What Is Math?

A teenager asked that age-old question, creating a thoughtful scientific debate

By Dan Falk of SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 8:00AM

It all started with a post by a high school student named Gracie Cunningham. Applying make-up while speaking into the camera, the teenager questioned whether math is “real.” She added: “I know it’s real, because we all learn it in school… but who came up with this concept?” Pythagoras, she muses, “didn’t even have plumbing—and he was like, ‘Let me worry about y = mx + b’”—referring to the equation describing a straight line on a two-dimensional plane. She wondered where it all came from. “I get addition,” she said, “but how would you come up with the concept of algebra? What would you need it for?”

Someone re-posted the video to Twitter, where it soon went viral. Many of the comments were unkind: one cretin said it was the “dumbest video” they had ever seen; others suggested it was indicative of a failed education system. Others, meanwhile, came to Cunningham’s defense, saying that her questions were actually rather profound.

Mathematicians from Cornell and from the University of Wisconsin weighed in, as did philosopher Philip Goff of Durham University in the U.K. Mathematician Eugenia Cheng, currently the scientist-in-residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, wrote a two-page reply and said Cunningham had raised profound questions about the nature of mathematics “in a very deeply probing way.”

Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real?

Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered—a position known as Platonism. It takes its name from the ancient Greek thinker Plato, who imagined that mathematical truths inhabit a world of their own—not a physical world, but rather a non-physical realm of unchanging perfection; a realm that exists outside of space and time. Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist. In The Emperor’s New Mind, he wrote that there appears “to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth—a truth which has a reality of its own…”

Many mathematicians seem to support this view. The things they’ve discovered over the centuries—that there is no highest prime number; that the square root of two is an irrational number; that the number pi, when expressed as a decimal, goes on forever—seem to be eternal truths, independent of the minds that found them. If we were to one day encounter intelligent aliens from another galaxy, they would not share our language or culture, but, the Platonist would argue, they might very well have made these same mathematical discoveries.

“I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. “Working mathematicians overwhelmingly are Platonists. They don’t always call themselves Platonists, but if you ask them relevant questions, it’s always the Platonistic answer that they give you.”

Other scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all?

Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York, was initially attracted to Platonism—but has since come to see it as problematic. If something doesn’t have a physical existence, he asks, then what kind of existence could it possibly have? “If one ‘goes Platonic’ with math,” writes Pigliucci, empiricism “goes out the window.” (If the proof of the Pythagorean theorem exists outside of space and time, why not the “golden rule,” or even the divinity of Jesus Christ?)

The Platonist must confront further challenges: If mathematical objects exist outside of space and time, how is it that we can know anything about them? Brown doesn’t have the answer, but he suggests that we grasp the truth of mathematical statements “with the mind’s eye”—in a similar fashion, perhaps, to the way that scientists like Galileo and Einstein intuited physical truths via “thought experiments,” before actual experiments could settle the matter. Consider a famous thought experiment dreamed up by Galileo, to determine whether a heavy object falls faster than a lighter one. Just by thinking about it, Galileo was able to deduce that heavy and light objects must fall at the same rate. The trick was to imagine the two objects tethered together: Does the heavy one tug on the lighter one, to make the lighter one fall faster? Or does the lighter one act as a “brake” to slow the heavier one? The only solution that makes sense, Galileo reasoned, is that objects fall at the same rate regardless of their weight. In a similar fashion, mathematicians can prove that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, or that there is no largest prime number—and they don’t need physical triangles or pebbles for counting to make the case, just a nimble brain.

Meanwhile, notes Brown, we shouldn’t be too shocked by the idea of abstractions, because we’re used to using them in other areas of inquiry. “I’m quite convinced there are abstract entities, and they are just not physical,” says Brown. “And I think you need abstract entities in order to make sense of a ton of stuff—not only mathematics, but linguistics, ethics—probably all sorts of things.”

