The Istvan Lovas scandal - should they eat shit?

Good ol' Hungary is at it again. Or at least Istvan Lovas is, one of the Brussels correspondents of the daily paper Magyar Nemzet (translating into Hungarian Nation), which is heavily leaning towards the current Fidesz-KDNP Government.

The story in a nutshell: Lovas wrote an e-mail to the journalists responsible for covering Hungarian events on international level, complaining that whereas they vividly depict the 'supposed' wrongdoings of the governing party, they don't inform the rest of the EU about any of the scandals the former governing party MSZP gets involved in. He ends his short rant by recommending the aforementioned media workers to eat shit.

You can see a Hungarian article on the scandal here:

http://atlatszo.blog.hu/2013/10/29/egyetek_szart_seggfejek_lovas_istvan_a_kulfoldi_tudositoknak

The page also contains Lovas's e-mail in English.

Truth be told: Lovas is right that the MSZP's affairs don't get much publicity nowadays aboard. But I think he is wrong about the reasons for this. Lovas implies that the Hungarian correspondents prefer MSZP and other parties in contrast to Fidesz-KDNP. That's bollocks. When MSZP was the ruling party international media was quick to deliver news about their wrongdoings. This happened both when the police reacted in a brutal way to some of the anti-government protests that sprung up after the 1956 ceremonies. Same thing applies to the case of ex-president Gyurcsany when someone got a recording of him beginning a speech addressed to his fellow MSZP members at a party meeting beginning thus: "We fucked up. We were lying in the morning, at noon, and in the evening."

There are two reasons why no one writes about MSZP but there is some coverage of the work of Fidesz-KDNP. First, Hungary is a small, quite insignificant country. Not too many care about news about the shady activities and mistakes of one of the opposition parties. Second, whereas MSZP's activity mainly harms Hungarians, the current Fidesz-KDNP government openly engages in anti-EU populist propaganda, took on board a very risky economic strategy to ease the debt situation of the country (we still don't see whether it will work or not), and they introduced modifications in the constitution and media law which can be used to the advantages of the governing party. These four things both go against much of mainstream EU thinking and values, and also openly engage with many of the EU's leading thinkers and politicians in a hostile way. Thus, they are more interesting as news material, more controversial and get more attention.

Lovas's character has often come under attack during the last few years. I think he is one of those people who openly engage in party rhetoric and do not even take the trouble of trying to appear balanced or impartial. In fact, this attitude gains him much popularity among far-right readers and the xenophobes. I think what makes his case really bad is that he knows the rules of the game very well, but pretends not to, pretends to be honest.

People like him are no use for Hungary, and not even for his party. He is a great example of those who - instead of trying to work at developing the country, gaining new opportunities, opening up and winning over territories in economic fields - are just satisfied with barking as loud as they can around the quarters of their masters, securing whatever personal gain they can, not caring for the consequences.

Does the untold speak? - How important is the unwritten in literature?

Sometimes it is hard to pin down what a book tells you. There are very straightforward books. Such are the ones where the writer tells you what his or her characters think, feel, want, and then also what happens to them, what they perceive, and maybe also tells you the author's/narrator's personal opinion.

But even with such pieces of writing it might happen that the structure also communicates something. You have to pay attention to what is said, in what order it is said.

Now, the most difficult thing is to understand that what is untold. Why certain things are left out. Or don't make sense. Or seem absurd.

An easy read is Joseph Heller's Catch 22. The narrator is also a character. We get an outer point of view of his actions, but can also, as it were, peak behind the curtains and see into his thoughts, etc. Also, we are given pointers to what unifies the narrative. The absurdity of the situation in which the soldiers live from they to day is often stressed. The lack of good planning and care for them as human beings is made fun of in the form of characters (Scheisskopf, the generals), and said explicitly.

But what about novels where much is left unsaid and leaving it unsaid if meaningful? I often asked this question since reading many post-1950 books. John Barth, in his Lost in the Funhouse, makes fun of making the narrative painstakingly explicit and self-reflexive. The story is not bad either, the fun made of the writing style is great too, and there is also a third, extra layer, delicious to lovers of literature, where the story (the little boy gets lost in the funhouse) interacts with the readers' being lost in the text which makes use of all the tools available to a writer of a prosaic short story.

Then again there are minimalists on the other end. In Brat Easton Ellis's books we often get a first person view of the world surrounding the protagonist. The descriptions of the world by these characters are usually very quick, very superficial, oriented toward looks, status symbols, media labels - the anchors of their fleeting attention, the lighthouses of their shallow but dangerous worlds. By making his characters so hostile to any deeper penetration into their inner Ellis creates a convincing illusion of both of having to do with such a person, and makes us feel a bit sorry for them. The people in his stories do not think or feel certain things, because they are not even able to. They don't have the conceptual skills, the mental sophistication, the psychological health and stability, the support from friends and family. What Ellis never writes about tells us a lot about the sadness of the lives of his characters.

