be an open and rather boundless form (in fact there’s a page on its policies and guidelines with a link to a page on how to propose policies). For someone coming out of political science, it’s intriguing.

To understand why, just look at wikipedia’s “Official Policy” page.

Our policies keep changing, and their interpretation as well. Hence it is common on Wikipedia for policy itself to be debated on talk pages, on Wikipedia: namespace pages, on the mailing lists, on Meta Wikimedia, and on IRC chat. Everyone is welcome to participate.

While we try to respect consensus, Wikipedia is not a democracy, and its governance can be inconsistent. Hence there is disagreement between those who believe rules should be explicitly stated and those who feel that written rules are inherently inadequate to cover every possible variation of problematic or disruptive behavior.

In either case, a user who acts against the spirit of our written policies may be reprimanded, even if no rule has technically been violated. Those who edit in good faith, show civility, seek consensus, and work towards the goal of creating a great encyclopedia should find a welcoming environment.

It’s own self-description points to the complicated process, the uncertainties, and tenuousness of forming rules to making desirable outcomes something other than completely random. Outside of the realm of formal theory, how institutions create outcomes, especially how they interact with environmental factors, cultural elements, psychology is, well, one of the grand sets of questions that constitute much of the social sciences. All the more complicating for wikipedia is that fifth key rule or “pillar” is that “wikipedia doesn’t have firm rules”.

Two of these rules or guidelines have worked to create an odd effect. The first is a “neutral point of view”, by which wikipedia (which reminds us that it is not a democracy) means a point of view “that at is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject. Debates are described, represented, and characterized, but not engaged in.” The second is “consensus”. The policy page on “consensus” is short. It largely discusses what “consensus” is not.

“Consensus” is, of course, a tricky concept when flushed out. To take a small aspect, people in agreement need not have the same reasons or reasons of equal force. Some may agree that democracy is a good thing because anything else would require too much time and effort in selecting the smartest, most benevolent dictator, etc., and another may believe that democracy is a good thing because it represents a polity truly expressing a collective and autonomously formed judgment. Sometimes, it means not just agreeing on positions, but also on reasons and the steps between the two. In wikipedia’s case, it seems to consist of reducing debate to “x said”-“y said” pairs and an enervation of issues that are points of deep disagreement.

One interesting consequence has been that the discussion pages, free of the “neutral point of view” and “consensus” requirements, have become sites of contest, often for “cites of contest”. Perhaps more interestingly, they unintentionally demonstrate what can emerge in an open discussion without the neutrality and consensus constraints.

I was struck by this possibility a few weeks ago when I was looking up Syrian Orthodox Christians, trying to unearth some information on the relationship between two separate (sub?)denominations of the church. The reason is not particularly relevant and had more to do with curiosity about different parts of my family and the doctrinal and political divides among some of them. (We span Oriental Orthodox-reformed, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic sects and it gets confusing who believes what.)

While looking up the various entries on the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, I came across a link to an entry on Knanayas. Knanayas are a set of families, an enthic (or is it sub-ethnic?) community within the various Syriac Nasrani sects in South India, and to which I also belong.

The entry itself was interesting, at least to me.

Knanaya Christians are descendants of 72 Judeo-Christian families who migrated from Edessa (or Urfa), the first city state that embraced Christianity, to the Malabar coast in AD 345, under the leadership of a prominent merchant prince Knai Thomman (in English, Thomas of Cana). They consisted of 400 people men, women and children, from various Syriac-Jewish clans…Before the arrival of the Knanaya people, the early Nasrani people in the Malabar coast included some local converts and largely converted Jewish people who had settled in Kerala during the Babylonian exile and after…The Hebrew term Knanaya or K’nanaim, also known as Kanai or Qnana’im, (for singular Kanna’im or Q’nai) means “Jealous ones for god”. The K’nanaim people are the biblical Jews referred to as Zealots (overly jealous and with zeal), who came from the southern province of Israel. They were deeply against the Roman rule of Israel and fought against the Romans for the soverignity of the Jews. During their struggle the K’nanaim people become followers of the Jewish sect led by ‘Yeshua Nasrani’ (Jesus the Nazarene).