Platonism has various alternatives. One popular view is that mathematics is merely a set of rules, built up from a set of initial assumptions—what mathematicians call axioms. Once the axioms are in place, a vast array of logical deductions follow, though many of these can be fiendishly difficult to find. In this view, mathematics seems much more like an invention than a discovery; at the very least, it seems like a much more human-centric endeavor. An extreme version of this view would reduce math to something like the game of chess: We write down the rules of chess, and from those rules various strategies and consequences follow, but we wouldn’t expect those Andromedans to find chess particularly meaningful.

But this view has its own problems. If mathematics is just something we dream up from within our own heads, why should it “fit” so well with what we observe in nature? Why should a chain reaction in nuclear physics, or population growth in biology, follow an exponential curve? Why are the orbits of the planets shaped like ellipses? Why does the Fibonacci sequence turn up in the patterns seen in sunflowers, snails, hurricanes, and spiral galaxies? Why, in a nutshell, has mathematics proven so staggeringly useful in describing the physical world? Theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner highlighted this issue in a famous 1960 essay titled, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner concluded that the usefulness of mathematics in tackling problems in physics “is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

However, a number of modern thinkers believe they have an answer to Wigner’s dilemma. Although mathematics can be seen as a series of deductions that stem from a small set of axioms, those axioms were not chosen on a whim, they argue. Rather, they were chosen for the very reason that they do seem to have something to do with the physical world. As Pigliucci puts it: “The best answer that I can provide [to Wigner’s question] is that this ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ is actually very reasonable, because mathematics is in fact tethered to the real world, and has been, from the beginning.”

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France, points to the example of Euclidean geometry—the geometry of flat space that many of us learned in high school. (Students who learn that an equilateral triangle has three angles of 60 degrees each, or that the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right-triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse—i.e. the Pythagorean theorem—are doing Euclidean geometry.) A Platonist might argue that the findings of Euclidean geometry “feel” universal—but they are no such thing, Rovelli says. “It’s only because we happen to live in a place that happens to be strangely flat that we came up with this idea of Euclidean geometry as a ‘natural thing’ that everyone should do,” he says. “If the earth had been a little bit smaller, so that we saw the curvature of the earth, we would have never developed Euclidean geometry. Remember ‘geometry’ means ‘measurement of the earth’, and the earth is round. We would have developed spherical geometry instead.”

Rovelli goes further, calling into question the universality of the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4… To most of us, and certainly to a Platonist, the natural numbers seem, well, natural. Were we to meet those intelligent aliens, they would know exactly what we meant when we said that 2 + 2 = 4 (once the statement was translated into their language). Not so fast, says Rovelli. Counting “only exists where you have stones, trees, people—individual, countable things,” he says. “Why should that be any more fundamental than, say, the mathematics of fluids?” If intelligent creatures were found living within, say, the clouds of Jupiter’s atmosphere, they might have no intuition at all for counting, or for the natural numbers, Rovelli says. Presumably we could teach them about natural numbers—just like we could teach them the rules of chess—but if Rovelli is right, it suggests this branch of mathematics is not as universal as the Platonists imagine.

Like Pigliucci, Rovelli believes that math “works” because we crafted it for its usefulness. “It’s like asking why a hammer works so well for hitting nails,” he says. “It’s because we made it for that purpose.”

In fact, says Rovelli, Wigner’s claim that mathematics is spectacularly useful for doing science doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. He argues that many discoveries made by mathematicians are of hardly any relevance to scientists. “There is a huge amount of mathematics which is extremely beautiful to mathematicians, but completely useless for science,” he says. “And there are a lot of scientific problems—like turbulence, for example—that everyone would like to find some useful mathematics for, but we haven’t found it.”

Mary Leng, a philosopher at the University of York, in the U.K., holds a related view. She describes herself as a “fictionalist” – she sees mathematical objects as useful fictions, akin to the characters in a story or a novel. “In a sense, they’re creatures of our creation, like Sherlock Holmes is.”