It is noteworthy how certain important layers of life are absent from his characters's views (for example in The Informers, Less than Zero, Luna Park). The only novel where the political and the international aspects of the world manage to get a hold on the protagonist is Glamorama. Even in this case, due to the characters lack of any experience in the above mentioned domains, he is wholly unable to handle his life as it is suddenly flooded by life and death questions in the realms of politics. One might almost think that Ellis points out how easy it is to manipulate people in questions of international politics, how easy it is to make them back up terrible ideas.

György Dragomán's book The White King is also an interesting specimen. The book tells the story of a little boy growing up in the 1950's-1960's of Russian occupied Communist Hungary. The stories are first touching, interesting, but certain scenes become more and more absurd. By the end of the book it is clear that the narrator couldn't have grasped things in the way and on the level he did - there is too much knowledge about politics, everyday reality pervading the story. At the same time it also becomes evident that the child's accounts of violence that he encounters (getting beaten by the football trainer, being attacked by knife-yielding neighbor kids, etc.) cannot be true. One might at this point get frustrated and after finishing the book discard it as a bad one. But if one gives it a second thought it becomes obvious that the title does not just refer to the narrator's absent father. It also refer's to Lewis Carroll's White Queen. The whole story is a dream, made up of the memories of the now grown up writer from his childhood, made more radical and terrible by his childhood fears, and mixed with his present knowledge about the tyrannical system. Dragomán never tells us this explicitly. The way we can understand is by considering the narrative, the events and their likelihood.

In the above mentioned cases this kind of 'read-it-out-somehow-without-being-told' method works well. But a really popular and recently read book puzzles me. The piece is Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds. The book is a nice one. Not very powerful, not as grasping as some others telling of terrible things. The reason why it isn't? Because we never really understand why Bartle and Sterling dropped Murph's body into the river. We never get told what moved Bartle to write the letter to the dead soldiers mother. We never get told what he got the prison sentence for.

First these instances didn't bother me. The book has enough content to carry you on without getting stuck. Some parts are so sad and expressive that they almost hurt. But then, at the end one asks some questions inevitably. Like 'How does this all add up?'

I read a review where the author thought that they do not. And that is a weakness of the novel. I admit, that was my first thought too. But then again, might it not be that Powers does not want to be one of the all-knowing narrators filling out the gaps in the consciousness and memory of his own characters to enlighten us of their inner working. It very well might. After all I can imagine Bartle as being shocked, tired, frightened. As being not that sophisticated. As not being in an environment that fosters reflexivity.

The question is, how sophisticated a writer is Powers? Can it be that the seeming incoherence and lack of explanation present at key points of the story is actually meant to make us aware that war and its effects do not fit our usual narratives neatly? That we will have to learn to accept that justification and explanation might be absent in strange ways from the actions and emotions of others?

I think such a lesson would be very valuable. Of course it does not matter much whether Powers intended to have this message or not. As anyone with a bit of skill in enjoying artworks knows the author's intentions only matter to a very restricted degree. We have to evaluate the work as it is. For me, this book achieved this feat. But I can imagine books better written, achieving this in an even more enjoyable and easy-to-grasp way.

On war

A powerful passage from Powers's book:

"Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught you whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but the then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever an yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done (...)" pp. 144-145.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

At the recommendation of a friend I acquired Kevin Powers' critically acclaimed 2012 book based on his experiences as a soldier in Iraq. I'm halfway through and this is what I can tell so far: the book offers one of those feelings for which I love literature. You just don't feel like putting it down. You want to linger in its world a little longer. You just want it to go on, and are already afraid that it will eventually end. You fear for the characters.

This book is well written, it has a good tempo, a healthy mixture of action-scenes, introspective-scenes, descriptions of characters and settings.

Also, what I just realized is that to be a soldier today for a Western person must be a terribly sad thing. A stupefying experience, except maybe if you are very rough. But as the reactions of most soldiers show they have lots of inner bruises to hide.   

Hope and Self-delusion

As Philippa Foot writes in one of her essays, hope is one of the virtues, and it is something important as it helps stick through hard times and great challenges. I like this thought. A hopeful person is probably less prone to be negative, and thus less likely to give up to early, to not to support her community in the face of difficult times. 

