tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/realism-25308/articlesRealism – The Conversation2023-10-29T10:07:08Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2155552023-10-29T10:07:08Z2023-10-29T10:07:08ZShepherd Ndudzo’s celebrated sculptures tell an untold history of southern African art<p>The <a href="https://intethe.co.za/shepherd-ndudzo/">work</a> of award-winning Zimbabwe-born sculptor <a href="https://artafricamagazine.org/shepherd-ndudzo-2/">Shepherd Ndudzo</a> is instantly recognisable. Fluid, elongated black bodies and body parts flow from white rock in a typical work. The bodies are dancing or praying, holding hands or reaching out. </p>
<p>These figurative sculptures, carved out of stone (marble and granite) and wood (ironwood), were recently shown along with his abstract wooden sculptures (titled Seed) at the <a href="https://artjoburg.com/exhibitors/">FNB Joburg Art Fair</a> in South Africa by Botswana’s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/oraloapi_/?hl=en">Ora Laopi</a> contemporary art gallery and research project.</p>
<p>The work by the artist (born in 1978) was displayed as a celebration of the sculpture of Botswana, where he lives and works. The show was <a href="https://www.facebook.com/oraloapi">dedicated</a> to his father, <a href="https://www.mmegi.bw/artculture-review/ndudzo-a-patriarch-of-local-sculptors/news">Barnabas Ndudzo</a>, the famed creator of realistic, often life-size sculptures. In a <a href="https://vimeo.com/861254066?fbclid=IwAR1KfPY63fbSjGwOgg3BxVF0fwQ0e0LM7MC-68wtN54O6igXOSoMnQRCcNQ">documentary</a> produced by the gallery, Shepherd tells how he was taught to sculpt by his father. He says that his works speak about migration and help tell his family story.</p>
<p>It’s a tale that spans three neighbouring southern African nations, all known for their sculpture – Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. It exposes a history of shared traditions and schools of teaching, of colonial-era gatekeeping and art world wars. It’s this history that informs the research for my <a href="https://www.ru.ac.za/artsofafrica/people/doctoralresearchers/barnabastichamuvhuti/">PhD thesis</a> on Zimbabwean art.</p>
<p>It’s my view that Shepherd Ndudzo’s work can only be fully appreciated by understanding his transnational story and how it has shaped his life and career, showing how art traditions are invented and reinvented across borders.</p>
<h2>Kekana school</h2>
<p>His father Barnabas was born in Zimbabwe and attended the Kekana School of Art and Craft in the late 1960s. Early art schools in Zimbabwe were founded and run by white missionaries and expatriates. But the Kekana School was founded by a black artist and teacher. The school was started at St Faith’s Mission near Rusape by South African sculptor <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/job-patja-kekana">Job Patja Kekana</a> in the early 1960s, long before Zimbabwe attained <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/zimbabawean-independence-day">independence</a> in 1980. </p>
<p>Kekana had trained at Grace Dieu Mission Diocesan Training College near Pietersburg (Polokwane). The same institution was attended by <a href="https://www.art.co.za/gerardsekoto/about.php">Gerard Sekoto</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ernest-methuen-mancoba">Ernest Mancoba</a>, two of South Africa’s prominent black modernists. (<a href="https://uobrep.openrepository.com/handle/10547/621830">Modernism</a> was an era of experimentation in art from the late 1800s to the mid 1950s. It saw new ideas, new media and the uptake of socio-political concerns.)</p>
<p>Kekana had settled at St Faith’s in 1944 and stayed until he died in 1995, except for the three years (1960-1963) when he attended art college in the UK. When Shepherd enrolled at St Faith’s High School in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s, he briefly met his father’s ageing mentor. </p>
<p>Shepherd mostly learned from assisting and observing his father at work. Like Kekana and all his students, Barnabas mostly carved realistic statues and busts.</p>
<h2>Art war</h2>
<p>Zimbabwe is famous for its <a href="https://artuk.org/discover/curations/shona-sculpture">“Shona sculpture”</a> tradition in which artists use handmade tools, patiently carving human and animal forms from <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/serpentinite">serpentinite</a> rocks. UK-born artist, teacher and museum curator <a href="https://africanartists.blogspot.com/2015/04/remembering-frank-mcewen.html">Frank McEwen</a> pigeonholed artists from various ethnic backgrounds and different countries – and not just from the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shona">Shona people</a> – in a single <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171633?typeAccessWorkflow=login">misnamed</a> cultural basket. Their individual creative styles did not matter. </p>
<p>McEwen was the founding director of the Rhodes National Gallery (<a href="http://www.nationalgallery.co.zw/">National Gallery of Zimbabwe</a>). Although he was celebrated for his efforts at promoting Zimbabwe’s abstract stone sculpture tradition, ensuring that the world accepted it as modern art, his presence was bad for artists who worked with media like wood and were making realistic works, as well as for those stationed at <a href="https://cyrenemission.com/2016/11/08/history/">missionary</a> <a href="https://zimnative.com/blogs/historical-sites-and-ancient-ruins/father-john-groeber-and-st-mary-s-church-at-serima-mission">workshops</a>. (Figurative art represents existing objects. Abstract art usually has no real-life visual reference. Realism refers to accurate depictions usually portraying a sitter or model.)</p>
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<p>McEwen preferred working with sculptors from the National Gallery School and the <a href="https://www.herald.co.zw/the-beauty-of-tengenenge-village/">Tengenenge</a> workshop until he had a fall-out with its founder, <a href="https://www.herald.co.zw/just-in-fare-thee-well-thomas-blomefield/">Tom Blomefield</a>. As reported in the press, Blomefield accused McEwen of stealing artists from his stable. Art historian <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315714465_Patron_and_Artist_in_the_Shaping_of_Zimbabwean_Art">Elizabeth Morton</a> highlighted that when Kekana visited the National Gallery School soon after his return from the UK he was chased away by McEwen, who didn’t want to see him near his students.</p>
<h2>Barnabas</h2>
<p>With McEwen holding the most powerful position at the nation’s central art institution, artists from Kekana’s school found themselves on the periphery of Zimbabwe’s mainstream art canon. They had to rely on church commissions and teaching jobs. This probably explains why Barnabas briefly found himself conducting “ecumenical workshops” for the Methodist Church in 1970 and 1971. Today the national gallery doesn’t have a single piece of his in its collection.</p>
<p>Barnabas headed south, finding a home at the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/federated-union-black-artists-arts-centre">Federated Union of Black Artists</a> (Fuba), an academy in Johannesburg. He settled in Botswana in the mid-1990s. He taught art at Gallery Ann and other institutions before moving to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thapong.centre">Thapong Visual Arts Centre</a> where he continued to mentor emerging artists. </p>
<p>He gained considerable recognition and respect in Botswana. And it’s in Botswana that his son Shepherd continues to sculpt, having moved to the country initially to assist his father.</p>
<h2>Shepherd</h2>
<p>The younger Ndudzo collects the <a href="https://www.herald.co.zw/ndafunga-dande-exhibition-opens-at-national-gallery/">hardwood</a> he uses from construction sites, especially from trees bulldozed for road construction. He prefers marble from Zambia and Namibia which comes not only in white, but also in various shades of grey and brown. He highlights how citizens of these countries walk across the countryside on this resource, hardly appreciating its importance. The black granite he combines them with is mostly from Zimbabwe.</p>
<p>Recently, Shepherd took me to his home in Oodi village in Kgatleng district. His vast open yard is his studio – where his artist neighbours tolerate the deafening noise of his sculpture making.</p>
<p>Though he <a href="https://vimeo.com/861254066?fbclid=IwAR1KfPY63fbSjGwOgg3BxVF0fwQ0e0LM7MC-68wtN54O6igXOSoMnQRCcNQ">talks</a> about moving away from his father’s realistic style, I still see strong elements of it in his work. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/bas-relief">bas-relief</a> carving in the larger works of wood exhibited at the Joburg Art Fair is a good example. It’s a style inherited from Kekana, <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=aXMHEwVL0bgC&oi=fnd&pg=PT44&dq=barnabas+ndudzo&ots=4S2f9dwvF3&sig=QxJZpGay1iqYFxULB93gbd7LuFE&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=barnabas%20ndudzo&f=false">who</a> “taught his students bas-relief carving, and realism and understanding of the wood grain”. </p>
<p>Thus I see Shepherd Ndudzo as an artist sustaining a legacy emanating from the Kekana school. However, his work oscillates between figuration and abstraction. It’s quite conceptual in that it is about ideas and quite experimental in that it blends different elements. The artist points to the likes of <a href="https://chapunguatcenterra.com/team/tapfuma-gutsa/">Tapfuma Gutsa</a> as his greatest inspiration. Gutsa transformed Zimbabwe’s stone sculpture tradition, blending stone with various other elements.</p>
<h2>Lineage</h2>
<p>Shepherd’s decision to dedicate his exhibition to his father and mentor is an important gesture. It highlights the story of a sidelined artist, mostly written out of history, like others from the Kekana school.</p>
<p>Artists do not make art in complete isolation. Highlighting the lineage Shepherd Ndudzo belongs to helps us understand his practice, choice of materials and aesthetic references.</p>
<p>It’s a lineage that’s transnational in outlook – linking Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe – and his materials are drawn from different countries. This helps us appreciate how artistic practice can feed off art ecosystems across southern African borders.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215555/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. </span></em></p>His work can only be fully understood by observing the shared traditions of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa.Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti, PhD in Art History, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2004872023-03-29T09:57:53Z2023-03-29T09:57:53Z‘QBism’: quantum mechanics is not a description of objective reality – it reveals a world of genuine free will<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517031/original/file-20230322-2124-l9gw62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=38%2C16%2C1296%2C1063&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In a cubist painting, reality is more than a single perspective can capture.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><iframe src="https://embed.acast.com/638f4b009a65b10011b94c5e/642304b2dd47b5001151d53f" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="190px"></iframe>
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<p>What does quantum mechanics, the most successful theory ever proposed by physics, teach us about reality? The starting point for most philosophers of physics is that quantum mechanics must somehow provide a description of the world as it is independently of us, the users of the theory. </p>
<p>This has led to a large number of incompatible worldviews. Some believe the implication of quantum mechanics is that there are <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-multiverse-how-were-tackling-the-challenges-facing-the-theory-201729">parallel worlds</a> as in the Marvel Comic universe; some believe it implies signals that travel faster than light, contradicting all that Einstein taught us. Some say it implies that <a href="https://theconversation.com/quantum-mechanics-how-the-future-might-influence-the-past-199426">the future affects the past</a>.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4874855">QBism</a>, an approach developed by Christopher Fuchs and me, the great lesson of quantum mechanics is that the usual starting point of the philosophers is simply wrong. Quantum mechanics does not describe reality as it is by itself. Instead, it is a tool that helps guide agents immersed in the world when they contemplate taking actions on parts of it external to themselves. </p>
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<p><em>This is article is accompanied by a podcast series called <a href="https://podfollow.com/great-mysteries-of-physics">Great Mysteries of Physics</a> which uncovers the greatest mysteries facing physicists today – and discusses the radical proposals for solving them.</em></p>
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<p>The use of the word “agent” rather than the familiar “observer” highlights that quantum mechanics is about <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1003.5209">actions that participate in creating reality</a>, rather than observations of a reality that exists independently of the agent.</p>