But there’s a key difference between the work of a mathematician and the work of a novelist: Mathematics has its roots in notions like geometry and measurement, which are very much tied to the physical world. True, some of the things that today’s mathematicians discover are esoteric in the extreme, but in the end, math and science are closely allied pursuits, Leng says. “Because [math] is invented as a tool to help with the sciences, it’s less of a surprise that it is, in fact, useful in the sciences.”

Given that these questions about the nature of mathematics have been the subject of often heated debate for some 2,300 years, it’s unlikely they’ll go away anytime soon. No surprise, then, that high school students like Cunningham might pause to consider them as well, as they ponder Pythagorean theorem, the geometry of triangles, and the equations that describe lines and curves. The questions she posed in her video were not silly at all, but quite astute: mathematicians and philosophers have been asking the same imponderables for thousands of years.

Rumble Viral This mother told her 3-year-old that she ate all of his candy and here was his ADORABLE response! Source & embed code: https://rumble.com/v8f4ez-i-told-my-3…. For licensing, please email licensing@rumble.com.

“The most important thing is that you keep practicing ceaselessly. A thousand scriptures cannot be more valuable than the single-minded desire to practice ceaselessly day in and day out. ⠀⠀This, you alone can choose to prioritize. Scriptures can only inspire you, by promising you that it is worth your every effort, your every struggle, your every dark night of the soul. ⠀⠀

Persevere, my friends. Become a top athlete in the world of sincere self-inquiry, offering everything you think and do to the One Infinite Creator. Soon the illusory dividing line between your sense of self and your true formless and eternal Self will fade. This is the regaining of your original freedom. ⠀⠀

But be patient. Be sincere about it. It’s the dedication of a lifetime of moments, not just a couple of weeks of moments. Even the uncompleted arduous road of ceaseless practice, when sincerely taken, is more blissful and rich in God-Essence than a life lived randomly banging about in the illusory enjoyment of sense objects. ⠀⠀

Be proud of yourself without pride, for undertaking this journey. Love yourself without puffing up your ego. Be kind to yourself and lighten up, without losing focus on what matters. God is what you are already. Practice realizing this. ⠀⠀

Even a single sincere effort to know God directly—not through symbols—is never in vain; while a million insincere motions made in mind and world are lost forever without any merit for your soul to stand on whatsoever.”

— Bentinho Massaro

A Conversation Between C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Pollin

VIA VERSO BOOKSBy C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Pollin 

September 22, 2020 (lithub.com)

The following conversation is from Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin’s new book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. The authors are interviewed throughout by economist C.J. Polychroniou.

C.J. Polychroniou: The 2015 UN climate agreement signed in Paris, popularly known as the COP21 agreement, has been hailed by world leaders (with the exception of Donald Trump) as a huge diplomatic success, but it has been rightly criticized by environmentalists and others for lacking any teeth. There’s indeed nothing mandatory in the Paris Agreement. Noam, why is it so difficult to check climate change?

NC: Looking beyond COP21, there is a great deal to say about why checking climate change is so difficult. But as to why the limited Paris Agreement has no teeth, the answer is clear enough.

The original goal was to establish a treaty with binding commitments. Laurent Fabius, the summit’s president, reiterated that goal strongly. But there was a barrier: the US Republican Party, which controlled Congress, would not accept any meaningful arrangements.

The Republican leadership was admirably frank about its intention to undermine the Paris Agreement. One reason, hardly concealed, is that the Republican wrecking ball must smash anything done by the hated Obama; that goal was put plainly by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when Obama was elected. Another reason is the principled opposition to any external constraints on US power.

But the immediate decision follows directly from the Party leadership’s uniform rejection of any efforts to confront the looming environmental crisis—a stand traceable in large part to the historic service of the Party to private wealth and corporate power, accelerated during the neoliberal years.