Another advantage of hopefulness might be that such a person might offer support to others. A hopeful person may be less prone to go 'all apeshit', as they say, and overreact when getting bad news. This way he doesn't strengthen the feeling of the person who trust's him with her problem that the problem is very bad. A hopeful person might provide calm advice, some supportive words, and maybe also a few practical ideas or good questions that point the way to a solution.

So, is hope all rosy? Not exactly. There are two things that matter. Hope can be exercised too much or about the wrong subject, and also for the wrong reasons. If one is hopeful in situations when there is an obvious danger that needs to be averted, one can do serious damage by remaining inactive. That is a problem people often point out with Christians who rely on divine intervention instead of, for example, medical treatment. Such cases draw criticisms that the agent rejecting medical treatment is irrational, since they are too hopeful. Even if there is a helpful, intervening God (I entertain this only as a theoretical possibility) it is not sure that 1) it would help in such cases, 2) in this particular case, 3) it would not help by offering the chance to get medical help, etc.

George Frederic Watts: Hope (second version, 1886)

A case where hope could be warranted, but one can still be irrational for being hopeful, is the case of a father who has an alcoholic daughter. The father hopes that his daughter will recover. Good thing, and hope can be a useful motivating factor that fuels his continuous support even after the roughest atrocities. But if he is hopeful for the wrong reason, his hope won't help him act in the right way. For example he might be hopeful because he has read many self-help books. These suggest things like 'everyone goes through difficult times, and that's a lesson we all need to get', or 'people need to fight their demons alone, and they will emerge stronger', or even just reading proper work without adequate training, and misunderstanding it. E.g.: the dad 'diagnosis his daughter with bipolar disorder. In fact, that's not the problem at all. The man does not seek adequate help, or tries to support his daughter with the wrong methods. In such cases the hope that would be beneficial if had for the right reasons can turn against those who should gain by it.

Some cases of placing too much weight on hope are instances of self-delusion. No matter that people didn't interact successfully with others earlier by following a certain set of principles, they still carry on. They base their hope that things will work out for them on some mistaken view. They might think that it was just that they did not get the right people as partners in business, or did not marry the right man. They might even think that they should actually take a firmer stance, since things didn't work out as they wanted them to work out. 'Now, it's time I do things my own way.' Whereby this led to some of the problems earlier as well.

It seems then that for hope to be a virtue one needs to have some constraints on it. If one is hopeful one should always assess what warrants the hope. If one finds the reasons convincing then hope needs no questioning. Also, being self-delusional about one topic does not mean that one is such about everything. As with other virtues, exercising hope in the right way needs practice and learning. And most of us screw up quite a few times on the way.

Mistaken stereotypes about 'women logic'

I've just recently been to a coffee in town. At the table besides me a few engineers (young professionals, not students) were chatting. I overheard them entertaining each other with the difficulty of programming a robot which can understand 'woman's logic'. I guess in most cases it is actually quite easy to explain to people like them the lack of sophistication behind such a label. But just to make sure, here are a few easy pointers to why talk about 'woman's logic' (especially in a demeaning sense) is just plain stupidity.

We have different concepts of rationality. Some of these applies to the capacities we posses as the types of animals we are. Such are our basic spatial positioning skills, our mathematical logic, our abilities to make inferences based on evidence, our mathematical skills, our skills tracking regularities in changes, etc. These are not specific to any gender.

'Rationality' is sometimes also used to stand for intelligence. Intelligence is gender independent - you find researchers, doctors, engineers, skilled professionals, mechanics, soldiers, and pretty much anything - requiring skill and doing well at school - among female population. Of course this only applies to countries where woman are allowed to get schooling, and throughout their upbringing and schooling aren't held back by harmful stereotypes they are made to adhere to, or pressure from peers.

What female agents seem to be more prone to do is placing value on emotions, personal relations (especially kin relationships). I emphasize 'seem' because I'm almost sure that most males are worried about, care about, etc. much more than they admit. Even if not, the explicitness is a difference. By explicitness I mean things that males often consider repugnant about female behavior, and hence, use discriminating terms like 'woman's logic' to talk about them. (Quick additional remark: valuing emotions and stable relationships is crucial to society.)

Such cases of making something explicit are for example being often worried about health of family members, about their emotional balance, getting stressed by cheeky remarks, etc. I do not even mention cases when females ask a male 'Do you still love/Find me attractive/etc.?' If you don't understand such games, teasers and affectionate jokes, you are not yet mature enough for a relationship. Just say something nice, complementary, and funny. No need to think your girl is really worried, expect if you start taking the question seriously. After all, that sends the message: 'Oh, I really have to think about this.' Silly response, isn't it?

