A Cultural Indicator?

I love this graphic! I first showed it, going all the way back to 1929, on the old LaMarotte here. This time I’ve updated it to 2010 but show it from 1951, the year I arrived in the United States. Of course this is an economic chart, taken from that very sanctuary of money wisdom, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, keeper of the Gross Domestic Product’s holy value. Nonetheless, I view this figure as a cultural indicator although it shows disposable income per capita in constant, thus inflation-free dollars. When I arrived on these shores (in New Orleans), the figure was $9,352 per living human; at the midpoint of my stay here, in 1980, the figure had more than doubled to $18,863. And now it stands at $33,010, nearly again double the 1980 figure. Since I arrived here the measurable purchasing power per person has increased three-and-a-half-fold!

Why is this a cultural indicator rather than a kind of capitalist’s version of Amazing Grace? I don’t need to point it out to likely readers of this blog. The chart came back into my memory as I contemplated times in which stopping Social Security payments (yes, to little old me)—and payments to the politicians’ most venerated subgroup, veterans (that’s me too) is now being used as a threat to avoid the country officially falling into technical bankruptcy. Back in 1951 there was no talk like that, no “drama” in high places along these silly lines. Back then real income was less than a third what it is today. And we were then in the middle of fighting the Korean War (36,516 dead versus 6,026 dead in Iraq/Afghanistan as of June 5, 2011). World War II with staggering costs in money and lives (416,800 dead) was still a recent memory then. The feel of the times back then was so very different; indeed energy, confidence, and public courtesies were all quite high.

Is sharply climbing wealth, therefore, a reliable cultural indicator—so that its every increase signals a step down in culture? Wealth as a contrarian indicator? If that is true our economic troubles these days may signal hope for the future—albeit our leading circles have not as yet discovered that.

Walking on My Own Floor

Retirement has benefits if you take advantage of it. From spring to late fall I wear simple sandals with firm rubber soles and Velcro straps—so that by now I have stripes of tanned and light skin on my feet where the straps expose or shield skin from the sun. Mine is an informal life so that wearing socks and shoes is an “occasion” usually tied to stress. It’s wonderfully simple to slip on sandals; Velcro provides a rapid, firm fastening. I love Velcro. We owe it to seeds of the kind that move from place to place by hooking on to living things—the burs. The Swiss electrical engineer Georges de Menstral, on a hunting trip in the Alps, noticed them clinging to his clothes and dogs and, curious, creative man, he looked at them under a magnifying glass. Inspiration came. In the 1950s. With the effort of putting on socks and shoes replaced by donning sandals almost without any effort at all—hey, these things become genuine issues with septuagenarians—I oddly lost the sensation of “wearing” shoes. The sensation has become another: “I prefer to walk on my own floor.”

Deep Memory of Quince

We planted a quince bush in our garden, a Father’s Day gift—one that surprised and specially delighted me. I encountered quince when I was five in the gardens of a vast, cold, impossible-to-heat old house we moved into on one of my Father’s frequent transfers. But summers there were like Paradise. The yellow, pear-shaped quince, and especially what Mother made of it, remained sharply imprinted on my memory. When Monique and John, entirely on their own, discovered quince and bought their own bush, my enthusiasm was evident. And they decided that I should have my own.

Soon after we planted ours, I went to the Village Market. It is a small but very potent store in walking distance of our house. I had a talk with the manager there—we often talk—and asked him if anyone produced quince jelly. Schmuckers had done so long ago, no longer. The Village Market’s manager had learned his trade at the knees of his grandfather. In my opinion he is the most knowledgeable grocer certainly in Detroit and environs. He said at once that the Trappist Monks in Massachusetts sold it; then he also found another outfit in his huge printouts. Trappist sounded good to me. Friday last I picked up our jars at the market. They’d arrived from St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, MA (founded in 1950; the order itself goes back to 1098 in France). Now I’ll tell you honestly: This was just a pious gesture because I know what a jelly is. But what I remember eating 70 years ago was not a jelly but something you could slice. But what it was and might be called was buried too deep in memory.