<p>QBism and its homophone, the art movement Cubism, share the understanding that reality is more than what a single agent’s perspective can capture. However, unlike the art movement, QBism does not attempt to represent reality. It does not attempt to bring the different perspectives together in one “third-person” view. QBism is fundamentally anti-representational and first person.</p>
<h2>Rescuing free will</h2>
<p>This puts QBism in direct contradiction with the two pillars of the 19th-century conception of a mechanistic universe. One is that nature is governed by physical laws in the same way that a mechanical toy is governed by its mechanism. The other is that it is, in principle, possible to have an objective view of the universe from the outside – from a God’s eye or third-person standpoint.</p>
<p>This mechanistic vision is still dominant among 21st-century scientists. For instance, in their 2010 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8520362-the-grand-design">The Grand Design</a>, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow write: “It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behaviour is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”</p>
<p>Instead, the QBist vision is that of an unfinished universe, of a world that allows for genuine freedom, a world in which agents matter and participate in the making of reality.</p>
<p>A key aspect of quantum mechanics is randomness. Rather than making firm predictions, quantum mechanics is concerned with the probabilities for potential measurement outcomes. The physicist Ed Jaynes famously expressed that to understand quantum mechanics, one has to understand probability first.</p>
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<span class="caption">Frank Ramsey, one of the originators of the personalist Bayesian approach.</span>
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<p>In this spirit, QBism’s starting point is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability">personalist Bayesian approach to probability</a> (originally a method of statistical inference and now a fully fledged theory of decision making under uncertainty). In this approach, probabilities are an agent’s personal degrees of belief.</p>
<p>So rather than describing the statistics of some experiment, probabilities provide guidance to agents on how they should act. In other words, probabilities are not descriptive but “normative” – analogous to an instruction manual. It turns out that the standard probability rules can be derived from the (normative) principle that one’s probabilities should fit together in a way that guards against a sure loss when used for making decisions.</p>
<p>QBism’s great insight was that the probabilities that appear in quantum mechanics are no different. They are not, as in the standard view, fixed by physical law, but express an agent’s personal degrees of belief about the consequences of measurement actions the agent is contemplating.</p>
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<p>In QBism, the role of the quantum laws is to provide extra normative principles about how an agent’s probabilities should fit together. Rather than providing a description of the world, the rules of quantum mechanics are an addition to the standard probability rules; to classical (non-quantum) decision theory. They assist physicists in decisions such as how to design a quantum computer in order to minimise the probability of error, or what atoms to use in an atomic clock in order to increase the precision of time measurements. </p>
<h2>Measurements are actions</h2>
<p>Just like “observer”, the term “measurement” can be misleading because it suggests a pre-existing property that is revealed by the measurement. Instead, a measurement should be thought of as an action an agent takes to elicit a response from the world. A measurement is an act of creation that brings something entirely new into the world, an outcome that is shared between the agent and the agent’s external world.</p>
<p>Quantum mechanics is often depicted as “weird” and hard, or indeed impossible, to understand. As a matter of fact, the weirdness of quantum mechanics is an artefact of looking at it the wrong way. Once the two main QBist insights - that the quantum rules are guides to action and that measurements do not reveal pre-existing properties - are taken on board, all quantum paradoxes disappear.</p>
<p>Take Schrödinger’s cat, for example. In the usual formulation, the unfortunate animal is described by a “quantum state” taken to be a part of reality and implying that the cat is neither dead nor alive. </p>
<p>The QBist, by contrast, does not regard the quantum state as a part of reality. The quantum state a QBist agent might assign has no bearing on whether the cat is alive or dead. All it expresses is the agent’s expectations concerning the consequences of possible actions they might take on the cat. Unlike most interpretations of quantum mechanics, QBism respects the fundamental autonomy of the cat.</p>
<p>Or take quantum teleportation. According to a common way of presenting this operation, a particle’s quantum state, again regarded as a part of reality, disappears at one place (A) and mysteriously reappears at another (B) - quite
literally as in a transporter in the Star Trek science fiction series.</p>
<p>For a QBist, however, nothing real is transported from A to B. All that happens in quantum teleportation is that an agent’s belief about the particle at A becomes, after the operation, the same agent’s belief about a particle at B. The quantum state that expresses the agent’s belief about the particle at A initially is mathematically identical to the quantum state that expresses that same agent’s belief about the particle at B after the operation. Quantum teleportation is a powerful tool used in applications such as quantum computing, but in QBism there is nothing counter-intuitive or weird about it.</p>
<p>QBism is an ongoing project. It spells out clearly the meaning of all mathematical objects in the theory and is thus a fully developed interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet, QBism is also a programme for developing new physics and has already yielded deep insights even if it is still a work in progress.</p>
<p>QBism has also led to a <a href="http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/20328">fruitful dialogue</a> with the kindred philosophical schools of thought of pragmatism and phenomenology. Its vision of the world is one in which agents possess genuine freedom and respect each other’s autonomy. I like to think that this is what quantum mechanics has been trying to tell us about reality all along.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200487/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruediger Schack receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation. </span></em></p>According to a school of thought known as QBism, quantum mechanics is a guide to action.Ruediger Schack, Professor of mathematics, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1986522023-01-26T22:45:07Z2023-01-26T22:45:07ZLiberal hawks versus realist doves: who is winning the ideological war over the future of Ukraine?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506691/original/file-20230126-22972-jlmetb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=36%2C12%2C8142%2C5444&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A German Leopard 2 heavy battle tank of the type destined for Ukraine.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The recent decision by Olaf Scholz’s German government to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/germany-leopard-2-tanks-ukraine">supply Ukraine with Leopard 2 tanks</a> – after weeks of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64402928">clear reluctance</a> to provoke Vladimir Putin – was more than a domestic policy shift.</p>
<p>It also demonstrated how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could prove to be a tipping point in a long-running battle of ideas between two schools of thought in the field of international affairs. </p>
<p>Scholars refer to the two camps as liberals and realists. A defining characteristic of liberalism is its view that global politics is an arena where moral values, legal norms and institutions are crucial for regulating the behaviour of states, and increasing the prospects of cooperation and peace.</p>
<p>The classical realist or “realpolitik” tradition, by contrast, remains sceptical about peace. It believes states are essentially driven by the pursuit of power and national interests through a reliance on military might. It views the international arena as essentially anarchic.</p>
<p>These two approaches have been visible in much of the commentary following Russia’s full scale invasion in February 2022. In particular, the two camps have clashed over how the war in Ukraine should end.</p>
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<span class="caption">End game: Russian president Vladimir Putin visiting an arms production facility in Saint Petersburg, January 18.</span>
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<h2>Appeasement or resistance?</h2>
<p>On the one hand, many realists believe the only way out of the current conflict is a negotiated peace. That involves recognising, in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/getting-ukraine-wrong.html">words of US political scientist John Mearsheimer</a>, the “taproot of the current crisis is NATO expansion”. </p>
<p>Ukraine must be encouraged, in some shape or form, to concede territory to Russia in order to end the invasion. Realists say it’s important for the West to recognise the legitimate security interests of a great power in Ukraine, and to avoid running the risk of Moscow forming a permanent alliance with China. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/us-will-give-military-tanks-to-ukraine-signaling-western-powers-long-term-commitment-to-thwarting-russia-198555">US will give military tanks to Ukraine, signaling Western powers' long-term commitment to thwarting Russia</a>
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<p>Moreover, they claim Ukraine cannot defeat the Russian occupation force because, if necessary, Putin will use nuclear weapons to ensure a “victory” – a prospect that worsens the stability of Europe and the world.</p>
<p>On the other hand, liberal hawks – sometimes called neo-idealists – maintain Russia’s Ukraine invasion is such a fundamental violation of the UN Charter that it has eliminated the moral and practical scope for a diplomatic compromise.</p>
<p>Negotiation in this context would only reward Putin’s aggression and undermine an international rules-based order that sought to uphold the territorial integrity and political independence of all states.</p>
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<h2>Hawks and doves</h2>
<p>Liberals acknowledge there are two ways of ending Putin’s annexation attempt in Ukraine. First, the Putin regime has the option of belatedly recognising its invasion is illegal, and withdrawing its troops to the internationally recognised borders of Russia.</p>
<p>Second, allies and supporters of Ukraine should ensure that Kyiv is sufficiently armed and equipped to fight a just war. Putin’s invading army is either defeated or the costs of the invasion become too high and Moscow is obliged to end its occupation.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-recap-supply-of-german-and-us-tanks-to-make-kyiv-a-real-punching-fist-of-democracy-198637">Ukraine recap: supply of German and US tanks to make Kyiv 'a real punching fist of democracy'</a>
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<p>Nearly 12 months on, it’s clear among the states supporting Ukraine that the hawkish liberal view – that Putin’s military venture must fail – has steadily edged out the dovish realist perspective that Putin should be appeased with some sort of land for peace deal.</p>
<p>Germany’s decision to supply tanks to Ukraine exemplifies the shift in thinking. But the ascendency of the liberal hawks is the product of long and short-term trends before and during the Ukraine conflict.</p>
<p>For one thing, a realist worldview has not sat comfortably with an increasingly interconnected world. Having struggled to explain events like the end of the Cold War and 9/11, realist diplomats and scholars have nevertheless insisted that great powers still call the shots in world politics.</p>
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<h2>The NATO factor</h2>
<p>The Russian invasion has also significantly eroded the realist case for ending the conflict.</p>
<p>The argument that <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-warnings-that-nato-expansion-into-eastern-europe-could-provoke-russia-177999">NATO enlargement</a> caused the Putin regime to attack looks unconvincing. It was not Washington but the states of Eastern Europe, historically fearful of Russian dominance, that clamoured for NATO membership.</p>
<p>Indeed, many neighbouring states have backed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s view that Putin’s invasion is part of a Russian imperial project that can be traced back to Peter the Great and which seeks to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Zelenskyy has successfully rejected any suggestion of moral equivalency between his democratically elected government and Putin’s authoritarian regime, whose invading troops are suspected of committing war crimes.</p>