So, what about the less obvious cases? Why do 'woman make so much fuss about things'? One obvious reason is evolutionary: females are hard-wired to care a lot about offspring. Also, social structures enable better survival chances for them and their kids, and more protection. A larger, healthier, more successful group can do better in terms of evolutionary fitness. These things do not depend on culture. They have evolved long ago, when small changes had higher stakes for staying alive.

Some other issues are culture influenced. Most of our societies are still male-dominated. Being male-dominated does not (only) mean that most good jobs are occupied by guys, and they get to make decisions for woman as well in many situations. It also means that this has been the situation for quite a long time, and hence the shape social institutions took, including norms of interactions, what's right and what's not, etc. have been heavily influenced by guys. I'm not making here any claims about this being good or bad. Just saying that this is the way it is. It seems to be quite likely that in many respects our communities are more physically and overtly aggressive than they would have to be given our current rates of food production. There is no need for as much vicious competition as was a long time ago. Of course competition does not disappear if more woman are elected. They also have in them to secure the necessary means for themselves and their groups. But the forms of aggression are different.

The male dominated character of culture places many normative behavior on woman. In most societies if one is not a good mother that still stigmatizes one strongly. Whereas if one is an awful father, one is reproach but not held responsible and blamed for the same degree.

Still, one might ask, if man and woman aren't so different then why are there so many visible differences in behavioral patterns? Well, already the question shows the fallacy of mixing up cause and effect. It is not that there are some differences in man and woman which would ground all of the behavioral differences between them. It is rather that there are some cultural expectations, stereotypes, social pressures, and basic hormonal processes, that are all involved in leading to such differences in behavioral patterns. So, it's not just inherent differences which cause different behavior, and then lead to different treatment. It is rather different treatment that causes different behavior.

One more thing. Different behavioral patterns aren't in themselves bad. If I would say 'let's change some of our social institutions which influence woman to behave in ways that bother man' that would not be much more than saying 'oh, yes, of course guys are always right, so if some of the less emphatic/sensitive/intelligent don't understand a piece of behavior without effort we have to change it!'. And that idea is bollocks.

Accepting the possibility of there being different but still okay patterns is a good step. And no, it does not mean 'anything goes'. It just means that you first think, and assess whether the difference is okay, or not. Obviously, differences in female and male behavior are perfectly fine. And, ideally, up to choice.

In general, if you don't understand someone, first don't blame them for not adhering to your standard of rationality (or 'logic'). Always try out different interpretations to see how you can make sense of their behavior. In most cases you simply don't exert enough effort to understand the other person. These skills can be learned and enhanced. So, before making jokes about 'woman's logic' think a bit about how logical your behavior would seem when you are emotional, moved, angry, stressed, tired, worried, etc. to others, who don't know you and are not sympathetic. See, you aren't that much of a role-model of rationality.

Stoppard's Arcadia at Oxford Playhouse

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is twenty years old. It is still popular and often played. The piece is a well balanced mixture of comedy, romance, and a few intellectual topics. It comments on topics through the learning, development, and debates of the characters on determinism, on the development of physics and mathematics, on differences between rationalism and romanticism, as well as on some difficulties of research. During all this it still manages to be witty, in the good, Oscar Wilde-sense. (Note: in one of his other plays, Travesties, Stoppard uses parts of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest).

The play was now performed at the Oxford Playhouse to celebrate it's twentieth anniversary. It was produced by the Oxford Student Company: Milk and Two Sugars. (Cast here.) It's hard to evaluate it in detail: the play has lots and lots of complicated discussions, and a storyline with several interrelated twists. I won't go into the details here. You can read the whole piece, or go and see it if interested.

The richness of detail draws away part of one's attention from the performance of the actual play. As one has to keep in mind many things, track all the relations between the characters - their romances, flirts, and rivalries - there isn't much energy left. Of course that I had this feeling tells that the actors were doing well. They managed to convey the story in an entertaining and accessible way. Some of the actors did excellently: David Shield's Septimus Hodge was clever, quick and critical, but a warm hearted young man at the same time. Amelia Sparling's Thomasina was charming and bright, brimming with ideas and youthful excitement. And Carla Kingham's Hannah was just as careful and a bit awkward as the written text suggests. I found a bit of difficulty with taking Ed Barr-Sim serious in Bernard's role. But I understand that for a student company it is hard to find anyone suitable for the role of a mature, established and donnish academic. Nevertheless, his performance in the scenes when Bernard becomes angry was a bit of a disappointment. Instead of a quick and clever, but dominant man, he rather portrayed a hysterical and self-important fake.