Following carefully worked-out Republican plans, McConnell informed foreign embassies that, according to sources reported in Politico, “Republicans intend to fight Obama’s climate agenda at every turn.” He also made it clear that any agreement that reached the GOP-controlled Senate would be “dead on arrival.”

“There is ‘no chance’ that such an agreement could clear the two-thirds hurdle, one Republican energy lobbyist said. ‘There are few certainties in life, but that is one of them.’”

Republicans also made it clear that they would “block Obama’s pledge to provide billions of dollars to help poor countries adapt to the effects of a warming planet,” and would sabotage other efforts to deal with global warming. “They are becoming the party of climate super-villains,” as one commentator put it succinctly.

It’s important to recognize the nature of this organization. For anyone who did not yet understand, it was made crystal clear during the 2016 Republican primaries, featuring political figures who were hailed as the cream of the crop—apart from the interloper who walked off with the prize to the dismay of the Republican establishment. Every single candidate either denied that what is happening is happening, or said maybe it is but it doesn’t matter (the latter message came from the “moderates,” former governor Jeb Bush and Ohio governor John Kasich).

“The Koch brothers launched huge campaigns to ensure that nothing would be done to impede the exploitation of the fossil fuels on which their fortune rests.”

Kasich was considered the most serious and sober of the candidates. He did break ranks by recognizing the basic facts, but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” That’s 100 percent support for destroying the prospects for organized human life, with the most respected figure taking the most grotesque stand. Amazingly, this astonishing spectacle passed with virtually no comment (if any) within the mainstream, a fact of no little import in itself.

It’s of some interest to see how this remarkable situation came to pass. There are general reasons (there is no space to go into those here), but also quite specific—and revealing—ones. A decade ago the Republican organization, while already well off the normal spectrum of parliamentary politics, was not firmly dedicated to denying what the leadership knows to be true. How this changed provides some insight into contemporary politics, under the impact of the most dedicated and reactionary elements of the highly class-conscious business world.

A glimpse into this world was provided after the death of David Koch in August 2019. This happened to coincide with the appearance of a major in-depth study of the Koch empire and corporate America by Christopher Leonard, who discussed some of his discoveries in articles and interviews. Leonard describes David Koch as the “ultimate denier,” whose rejection of anthropogenic global warming was deep and sincere.

Let us put aside suspicions that this might have something to do with the fact that he had an immense fortune at stake in this denialism, perhaps trillions of dollars of potential losses over a period of 30 years or more if denialism were to fail, Leonard estimates. Let’s nevertheless suspend disbelief and accept that the convictions were entirely sincere.

That would come as little surprise. John C. Calhoun, the grand ideologist of slavery, was no doubt sincere in believing that the vicious slave labor camps of the South were the necessary foundation for a higher civilization. And there are other examples, which, out of politeness, I will not mention.

The Koch brothers’ denialism went vastly beyond mere efforts to convince. They launched huge campaigns to ensure that nothing would be done to impede the exploitation of the fossil fuels on which their fortune rests. As Leonard recounts, “David Koch worked tirelessly, over decades, to jettison from office any moderate Republicans who proposed to regulate greenhouse gases.”

But the efforts did not entirely succeed. In 2009–10, the Republicans were flirting with reality, coming close to supporting a market-based cap-and-trade plan for green-house gas emissions. John McCain ran for president on the Republican ticket in 2008 warning about climate change. With the help of Mike Pence and others like him, the Koch juggernaut was able to derail the heresy, ridding the Party of moderates who might not toe the line on denialism and twisting the arms of the recalcitrant with a combination of public vilification and private funding. The consequences of which we now see before us. The lessons about “really existing democracy” as well.

The Koch network, Leonard writes, “has tried to build a Republican Party in its image: one that not only refuses to consider action on climate change but continues to deny that the problem is real.” With impressive success.

The juggernaut is indeed impressive. No stone was left unturned: networks of rich donors, discourse-shifting think tanks, one of the largest lobbying groups in the country, the organization of what can pose as grassroots groups to ring doorbells, pretty much creating and shaping the Tea Party. And it had many other goals as well, such as undermining labor rights, destroying unions, and blocking government policies that might help people: what’s called “libertarianism” in US usage.