Some of history I’d known; other parts such as being allegedly descendants of the Qnana’im, I did not. Searching through the pages on the topics, what struck me most was nothing on the entry pages, but rather a single comment on the discussion pages. It read:

I object to the Bias of this page. We Knanaya are not all Christians, only the Nasrani among us are Christians. Can you please tone down the overtly Christian propaganda on this page and focus more on us as an ethnic group. Thankyou. [sic]

With that line, images of the my family’s community shifted. It also revealed something about the value of disagreement, and not forcing consensus.

Ram, who writes for 3QD, explored multiculturalism, cultural rights, and group conflict in his dissertation. He is fairly critical of the concept and much of the surrounding politics, as I am. Specifically, he doesn’t believe that there are any compelling reasons for using public policy and public effort to preserve a culture, even a minority culture under stress. For a host of reasons, some compelling, Ram believes that minority cultures can reasonably ask for assistance for adjustment, but cannot reasonably ask the rest to preserve their way of life. One which he offers, one with which I agree, is that a community is often (perhaps eternally) riddled with conflicts about the identity, practices and makeup of the community itself. These conflicts often reflect distributions of power and resistance, internal majorities and minorities, and movements for reform and reactions in defense of privilege. Any move by public power to maintain a community is to take a side, often on the side of the majority. (Now, the majority may be right, but it certainly isn’t the role of public power to decide.)

But the multicultural sentiment is not driven by a desire to side with established practices within a community at the expense of dissidents and minorities. Rather, it’s driven by a false idea that there’s more consensus that there is within the group. The image is furthered by the fact that official spokesmen, usually religious figures, are seen as the authoritative figures for all community issues and not merely over religious rites, and by the fact that minorities such as gays and lesbians are labeled as shaped or corrupted by the “outside”. Forced consensus in other areas, I suspect, suffers from similar problems.

When articles on wikipedia were disputed more frequently, the discussion pages were, if anything, more filled with debate. Disputes have not been displaced onto discussions pages; and if they’ve become more interesting, it is only relatively so. Since the 1970s, ever since political philosophy, political theory and the social sciences developed an interest in ideal speech situations, veils of ignorance, and deliberation, there’s been a fetish made of consensus. Certainly, talking to each other is generally better than beating up each other, but the idea of driving towards agreement may be doing a disservice to politics itself. It was for that reason I was quite pleased by the non-Christian Knanya charging everyone else with bias.

Happy Monday and Happy May Day.

Issues 1-3 of n+1 feature a section titled “The Intellectual Situation” which “usually scrutinizes the products of our culture and the problems of everyday life.”  (A typical scrutiny, from Issue 2: “A reading is like a bedside visit. The audience extends a giant moist hand and strokes the poor reader’s hair.”) But in Issue 4, out today, the magazine’s editors, worried “that our culture and everyday life may not exist in their current form much longer,” take a break from topics like dating and McSweeney’s and devote the section to “An Interruption”: Chad Harbach’s summary of global warming. It’s a startling essay because, unlike writings on the same subject by researchers, politicians, economists, and scientists, Harbach claims absolutely no personal authority and offers little analysis of the particulars of the situation.  Instead, he’s scared, and thinks you should be too.  And you shouldn’t be scared just of the hurricanes, but of the nice days as well:

Our way of life that used to seem so durable takes on a sad, valedictory aspect, the way life does for any 19th-century protagonist on his way to a duel that began as a petty misunderstanding.  The sunrise looks like fire, the flowers bloom, the morning air dances against his cheeks.  It’s so incongruous, so unfair!  He’s healthy, he’s young, he’s alive – but he’s passing from the world.  And so are we, healthy and alive – but our world is passing from us. 