I had some of that jelly for breakfast today. “It’s all sugar, mostly,” I told Brigitte. “Lord. I wish I could remember what it was Mother used to make back in Cegléd. Too bad we can’t just call Heaven by cell phone.” Brigitte also remembered something you could cut and, just sitting there, she invented a recipe she thought would work when, finally, our bush produces fruit. I said: “I’ll just go and try to find out what quince is in Hungarian. We live in the age of the Internet now.” Before I went I made my second cup of coffee. As I was stirring the cup, suddenly into my mind came the word birsalma. (The s is sounded as sh, the a as in awl.) And no sooner had this thought arrived than came a combination: birsalma sajt. Sajt means cheese. I knew at once that now I had it! Yes! Birsalma meant quince. And the solid something I remembered eating was called a cheese. Just calmly stirring my coffee, my memory finally brought the words—or my Mother got the call in Heaven and whispered the answer; no need for cell phones in such communications.

The rest was easy. Soon I had a recipe for birsalma sajt in Hungarian. Then I discovered that the phrase translates into English directly. Quince cheese is a well-known product to those in the know. Therefore soon I had multiple recipes, Spanish-style, Turkish-style, Hungarian-style, all in English, too. And one site, this one, also brought me a picture that confirmed it all visually. Yes, sir! That’s what it looked like. Quince is yellow on the outside but red inside. And quince cheese is quite firm, easy to slice, and lasts for a long time. Seventy years ago…

Melting Pots Old and New

Back in the (mercifully brief) Nazi days in Hungary, all people employed by the state—beginning, I suppose, with a certain rank—had to present proof-positive using birth registry extracts, three generations back, that they had no Jewish blood. That gave the country’s registrars a bit of a work-out. By happenstance all of the papers my family had to file (my father being an officer in the army) eventually ended up in my hands. They filled a rather large box and turned out to be a treasure showing the lineage of my family. Some of these records were carefully notarized extracts from church registries—and in the earliest of these records I recognized no name at all. My father, of course, had to account for his wife as well: an officer married to a Jewess could not be trusted to be reliable. Therefore more than forty birth certificates were in this archive. Twenty-eight would have satisfied the strict requirements, but some of the people (like my grandfather) had married twice, and under the rules subsequent spouses, even if their “blood” had not entered the stream, had to be accounted for—presumably because their ideas and influence could nevertheless corrupt the succeeding generations. Insanity is not something we’ve invented recently.

But my topic is melting pots, not collective aberrations. These record showed that a phenomenon we associate with America is and has been alive and well in Europe—and everywhere else, for that matter, as far back as memory can be traced. My family originated in the Duchy of Württemberg in the southwestern part of Germany. My forebears, called Dorner, were immigrants to the Austrian Empire, which then encompassed Hungary. This happened sometime in the nineteenth century. They were enticed by incentives. Austria was attempting to attract industry, and we were in the iron business (foundries and the like)—indeed, parts of my family still were, even in my day, although the rich part of the family had long since diversified into all kinds of other businesses as well.

Now what I found fascinating, studying the deposit of documents from the bad-old Nazi days, was how persistently my family, extending backwards, had always and only married into other German families. Every name was German until the twentieth century. The family was evidently too wealthy to mingle with the lower orders of the native population—but not rich enough to marry into the nobility. That finally happened when my great-grandfather married into a genuinely Hungarian family—not in trade, they, no! Landed aristocracy—to be sure of the lower sort. But they were the real thing: lots and lots of land and going back lots of generations too! And my father, in turn, married a woman who came from a Slavic line (Gluzek, they were called—but renamed themselves Gyulafia (“Son of Gyula”) to erase the Slavic traces as Nationalism rose but before it married Socialism). That line had reached prominence through the professions—and a great uncle of mine, the towering figure in that family, had had charge of all psychiatric hospitals in a country unapologetically operating a centralized, state-run medical system.

Melting pots all over the place—just less obviously visible. And here I hasten to note that Brigitte’s family has an identical history, different only in minor details. Her family had settled in Poland, attracted there by Poland’s own desire for industry. And the industry was textiles, not iron. Her family’s was a somewhat later exodus. Like Swedish Finns, they didn’t speak Polish much—whereas my family, longer in residence, spoke Hungarian. They too were all expanding by marrying into other German families, also all resident in Poland. But had mayhem and war not unpleasantly intruded, and thus caused some more bubbling in that pot, Brigitte might have ended up marrying a stalwart Polish duke rather than me.