The Koch brothers’ juggernaut stands out in its careful planning and successful use of the immense profits it has gained from polluting the global atmosphere without cost—a mere “externality,” in the terminology of the trade. But it is symbolic of the savage capitalism that is becoming more and more evident as the neoliberal project that has served private wealth and corporate power so well comes under threat.

Both political parties have drifted right during the neoliberal years, much as in Europe. The Democratic establishment is now more or less what would have been called “moderate Republicans” some years ago. The Republicans have mostly gone off the spectrum. Comparative studies show that they rank alongside fringe right-wing parties in Europe in their general positions. They are, furthermore, the only major conservative party to reject anthropogenic climate change, as already mentioned: a global anomaly.“Why are populations so willing to look the other way when survival of organized human life is literally at stake?”

The positions of the leadership on climate surely influence the attitudes of Party loyalists. Only about 25 percent of Republicans (36 percent of the savvier millennials) recognize that humans are responsible for global warming. Shocking figures. And in the ranking of high-priority issues among Republicans, global warming (if it is even assumed to be taking place), remains low and unchanged into the election year.

It might be considered outrageous to assert that today’s Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. Perhaps so, but in the light of the stakes, what else can one rationally conclude?

Even apart from Republican obstructionism, it is unlikely that the US would have accepted binding commitments at Paris. The US rarely ratifies international conventions, and when it does, it is typically with reservations that exclude the US. That’s true even of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US after 40 years but excluding the US, which retains the right to commit genocide. There are many other examples.

Returning to COP21, the immediate reason for the lack of teeth is the Republican Party, but the chances that the US would have agreed to binding commitments were slim even without the obstructionism of the most dangerous organization in world history.

In the background of this obstructionism is a lingering question, the one raised by Alon Tal: Why is it so hard for governments to confront this crisis realistically? And still deeper in the background: Why are populations so willing to look the other way when survival of organized human life is literally at stake?

One answer was given by a participant in the remarkable Yellow Vest uprising in France. The immediate cause of the uprising was President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal in 2018 to raise fuel taxes with alleged environmental concerns, a move that would hit the poor and working people in rural areas particularly hard. But the background to the protests, more broadly, was the whole range of Macron “reforms” that benefited the rich while harming poor and working people.

The participant, perhaps a committed environmentalist himself as many were, said that you are talking about “the end of the world” but we are concerned with “the end of the month.” How are we to survive your “reforms”?

A fair question, which quickly became the slogan of the grassroots demonstrations sweeping Paris and much of the rest of the country. And a question that cannot be overlooked by the environmental movement.

Global warming has an abstract feel. Who understands the difference between 1.5oC and 2oC (2.7oF and 3.6oF respectively)—in contrast to having food to put on the table for your children tomorrow? True, there are more storms, heat waves, other disturbances today—but others doubtless can conjure up something like my own personal experience.

I’ve lived through many hurricanes in Massachusetts, but none as fierce as those almost 70 years ago. So maybe Trump is right when he says the climate always changes—sometimes it’s warmer, sometimes colder? It’s easy to fall into that trap when your prime concern is putting food on the table tomorrow.

And why follow President Carter’s gloomy prescription of turning down the thermostat and putting on a heavy sweater, and in general cutting back on our lifestyle while billions of Chinese and Indians—so we hear on Fox News—are pouring pollutants into the atmosphere with abandon?

Or consider the mineworker in West Virginia who was cheering at a Bernie Sanders rally until Sanders said that for any chance at decent survival, we must stop producing coal. No applause for that line. That would mean losing his job, and there’s not much attraction in an alternative in the growing service industries or installing solar panels, which, other reasons aside, would mean losing his pension and health care, which were won in hard union struggles and are tied to employment. Lose your job, and you lose not only personal dignity but also the means of survival.