Harbach longs for the days before he knew what carbon dioxide and methane do to our climate; he doesn’t seem to resent the “way of life that used to seem so durable” as much as he does the fact that he knows it is no longer durable, and is forced to watch it progress.  It’s the coupling of access to knowledge and lack of agency that feeds Harbach’s nightmare.  And the nightmare is compelling because it doesn’t come from a journalist who has gone to the ice caps or a scientist who has gone to the ice caps or a politician who has gone to the ice caps.  It comes from a guy who has read about the ice caps on the internet.  It’s as if the 21st century protagonist has Googled his duel and learned the outcome, but must nevertheless continue on his way, unsure when he’ll meet the opponent. 

Or if he’ll meet him at all.  It takes a minimum of 40 years for some burned fuels to affect the climate, Harbach informs us.  In a sense, we’re living our grandfather’s dreams, and dreaming our granddaughter’s days. Where we, in the present, fit in is murky.  How can emergency rhetoric operate in a discussion that holds its outcomes so far in the future, and its causes so far in the past?  Harbach acknowledges that the “long lag is the feature that makes global warming so dangerous,” but his own warning is urgent, finite, and is positioned by his editors as a brief perforation with no past or future.  The essay’s marked as “An Interruption” in the regular “Intellectual Situation,” signaling both that the content is important enough to warrant the reader’s immediate attention, and that that very attention is transient. In Issue 5, the editors imply, “The Intellectual Situation” will return to its usual treatment of “problems of everyday life.”  What Harbach wants, however, is for Global Warming to be the every day problem.  But what language can convey that, when the warning is always about tomorrow?

Global warming certainly isn’t a practical concern for most Americans.  It’s practical to be concerned about events like hurricanes and tornados and floods, but global warming – whether there will be more hurricanes in the next century than in this one –isn’t enough of a practical concern to make any difference in the voting booth.  Of course, gay marriage certainly isn’t a practical concern for most Americans either.  Most Americans aren’t gay, and I can’t think of a single American who would be practically threatened by a gay marriage.  But the language surrounding the issue – one of tangible emergency, one of assault on today’s family – makes the issue practical.  It suggests that the marriages of heterosexual partners are instantly destabilized and undermined at the moment when same sex partners marry.  Political power is gained, in that case, by constructing immediate personal threat. 

Harbach takes an opposite approach – he tries to construct threat by unleashing a torrent of imagined future problems so awful and so overwhelming that they seem present.  It’s a solid strategy because he executes it so well, but my lasting feeling was selfish – I’ll die before the shit hits the fan.  Environment related language rarely confers personal threat.  Guilt, perhaps, but almost never threat.  Environmental Protection Agency?  The environment doesn’t get scared or vote.  Natural Resources Defense Council?  Natural Resources don’t get mad or donate money.  Voters are selfish, and to issue a call to arms about global warming you’ve either got to convince them to care about the earth, care about their grandchildren, or get them nervous about themselves here and now. Bush exploited this last strategy in his State of the Union address when he warned that “America is addicted to oil,” implying a human weakness and illness that had to be cured, and fast.  Addiction is also a personal subject for the President; he is a born again Christian who kicked his booze habit and can therefore kick oil, too.  He held Americans as today’s victims, not the earth. 

Toward the end of his essay, Harbach addresses the “addiction” to oil: “This [the transition to renewable energy] is the responsibility incumbent on us, and its fulfillment could easily be couched in the familiar, voter-friendly language of American leadership, talent, and heroism.”  It’s true, it could be easily couched that way – but what seems to keep Harbach himself up at night are global warming doomsday scenarios, not American heroism. “Addicted to Oil” plays on these nightmares.  Perhaps it’s time that the NRDC and company did too.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

—Omar Khayyam

Harvey died on May 19th 2002, at 3:20 p.m. The cause of death was chronic lymphocytic leukemia/lymphoma. Death approached Harvey twice: once at the age of 34 when he was diagnosed with his first cancer, and after years of living under the shadow of a relapse, when he was over the fear, a second and final time 4 years ago. He met both with courage and grace. In these trials, he showed how a man so enthralled by life can be at peace with death. Harvey did not seek refuge in visions of heaven or a life after death. I only saw him waver once. When in 1996, our daughter Sheherzad developed a high fever and a severe asthmatic attack at the age of two, Harvey’s anxiety was palpable. After hours of taking turns in the Emergency Room, rocking and carrying her little body connected to the nebulizer, as she finally dozed off, he asked me to step outside. In the silence of a hot, still Chicago night, he said in a tormented voice, “If something happens to her I am going to kill myself because of the very remote chance that those fundamentalists are right and there is a life after death. I don’t want the little one to be alone”.