<p>The Zelenskyy government has vowed it has the right to fight “until it regains all its territories” from Moscow, and the Biden administration in the US has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/25/us-m1-abrams-biden-tanks-ukraine-russia-war">swung strongly behind</a> this position.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-russias-war-in-ukraine-today-is-so-different-from-a-year-ago-198023">Why Russia's war in Ukraine today is so different from a year ago</a>
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<h2>Great powers can lose</h2>
<p>The Biden stance reflects US respect for the outstanding performance of the Ukrainian military on the battlefield and also the growing resistance to appeasing an outright aggressor. </p>
<p>That would be a recipe for encouraging more territorial demands from the Putin regime, and perhaps embolden China to put even more pressure on Taiwan.</p>
<p>At the same time, the successful <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2022/10/14/mapping-one-month-of-ukraines-counteroffensive">Ukrainian counteroffensive</a> in the last quarter of 2022 was a reminder to its supporters in NATO and elsewhere that great powers can and do lose wars against smaller adversaries. </p>
<p>With the right level of military support in 2023, Ukraine could realistically defeat Putin’s invading army.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the hawkish liberal vision of helping to ensure Putin’s defeat has seemingly prevailed because it offered the best prospect of justice for the victim of aggression. It also bolsters an international rules-based order threatened by the illegal use of force.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198652/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert G. Patman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How should the war in Ukraine end? That’s the question dividing two schools of geopolitical thought, but one side seems to be winning the argument.Robert G. Patman, Professor of International Relations, University of OtagoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1943062022-11-11T16:31:17Z2022-11-11T16:31:17ZPermacrisis: what it means and why it’s word of the year for 2022<p>The Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2022 is “<a href="https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/permacrisis">permacrisis</a>”. As accolades go, the managing director of Collins Learning, Alex Beecroft, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/nov/01/sums-up-2022-permacrisis-chosen-as-collins-word-of-the-year">has said</a> that this one “sums up quite succinctly how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people”. </p>
<p>The word, most widely understood as a portmanteau of “permanent” and “crisis”, has been in use for a little longer. In April 2021, policy analysts in Europe <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/future-eu/opinion/the-age-of-permacrisis/">saw it</a> as defining the era in which we live. Some in Britain inevitably ascribe the genesis of that era to <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/permacrisis-ever-end-covid-pandemic-brexit-ukraine-crisis-latest-fpznr05qk">Brexit</a>. Others point to the <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/future-eu/opinion/the-age-of-permacrisis/">pandemic</a>. For others still, it was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/mar/23/theyre-entitled-to-know-the-world-isnt-always-a-safe-place-how-to-talk-to-your-children-about-the-permacrisis">Russia’s invasion of Ukraine</a> that made the word indispensable. As the writer David Shariatmadari <a href="https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/a-year-of-permacrisis/">has put it</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Permacrisis” is a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner.</p>
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<p>This represents a shift from the way the notion of crisis has been defined until now. However, digging into the philosophical roots of the word reveals that a crisis is not necessarily awful, but may, in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-crisis-and-the-dangers-of-tech-obsessed-long-termism-176951">long term</a>, prove a necessary and beneficial corrective. </p>
<h2>Crisis as necessary to progress</h2>
<p>Philosophers have long defined a crisis as a situation that forces an individual or group to a moment of thoughtful <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Crisis-and-Critique-On-the-Fragile-Foundations-of-Social-Life/Cordero/p/book/9781138393011">critique</a> – to a point where a new path is mapped out in relation to some issue of pressing concern. This definition stems from the ancient Greek term κρίσις or <em>krisis</em>, which describes a medical or political moment of opportunity that bifurcates into life or death, victory or defeat. </p>
<p>However, as philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1598">has shown</a>, in modern philosophy, that ancient Greek notion of crisis undergoes a semantic shift. Its meaning changes radically, to refer to a contradiction between opposing forces that accelerates the transition of past into future. </p>
<p>This can be seen in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35194/capital-by-karl-marx-intro-ernest-mandel-trans-david-fernbach/9780140445701">Karl Marx</a>’s description of capitalism as a crisis-ridden economic system. In struggling to tame its forces of production, labour and machinery, <a href="https://theconversation.com/karl-marx-ten-things-to-read-if-you-want-to-understand-him-95818">Marx</a> contends, this system causes crises of overproduction: an excess of supply that cannot be met with an equivalent demand. These crises in turn foster opportunities for cultural, social and political innovation, the best 20th-century example of which is the creation of the welfare state. </p>
<p>“Crisis” is similarly defined in American philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html">approach</a> to the history of science. <a href="https://theconversation.com/set-in-stone-using-statue-related-metaphors-to-describe-history-misses-the-mark-180372">Kuhn</a> views progress in modern research as driven by crises within existing scientific paradigms. The progressive shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian paradigms in 20th-century physics most neatly illustrates his thinking. </p>
<p>In both cases, “crisis” is linked to the idea – the ideal, even – of progress. Marx believed that, because the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, capitalism would meet a final crisis and that this would lead to the emergence of communism: an entirely new and, crucially, better socio-political situation.</p>
<p>“<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-climate-crisis-conflicts-meme-ing-our-way-through-the-apocalypse-131572">Permacrisis</a>” represents the contemporary inversion of this conception. It is similar to Marx’s idea that human history will lead to a final crisis, only it precludes any idea of further progress. Instead of leading to something better, it denotes a static and permanently difficult situation. </p>
<h2>A new realism</h2>
<p>This concept of permacrisis has its roots in contemporary systems theory, which claims that a crisis can become so complicated that we can’t predict its outcome. In this regard, in his 2008 book, <a href="http://www.hamptonpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=978-1-57273-801-0&Category_Code=ST">On Complexity</a>, French philosopher Edgar Morin argues that humanity now resides within a network of interlocking systems and any crisis in one of those systems will engender a crisis in all the others. </p>
<p>Morin uses the word “polycrisis” to describe this situation. It is an idea that is also used in historian Adam Tooze’s work on crisis and disaster. As Tooze <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/adam-tooze-chartbook-substack-newsletter-inflation-crisis/661467/">recently put it</a>, when considering the sheer accumulation of problems the world currently faces – from conflict and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-crisis-migration-cannot-be-the-only-option-for-people-living-on-drowning-islands-117122">climate crisis</a> to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-standard-ways-of-valuing-health-were-set-aside-during-the-pandemic-153222">pandemic</a> and rising inflation – “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts”. Interconnected microsystems, because of ever-shortening positive feedback loops, can very quickly trigger crisis, even catastrophe, in the wider macrosystem. </p>
<p>Taking this one step further, the shift from “polycrisis” to “permacrisis” implies that we now see our crises as situations that can only be managed, not resolved. Indeed, “permacrisis” suggests that every decision to accelerate a difficult situation in order to come out on the other side of it risks something far worse. </p>
<p>Take the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk-prime-minister-forced-from-office-amid-economic-turmoil-chaos-in-parliament-and-a-party-in-disarray-192795">recent demise</a>, in the UK, of the Truss administration. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/emergency-budget-announcement-expert-reaction-to-new-uk-chancellors-attempt-to-calm-financial-markets-192669">decision</a> to resolve an economic crisis only heightened a self-defeating <a href="https://theconversation.com/chaos-in-westminster-why-liz-truss-finally-lost-control-of-mps-192921">political crisis</a> – which then very rapidly further <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-uk-is-facing-an-economic-crisis-heres-why-it-needs-to-find-a-global-solution-192823">compounded</a> the original economic crisis.</p>
<p>Permacrisis signals not only a loss of faith in progress, but also a new realism in relation to what people can cope with and achieve. Our crises have become so complex and deep-seated that they can transcend our capacity to understand them. Any decision to tackle them risks only making things worse. We are thus faced with a troubling conclusion. Our crises are no longer a problem. They are a stubborn fact.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194306/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neil Turnbull does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Crises are no longer something to fix but situations to manage.Neil Turnbull, Head of Department: English, Linguistics and Philosophy, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1872142022-08-03T15:43:05Z2022-08-03T15:43:05ZWhat ethical standards should we hold politicians to? A philosopher explains two different approaches<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477190/original/file-20220802-22-yvvcy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=191%2C143%2C7796%2C5173&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Boris Johnson's resignation: an interesting moment for ethics in politics.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-uk-7th-july-2022-prime-2175936439">Michael Tubi / Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With Boris Johnson’s departure, the drama of the Conservative leadership election, and Keir Starmer’s declaration that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTU9zdIq-cU">“integrity matters”</a> in politics, the question of what ethical standards we ought to hold politicians to has never felt more pressing in the UK.</p>
<p>The idea that ethics has anything to do with politics is often (justifiably) met with some degree of scepticism. As philosopher <a href="https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Walzer/Political-action.pdf">Michael Walzer notes</a>, it is conventional wisdom that politicians are “a good deal worse, morally worse, than the rest of us”.</p>
<p>There are two arenas where the ethics of politicians come into play. First is in their political work: putting their personal scruples aside to achieve noble political goals, engaging in “dirty deals”. The other is, of course, in their private lives: the sex scandals and other personally unethical behaviour that are characterised in Britain as “sleaze”.</p>
<p>To decide how to judge politicians who engage in either of these activities, we can turn to a philosophical debate between so-called “realists” and “moralists”.</p>
<p>In political philosophy, the realist views politics as a different world from everyday life, where different values apply. In contrast, a moralist believes that the same ethical standards (perhaps even higher standards) apply in politics as in everyday life. As political scientist <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1474885110374002">Richard Bellamy puts this</a>, we “desire better of those that represent us because we expect them to serve our interests rather than their own”.</p>
<p>In a recent interview, Allegra Stratton, Boris Johnson’s former advisor <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-06/will-boris-johnson-go-amid-resignation-wave-the-readout-with-allegra-stratton">suggested</a> that her former boss thought that politicians who acted on principle ought to be criticised for being “not political enough”. This chimes with the realist view, that the correct ethical standards for politicians are specific to politics. </p>
