What Happened: November 29, 2021

The Big Story

Today’s Back Pages: The Language of Progress

The Rest

→The United States is not planning any new lockdowns as a result of the Omicron strain of the novel coronavirus, President Biden assured the public on Monday. While a number of other countries have instituted new shutdowns after the new variant was detected in Botswana in southern Africa, the United States is said to be focusing on “more widespread vaccinations, boosters, testing, and more,” Biden said, teasing a more detailed plan to be released Thursday. The new strain is still being studied, but Dr. Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who discovered it, said in an interview with a British news outlet that the cases she had observed so far are “extremely mild.”

→Talks reconvened Monday in Vienna between Tehran and the other signatories to the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Because the United States is no longer a party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) after Donald Trump exited the deal, American officials are now formally trying to negotiate their way back into the negotiations. “The U.S. has no other way for its return to the JCPOA but to remove all the sanctions imposed on the Iranian nation since it walked out of the JCPOA,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said. But U.S. officials have said they won’t lift the sanctions until Iran gets back into compliance with the terms of the 2015 deal. Meanwhile, the Israelis are reportedly sharing intelligence with the United States that shows Iran is getting ready to enrich uranium above the current 60% level—already far above the limit set by the 2015 deal—to the 90% purity level used for weapons production.

→Kevin Nishita, a retired police detective working as a security guard for a local TV news station in Oakland, was shot and killed during an attempted robbery while he was on location with a KRON 4 news crew covering a story about a robbery in downtown Oakland. Last month, a retired Oakland police captain, Ersie Joyner, was shot multiple times after three men tried to rob him while he was pumping gas at a Chevron station in the city. “This is the smallest the department has been in nearly 10 years, and it’s also the highest level of violence we’ve seen in nearly 10 years,” Oakland’s police chief said during a press conference in October.

→Using tear gas and batons and firing bird shot into the crowds, Iranian security forces attacked demonstrators in the central city of Isfahan who were protesting water shortages, according to witnesses and video taken at the protests. The police reported that they had arrested 67 people on Saturday. Similar protests by farmers in the region broke out in July. The water shortages appear to be caused by Iranian authorities diverting water away from the farms in Isfahan “toward industrial complexes in the desert province of Yazd and for drinking water to the religious city of Qom,” according to The New York Times.

→After being forced out as Donald Trump’s first national security advisor on trumped-up Russiagate-related charges—only to later be pardoned by Trump—retired general Michael Flynn was thought to have embraced the lurid and convoluted QAnon conspiracy movement. But in a new audio recording of a person purported to be Flynn released by one-time Trump lawyer Lin Wood amid a dispute between Wood and former Trump world allies, Flynn calls QAnon “a disinformation campaign that the CIA created” and describes it as “total nonsense.”

→A new law introduced by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison would use the threat of legal action to force internet platforms to disclose the identities of users who are accused of defamation. The law would require platforms to create complaint systems through which users could petition companies to take action if they feel that they’re being defamed or harassed—action that includes revealing the identity of the person against whom they’re making the complaint. “The online world should not be a Wild West where bots and bigots and trolls and others are anonymously going around and can harm people,” Morrison told reporters.
Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/28/22806369/australia-proposes-defamation-laws-unmask-trolls

→Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms can yield lasting benefits for people struggling with mental health issues, according to a study released in October by researchers from Virginia Tech and Virginia Commonwealth University. The researchers drew their conclusions by studying the impact that small doses of a psychoactive drug had on the brains of mice but cautioned that patients predisposed to psychotic symptoms could exacerbate their condition by taking psychedelics.

→That’s one way to deflect any criticism—just claim that it’s all an attack on “science.”

Lawmakers like Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have called for Dr. Fauci to step down and be prosecuted over the course of COVID-19. Fauci scoffs at such threats, calling it “noise.”

“They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/zLzceD2DHe

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 28, 2021

→The New York Mets agreed to a record-setting $130 million contract with the 37-year-old future Hall of Fame pitcher Max Scherzer on Monday. The deal comes out to roughly $43.33 million per year. The eight-time All-Star has won three Cy Youngs and just came off a season during which he finished third for the top pitching award. 
Read more: https://nypost.com/2021/11/29/mets-signing-max-scherzer-to-record-130-million-deal/

The Back Pages

backpages The Language of Progress

While the Twitter announcement has us thinking about the implications of information controls and free speech, here’s the rabbi and poet Zohar Atkins with a meditation republished from his Substack, “What Is Called Thinking,” on the question of language and progress.

Let’s assume there are some things you think have gotten better over time (e.g., dental care) and some things that have gotten worse (presence and attention-span). What are areas where you think progress/regress is the wrong frame? Can there be progress in philosophy, for example? Or is it the case that for the most elemental aspects of the human condition, “nothing is new under the sun”?

One area where I think progress is the wrong frame is “language.”

The progressive case for linguistic development is:

• Over time, languages gain more words and phrases.
• Languages blend and borrow from other languages.
• Longer linguistic histories make for deeper expression.
  

The conservative case for linguistic devolution is:

• The increase in words and phrases indicates alienation from the simplicity of the original.
• Hybridity of languages makes for more confusion.
• Our increased linguistic output tracks with a deflated quality of output: i.e., where are today’s Homers, Virgils, Dantes, and Shakespeares?

If the progressive case sees vitality in the new, the conservative case finds it in the old. The one seeks more words to express more things; the other sees the power of a few words to express a variety of things. The one seeks increasing clarity and distinction; the other celebrates polysemy, density, poetry.

Perhaps the view of linguistic progress or regress is a matter of temperament. Perhaps it is a question of what we hope language to “do.”

Yet language cannot be said to improve or decline in the same way that technology, science, politics, or morality are said to improve or decline. Why?

One possibility is that language, unlike these other arenas, is not an instrumental good, but an end in itself. Tools can get better; but language is not reducibly a tool. Sure, we use words to communicate. And yet, as Heidegger argues, the task of words is not simply to express the “content” in our minds. Words disclose our world. They are bridges between mortals and their dwelling place. A language cannot get better or worse. Only a world or a being-in-the-world can get better or worse. Words merely are.

And yet languages are symptoms of the world we inhabit. And so if you want to take a temperature check of your age, consult the language. We should expect the values of an age to be reflected in the aesthetics of its language. But does a better age mean a better language? Or does our obsession with making everything “better” not betray an inability to be thankful for those things which need no improvement? Perhaps it is language’s refusal to be improved—contra Ezra Pound’s claim that poets are the “janitors of language”—that allows us to experience something like the eternal. The right word is always available and always just out of reach. The wholest language is the broken one.