Truth is what mattered most to Harvey. He faced it and accepted it. When I would become upset by the intensely painful nature of his illness, Harvey was always calm and matter of fact, “It’s the luck of the draw, Az. Don’t distress yourself over it for a second”. It was an acceptance of the human condition with quiet composure. “We are all tested. But it is never in the way we prefer, nor at the time we expect.” W. B. Yeats was puzzled by the question:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of work.

Fortunately for Harvey, it was never a question of either or. For him, work was life. Once, towards the end, when I asked him to work less and maybe do other things that he did not have the time for before, his response was that such an act would make a mockery of everything he had stood for and done until that point in his life. Work was his deepest passion outside of the family. Three days before he died, Harvey had a lab meeting at home with more than 20 people in attendance, and he went over each individual’s scientific project with his signature genuine interest and boyish enthusiasm. Even as he clearly saw his own end approach, Harvey was hopeful that a better future awaits other unfortunate cancer victims through rigorous research.

Harvey grew up in Brooklyn and obtained his medical degree from the University of Rochester. He trained in Medicine at New York Hospitals, Cornell Medical Center, and in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute. At the time of his death, he was the Director of the Cancer Institute at Rush University in Chicago and the Principal Investigator of a ten million dollar grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to study and treat acute myeloid leukemias (AML), in addition to several other large grants which funded his research laboratory with approximately 25 scientists entirely devoted to basic and molecular research. He published extensively including more than 350 full-length papers in peer reviewed journals, 50 books and/or book chapters and approximately 400 abstracts.

Harvey loved football with a passion that was only matched by mine for poetry. He was exceedingly anti-social and worked actively to avoid company while I had a considerable social circle and was almost always surrounded by friends and extended family. If you saw the two of us going out to dinner, you would have been confused; I looked dressed for a dinner at the White House while Harvey could have been taking the trash out. We met in March 1977 and did not match in age (I was 24, he was 36), status (I was single and a fresh medical graduate waiting to start my Residency, he was married with three children and the Head of the Leukemia Service), or religion (I was a Shia Muslim, he came from an Orthodox Jewish family, and his grandfather was a Rabbi). Yet, we shared a core set of values that made us better friends than we had ever been with another soul.

Harvey liked to tell a story about his first scientific experiment. He was four years old, living in Brooklyn, and went to his backyard to urinate. To his surprise, a worm emerged from the little puddle. He promptly concluded that worms came from urine. In order to prove his hypothesis, he went back the next day and repeated the experiment. To his satisfaction, another worm appeared from the puddle just as before, providing reproducible proof that worms came from urine, a belief he steadfastly hung on to until he was nine years old. An interesting corollary is the explanation for this phenomenon provided by his then six year old daughter Sheherzad some years ago. As he gleefully recounted his experiment, she pointed out matter-of-factly, “Of course, Daddy, if there were worms living in your favorite peeing spot, they would have to float up because of the water you were throwing on them!