Reification

When I first came across this curious word I understood it right away—and that because my little Latin sufficed to tell me that the re stood for the Latin res, thing. Therefore the word meant thingification—and signals the process whereby something that isn’t is turned into something that is—a thing. The word comes from German, Verdinglichung. It was coined by Marx, but for German readers it is as immediately understandable as thingification is in English, but with a lesser feel of awkwardness, the reason being that both parts of Verdinglichung come from West Germanic roots, but in thingification the thing is West Germanic but the -ification comes from Latin; the smell of a mongrel is in the air. Not surprisingly, therefore, translators rendered that German word in Latin. A variant is Versachlichung, rendered as objectification, and that English word is much less awkward because object comes from Latin too. Germans are less inclined to form neologisms from Latin—one reason why it is relatively easier to read philosophical works in that language. That Norman invasion has done strange things to English.

What Marx had in mind was turning living labor into gold, thus into a lifeless, tradable good. I came across the word in a more philosophical context and discovered, only this morning, that Marx and economics loomed behind it. In the philosophical context it stands for turning spiritual values into the material. Hence this word is a terrific single sound for characterizing cultural decline. It’s everywhere. Life is just a species of chemical reactions. Mind’s just the firing of neurons.

The 2011 Welcome Sign

While celebrating the achievements of the Paret branch of the family, I thought I’d bring here the Welcome sign marking our reserved parking spot at Wolverine Lake ahead of the July 3rd fireworks. Most of these signs over the years have been drawn by Stella, Michelle’s second child, whose many gifts include a penchant for design. Indeed the only image on this blog of me is one that she drew and I presented here. The signs are different every year, always hiding behind what looks like ink-work, from a distance, images that arise from Stella thoughts from the paper at the movement of inspiration. In this family, so far as I know, several people write their dreams down—but only one paints hers…

Max Passed Le Bac!

To know the feeling of immense gratitude, pride, and relief we feel in Ghulfdom today, you have to know something about the horrors that surround European education. Words want to fail. The tension was enormous. But we’re wiping tears after having danced up and down the stairs. Max, for the record, is Michelle’s oldest, thus the first to meet this trial—and he made it on the first try!!!  Jubilation! Jubilation!

Talking to Ads

“Does your money cross borders as easily as you do?”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Well, stop reading this ad.”

Tiki Night 2011

The date and time of this post exactly match the time when these pictures were taken at Wolverine Lake, Michigan, the occasion being Tiki Night, always held on July 3. Looking back more than a decade now, we note with gratitude that the weather has always been perfect! Tradition, tradition! Thank you, again, Magees! Your hospitality, community spirit! Splendid! They light up the summer. And note in low voice that, for them, Tiki Night means mountains and mountains of Tiki Work in advance and in arrears...

And God said...

Clawing around trying to find my password notebook, I just came across an ancient slip Brigitte had chanced across and had put on my desk the other day with an annotation. Her note says: “Too bad I did not indicate where this came from. But it is so perfect for your most recent research effort on LOGARITHMS!” The slip, courtesy of my little Kodak and some painstaking efforts to camouflage coffee stains using Paint, is shown here. It is, indeed, the perfect—and possibly the earliest—version of this cartoon. Try as I might, I could not find a copy on the Internet, hence my efforts. One usually sees a much simplified version on T-Shirts, showing only Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism. The T-shirt photo I am showing comes from this Zazzle site.

One Song Does Not an Opera Make

This was our conclusion after seeing Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and the song within it, which certainly has had and will have a long life, was Barcarolle, in this YouTube version sung by the sisters Iordachescu, Irina (soprano) and Cristina (mezzo-soprano). We went on an opera marathon here recently and saw two versions of Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Godspell. Andrew Lloyd Webber composed Superstar in 1970 and Joseph in 1968. Superstar is much better; in Joseph a few songs call attention to themselves, but the work as a whole appears to be a loose stitch-together of the songs. We found Godspell weak—but filled with memories: Monique had played in a version produced at Eisenhower (that used to be a high school in Hopkins, Minnesota).