<p>As realist thinker Edward Hall puts it, “Responsible politicians do not seek to manifest a ‘purity of intention [which] is unconditioned by the need to compromise, negotiate, [or] exercise authority over others’, because such a view is <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1369148117744956">deeply anti-political</a>”. This sentiment is echoed in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Niccolo-Machiavelli/The-Prince">Machiavelli’s famous exhortation</a> that the political leader must “learn how not to be good”. </p>
<p>For the realist, then, we should favour politicians who are prepared to engage in dirty deals in pursuit of good political goals.</p>
<p>A pure moralist reading of Stratton’s comments might say that we should never tolerate politicians who are willing to compromise on their personal ethics in order to pursue good results. However, this take looks implausibly strong when you remember that moralists believe the same ethical standards ought to apply in politics as in everyday life. </p>
<p>In ordinary life, using a bad means to achieve a good end is sometimes ethically acceptable, perhaps even required. <a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/files/psych/files/beyond-point-and-shoot-morality.pdf?m=1441302794">Research shows</a> that we are all willing to prioritise good consequences over dubious means, at least sometimes.</p>
<p>For the moralist, cases where we ought to tolerate politicians engaging in dirty deals for good ends will be rarer, but will nonetheless exist. We ought to judge the politician here by the same standards as we judge the regular person. </p>
<h2>Sleaze: a different story</h2>
<p>For the realist, who holds that politics has its own set of ethical standards, we can judge the sleazy politician when this behaviour gets in the way of their political goals – but not for the sleaze itself.</p>
<p>We should assess the politician on their adherence to politics’ internal standards (including their ability to competently engage in dirty dealings), without reference to the ethics they display in their personal life.</p>
<p>A good example here would be John F. Kennedy, who is generally thought of as a <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reeves-jfk-centenary-20170529-story.html">competent politician</a>, but with a <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/jfks-image-for-better-or-worse-098894">very chaotic (and unethical)</a> personal life. However, he is the exception. It is more likely that someone with an unethical private life would carry this behaviour into their politics. For example, using their office for self-interested ends, enriching themselves and improperly advancing their friends and lovers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of JFK and Jackie Kennedy in an open top motorcade" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477194/original/file-20220802-12076-qze1zx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">John F. Kennedy is a realist’s dream of a good politician, despite a colourful private life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/John_and_Jacqueline_Kennedy_27_March_1963.jpg">Abbie Rowe, National Park Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>For the moralist, sleaze matters, as poor ethical judgment and character in everyday life is evidence of poor ethics in political life. This view was famously <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/dirty-hands/598DB8C005CB6E80787BB5357DB9CA6C">expressed by Thomas Jefferson</a>, who claimed:</p>
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<p>I never did or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public and another for a private man.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We might wonder at this point whether moralists are just insufferable prudes. However, it is important to emphasise that the moralist view is not criticising politicians for having an unconventional or colourful personal life. It is arguing that unethical behaviour in personal life is likely to translate into bad ethical character in public life. But a colourful personal life is not necessarily evidence of bad ethical character.</p>
<h2>Who is correct?</h2>
<p>The ethical debate between the two approaches is not going to be settled anytime soon. But we might question whether the realist view of a “good” politician – one who is good at making dirty deals and engages in sleazy behaviour only in their personal life – can really exist.</p>
<p>Politicians who are unethical in their personal life but not in office <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Presidential-Character-Predicting-Performance-in-the-White-House-With/Barber/p/book/9780367366773">are rare</a>. Bad ethical character can get in the way of competence, and politicians are no more able than the rest of us to turn their character traits on and off at work. It may be the moralists then, not the realists, who are being realistic when they take private ethical character as an indicator of how politicians will behave in office.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187214/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Hobbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What would moralists and realists say about the UK’s recent political turmoil?Joshua Hobbs, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1760862022-02-01T13:07:27Z2022-02-01T13:07:27ZUlysses at 100: why it was banned for being obscene<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443744/original/file-20220201-23-1ajoi0b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C14%2C1389%2C1184&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/dl%2020th%20century/20th%20century%20collection%20items/instalment-of-ulysses-cup_503_ee_1_front_cover.jpg">British Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>James Joyce’s Ulysses, which turns 100 this February, is now central to the literary canon and features on university literature courses around the world. However, it was not always as revered as it is now. In fact, it was banned as obscene before it was first published as a complete novel, regarded as a work of perversion. </p>
<p>Ulysses was initially published in instalments in the US literary magazine <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181777/little-review-ulysses">The Little Review</a>. The chapter that became known as “<a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/instalment-of-ulysses-episode-xiii-nausicaa-in-the-little-review-april-1920">Nausicaa</a>” features the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom, masturbating on a beach while gazing at a 17-year-old girl called Gerty McDowell. </p>
<p>It was this episode, published in 1920, that caught the attention of the daughter of a New York lawyer, who referred it to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. A prosecution was launched. </p>
<p>The editors of the Little Review were <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/new-york-times-article-reporting-the-prosecution-of-the-publisher-and-editor-of-james-joyces-ulysses">taken to court</a> and fined for publishing an obscene work. The decision meant that US publishers were prohibited from publishing Ulysses. Other countries, including the UK, followed suit. </p>
<p>It was only in <a href="https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6052517">Paris in 1922</a> that Ulysses was finally published as a complete novel through the independent publisher Sylvia Beach. </p>
<h2>Divided views</h2>
<p>The New York decision to ban Ulysses split global opinion. For many readers, as well as Joyce’s literary contemporaries including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, the idea that Joyce’s experimental work had been banned as obscene was absurd. For many legislators, journalists and other readers, the book was pornographic and blasphemous. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-why-joyce-was-so-obsessed-with-the-perfect-blue-cover-175956">Ulysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover</a>
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</p>
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<p>Ulysses, by the standards of the day, was extremely sexually explicit, showing Bloom being fisted in a brothel and his wife Molly musing on the joys of being “fucked” hard by her lover. As well as being a vast collection of literary and religious quotations and everyday trivia, it is also an encyclopaedia of obscene words. And it was blasphemous, beginning with the character Buck Mulligan mocking the rituals of the Catholic Church. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Big blue book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/443746/original/file-20220201-18-1sx58ma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach the Parisian publishing house in 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)#/media/File:James_Joyce_Ulysses_1st_Edition_1922_GB.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The book also broke new ground formally. It was radically experimental, which involved new literary techniques, such as that of the interior monologue, and a range of different styles, including a section written as a play script, and another written in the style of a newspaper front page. </p>
<p>Ulysses was not the only modernist novel to combine formal experimentalism and sexually explicit content, and many others books, such as Lawrence’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/why-dh-lawrence-the-rainbow-was-banned/">The Rainbow</a>, were also censored as obscene. The combination of formal and sexual shock-effects has shaped 20th-century literature. </p>
<h2>The freedom to express?</h2>
<p>Even after the US courts lifted the ban on Ulysses in 1934 and the obscenity laws changed in many countries, including in 1959 in the UK, novels continued to fall foul of the law. As such, 20th and 21st century world literature has often involved a combative relationship to the law. The conflation of literary value with iconoclasm has been a tenacious one. </p>
<p>But perhaps less obviously, the free speech arguments made in defence of Ulysses and other censored modernist texts have also shaped subsequent debates about literature’s rights to freedom of expression. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-why-joyce-was-so-obsessed-with-the-perfect-blue-cover-175956">Ulysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>One argument made by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25487020">T.S. Eliot</a> at the time was that the censorship of modernist books, including Ulysses, was based on a category mistake. Literature and pornography were mutually exclusive terms. This often rested on strong claims for the book’s specific literary credentials. </p>
<p>Ulysses, they claimed, with its experimentation, parallels with Homer’s Odyssey and playful language, was a highly crafted literary artefact. As an autonomous literary work, it was disconnected from causal effects such as the incitement to sexual stimulation, which was one way of describing the effects of pornography. </p>
<p>A different argument by poet Ezra Pound was to stress that the sexual details in novels formed part of their realism. </p>
<p>Ulysses includes meticulous descriptions of Dublin geography, buildings, conversations and people. Bodily functions, including sexual activities, were features of the ordinary lives of ordinary people on an ordinary day in Ireland in June 1904. If countries including Ireland, the UK and the US wanted to have a meaningful cultural sphere, then novels needed to be able realistically to represent adult themes. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ulysses-at-100-start-here-if-you-want-to-read-this-modernist-classic-176114">Ulysses at 100 – start here if you want to read this modernist classic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>These arguments in defence of the literary text view its effects on readers differently. One stresses literature’s formal autonomy and downplays its ability to produce direct causal effects in the world. The other attends to literature’s important role in mirroring reality and telling the truth about ordinary life. </p>
<p>Of course, the meanings of literary texts always mutate as they travel through time and space and encounter new readers. The words that once shocked many readers do so no longer, while words that to many at the time seemed innocuous now make readers recoil. </p>
<p>One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses in 1922, the idea of banning it may seem absurd. But with literary texts being <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/sales-maus-soar-tennessee-school-board-ban.html">censored in many parts of the world</a>, arguments in defence of free expression continue to mobilise claims about the particular status and power of literature.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176086/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:rachel.potter@uea.ac.uk">rachel.potter@uea.ac.uk</a> has received funding from the AHRC (the Arts and Humanities Research Council), for a project on the history of the writers' organisation International PEN and its defence of freedom of expression. She is a member of English PEN, which is a charity.