Harvey was an exceptionally gifted child whose IQ could not be measured by the standardized tests that were given to the Midwood High students in Brooklyn. He was experimenting with little chemistry sets, and making home-made rockets at 6 years of age, and had read so much in Biology and Physics that he was excused from attending these classes throughout high school. He decided to study cancer at 15 years of age as a result of an early hypothesis he developed concerning the etiology of cancer, and he never wavered from this goal until he died. Harvey worked with some of the best minds in his field, his mentors included Phil Leder, Paul Marks, Charlotte Friend, Sol Spiegleman and James Holland. Harvey started his career in cancer by conducting pure molecular and cellular research, for a time concentrating on leukemias in rats and mice, but decided that it was more important to study freshly obtained human tumor cells and conduct clinical research since man must remain the measure of all things. Accordingly, he served his patients with extraordinary dedication, consideration, respect and manifested a deep understanding for the unspeakable tragedies they and their families face once a diagnosis of cancer is given to them. Harvey exercised supreme wisdom in dealing with cancer patients as well as in trying to understand the nature of the malignant process. He not only succeeded in providing better treatment options to patients, he also devoted a lifetime to nourishing and training young and hopeful researchers, providing them with inspiration, selfless guidance and protection so they could achieve their potential in the competitive and combative academic world. As a result, he was emulated and cherished enormously as a leader, original thinker, and beloved mentor by countless young scientists and physicians. In acknowledgment of his tireless efforts to inspire and challenge young students, especially those belonging to minority communities, or coming from impoverished backgrounds, Harvey was given the Martin Luther King Junior Humanitarian Award by the Science and Math Excellence Network of Chicago in 2002. Unfortunately, he was too sick to receive it in person, nonetheless, he was greatly moved by this honor.

Harvey traveled extensively to see the works of great masters first hand. He returned to Florence, Milan and Rome on an annual basis for years to see some of his favorites; the statue of Moses; the Unfinished Statues by Michelangelo; the Sistine chapel. He would travel to Amsterdam to visit the Van Gogh Museum, and to Paris so he could show little Sheherzad his beloved Picassos. His three greatest heroes were Moses, Einstein and Freud, and his study in every home we shared (Buffalo, Cincinnati and Chicago) had beautiful framed pictures of all three. Harvey had a curious mind, and read constantly. His areas of interest ranged from Kafka and Borges to physics, astronomy, psychology, anthropology, history, evolutionary biology, complexity, fuzzy logic, chaos, paleoanthroplogy, the American Civil War, theology, politics, biographies, social sciences, to science fiction. His books number in thousands. The breadth of his encyclopedic knowledge in so many areas, combined with his ability to use it in a manner appropriate for the time or to the occasion often astonished and delighted those who had serious discussions with him.

From Mark (Harvey’s son from his first marriage):

Our Dad was not a sentimental man. He was the ever scientist. Emotions clouded reason…and if you cannot see reason you may as well be blind. But Dad did have a side few were lucky enough to see. While he was always practical… He truly was an emotional man. He stood up for his beliefs and he never backed down. One of those beliefs was that it was important to die with dignity. No complaints, despite all the pain. He didn’t want to be a burden to his children or his wife. He never was. Azra said it best: Taking care of him was an honor, never a burden. There’s a Marcus Aurelius quote he often spoke of: “ Death stared me in the face and I stared right back.” Dad, you certainly did.

More than anything our Father was a family man. He cherished us and we cherished him. He often thanked us for all the days and nights spent by his side, but I told him there was no need for thanks. None of us could have been anywhere else. He and I often discussed his illness. He once asked me why he should keep fighting…what good was there in it? I told him his illness had brought our family much closer together. He smiled and said he was glad something good came of it.

Azra, he adored you. He often told me it was love at first sight. You two shared a love that only exists in fairy tales. Dad could be unconscious but still manage a smile when you walked into the room. I have never seen anything like it and I feel privileged to have witnessed your devotion to each other. The way you took care of him is inspiring. You never left his side and you refused to let him give up. No one could have done anything more for him and he knew it. He was very lucky to find you.

While going through his wallet I was shocked to find a piece of paper folded up in the back. On it were two quotes written in his own pen. I’d like to share one with you. “There isn’t much more to say. I have had no joy, but a little satisfaction from this long ordeal. I have often wondered why I kept going. That, at least I have learned and I know it now at the end. There could be no hope, no reward. I always recognized that bitter truth. But I am a man and a man is responsible for himself.” (The words of George Gaylord Simpson). Our Father died Sunday, May 19th at 3:20 in the afternoon. His family lives on with a love and closeness that will make him proud. Pop, we love you. You were our best friend. We will miss you everyday.

And thus Harvey lived, and thus he died. Proud to the end.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe.

–John Donne