Maritime Manifestations

I came across a curious manifestation the other day.  I don’t know whether any scientific scholarship discussing said manifestation already exists, but if it does, I would like to take this moment to add to the existing scholarship by chronicling my experience.


The sand was cold but the water was calm; the sun was genial: the air as fragrant as new-mown hay. 


We were at Delray Beach sitting Indian style on a ragged pink quilt.  My girlfriend and I unpacked our BLTs and flavored drinks, chatting about fishy personifications and crime fighting grocers.

Within minutes of un-wrapping our sandwiches, seabirds alighted only a few feet from our quilt.  Trying to act disinterested in our food, or us for that matter, the birds pecked around at shells and other small objects in the sand.  But the more we ignored the nervous little foragers, the closer they shuffled.  And shuffle closer they did.

Soon we were surrounded; the seabirds prowled around us, like hungry hyenas, hastened strides hemming us in. 


Feeling a little anxious, I stood up to scare them away. As I leaned forward and flailed my arms a little, one aviated but the rest just took a few hops back, though did so indifferently, almost unphased.  

Two minutes later, the seagulls had slunk back while my girlfriend and I had been conversing.  Now a little annoyed, I jumped up again to scare them with my rubber arms but had to feign a predatory pounce before the impudent little white birds either took to the sky or bounced a few paces back. 

Similar strands of events went on every few minutes or so for the next 20 or 25 minutes, the seabirds shuffeling back little by little and me flailing my arms to and fro. 

But then, with two BLT sandwich halves to spare, the birds had given up.  Somehow, six or seven failed attempts to urge us into a feeding frenzy had convinced the birds that we didn't want to feed them. 


We didn't even finish one of the halves.  But the seabirds were gone. 

That was when all this "bird scaring" got me to thinking.


Was I actually scaring them, or were they thinking rationally, collecting observable evidence and concluding inductively?  Let me rephrase that.  Did the seabirds move because pangs of fear shook through their hollow bones, or did the birds move because they had concluded, after a thorough process of trial and error, that we would not relent? 


Or was their action a response to some distressing inward feeling?  Did I finally instill fear in the seabirds after "scaring" them away six or seven times?    

They never seemed scared.  The seagulls, as it were, moved in the interests of safety; they didn't give up right away.  Accordingly, was the discontinuance of their persistence actually an expression of foresight?  Did the seabirds expect that no food would be given no matter how insistent their urgings? 

This all amounts to these final questions: Do birds think rationally?  Can birds, like humans, make general conclusions by collecting observable evidence and then put those conclusions to use in particular situations, so as to not waste any more of their time pursuing something that they feel confident will amount to nothing? And, if not, why did the birds give up before the food was gone? 

Any takers? 

BOOK REVIEW

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

In one of his most recent publications The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Robert C. Allen, over the course of 11 chapters and two sections, argues that the high cost of labor and the abundance of coal in northern and western Britain provided the requisite circumstances for an industrial revolution.

His argument comes with some subtle niceties, like the importance of Britain’s "not too big" "not too small population," which he glosses over, but on the whole, he puts forth his argument clearly and in astute detail. 

In part one of this book, Allen demonstrates the medieval origins of the Industrial Revolution.  He posits that the Black Death freed up more and better grazing land for sheep, thereby fattening them and subsequently lengthening their undercoats.  Britain’s then mercantilist approach to economics resulted in the placement of a heavy tax on wool exports.  This tax helped guarantee that Britons would reap the then greater rewards of selling finished product.  Accordingly, the emergence of long-haired sheep in Britain led to a lucrative textile trade between Britons and their continental counterparts.

Once the textile industry took off, Britons had reason to move to London.  Emigration from the countryside, to work in the textile business, raised the nation’s level of urbanization.  And greater urbanization meant greater demand for produce, finally goading farmers to improve their age-old practices and innovate on the land. 

At this point, Londoners were making more than subsistence, and this demographic could afford luxury goods now. Creating a market for new goods, clocks, tobacco, sugar, etc., British affluence had prompted a consumer revolution.

Yeomen who wanted to participate in this consumer revolution were faced with two options: give up and move to the city or improve agricultural yields.  Many chose the former, but some stuck it out.  And those farmers who did endure accomplished improvements in yield by reducing labor or increasing the productivity of the land. 