My only complaint would be about the directors work. The performance placed a lot of emphasis on the comical elements, and the characters rarely adopted serious tones. This way much of the darker tones and darker humor became too light, and its significance got lost among the many clever and cheerful riposts. Also, the more complicated elements of the plot were sometimes rushed through - the characters were portrayed as becoming very excited and quickly pouring out their ideas. This might have been disturbing for audiences who haven't met the text earlier or saw the play for the first time. And if one misses any of the story elements, some of the great jokes and surprises might be later incomprehensible.

All in all, the performance was a good interpretation of the play, focusing mainly on the fun site of the comedy. I do not want to suggest that the serious issues were downplayed, but they could have given more weight. Still, it was an entertaining performance, very good entertainment for Saturday afternoon, and material for interesting discussions with one's company.

What is natural for children?

A friend of mine voiced the opinion that it is important for kids to spend much time in nature. I always viewed claims aspiring to tell us that we should do something 'because it is natural', 'because that's how we did it always', etc., with suspicion. And not without any reason.

You often hear claims like: 'we should eat food X because it is natural food for us and our ancestors ate it always, and they never had cancer', or that 'in my time kids used to play outside a lot and ... [insert your favorite beneficial outcome for your life]'. There are three problems with such claims.

First think about it this way: evolution is a slow process. Most of the features of our body have evolved a long-long time ago (tens of thousands of years ago) and have changed little. Our basic structure is the same, our basic bodily functions (blood circulation, digestion, hormone transactions, etc.) are the same. And our ancestors have lived a very different life from ours. So, our body is basically not really 'made' for the sort of lives most people in second and first world countries live.

Nevertheless we live much-much longer and healthier lives than did our ancestors. Thanks to the development of moral skills and cultures we aren't killed by other humans at first sight, stronger individuals cannot just simply take what is ours or kill off our kids, males don't regularly rape females, we don't have to use physical violence to get our food, and so on. And thanks to medicine, fertilization, crops growing, vaccines and a whole lot of other inventions we are not subjects to mass early childhood death, to 30-50 years of average lifespan and so on. So, our inbuilt mechanisms aren't necessarily a good guide to how we should live.

Thanks to our basic architecture we are pretty adaptive and can lead lives substantially different from the ones our bodies evolved to live. And thanks to the lucky cultural basics we developed we did not became a fiercely competitive but a very cooperative race. Furthermore, we can now use these bodies in much-much more efficient ways than 'nature told us to', and have far greater knowledge how to gain pleasure, fight inequality, fear, depression, death and pain, than any other animal, which lives a natural life.

Second, The 'keep to the well trodden path' style of arguments deserve no credit either. What was working as a good rule of thumb ten, twenty, or fifty years ago has not much to do with what will work nowadays. Don't misunderstand me: it might work. There are social settings and economic areas where the structure remained largely unchanged since long time. Also, these rules might work due to luck. But they surely aren't rules you should accept because they worked earlier, or someone found them useful. 

This does not necessarily apply to rules which pertain to personal matters, such as family or relationship matters. Since in these things it is extremely hard to get right what is beneficial both for individuals in terms of subjective feelings of happiness, security, etc., and what is good for society, plus these categories are - as we have them nowadays - almost purely social constructions, it is very much possible that a good constellation is one that we hit on earlier.

Third, what about the personal experience based views, for example when your friends say that kids should definitely start doing a part time job when they are 15, or when they want their kids to learn music, since it was such an important experience in their lives? There are two problems with these kinds of ideas: one is, that they are based on subjective thoughts formed here and now. But these thoughts do not reveal anything about the real processes that led up to the stage one is in. It does not underpin a relation between one's satisfaction with certain aspects of one's own life and the earlier experience. Also, it does not take into account all the people who had the same experience, but failed in life in all sorts of way - they ended up lonely and suffering from it, jobless, homeless, and so on.

The other problem with these sorts of views - held by everyone - is that they are very likely to be affected by cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological mechanism at work in all of us. It ensures that we have a picture of ourselves and our lives that is easy to live with. For this purpose it very often 'cheats us'. For example, if we are wrong about a factual question and someone points this out, and later we get to know that we were wrong, we like to look for explanations that suggest that the question is still open. There was a problem with the proof, with the evidence. We didn't understand the question in the same way. And so on. Everyone is good at giving excuses.

The same happens in cases of relying on personal experiences of what was and what wasn't useful for one. Most people would like to see their relatives, their partners and themselves in favorable light. So, they like to glorify and justify their methods and choices in raising them, living with them. Therefore we often adopt methods, or justify adopting method that have nothing to speak for them. Except that adopting them makes us feel better about our own lives.

Also, in many cases it might be true that it is useful to spend a lot of time outside. Kids might have hardwired, innate developmental segments which only activate or work really effectively if they receive particular stimuli. But whether this is so or not can only be decided by neurology, psychology and education studies. It is not something you should take guesses at, nor should you take advice from non-professionals.