Here we come up against a fateful decision by US labor in the 1950s: to choose class collaboration, making deals with corporate management for wages and benefits while abandoning control of the workplace and broader social reforms. That decision by US labor leaders contrasted with the choice by the very same unions in Canada to fight for health care for the whole population, not just ourselves.

The results are quite visible. Canada has a functioning health care system while the US is burdened by an international scandal, with costs about double those of comparable countries and relatively poor outcomes, thanks in no small part to the inefficiency, bureaucratization, and profit-seeking of the largely privatized US system.

By choosing class collaboration, US labor leaders left that mineworker and others like him at the mercy of the corporate owners, who were free to cancel the bargain. Which is what they have done, quite dramatically since the dawning of the neoliberal years. In 1978, UAW president Doug Fraser finally recognized that the business classes never abandon class war, even if labor leaders agree to do so.

Fraser criticized the “leaders of the business community” for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and for having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.”

Hardly a surprise, particularly in the US with its highly class-conscious business community and bitter history of violent suppression of labor, unusual in the developed world.

There followed years of neoliberal globalization designed in the interests of investors and the ownership class at the expense of American workers, alongside the neoliberal “reforms” guided by the same fundamental imperatives. The results should be well known. Wealth concentrated sharply, with the obvious consequences for functioning democracy, while real wages stagnated. Workers now have about the same purchasing power as they did 40 years ago.“Revival of the labor movement is an essential task for many reasons. One is the environmental crisis.”

Unions came under bitter attack during the extreme anti-labor Reagan administration, a process carried forward under his successors. Demolition of the labor movement is a major achievement of neoliberal policies, following the Thatcherite doctrine that there is no society, only individuals, isolated creatures who face market discipline on their own, unorganized. That has been a core principle of neoliberalism going back to its Austrian origins in the 1920s.

It’s why the far-right “libertarian” guru, Ludwig von Mises, in the interest of preserving “sound economics” from interference, enthusiastically welcomed the crushing of the vibrant Austrian labor movement and social democracy by state violence in 1928, laying the groundwork for Austrian fascism; and in his major work, Liberalism, he praised fascism for saving European civilization.

To be sure, the atomization principle holds only for what Thorstein Veblen called “the underlying population.” Those who matter, private wealth and corporate power, are highly organized in pursuit of their class goals, manipulating state power in their interests while the rest become “a sack of potatoes,” to borrow Marx’s phrase in his condemnation of the autocratic regimes of his day. The sack of potatoes, unorganized and increasingly consigned to precarious work and lives, are much more easily controlled.

Returning to the mineworker and many others like him, it is not hard to discern good reasons why they should resonate to the Yellow Vest slogan and resist the mass mobilization that is essential if we are to overcome the environmental crisis.

For organizers and activists, all of this provides important lessons. Revival of the labor movement is an essential task for many reasons. One is the environmental crisis. If the sack of potatoes becomes organized, active, and committed, it could become a leading force in the environmental movement. These are, after all, the people whose lives and future are at stake. It’s not an idle dream.

In the 1920s, the vigorous US labor movement had been crushed by state and business oppression, often through direct violence. The title of labor historian David Montgomery’s classic The Fall of the House of Labor refers to that period. But a few years later, a lively and militant labor movement rose from the ashes and spear-headed the New Deal reforms that have greatly improved the lives of Americans through the great postwar growth period, before falling victim to the neoliberal assault. It’s worth remembering that Bernie Sanders’s revolution would not much have surprised Dwight Eisenhower, an outspoken supporter of New Deal measures.

It might be worth recalling the attitudes of the last conservative president, just to see how far we have come in the neoliberal age. Eisenhower declared:

I have no use for those—regardless of their political party—who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass . . . Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice . . . Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are . . . a few . . . Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

They were in fact far from stupid. They were well-organized, committed, and waiting for the opportunity to show that “you can do these things,” the basic thrust of the neoliberal age.