</span></em></p>By the standards of the day, Ulysses was extremely sexually explicit.Rachel Potter, Professor of Modern Literature, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1397172020-07-07T10:47:01Z2020-07-07T10:47:01ZWhy realism is the key to wellbeing – new research<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343787/original/file-20200624-133013-jcfank.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Half full, half empty, or just some water in a glass?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/glass-half-full-662679214">Shutterstock/Oriol Domingo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Life coaches and motivational speakers often treat positive thinking as the key to happiness. Self-help books tend to promote a similar message, with Norman Vincent Peale’s bestseller <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Positive-Thinking-Norman-Vincent/dp/0091906385">The Power of Positive Thinking</a> claiming: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The idea is not merely that optimistic thinking dispels present gloom, but that it also launches a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby simply believing in success delivers it. In happiness terms, optimistic thinking seems to be a win-win strategy. </p>
<p>Perhaps this is why unrealistic optimism – the tendency to overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen and underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen – is one of the most pervasive human traits. Studies consistently show that a large majority of the population (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211011912">about 80% according to most estimates</a>) display an overly optimistic outlook. </p>
<p>But pessimism does have its advocates. Despite the fact that <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/312/5774/754?casa_token=spKZ5o5e6ccAAAAA:zKYHa7fDCIoh-A9R5Sk5Eysft9sHwzCyxIelu7SPNe-ikxVe_jvj5hMhP2MwZgN9ro06YhdaEvaemg">expecting the worst</a> can be extremely psychological painful, pessimists are, by their nature, fairly immune to disappointment. </p>
<p>As the English writer Thomas Hardy <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_FXLz5x2r18C&pg=PA319&lpg=PA319&dq=Pessimism+is,+in+brief,+playing+the+sure+game.+You+cannot+lose+at+it;+you+may+gain.&source=bl&ots=zynQ0yIUiB&sig=ACfU3U0wz0sA_v-MdUXXoZBznUCQYTTlLQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwikpofNw5XqAhX4SBUIHcENARgQ6AEwAnoECAwQAQ#v=onepage&q=Pessimism%20is%2C%20in%20brief%2C%20playing%20the%20sure%20game.%20You%20cannot%20lose%20at%20it%3B%20you%20may%20gain.&f=false">noted</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This view receives implicit support from Nobel Prize winner <a href="https://scholar.princeton.edu/kahneman/home">Daniel Kahneman</a> and his late colleague, Amos Tversky. According to their concept of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">loss aversion</a>, we feel twice as much pain from losses than we experience joy from equal gains. </p>
<p>For example, the pain of an unexpected loss of £5 is twice as strong as the joy of an unexpected gain of £5. In most cases, whether a gain or a loss is perceived, depends on what was expected. Getting a pay raise of £5,000 may seem like a loss if you were expecting £10,000. Unrealistic optimists, by expecting a lot, are setting themselves up for large doses of destructive disappointment. </p>
<p>These behavioural views of the merits of an optimistic or pessimistic mindset contrast with the perspective of mainstream economics according to which it is best to have realistic beliefs. The point is that to make good decisions, accurate, unbiased information is required. </p>
<p>Optimism and pessimism are therefore judgemental biases that make for poor decisions, leading to worse outcomes and lower wellbeing. Particularly prone to harmful error of this sort are <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292118301582">career choices</a>, saving decisions and any choice involving risk and uncertainty. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167220934577">our research</a>, we investigated whether it is optimists, pessimists or realists that have the highest long term wellbeing. To do this, we tracked 1,601 people over 18 years. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343793/original/file-20200624-133008-1l2wlez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Which way wellbeing?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/green-traffic-direction-board-cloudy-sky-438051226">Shutterstock/Notto Yeez</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wellbeing was measured by self-reported life satisfaction and psychological distress. Alongside this, we measured particpants’ finances and their tendency to have over or under estimated them. Better finances are associated with higher wellbeing, so no surprise there. </p>
<h2>Keeping it real</h2>
<p>Our main finding is that it is not just outcomes that matter but also expectations. Other things being equal, overestimating outcomes and underestimating them are both associated with lower wellbeing than getting expectations about right. Realists do best. </p>
<p>The research may well come as a relief to many people, as it shows you don’t have to spend your days striving to think positively. Instead, we see that being realistic about your future and making sound decisions based on evidence can bring a sense of wellbeing, without having to immerse yourself in relentless positivity.</p>
<p>As to why these results arise, two mutually inclusive possibilities come to mind. Firstly, our results could be the result of counteracting emotions. For optimists, disappointment may eventually dominate the anticipatory feelings of expecting the best, so happiness starts to fall. For pessimists, the depressing effect of expecting doom (dread) may eventually dominate the elation when the worst is avoided. </p>
<p>An alternative to counteracting emotions is that plans based on inaccurate beliefs are bound to deliver worse outcomes than would rational, realistic beliefs. In all events, our finding is that a misperception of either sign involves lower wellbeing. </p>
<p>A majority of the population tend towards optimism, so should they curb their enthusiasm? Our study does suggest realists are the happiest, but this does not necessarily mean that becoming a realist (if such a change was possible) would necessarily boost wellbeing. All we can say is, it might. </p>
<p>This may be especially so in the context of coronavirus. Both optimists and pessimists make decisions based on biased expectations. Not only does this lead to bad decision making, but also a failure to take suitable precautions to potential threats. </p>
<p>Optimists see themselves as less susceptible to the risk of COVID-19 than others and are therefore less likely to take appropriate precautionary measures. Pessimists, on the other hand, may never leave their houses or send their children to school again. Neither strategy seems like a suitable recipe for wellbeing. Realists meanwhile, take measured risks knowing susceptibility depends to a major extent on age.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139717/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Optimism and pessimism can lead to poor decision making.Chris Dawson, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Business Economics, University of BathDavid de Meza, Professor of Management, London School of Economics and Political ScienceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1064042018-11-12T15:51:02Z2018-11-12T15:51:02ZRed Dead Redemption 2: can a video game be too realistic?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245089/original/file-20181112-83570-adg0is.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=226%2C57%2C1364%2C672&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw_oH5oiUSE&has_verified=1">Rockstar Games / Youtube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Red Dead Redemption 2, a new video game about an outlaw gang on the American frontier in 1899, has been met with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/oct/25/red-dead-redemption-2-review-western-playstation-xbox-rockstar">huge adoration</a>. Journalists have lauded it as a “landmark” title, a “<a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-red-dead-redemption-2-tech-analysis">technological masterpiece</a>”, even a “<a href="https://www.gamereactor.eu/reviews/703083/Red%20Dead%20Redemption%202/?page=2">watershed moment</a>” in entertainment. Much of the praise has focused on how developer Rockstar Games has coded a “living” game world that oozes character and aesthetic richness.</p>
<p>However, now that the digital dust has started to settle, that same world has come in for <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/29/red-dead-redemption-2-is-a-disappointment/">criticism</a>. Gamers have dubbed the title <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/9rjbrt/rdr2_is_the_most_boring_game_ive_ever_played/">“boring” and “slow,”</a> with their enjoyment of the game noticeably impeded by “<a href="https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/200179-red-dead-redemption-2/77175805">clunky controls</a>” and the lack of easy “<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/10/30/ten-things-i-wish-i-knew-when-i-started-red-dead-redemption-2/">fast travel</a>” between destinations. Matt Reynolds for Wired recently complained how Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately “<a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/red-dead-redemption-2-review-rockstar">feels like a chore</a>.” The ability to kill a life-like female suffragette in the game also courted controversy, with YouTube <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46137186">first banning then restricting</a> the gratuitous footage.</p>
<h2>The price of realism</h2>
<p>Most of the criticism reflects a growing problem with video games: the pursuit of realism. For decades now, mainstream developers (with the notable exception of Nintendo) have committed their energies to crafting visually realistic game worlds. More than any other studio, Rockstar has dedicated itself to the holy digital grail of verisimilitude, throwing millions of dollars (and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/oct/18/rockstar-games-working-conditions-red-dead-redemption-2-rob-nelson">controversially long work hours</a> for its staff) chasing reality. </p>
<p>In the 1970s, arcade Westerns such as <a href="https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8039">Midway’s Gun Fight</a> featured barely-animated stick figures “firing” dots at each other across a landscape populated by a single pixelated cactus. By contrast, in Red Dead Redemption 2, game character Arthur Morgan’s hair, wardrobe and waistline grows and stunning digital vistas rival Albert Bierstadt’s paintings of the <a href="https://www.cowboysindians.com/2018/06/albert-bierstadt-witness-to-a-changing-west/">1800’s American Interior</a>. </p>
<p>In Rockstar’s stunning quest for the life-like, more than 170 species of animal wander the digital terrain. In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge, seeking to answer the question of how horses gallop, captured their movement through <a href="http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/muybridge_image_and_context/animal_in_motion/">a series of photographs</a>. Nearly 150 years on, Rockstar uses 21st-century motion capture to perfect literally hundreds of “living”, “breathing”, and galloping horses on the digital screen, to such detail that, as lad magazines recently enthused, <a href="https://www.unilad.co.uk/gaming/red-dead-redemption-2-will-have-realistic-horse-testicle-physics/">even their testicles shrink</a> in the cold.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245091/original/file-20181112-83564-16594zh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The game is set in 1899 in five fictitious states of the US.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw_oH5oiUSE&has_verified=1">Rockstar Games/Youtube</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Too much responsibility?</h2>
<p>Not only has Rockstar strived for visual realism, but the studio has constructed a world of realistic player activities and responsibilities. From their inception, video games have digitised the “every day”. From delivering newspapers in <a href="https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8977">Atari’s Paperboy (1984)</a> to collecting airport baggage in <a href="http://www.8-bitcentral.com/reviews/2600lostLuggage.html">Apollo’s Lost Luggage (1982)</a>, video games have transformed mundane tasks into moments of digital revelry. Released back in the 1990s, Sega’s <a href="https://segaretro.org/Shenmue">Shenmue (1999)</a>, set in a “living” Japanese city, incorporated a range of daily tasks including driving a forklift for money. Such titles have provided moments of “playful realism”. </p>