Should we abandon all such rules of thumb? All such 'traditional' advice? I think not. The problem is, that we do not have anything better to rely on as long as we don't have sufficient relevant statistical data. Professionals in healthcare, education studies, psychology, sociology and other fields are working actively to gather such data. You can always find good books, correct websites with the most up-to-date positions, gathered and interpreted by professionals. 

If possible, do not rely on journals or websites run by journalists or other non-professionals. They might misinterpret the data, or even the interpretation of the scientists. Usually understanding research results is very difficult. Don't try it yourself. Let the professional explain it to you. If you don't understand it try again, try harder. It's no one's fault. You just lack the skills and education. We all face this problem and no one is good at everything. Take your time. Ask for help. Learn a bit. And don't run to easier solutions, don't read esoteric and alternative stuff. If it seems too plausible and easy, it's probably false. And it can seriously harm your kid's or your own development.

The critical way is hard, but the only good one. See this for example.

Doing research on XY

Whenever I go to a conference, talk or lecture and someone says "I'm doing research on XY" I see them before me as actually sitting/standing on that person/thing and doing research on it. It's one of those terrible jokes one never voices, because he has enough self-critique to know that they aren't funny. Nevertheless, I cannot get it out of my head. So here it goes. One I heard a few weeks ago from a philosopher: "I'm doing research on Wittgenstein".

On Nadas's Parallel Stories

A few days ago we got to know the new Nobel Prize winner, Alice Munroe. In the near future I'll try to read some of her work and write on it, but until then a few more lines on Peter Nadas, and his giant book Parallel Stories. I will take a brief look at four criticisms of Nadas’s book, show why they are mistaken in the complaints and point to the main merits of the book.

A nice place to start criticizing is Jonathan Cape's review, which appeared in The Independent. Cape voices a negative criticism emphasizing that not all of the story lines merge. Voicing this complaint nowadays is anachronistic: most writers try to get you to know their characters by revealing them through the unfolding story and offering a peek into their emotional life. A point Cape might be right about is that for someone from a culture which didn't go through German and Soviet influence and occupation the tragedies of the characters, their experiences might be harder to relate to, as for people in post-soviet countries and Germany.

Toby Clements writes in a very similar tone for The Telegraph. Clements laments that the book is challenging. Well, if you want to read easy novels, you should have picked up something in the '3 for 2' section of Tesco. Clements' main problem is that he doesn't get much to know about anything and he does not see any conclusion. My main problem with Celements is, that much of the 20th century's good literature follows a pattern that does not cherish easy conclusions: it shows you scenes of the lives of its characters, which then enable you to understand them better, to see how they behaved in certain historically charged settings, how they reacted to things present in the lives of each of. The conclusions are there for you to draw. Too much work?

Benjamin Moser wrote a review of mixed feelings for The New York Times Sunday Review. At least Moser is honest compared to the two reviewers we assessed earlier: he admits that the long books he likes are in some respect simple. (Although I don't know what's simple about Tolstoy'sWar and Peace, which is interspersed with 20-40 pages long excursions on how to write about history.) A common complaint is voiced in this review as well, one with which I cannot entirely disagree: there are long sex scenes that become tiresome because they lose their mood of being a scene about sex. Although, I’m sure this isn't an accident: such an approach to scenes, which seem to start out as one thing and then turn out to be something else can serve to make the reader experience what the characters often go through. For example the feeling of meeting a friend and then realizing that one is threatened, or begged for a favour, or warned.

Tibor Fischer lines up firmly with the superficials, in his review published in The Guardian: "I say Nádas couldn't tell a story about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Frenchman walking into a bar." I do not know what the problem is with these reviewers, but they do not like overt realism (all of them refer to Tolstoy as a writer of great novels, but none to Dostoevsky). Fischer also seems to oppose the way Nadas approaches his topics and condemns the attitude of speaking out an all matters political. Surely one does not have to read a book dealing with family stories that happened in a period when one could not withdrew from being influenced. But then why write a review about it?

And now to cherish what’s good: Parallel Stories is a novel which tries to capture the complicated history of the central region of Europe, and tries to make the reader feel that all those problems, those conflicts, those clashes of interests, those horrors have had no solutions and are still present today. It is not about resolutions, not about happiness, not about finding out who the murderer is. It is about the frustration of having to leave with the past, with pressure, with resentment and remorse towards your fellow countrymen, and not being able to do much about it. And that's reality. If one isn't interested in a book that helps you better understand these times, while at the same time guiding you through many emotional conflicts, love affairs, family losses and drama, then you shouldn’t pick it up. You’ll miss out on some of the most captivating, psychologically accurate and tension filled scenes ever written. If one can enjoy these things, this book is an excellent read.