The revival of the labor movement in the 1930s is an important precedent, but there are more recent ones. It’s well to remember that one of the first and most prominent environmentalists was a union leader, Tony Mazzocchi, head of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW). The members of his union were right on the front line, facing destruction of the environment every day at work, and were the direct victims of the corporate assault on individual lives.

Under Mazzocchi’s leadership, the OCAW was the driving force behind the establishment in 1970 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), protecting workers on the job, signed by the last liberal American president, Richard Nixon—“liberal” in the US sense, meaning mildly social democratic.

Mazzocchi was a harsh critic of capitalism as well as a committed environmentalist. He held that workers should “control the plant environment” while also taking the lead in combating industrial pollution.

By 1980, when it was clear that the Democrats had abandoned working people to their class enemy, Mazzocchi began to advocate for a union-based Labor Party. That initiative made considerable progress in the 1990s but couldn’t survive the decline of the labor movement under severe business-government attack, reminiscent of the 1920s.

The project could be revived, just as it has been in the past. Recent militant action in the growing service industries might be a harbinger of things to come, along with the impressive strikes by teachers in the red states, aimed not just at overcoming their miserable wages but more importantly at improving the woefully underfunded public school system—another target of the neoliberal assault on society. The path that Mazzocchi tried to forge—militant labor as a driving force of the environmental movement—is not an idle dream and should be actively pursued. 1 23FULL PAGE>>

C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Pollin

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona. Author of American Power and the New Mandarins and Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), among many other books, he is a linguist, historian, philosopher, and cognitive scientist who has risen to prominence in the American consciousness as a political activist and the nation’s foremost public intellectual.

Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is also the founder and President of PEAR (Pollin Energy and Retrofits), an Amherst, MA-based green energy company operating throughout the United States. His books include The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (co-authored 1998); Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (2003); An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for South Africa (co-authored 2007); A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (co-authored 2008), Back to Full Employment (2012), Greening the Global Economy (2015), and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal (co-authored 2020).

C J Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist who has has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. He is the author of Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky on Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (Haymarket Books, USA; Penguin Books, UK).

September 22, 2020 • TheOnion.com

Aries | March 21 to April 19

For centuries, fire was a sacred symbol of vitality and strength. Keep this in mind as you roll around frantically on your kitchen floor this Thursday.

Taurus | April 20 to May 20

The fruits of your labor will finally ripen this week before going soft and filling with mold two days later.

Gemini | May 21 to June 20

It may take more muscles to smile than it does to frown, but with 90% of your body completely paralyzed, even frowning would be a worthwhile workout.

Cancer | June 21 to July 22

Your imagination is the limit! Try visualizing what your future would look like as head garbageman!

Leo | July 23 to Aug. 22

The explosion of a blood vessel beneath your brain’s memory center will soon give you the fresh start you’ve been searching for.

Virgo | Aug. 23 to Sept. 22

A thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters will finally produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, only to dismiss them as inferior to the oeuvre of Christopher Marlowe, or even Francis Bacon at his height. 

Libra | Sept. 23 to Oct. 22

Don’t be surprised this week if someone strangles you with a length of piano wire as you read about your future.

Scorpio | Oct. 23 to Nov. 21

When life gives you lemons, why not blame them on your troubled upbringing and consequent inability to show affection? It sure beats making lemonade.

Sagittarius | Nov. 22 to Dec. 21

Don’t listen to what others may be saying about your highly unstable nature and crippling psychosis. After all, most of those voices exist only in your head.

Capricorn | Dec. 22 to Jan. 19

You will once again dress up as an emotionally stunted man-child for Halloween this year.

Aquarius | Jan. 20 to Feb. 18

Nobody said that it was going to be easy, or fun, or even practical. But then nobody really said much about your desire to take up differential calculus.

Pisces | Feb. 19 to March 20

The stars think it’s time you stopped skirting around the issue and finally told your cat how you really feel.