<p>Red Dead Redemption 2 represents a new scale-up and seriousness to the enterprise. As the character Arthur Morgan, the player is expected to hunt and skin wild animals, maintain his guns and wares fastidiously, and feed and groom his horse. In the process, Red Dead Redemption 2 undoubtedly offers a more meaningful adventure. But the game also tests boundaries over notions of play and digital experience.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, performing work-like tasks and living the “every day” in games can easily test our patience. The closer a game gets to any semblance of reality, the greater the player notices its flaws. In “reality”, most of us (at least on a basic level) can choose when to do things, perform tasks freely and organically, and process multiple sensations while doing them (such as the weight of an item, or our own limited strength). </p>
<p>In ultra-realistic games, those expectations are quickly frustrated: we push a complex sequence of buttons to perform simple actions (such as drawing a gun), we lose authorial control (and voice) to orchestrated story arcs (Red Dead’s set missions), and narrow visual cues become an excuse for human experience. In-game realism is quite a different property, then, to the world outside.</p>
<p>Too much realism also rails against the basic appeal of games: to escape, to play, to indulge in fantasy (in other words, the “unreal”) and most of all, have fun. </p>
<p>Writing in <a href="http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/1474/homo_ludens_johan_huizinga_routledge_1949_.pdf">Homo Ludens (1938)</a> on the concept of games, Johan Huizinga declared “the fun-element” crucial to “the essence of play”. In the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar has pushed the boundaries of gamic realism to new heights of maturity and sophistication. Rockstar shows how we can find beauty in a digital place and a digital moment, and is actively testing what “gameplay” means. However, while a landmark title, few reviewers have applauded the game as enjoyable. The true limit of gamic realism may not come in terms of technological hardware, programmer hours or dollars spent, but in our basic human desire for games to be fun.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106404/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Wills does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Rockstar Games’s latest release has set a new precedent for realism, but living the “every day” in games can easily test our patience.John Wills, Scholar in American Studies/Cultural Studies, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/926322018-03-02T11:44:46Z2018-03-02T11:44:46ZIt’s a turbulent world. Stop stressing and adapt<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208529/original/file-20180301-152575-di0ut0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Instability is the norm in politics</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The American people have been roughed up over the last decade. A sense of vulnerability and danger tinges their view of public affairs. </p>
<p>The 2008 crash made them wary of markets. The last two years exposed the weakness of political institutions. And international politics has turned ugly.</p>
<p>The main question in politics today is how to deal with this fragility.</p>
<p>Some people are escapists, engaged in a futile effort to make fragility go away. </p>
<p>And some are realists. They accept fragility as an unavoidable aspect of political and social life. They see an open society as the only way to manage fragility well.</p>
<p>Some political scientists will say that I am misusing the concept of realism. <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-intl-relations/#RootRealTrad">In their view</a>, realism is strictly about foreign affairs, and realists are people who see global politics as a brawl among power-hungry countries.</p>
<p>These academics identify the ancient scholar Thucydides as a father of realism. Thucydides wrote a <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html">history of the war</a> between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century B.C. – a ruthless decades-long struggle for survival. One scholar says that Thucydides wanted to reveal the “<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/204816">unalterable nature</a>” of international relations.</p>
<h2>Order is fragile</h2>
<p>But Thucydides did more than this. He described an idea that dominated politics within the Greek city-states: that political and social order is fragile. </p>
<p>Thucydides gives us a history of worried peoples. They know that they live in a world suffused with perils.</p>
<p>In the epoch described by Thucydides, the main peril confronting Greek city-states was posed by other states. But people had other worries too. In some places, people lived in “constant fear” of revolution and lawlessness. Elsewhere, they feared drought, famine and disease. Some felt an “undefined fear of the unknown future.”</p>
<p>These were Thucydides’ realists – people who understood that the world was a turbulent and dangerous place.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208538/original/file-20180301-152572-vcc2gi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thucydides described a turbulent and dangerous world.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Concern about fragility was shared by later writers in the realist tradition. Machiavelli feared that Florence would be attacked by other city-states but also fretted about <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2HCH0019">unrest within its own walls</a>. The French jurist <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bodin/">Jean Bodin</a> also fixated on internal disorders as well as external enemies. The English statesman Francis Bacon offered a list of conditions – including inequality, religious disputes and immigration – that could produce <a href="http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-27.html">“tempests” within the state</a>. A good leader, Bacon said, looked for signs of coming storms.</p>
<p>Early American leaders were realists too. They were not just worried about threats from Europe. They agonized about <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp">“domestic factions”</a> and the “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=9HQSAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA168&dq=%22fluctuations+of+trade%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiNptftzMnZAhUQWq0KHXFLCtoQ6AEIWjAJ#v=onepage&q=%22fluctuations%20of%20trade%22&f=false">vicissitudes of trade</a>” as well.</p>
<p>And they worried about the future. </p>
<p>“To say that there is no danger,” a Maine newspaper editor warned as he appraised the country’s prospects in 1824, “would betray a gross ignorance of the history of nations.”</p>
<p>The feeling of fragility has oscillated throughout American history. In the 20th century, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/four-crises-of-american-democracy-9780190459895?cc=us&lang=en&">the mood has shifted many times</a> – from confidence in the 1920s to anxiety in the 1930s, to confidence in the 1950s and anxiety in the 1970s.</p>
<p>By 2000, the country was confident again. President Bill Clinton boasted that it had never enjoyed <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58708">“so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.”</a></p>
<p>So much for that. Since 2000, Americans have faced terrorist attacks, wars and threats of war, frayed alliances, market busts, technological and climatic shocks, protests and polarization. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/02/15/americans-are-seriously-stressed-out-about-the-future-of-the-country-survey-finds/?utm_term=.1ada9913f4bf">Polls</a> show that Americans are stressed by uncertainty about the nation’s future. Pundits have encouraged despair, speculating about <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n23/david-runciman/is-this-how-democracy-ends">the end of democracy</a> and even <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/end-of-west-western-establishment-wolfgang-ischinger-munich-security-conference-blame-a7582081.html">the end of the West</a>. </p>
<p>This is hyperbole. Our times are difficult but not unusual. History shows that fragility is the norm. What is unusual are moments of calm in which politicians like Clinton succumb to complacency.</p>
<h2>Realist credo: Adapt in the face of change</h2>
<p>The central question today is how Americans should deal with fragility. </p>
<p>One response is isolationism. This is the politics of gated communities and Fortress America. The theory is that the country can separate itself from foreign perils. </p>
<p>More often, though, retreat allows those perils to fester. And it forgets the warning of classical writers: There are dangers within city walls, too.</p>
<p>Another response, aimed at internal perils, is authoritarianism. The search is for a strong leader who can purge society of threats and uncertainties. </p>
<p>But the <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state">sorry record of state planning</a> shows the folly of this. Society is too complex to be completely disciplined. And big government has its own internal weaknesses. Societal fragility is simply replaced by state fragility. </p>
<p>A more constructive response is to recognize that fragility cannot be avoided. <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2HCH0025">As Machiavelli said</a>, fortune cannot be entirely tamed. The key to survival is adaptability in the face of change. This is the realist credo.</p>
<p>Adaptable societies have three capabilities. First, they are vigilant for dangers. Second, they are open to new ideas. And third, they are ready to abandon outmoded practices and experiment with new ones.</p>
<p>Adaptable societies reject both authoritarianism and isolationism. They prize openness, not just because it promotes freedom, but also because it improves resilience.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Public+and+Its+Problems">The philosopher John Dewey</a> articulated this idea almost a century ago. The state, he said, must be remade constantly to deal with changing conditions. This can only be done through patience, dialogue and experimentation.</p>
<p>John Dewey was a realist too. He was concerned with survival in a turbulent world. His prescription still works today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92632/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alasdair S. Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Our current politically turbulent times in the US are difficult – but not unusual. History shows that fragility is the norm. Get used to it. What is unusual are moments of calm.Alasdair S. Roberts, Director, School of Public Policy, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/843122017-09-27T11:29:13Z2017-09-27T11:29:13ZA time traveller’s guide to television acting<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187551/original/file-20170926-10570-1l41wv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">William Hartnell as the original Dr Who.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009y3yj">BBC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>British television acting has changed a lot since the days of live drama. With the exception of soaps and some sitcoms – such as Ben Elton’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4793190/">Upstart Crow</a> – production has shifted from multi-camera studio to single camera location and the rehearsal process that was once so vital is now little more than a table-read at best. At worst, it’s a brief discussion with the director on the shoot. The other side of this coin is that training for TV – which used to be an afterthought at drama schools focused on stagecraft – is now a much larger part of a performer’s toolkit. So, what impact have these changes had on how actors work for TV? </p>
<p>That was the question I wanted to answer when I undertook <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784992989/">my own research</a>. I interviewed more than 30 actors, directors and producers from six decades of television drama and looked at a selection of TV sci-fi programmes, including <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045436/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3">The Quatermass Experiment</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2x0">Doctor Who</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072572/">Survivors</a> – each of which was remade in the 2000s. These provided both a historical overview and a “then and now” comparison of changing acting styles.</p>
<p>As most early television was live, we don’t have many recorded examples of TV acting before the 1950s. The accusation often made about these performances is that they are “stagey” or “mannered”. But watching the opening episode of Quatermass shows that some actors were already learning to scale down their theatre performances to something more suited to the small screen. </p>
<h2>‘Studio realism’</h2>