We noted, this time around, that Superstar and Godspell, both of which trace Jesus’ final days, both stop short of the resurrection—which gave us things to talk and think about beyond opera and music …

The older a thing, the more we approach it with awe—at least in anticipation—hence we waited for the first strains of The Tales of Hoffmann in appropriate awe. In its final, finished version the opera was first produced in 1879, one of the last works of Jacques Offenbach, widely celebrated by that time as the composer of fifty some odd operettas, among these Orpheus in the Underworld. Well. We were not very impressed by Tales. Perhaps romanticism is too far in the past, perhaps we’re tired of recycled Mephistopheles, and the music, here and there almost achieving beat and melody, invariable fell apart, distracted as we were by the kitchy baroque of the production-values of this 1951 film.

One song does not an opera make. We did enjoy Barcarolle. But it only consumed 3 of 128 minutes of this seemingly endless confusion.

A Reluctant Conclusion

Despite their entertainment value, I’ve decided to delete two earlier postings this morning highlighting the Strauss-Kahn affair and a rash of stories that marked cultural meltdown in the papers this morning. The thought came that such efforts at critique have virtually no value—and interfere with those who have wisely decided to avoid the media in order to avoid the untreated sewage that reaches them in that fashion. Hereafter, I’ll constrain myself—and consequently postings may thin out. But that’s all right. It’s summertime.

Geologic Ages: Some Footnotes

The oldest blogger on the web, more or less, except perhaps for Jerry Pournelle, is Brandon Watson on Siris—and here’s a post from Brandon to prove it. In that most informative note Brandon makes use of geologic ages to communicate just exactly how old a blogger he really is—but being a great teacher, he is actually pulling a fast one. Most of us have no idea that we are denizens of the Holocene, the most recent segment of the Quaternary—or, like me, knew once but had forgotten long ago. Brandon secretly hopes that we shall “look it up.” But the effort may be too great for some. Therefore, to help those struggling with Brandon’s post (Cenozoic? Mesozoic?) I present three graphics from ever-helpful Wikipedia here:

The first presents all geologic time. The second shows the last block of the first expanded to show more detail. The third shows the last block of the second, ditto. You will find Brandon in the second graphic, on the right, right on that line that separates the Cretaceuous from the Paleogene. Jerry Pournelle? He is left of the Cretaceous.

Blogging is a great educator if you have a guide like Brandon and able assistants like yours truly—albeit in actual physical age, I am an Upper Tarantian to Brandon’s Holocene.

The Video in Question

Let us consider a video game and describe it in the ponderous language of law. Consider a game—

“in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being, if those acts are depicted” in a manner that “[a] reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors,” that is “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors,” and that “causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”
     [Text from the California Assembly Bill 1179, quoted in the recently decided Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. reachable here.]

California has prohibited sale of such games to minors. The Supreme Court has just held that such a prohibition is a violation of the First Amendment. The only pertinent words in that amendment are: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Since that amendment’s enactment, we’ve discovered that everything is speech, including expenditure of money. Haven’t we? No. Not quite. The Supreme Court holds that—

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.
     [Text of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942). The emphasis is mine.]

Chaplinsky, indeed, upheld the fighting words aspect of this “dispensation.” In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants, the Supreme Court cites Chaplinsky as well as Roth v. United States (1954) in which obscenity is defined as material whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest” to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.” It’s okay to prohibit obscenity as well, evidently, for the same reasons I’ve italicized in the quote above. The Court also cites Brandenburg v. Ohio (1959) in which the court defined incitement that may be prohibited in these words:

… the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
     [Brandenburg v. Ohio, emphasis mine.]

Now it strikes me that emphasized phrases in all of the above might very easily be applied to video games of the sort defined by the State of California. They are (1) certainly not any exposition of ideas, (2) steps to truth, and (3) certainly operate against social interest in order and morality. Or is it a good thing to let teenaged boys experience, even if only virtually, torturing and raping people? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. No need to enlighten me.

Get Rid of the Black Navbar Google

The navigation bar on Google’s search engine has now been changed—and if it offends you, you can’t get rid of it if you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Users of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera can use a work-around, but it is—a work-around.

This reminds me of New Coke. Eventually all of us who promptly switched to drinking Pepsi, Royal Crown, and other soft drinks made Coca Cola see the light, and New Coke bubbled away. I hope the same thing happens to Google’s black navbar—hard to read and a disfigurement, like a huge and ugly wart on a likeable face.