Eventually, not only Londoners but everyone in Britain was earning more than mere subsistence, and participation in the consumer revolution, further fueled by raw materials and finished products flowing out of colonial acquisitions, exploded.

  Then in part two, Allen explains that the high cost of labor and the proliferation of coal in Britain made it profitable to undertake R&D, which sought to eliminate labor, usually replacing it with coal. 

From the R&D stage, Britain then moved to another phase, in industrial innovation, that Allen calls “local learning.”  “Local learning,” a process where inventions were improved by the sharing of innovations among the members of communities across Great Britain, eventually improved technology invented by high dollar R&D projects with low dollar daily business operations.

 In the end, Allen explains, the technology invented to circumvent British economic biases was improved past a “tipping point” in which the technology was so improved that its implementation was made profitable on the continent and overseas.

BOOK REVIEW

The Whig Interpretation Of History

In The Whig Interpretation Of History, Herbert Butterfield contends that the “Whig” interpretation of history does not reflect the evidence of the past.  He demonstrates this failure, seeking, through foil, to explain how amateur and professional historians should approach the evidence of the past.

Butterfield observes that, presumably at least up unto the time of his exposition, historians have been adhering to malicious tenets, and his aim is to highlight them, showing his reader what history is by making it clear what history is not. 

He pursues his aim in five chapters, “The Underlying Assumption,” “The Historical Process,” “History and Judgments of Value,” “The Art of The Historian,” and “Moral Judgments in History,” each of which focuses on a different problem with the “Whig” interpretation of history.

In these divisions, Butterfield sets about his diatribe. He begins by chastising his peers and predecessors for fashioning a present minded interpretation of history.  He argues that too many historians have written their histories from the viewpoint that the present day represents the absolute, constructing a story of protagonists and antagonists in some over-arching narrative of progress. On page 29 he writes,

But it is the thesis of this essay that when we organise our general history by reference to the present we are producing what is really a gigantic optical illusion; and that a great number of the matters in which history is often made to speak with most certain voice, are not inferences made from the past but are inferences made from a particular series of abstractions from the past—abstractions which by the very principle of their origin beg the very questions that the historian is pretending to answer.

This quote alludes to his next point, that history interpreted with a focus on the present confuses the audience, leaving them with a false sense of causal relationship between events and people.  On page 47 he writes, “History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.”  In other words, there really is no true narrative.  Ultimately he deems this interpretation of history as a means to an end.  He postulates that perhaps it arose to deal with the difficult question of how to abridge history. 

Highlighting the problem with the “Whig” belief that historians are seers, Butterfield treads deeper into his phillipic.  Here, he argues that historians are valuable not as fortune-tellers or prognosticators but as mediators. Butterfield believes that history is too intricate to be predicted.  He thinks that a historian should first seek to understand the evidence of the past and then, appealing to an argot familiar to his contemporaries, seek to explain it.  He thinks that a historian needs to immerse himself or herself in the world of the people he studies. Furthermore, he argues that the debunking of post hoc misconceptions further adds to the value of careful historical research.  And he illustrates this point with a short discourse about Martin Luther and the Reformation.

 In the second to last subdivision of his book, “The Art of The Historian,” Butterfield explains that a historian should, above all else, seek to understand the people he writes about.  A historian should want to know why a certain person thinks what they think or believes what they believe.  On page 96 he says, “But the true historical fervour is the love of the past for the sake of the past.”

He then goes on to give what he considers the proper paradigm for abridging history.  On page 103 he says, “It is not the selection of facts in accordance with some abstract principle….It is the selection of facts for the purpose of maintaining the impression—maintaining, in spite of omissions, the inner relations of the whole.”

Concluding his treatise, Butterfield denounces all moral judgments in historical writing.  He goes about this with an all out assault against Lord Acton and his adherence to maintaining the moral integrity of history.  Ultimately, according to Butterfield, it is not the historian’s job to decide who is right and who is wrong but rather to understand.

            Butterfield’s work is linear.  So linear that if a reader puts down his book to cook a potato, he won’t know what Butterfield is talking about when he gets back.  In the twenty-first century, non-linear media is everywhere and thus this book may be difficult for the modern student to fully comprehend without excessive re-reading.  In sum, his exegesis is astute but at times, due largely to his excessive use of pronouns, unclear and difficult to follow.