<p>Yes, there are wide, and at times hilarious, variations in the level of projection used for voice and body (by modern standards, <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/519559bd6f135">W. Thorp Devereux</a> is particularly wooden). But the lead actor, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Tate">Reginald Tate</a>, had already perfected a style that wouldn’t be entirely out of place today. Unlike some of his colleagues he keeps unnecessary gestures to a minimum and his voice is only as loud as it needs to be for the boom microphones. I’ve called this emerging style “studio realism”.</p>
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<p>Ten years later, the cast of Doctor Who were much more consistent when it came to gesture and vocal projection. Studio realism was beginning to bed in. The coming of videotape made little difference to the BBC’s production routine: the cast still practised lines and actions in a rehearsal room before moving into the studio. However, there is less sense of a theatre performance being given – despite the fact that the stage is where most actors still cut their teeth.</p>
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<h2>‘Location realism’</h2>
<p>In the mid 1970s, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUi_ZHiImRw">Survivors</a> saw the start of a sea change, away from the studio and on to location, albeit with outside broadcast cameras more often used to cover football matches. This is the start of modern “location realism”. Being out on site means the “frontal” acting required by three-walled studio sets can be abandoned and – no longer surrounded by the technological paraphernalia of Television Centre – many of the cast are pitching their lines at a more natural level.</p>
<p>Thirty years on, the relaunched Doctor Who and Survivors featured actors who had spent more time on screen than on stage and an arguably more spontaneous acting style has emerged. These day rehearsals have virtually disappeared and the production block is devoted primarily to filming. Scenes are usually recorded out of story order and the emphasis is now on repeated takes. Whereas multi-camera meant actors were playing scenes (and sometimes whole episodes) all the way through, the modern TV actor’s job is less a case of staying “in the moment” for a practised performance than an attempt to maintain “the illusion of the first time” (a phrase coined by US actor William Gillette to describe the actor’s art of making a scripted scene seem live and unrehearsed) while keeping continuity firmly in mind. All on increasingly tight shooting schedules.</p>
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<p>In addition, the screen training now provided at drama schools, where students are warned they will be “too big” for TV, has led to an under-projected physical and vocal style that can sometimes <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/472670/Jamaica-Inn-Disappointing-BBC-drama-with-mumbling-dialogue-and-absent-plot">frustrate audiences</a> and directors. BBC shows such as Jamaica Inn and <a href="https://theconversation.com/speak-up-why-some-tv-dialogue-is-so-hard-to-understand-75423">SS-GB</a> have both come under fire for inaudibility. </p>
<p>When The Quatermass Experiment was remounted live by the BBC in 2005, the cast and crew were attempting to recreate a production template that fell out of use decades before. Intensive and lengthy rehearsals were required and nerves ran so high on the night that the adrenaline-fuelled, accelerated production came in significantly under time.</p>
<p>While most of those involved enjoyed the challenge – particularly the generous preparation time – few wanted to see such a stressful model become the norm again. However, nearly everyone I spoke to said they would like more rehearsal. Actress <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0417062/">Louise Jameson</a> explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The absolute ideal is film, one camera – hours to light it, hours to rehearse it. When you’ve got that kind of luxury it’s fabulous, but it’s so rare.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My research showed that, while British TV acting hasn’t always followed a straight or predictable path, the scaled-down style of location realism has now almost entirely replaced studio realism. What direction it will take next, in an age of multi-platform and mobile viewing, remains to be seen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84312/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Hewett is affiliated with Manchester University Press, who published his book, The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, in August 2017. </span></em></p>TV acting has evolved from the early performances of actors like William Hartnell. It’s a more subtle craft and quite different from stage acting.Richard Hewett, Lecturer in Media Theory, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/818852017-08-08T00:56:58Z2017-08-08T00:56:58ZHow ‘Bambi’ paved the way for both ‘Fallout 4’ and ‘Angry Birds’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181269/original/file-20170807-25556-1db7pu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Realistic and stylized at the same time.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://disneymovieyear.wordpress.com/tag/forest/">Disney</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When “<a href="http://movies.disney.com/bambi">Bambi</a>” premiered in London on August 9, 1942, the fifth film from Walt Disney Animation Studios broke a lot of new ground. It was the first Disney film in which a <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/disney-secrets-beauty-and-the-beast">character’s parent dies</a> early in the film – which is now a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/bambi-moment-when-pop-culture-taught-us-about-death/324507/">common plot device</a>, as in “The Lion King” and “Frozen.” It was the first Disney film without human characters. And it heralded a new development in animation: a shift away from visual realism, and toward abstractness.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=227&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=227&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=227&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181288/original/file-20170807-25556-ua4ile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">From left, a cave painting from Borneo, the perspective of Vermeer and the abstraction of Mondrian.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Conversation US, compiled from Luc-Henri Fage, Johannes Vermeer and Piet Mondrian.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since humans began painting in caves more than 40,000 years ago, and all the way through the 17th century, artists aimed to make realistic portrayals of their subjects. But not long after Vermeer cracked the puzzle of <a href="http://www.essentialvermeer.com/camera_obscura/co_three.html">depicting three-dimensional perspective accurately</a> on a two-dimensional canvas, something fundamental shifted: Realism began to give way to the more stylized and abstract art of Van Gogh and Monet through Picasso and Dali to Mondrian and Pollock and the <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528732-000-get-the-picture-art-in-the-brain-of-the-beholder/">advent of modern art</a>.</p>
<p>The same trend happened in animation. “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029583/">Snow White</a>,” Disney’s first animated film and the first full-length movie with every frame drawn by hand, was heralded for its realism. A <a href="http://waltdisney.org/content/multiplane-camera">multiplane camera</a> allowed the film’s artists to use shadows and three-dimensional effects to striking effect. Just five years later, in “Bambi,” the studio was making conscious decisions to avoid realism in the artwork.</p>
<p>As a scholar and researcher of computer animation for movies and video games, I’ve noticed this general trend toward realism followed by the intentional adoption of more abstract and stylized imagery can be seen across the visual arts, including in electronic media.</p>
<h2>Starting with realism</h2>
<p>When making “Bambi,” Disney’s animators had a strong initial focus on realism, sending artists to the Los Angeles Zoo to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070228102553/http://disney.go.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/collection/masterworks/bambi/index.html">observe deer behavior</a> and even keeping two fawns at the studio. That helped make the depictions of Bambi, his mother and the other deer very realistic. But the producers found the initial sketches of the forest background too busy and distracting.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181233/original/file-20170807-25514-6x4hdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Walt Disney with the two fawns the studio used for animating ‘Bambi.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://ohmy.disney.com/news/2013/12/06/23-behind-the-scenes-photos-from-disney-animated-films/">Disney</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So they intentionally substituted an impressionistic style to depict the forest backgrounds. By incorporating more detail at the center of the action and less detail near the edges, the artists were able to direct viewers’ attention to the characters. </p>
<h2>Spreading to video games</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181254/original/file-20170807-25504-t6lteu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The primitive graphics of ‘Space Invaders.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASpace_Invader_Cabinet.jpg">Scalleja</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>The development of computer animation and video games followed a similar trajectory. The first arcade games, like “<a href="https://www.engadget.com/2014/07/09/worlds-first-arcade-videogame/">Computer Space</a>,” “Pong,” “<a href="http://www.classicgaming.cc/classics/space-invaders/history.php">Space Invaders</a>” and “Asteroids,” used vector graphics to display line drawings, the electronic equivalents of prehistoric cave art.</p>
<p>Realism improved along with screen technology, and particularly with the increasing prevalence of raster displays, where the image is divided into a grid of individually illuminated pixels. Color brought “<a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/2571216/">Donkey Kong</a>,” and by the 1980s middle-class kids were playing “<a href="https://www.mariowiki.com/Super_Mario_Bros.">Super Mario Bros.</a>” at home on their televisions.</p>
<p>At the end of the 1980s, improvements in graphics hardware achieved the video game equivalent of Vermeer’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura">camera obscura</a>. Then game designers could <a href="https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10446">depict three-dimensional space</a> on <a href="https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8072">two-dimensional screens</a>. Like the paintings of Vermeer, computer games were finally able to achieve the realism of accurate perspective, and keep the images flowing in real time with the gameplay. </p>
<p>For the next 25 years a primary goal of the video game industry was improving realism by incorporating shadows, texture, increasingly detailed geometry and ever more complex lighting effects. By 2015 and 2016, games like <a href="https://bethesda.net/">Bethesda Game Studios</a>’ “Fallout 4” and EA DICE’s “<a href="http://www.dice.se/games/battlefield-1/">Battlefield 1</a>” achieved breathtaking levels of realism, though they also made clear that there remains room for improvement.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=224&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=224&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=224&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181259/original/file-20170807-2667-u1zy75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dramatic realism in ‘Fallout 4.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fallout4.com/games/fallout-4">Bethesda Game Studios</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Going mobile</h2>
<p>The advent of the iPhone in the late 2000s led video games back away from realism. The new devices almost immediately spawned thousands of simple, two-dimensional, abstract and often <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-iphone-apps-when-the-app-store-launched-2011-5?op=1">highly stylized games</a>. In this case the abstraction was more a product of need than a conscious choice: Smartphones are <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/arm-unveils-processor-and-graphics-chip-designs-of-2016/">not powerful computers</a> and cannot compute advanced graphics algorithms or achieve the realism of high-end gaming computers. But nearly everyone has a smartphone, so the mobile gaming industry has <a href="https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/the-global-games-market-will-reach-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/">significantly expanded</a> the number of people who play video games.</p>