MIT Video Productions Howard Zinn (1922-2010) offers a talk at MIT titled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” on March 14, 2005. He is the inaugural lecturer in the series “Myths About America” organized by MIT’s Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS), which is hosted at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He is introduced by Bish Sanyal, director of the SPURS/Hubert Humphrey Program. Howard Zinn is renowned as the author of “A People’s History of the United States” (1980). Historian, playwright and self-described democratic socialist, Zinn was chair of the history and social sciences department at Superman College, and political science professor at Boston University. Please visit the MIT Infinite History site: https://infinitehistory.mit.edu Please Subscribe! http://www.youtube.com/c/MITVideoProd…

Wolf Conservation Center Why get up when you can howl lying down? Alawa (front and lazy) and Zephyr are captive-born gray wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC), a 501c3 non-profit organization, in South Salem, NY. They are two of the three ‘ambassador wolves’ at the WCC that help teach the public about wolves and their vital role in the environment. If you want to watch Zephyr, Alawa, or Nikai or the WCC’s critically endangered Mexican gray wolves or red wolves in live time, visit our live wolf webcams at http://www.nywolf.org/webcams. If you see something cool, let us know! For more information about wolves and the WCC’s participation in wolf recovery, please visit our website at www.nywolf.org and follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/nywolforg) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/nywolforg), and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/wolfconserv…)

As Trump’s fearmongering, demonization, and threats of violence have invited comparisons to Hitler’s rise, historian Peter Fritzsche separates fact from exaggeration.

BY JOE HAGAN AND EMILY JANE FOX SEPTEMBER 18, 2020 (vanityfair.com)

This week Inside the Hive welcomes historian Peter Fritzsche, author of Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, to help separate fact from exaggeration on the increasingly pressing question of how much Donald Trump’s GOP resembles the Nazis of the early 1930s. As Trump attacks democratic norms and undermines the electoral process, and Attorney General William Barr stokes fear of “a socialist path” if Trump loses, historians are hearing distressing echoes of Adolph Hitler’s rise, from the fearmongering demonization of the left to the threats of street violence and military force against enemies both real and imagined. One difference: “A white ethnic America is much more important in Trump’s campaign than the vision of an Aryanized Germany was in Hitler’s electoral campaigns,” says Fritzsche. The MAGA conception of America, he adds, “means there are villains who have undone America, but now there are the virtuous who can remake America and ‘make it great again.’ I call it ‘muscular melodramatic populism’”—the same phenomenon that brought Hitler to power. 

09.21.20 (Wired.com)

A century-old TB shot could protect against Covid-19, Russia sells its vaccine to more than 10 countries, and the common cold strains testing and supplies. Here’s what you should know:Headlines A century-old TB vaccine shows some promise for fending off Covid-19 Research has found that an old tuberculosis vaccine for newborns protected people over 65 against viral respiratory infections. Some scientists say this suggests that the shot creates a “trained” innate immune response that rewires the immune system to ward off multiple diseases. Now there’s hope that this vaccine could also protect against Covid-19, and there are at least 20 randomized clinical trials underway. Russia sells its controversial Covid-19 vaccine to more than 10 countries Russia has struck deals to sell its Covid-19 vaccine to more than 10 countries including Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India, and is in talks with roughly 10 other countries. The shot was approved by Russian authorities in August after small-scale tests on just 76 volunteers had been completed. It began trials on 40,000 volunteers late last month. It will be manufactured and distributed as soon as November, though it will require local regulatory approval before distribution.

Greta Thunberg|TEDxStockholm November 2018

The disarming case to act right now on climate change

In this passionate call to action, 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg explains why, in August 2018, she walked out of school and organized a strike to raise awareness of global warming, protesting outside the Swedish parliament and grabbing the world’s attention. “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions,” Thunberg says. “All we have to do is to wake up and change.”

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxStockholm, an independent event. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Greta Thunberg · Climate activist. Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate activist.