The Crows are Back

In October 1999 the USGS Wildlife Health Center issued a health alert to notify natural resource agencies “of the emergence of the West Nile virus in both free ranging and captive birds in the New York City area.” West Nile virus is transmitted by mosquitoes and affects some eighteen species of birds, most notably American crows, but blue jays, mallards, and several kinds of hawks were also affected if in low numbers (link). The experts did not know whether the virus would spread but thought not—because crows are not migratory birds.

Migratory or not, the disease arrived in our area by the fall of 2001. The Associated Press announced the fact in an August 29 story titled “Detroit Crows Have West Nile Virus,” citing the Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing. Down on the ground, we noticed a sharp drop in numbers about six years ago—and later crows just about disappeared. I mentioned that in a tribute to crows and their kin on this blog last year here.

Well! Late this Spring Brigitte comes in from outside and says, full of wonder and a hint of pleasure. “I think I heard some crows. I may have even seen one.” — And, yes! They’re back. I’ve since both heard and seen them, in good numbers, flying and settling, wonderful, sleek black forms, sharp, unsettling sounds—that strike our ears quite pleasantly now.

This brings to mind an old poem about crows. Here the first verse of it:

Two old crows sat on a fence rail.
Two old crows sat on a fence rail,
Thinking of effect and cause,
Of weeds and flowers,
And nature’s laws.
One of them muttered, one of them stuttered,
One of them stuttered, one of them muttered.
Each of them thought far more than he uttered.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle:
The muttering crow
Asked the stuttering crow,
“Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?
Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?”
“Bee-cause,” said the other crow,
“Bee-cause,
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.”
     [From Two Old Crows by Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)]

The verse, of course, needs modernizing. Around here, anyway, it should be titled “Two Young Crows.”

Not Last Year’s June

It startled me to realize that it’s already the 27th of the month. This isn’t simply a consequence of another well-known phenomenon—but one that Einstein, despite his love of relativity, entirely overlooked in his equations—namely that as you age the flow of time speeds up. No. My surprise now came because the real June is still, oddly, ahead. What we had this month was a late, weary, and bedraggled May. Just to make sure, I stepped back into 2010, at least as noted on this blog. Sure enough, in midmonth last year I noted flowers beginning to fade—the same ones just now beginning to emerge! Everything’s late. By now the rainy season should be over—but isn’t. The fish fly season started weeks late—and the numbers are drastically down. Nature is adaptive and takes all this in stride, but if the fish flies are an indication, populations pay or garner the price for all those up, down swings.

Un Départ by Invitation

Train Ride to Detroit
by Michelle Darnay

«Le trafic sur la ligne B est fortement perturbé.
Traffic on the B line is highly unpredictable.
El trafico en la liña B esta muy perturbado. »

People worry. People read. People type.
People sit, ears sprouting wire, white and black,
Ears hidden beneath mushroom-shaped growths.
People sleep, heads resting on 
Glass leaving greasy spots.
Men in white shirts knot ties,
Wipe pant legs, shine shoes,
Preparing for service.

Train jiggles, jostles, rushes.
Black clouds lean across grey skies
Yet willow fronds hang still;
Sparse yellow flowers push up between
Rock and rail;
Lush ivy drapes thickly over
Concrete walls, broken buildings;
Lively graffiti peeks through
Green masses, dazzles on
Heavy highway pillars.

Hearts race, too fast,
Caffeine driven, stress stimulated;
Breath comes short, chests rise and fall,
Fall and rise, too quickly;
A feeling of pressure between
Ribs, lungs never fully, fully full.
Eyes search for beauty.
Out the window, cars inch in lines between
High, high trucks.

«Ce train a pour terminus l’aéroport Charles de Gaulle.
The terminus of this train is Charles de Gaulle airport.
El final del tren esta el aéropuetro Charles de Gaulle.»

Train flies and stops, flies and stops.
In a tunnel, blackness flashes,
Electric light is then isn’t rhythmically,
Pure sound howls then whistles as
Train exits tunnel.

Eyes find beauty,
Nose finds pleasure :
African women wrap chubby babies
On to backs with
Cloth of exuberant shades;
Butterfly head-dresses stand alert,
One round, black shoulder bared,
Panther-soft skin visible,
Exotic perfume spices the air.
With bags and babies ready, they alight.