<p>Part of their popularity may be, in fact, that these new games aren’t realistic, but rather silly and cute. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/30/angry-birds-players-200m-rovio">Far more people</a> have played “<a href="http://lol.disney.com/games/wheres-my-water-app">Where’s My Water?</a>” and “<a href="https://www.angrybirds.com/games/">Angry Birds</a>” than “<a href="https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-ships-12-million-copies-in-one-day-break/1100-6432277">Fallout 4</a>.” There is even an “Angry Birds” <a href="https://www.angrybirds.com/movie/">movie</a>.</p>
<h2>Back to the drawing screen?</h2>
<p>This trend toward – and then away from – realism also appears in computer animation for the movie industry. Computers were first used to assist in traditional animation, where a seasoned animator draws a few important “key” frames and a less-skilled assistant draws the frames in-between. In 1974 computers replaced the assistant in producing the (highly stylized) short film “<a href="http://onf-nfb.gc.ca/en/our-collection/?idfilm=10443">Hunger</a>.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QXbWCrzWJo4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The ‘Genesis’ effect in ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over the next two decades filmmakers increasingly used computers, like the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/357318.357320">computer-generated “Genesis” effect</a> in 1982’s “<a href="http://www.startrek.com/database_article/star-trek-ii-the-wrath-of-khan">Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan</a>” and the T-1000 and other special effects in 1991’s “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/">Terminator 2: Judgment Day</a>.”</p>
<p>It wasn’t until 1995 that Pixar released “Toy Story,” the first feature-length animated film <a href="http://time.com/4118006/20-years-toy-story-pixar/">depicted in a three-dimensional world</a>. Software representations of how light falls on a scene and interacts with the surfaces it hits were still primitive, and resulted in a very “plastic” look – which Pixar turned to its advantage by telling a story involving plastic toys. The human characters did not look realistic.</p>
<p>In the two decades since, the animation industry has made enormous progress in creating realistic virtual characters. There has been enormous progress even in the six years that separate Clu in “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/">Tron: Legacy</a>” and Grand Moff Tarkin in “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3748528/">Rogue One</a>.” Before the end of the decade, we may see virtual characters that are indistinguishable from real actors. </p>
<h2>Moving back to stylized designs</h2>
<p>In movies now, we are again seeing artists intentionally abandoning realism for stylization. Director Steven Spielberg originally planned his 2011 adaptation of the “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/">The Adventures of Tintin</a>” as a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8825003/Steven-Spielberg-on-making-The-Adventures-of-Tintin.html">live-action film</a>, but his fellow producer Peter Jackson convinced Spielberg to shoot the film in a digital motion-capture studio to create a more stylized look that would more closely resemble the original comic. </p>
<p>The choices of moviemakers to use or not use realism have become artistic in nature. The 2.5-dimensional short “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W87YRboM6A">What to do with CO2</a>,” made in 2013, is compelling because it isn’t realistic. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1W87YRboM6A?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘What to do with CO2.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Similarly, in 2015 Netflix used both realism and stylization for artistic effect in “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1754656/">The Little Prince</a>” – where the real world of the Little Girl was portrayed realistically, but her imagination of the world of the Little Prince is shown in stop-motion-like scenes.</p>
<p>Across all this time and all these technologies, a trend seems clear: Humans try to express reality. Once they do, they go back to making art.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81885/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Bargteil works for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is a Director-at-Large with ACM SIGGRAPH. He receives (or has received) funding from the National Science Foundation, The Walt Disney Company, and Adobe Systems. </span></em></p>As the animated film ‘Bambi’ celebrates its 75th anniversary, a reminder that humans often try to express reality. But once they do, they go back to making art.Adam Bargteil, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/554552016-02-26T15:30:52Z2016-02-26T15:30:52ZThe real Henry James will never stand up – that’s his greatest legacy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113079/original/image-20160226-27003-557gel.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Henry James in 1912</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the evening of December 1 1915, Henry James collapsed with a stroke at his home in London. At first it seemed that he would recover, but over the following weeks the renowned American novelist’s condition was far from steady. On some days he would be cogent and conversational, on others he would call in his secretary and earnestly dictate letters in the persona of Napoleon. At times, his hand would move across the bedspread as through he imagined he was writing. </p>
<p>His brother’s widow Alice braved the hazardous war-time Atlantic crossing to be by his bedside. Devoted literary friends such as <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Gosse">Edmund Gosse</a> and <a href="http://www.edithwharton.org/edith-wharton/biography/">Edith Wharton</a> visited or kept in touch. In January 1916, James was awarded the Order of Merit for services to literature over a 50-year career, during which he had written some 20 novels and over 100 short stories. But he was 73 and his strength was fading. He had a history of heart trouble and depression, and he found the anxiety and grief of wartime exhausting. He died on February 28 the same year. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vintage James.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/57440551@N03/23411616490/in/photolist-4ioD2g-pk5nKX-2TpGhw-BENDWb-5s4xwJ-qfvSwz-RUxc3-oeKsb5-e3Xybc-8nR99n-goEN3Y-7JkmSJ-7Jgrjg-apL9WG-eiWgGh-aP5wLx-r3V516-hAvjtM-baFKBP-2TmZ9f-45afe2-64qbTH-6YDjb3-8oQgQa-xJJnFb-55H6C-e6hGb9-5ffjX7-q1bKqG-77Wfi9-5RgGf7-8zLtAu-5KzoQF-y7iuUo-4kJm2J-aKphUe-9Z5Frj-hBoWd3-qNCgnT-oQzor6-f9o9TQ-5gm2oQ-77Skjt-47QuYi-cNj9Su-69bnrB-8rkNJp-tdfkkE-7c7GiL-77Wfk7/">Leo Boudreau</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One hundred years later, James’s cultural standing is higher than ever. His work features in classic paperback series and university reading lists, and has been adapted for film, television and stage. His private life has been scrutinised and reinvented repeatedly in biography and bio-fiction – <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43691.The_Master">sometimes</a> more creatively than accurately. His fiction and letters – over 10,000 still exist – are both in the process of being re-edited and republished. There are two international societies for scholars who are interested in studying his work. </p>
<p>This would all have been a surprise to James and his publishers, who never made as much profit from his work as they hoped. Many of his later novels failed to recoup their advances, and latterly he made more money from short stories placed in magazines. Even in his lifetime, James had a reputation as a difficult writer for clever readers. In fact, this reputation was part of his value in the magazine market, where his name on the contents page added a touch of literary class – whether his stories were read or not. </p>
<p>Yet in a world of cut-throat literary reputations, the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Portrait-Lady-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/1853261777">The Portrait of a Lady</a>, <a href="http://www.henryjames.org.uk/tots/home.htm">The Turn of the Screw</a> and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259020.The_Golden_Bowl">The Golden Bowl</a> has survived while contemporaries like <a href="http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/victorian-fiction-research-guides/sarah-grand/">Sarah Grand</a>, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/caine/bio1.html">Hall Caine</a> and <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/corelli/salmonson1.html">Marie Corelli</a> who outsold him spectacularly have all but vanished. James often explored this mismatch between popularity and lasting value in tales such as <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/645">The Figure in the Carpet</a>. Shrewdly, he also saw that what readers respond to is not the real writer, but a persona which they buy into or construct. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Henry James 1843-1916.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/halighalie/663414371/in/photolist-21CaYP-6d6hS9-9XcgnY-4Xf5vH-9nBe6p-6d6iAY-6d6jkA-6d6h9Q-6d6iZy-bvRBiJ-9nBdwD-nLB9JY-nH7iu1-6orxvM-8yNEZN-6orwQP-7styWN-6gjyTj-5PEhy7-8fucFU-8PYwXP-4HVUVF-hsdV4x-6eX4n7-goD24d-4HDjd2-6d28HR-6d2b2x-8KGAQA-fDutq1-7KfBrA-4kj55r-7FnyNv-rwTh1-q6WYmb-5GtNk-4BvCqL-ndJrom-9n2bkj-goCNP2-6ovHhG-8Encfe-4J18Nq-eopjcC-bvfKQ-4HDizi-81CNy-goCJVv-goD53g-goD4Fs">giuliaduepuntozero</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>James signs off</h2>
<p>The last piece of writing James worked on before he fell ill <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/henry_james_review/v029/29.2.hutchison.html">was an essay</a> about the young English <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/brooke_rupert.shtml">soldier-poet Rupert Brooke</a>. Brooke had died the previous April of blood poisoning on a troop ship in transit to Gallipoli, just weeks after the publication of his <a href="http://www.rupertbrooke.com/poems/1914/">1914 sonnets</a>, including his best known poem, The Soldier. James knew him, and wrote to a mutual friend that this loss was so “stupid and hideous” that one could only “stare through one’s tears”. </p>
<p>James’s piece formed the introduction to Brooke’s travel essays, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1106608.Letters_from_America">Letters From America</a>, and was also a response to the mythology that sprang up around Brooke immediately after his death. In The Times, Winston Churchill had praised Brooke as the ideal of Englishness: “Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose.” </p>
<p>This obituary perhaps said more about Churchill and his agenda than about Brooke, however. Notably, it appeared alongside an appeal for more young men to enlist for military service. In contrast, James’s tribute focused on Brooke as a flawed human individual, while also making a strong claim that he be considered a “true poet” alongside Byron and Keats.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">War-poet Rupert Brooke.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When Letters From America was published on March 8 1916, little more than a week after James’s death, this essay about the tension between a remembered person and a literary persona would have seemed even more poignant. Reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement the next day, James’s friend the biographer and critic <a href="http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4838/Percy-Lubbock.html">Percy Lubbock</a> said that the names of Rupert Brooke and Henry James were both “already a legend”, and “here run into one”. </p>
<p>Lubbock would later be appointed as James’s literary executor and given the tricky job of publishing his unfinished work and collecting his personal letters for publication. By editing and promoting his writing, Lubbock would play a major part in creating one of the most enduring versions of James, that of the serious literary craftsman and thoughtful, scrupulous student of human nature. </p>
<p>There are certainly many other versions of James, often contradictory: shy, self-assured, homosexual, heterosexual, altruistic, rapacious, self-aware and self-deluded. You might wonder where, a century on, we can ever find the real James. We can’t. Like his creation Hugh Vereker in The Figure in the Carpet, he has vanished, leaving us to puzzle endlessly over his rich and multi-layered work. That’s precisely the beauty of it, though. The fact that James’s work can be interpreted and reconfigured in so many different ways suggests that when we read his fiction, what we are really learning about is ourselves. And that, of course, is the hallmark of a great writer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55455/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hazel Hutchison is the author of Brief Lives: Henry James (2012) and The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War (2015). She lectures at the University of Aberdeen. </span></em></p>The American writer remains as elusive 100 years after his death as he was at the time.Hazel Hutchison, Senior Lecturer, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.