Sunrise, music and tea

A little morning beauty to get the day going:

Also, this is the view I enjoy every morning. Lovely late sunrise.

Interesting Facebook posts: a backdrop of having many clever friends

I guess many others have also experienced this: you just check in to see whether someone wrote to you on Facebook, but then, one of your friends you respect for his or her cleverness/political courage/wisdom/specialized knowledge, etc. posted something interesting. You go and read the piece. Satisfied, that your friends post interesting stuff you scroll down a bit. Oh, what's that? Another good article on a political event you are interested in...and by the time you get through a few pieces an hour has gone by, coffee time is well behind and you realize that you should be working/training/lecturing in ten minutes!

Here is a compilation of the ten links that robbed me of some time in the last couple days (and I didn't mind that they did):

1. Most interesting and one to which I could personally relate very well, thanks to two members of the family who made us go through lots of sad moments, this article about why lying causes so much harm in relationships and family is a great read. (Posted by a journalist friend.)

2. As my readers will by now surely have noticed, I'm for all things bettering human lives, be that clever policies, science, humanities, literature or other art forms. So I was particularly happy to read about the experiences that Michael Puett's classes on Chinese Philosophy provide. Read here. (Posted by a philosopher friend.)

3. On love, belonging and personality: a justly famous interview with Hannah Arendt. (Posted by a friend working on literature.)

4. I guess many have seen this joker, but I found it quite funny. How not to advertise your property. (Posted by an accountant.)

5. A conversation on freedom with some heavyweights. Especially interesting in our new era of no-privacy government policies. (Posted by a classicist.)

6. A lovely collection of mistakes made in a study published in a peer-reviewed journal. (Posted by a cognitive psychologist friend.)

7. Is open access good or not? That's not a question anymore. We have to push for it. But how? Showcasing some sad instances of trying to make a good living by betraying academic honesty and downplaying the seriousness of blind-reviews. (Posted by a neurologist.)

8. Rather sad: 2013 and your sexual orientation is still an issue. Read here. Of course since this time oil countries do it, there won't be much international pressure to stop them. (Posted by a clinician.)

This post also reminded me of the mistake many people make when they argue for the equal rights to marriage and adoption for homosexuals. So, according to some people it is okay to be a homosexual, since your sexual orientation is genetically determined. What's the problem with this argument? Well, that it does basically claim that if you are genetically determined to be gay you might be, but not in other cases. And this is not what a democrat should want. What a true democrat should want is to say that being homosexual is okay because who you have sex with and who you live with depends on your free choice.

9. A longer comic by the Oatmeal, explaining a bit didactically but still in a funny way why we shouldn't have a Columbus day. (Posted by a programmer.) On the same note: there is a post in the drawer on why it is time to change our set of heroes - both in history classes, national holidays and in public life.

10. A short video report on some new developments in robotics, that is, meet Boston Dynamics' Wildcat. (Posted by a musician.) I'm just in the process of commenting on some new reports on automated weapon system development and seeing this little gem running around made the hair on my back stand up . Wonderful and scary at the same time.

Oh, and by the way: the Nobel for Literature was won by Alice Munroe! Looking forward to read some of her stories.

Nobel prize: tomorrow!

We will get to know tomorrow who will receive these years Nobel Prizes. In literature I'm for Pynchon or Nadas - although I've read Roth, Oates, Murakami and like them as well, I don't think they are nobel-level writers, whereas the first two are.

In medical sciences I'm hoping that the award goes to the research that enabled the large-scale treatment of breast cancer. I know it is not a solution that helps cure all forms of breast cancer, but still, as it applies to almost 30% percent of those inflicted, it is widespread, saves many lives and is a great step towards personalized treatment too.

We will get to know the results of the literature award tomorrow at 1 pm Stockholm time. [In the meanwhile I noticed that the winners of the medical prize have been revealed already. Check it out here. The site has short and accessible summaries, information about the researchers and many interesting additional data.] 

If you want to understand what's going on in Hungary...

If you are curious why a country, which is part of the EU, has a strong conservative-nationalistic and clerical leaning, how it can have a far-far-right party standing at around 17% percent in polls monitoring possible election outcomes, why it accepts the rule of a party led by a single man portraying himself as the savior of the nation, and claiming that no one is part of the Nation who is not a True Hungarian, then I'm glad to offer you a short list of suggested readings.

If you want to understand what’s going on in Hungary you don’t need to understand a lot of very complex theory. And you should definitely not, not even for a second, listen to the politicians.