«Je ne parlerai à personne là-bas, pendant les deux mois !
I won’t speak to anyone for two months straight!»

Daughter vomits. Daughter drinks,
Pees, whines, smiles, hugs,
Zigzags away toward
Bluer landscapes.
Waves once more,
Eyes bright over
Narrowed shoulders, hair shiny,
My tall, tall, little girl off
To Detroit.

A Certain Weakness…

A certain weakness in democracy is that, functionally, the only real qualification of an elected official is the ability to persuade a majority of ordinary people to vote for him or her. Popularity, one might say, is thus a constant (as in a mathematical context); it was thus in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and still is in the twenty-first century. But effective rule then becomes the function of at least two variables that can and do change over time. One of these is the size of the electorate that votes for any one representative. The other is the quality of the electors measured in education, wisdom, and sense of responsibility.

When the number of electors is relatively small, the candidates are better known; as that number increases, the electors’ knowledge of the individual thins out and therefore becomes more and more abstract. The costs of learning about the candidate mount—for the individual voter; knowledge certainly requires, minimally, expenditure of much more time. More and more mechanical means of communications (beyond personal contact and word-of-mouth reputation) must be used; money becomes ever more necessary to use the new means. Natural candidates—who emerge quite, ah, naturally in day-to-day contacts (and this still happens at the village level)—may not even come close to running. Huge competitions precede even the first stage, that of achieving the status of candidacy!

The quality of the electorate changes as the franchise is granted to people of ever less “natural” (that word again) qualification. The minimum is that of a householder, male or female, to be sure. To this one might add—of a certain age. In our history the age qualification was moved downward; it should have been moved up. Property qualifications have been removed—whereas they should have been retained but modernized: must pay a mortgage or pay rent. The combination of extending the franchise to anyone—and removing the candidate from direct contact with the public by increasing size, produces a new kind of representative who, quite evidently, is no longer capable of effective rule.

This came to mind today when Brigitte read me an editorial in New York Times titled “Dangerous Imports,” reporting on Congressional efforts to cut the FDA’s budget—despite the fact that two-thirds of fruits and vegetables, 80 percent of seafood, half of the medical devices, and 80 percent of active ingredients in medications are imported. We have, alas, far too many legislators who believe that regulation (not least of food safety) is some kind of arbitrary malevolence directed by the Left against the corporate sector—rather than a by now traditional process of protecting public health.

Empires of Empiricism

I got to thinking about the meaning of empirical in the context of contemplating the paranormal, more specifically the subject of precognitive dreams. The word is very closely linked to science in such combinations as “empirical method” and “empirical research.” Now it turns out that the word itself derives from the Greek empeiria, meaning experience. Curious, therefore, that the paranormal falls beyond the pale of modern science—considering that such study is entirely and solely dependent on the examination of experience, accessible only, therefore, to empirical investigation.

The reasons for this stand-off are traceable to the drift in the meaning of the word as well as its deeper roots. Empeiria itself derives from the Greek word meaning skilled, which derives from the words en and peira, thus in and trial or experiment. From Greek the word emigrated to Latin as empiricus, meaning a physician who worked from experience—as opposed to a physician who worked from philosophical principles such as a dogmatic, theoretical knowledge that the imbalance of humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) were entirely responsible for disease.

Thus empirical first served to separate the skilled artisan from the thinker, then the skilled professional from the philosopher. The trial-and-error in that root (applied with an open mind of course) became foundational for science—despite the fact that some sciences don’t permit trial and error (e.g., astronomy, geology). In modern times the qualitative approach to using observation yielded to the dominance of the quantitative approach. (The greedy manufacturers of instruments got the upper hand and caused all this—as arms manufacturers cause war.) And therefore the empirical approach, if deprived of trial-and-error, replication, and precise measurement, is no longer an acceptable avenue to the gathering of insight into the darkest shadows of reality.

I hope this exposition is a helpful nudge back to a more comprehensive approach to genuine science. But now you wonder about empire, don’t you. Is that connected here somewhere, or was I once more yielding to linguistic urges in framing the title of this post? The latter. Empire comes from the Latin imperium, meaning rule or command. Its root is once more im-, meaning in, and parare, to order.

The above composed by a financial contributor to Online Etymology Dictionary.