Just go and read a few – as it happens to be, quite entertaining – books. One of them is Istvan Orkeny’s One minute short stories (Egyperces novellák). Orkeny makes fun of the oppression and nonsensical, often ad-hoc and cruel rules the communist regime enforced on Hungarians with the support of the Russian army. Also (a bit similarly to Joseph Heller, but in a much-much more condensed version) he points out forcefully the meaningless violence of the Second World War, and the perverse distortion of any rationality.

If you then go on and read Peter Nadas’s book, Parallel Stories (Párhuzamos történetek), you can get a much broader and detailed picture – a bit the opposite of Orkeny – about the many ties of the dictatorial oppression that run through and corrupted the lives of generations in Central- and Eastern-Europe. It has less humor than the brilliant, absurd short stories of Orkeny, but offers a much more detailed picture of all the political ties between the histories of neighboring countries in the region, and gives awe-aspiring depictions of individual fates.

A nice third novel to round out the collection is Gyorgy Spiro’s Spring Exhibition (Tavaszi tárlat). The novel focuses on the story of a man who was in hospital during the events of the 1956 revolution against the Russians. Accordingly, he couldn't take part in the fights, he couldn't go to work, he was left out of everything and seen nowhere. But in the eyes of the secret police, who want to hold a few big lawsuits (pre-organized), this makes him an ideal victim to involve in one of their schemes. He gets accused of having been a member of a secret organization plotting against the communist system. As he reflects in the following days, in his terror before being taken away, he sees through the injustice and artificiality of the systems workings, and it's perverse logic: they can make a victim out of someone, because he is entirely innocent.

Oh, and just in case you would wonder: but why did Hungary fight on the side of Nazi Germany in WW II in the first place? Well, it is enough to read a bit of Laszlo Nemeth’s excellent book, Sin (Bűn). Nemeth guides you through the reality of late 1920’s, early 1930’s Hungary. The country hasn't been called ‘the land of the two million beggars’ for no reason. Society’s structure was still very much the same as before WW I, when all the privileges of the aristocracy still existed and were enforced by law. If you weren't lucky enough to be born into at least an upper middle class family, you didn't stand much chance for a decent life.

All these novels portray the reality the majority of Hungarians had to endure and struggle with during the last hundred years. You might get an idea from this, why they aren't surprised by, why they aren't revolting against the changes the current Fidesz-KDNP government carried out.

And I’m not talking about their economical policy. That is a matter which according to some has a certain chance of success. We will see later whether it works or not. The problematic points are the eroding of honesty, the acceptance of archaic and extreme clerical and nationalist views, the message that it is perfectly alright to govern a country by force. Meanwhile, there is not even a glimmer of self-criticism, or a chance of being open to input from any other sources than the ones loyal to them. And that’s just what we had to get used to for a long time in our history due to a conservative, slowly adapting and status quo preserving aristocracy, and then later due to the ultra-nationalist revisionist Horthy era, and after that the WW II governments, including a short Nazi and German rule, and then a Communist rule, supported by the Soviet Union and its wast army, far outnumbering the Hungarian one.

But one thing they couldn't ruin is an excellent art life. As one of my friends wrote recently in a review on the work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai (author of Satan’s Tango, and collaborator of Bela Tarr, the famous director of among other movies The Horse of Turin): Hungarian literature is world literature, in as far as it is concerned with all its issues, exemplifying all its trends, advancing new solutions and style, and creating great works in all its genres.

Rules and exceptions

When I was small I often wondered about the saying 'The exception strengthens the rule'. I thought I would share the three ways in which I have managed to make sense of the saying since then.

1. When there is an exception we explain it by citing a special explanation (e.g. when someone is crazy we invent a new category and do not modify our original category of normal – so the rule of what counts as normal does not alter, the rule does not change, it gets stronger because we can apply it.

2. When someone acts out of habit, against his usual dispositions, we can usually say that this does not change the pattern of his behaviour, and we relegate the case to an isolated category of exceptions.

3. Also, exceptions are cases not properly belonging into the set of cases that the rule covers. By making it explicit how they stand out, you can understand the rule better.

Any further comments? Did I terribly misunderstand something?

A little puzzle: the present and the future you, and their conflicting interests

Imagine that you have some character trait that you feel you would be better off without. Imagine also, that you lack some trait you would be happy to have. If you now make certain decisions and commit yourself to them in due time you can, with good chance, achieve to become the sort of person you want to be.

But what if the person you become does not enjoy being the way she is? What if she finds some of her traits bothersome? Of she thinks others find it irritating that she is the way she is and maybe that's why she feels lonely. Maybe she should change...

The problem emerging from this scenario is the following one: if you value certain character traits now and manage to become the sort of person who has them, your scale of values and their ranking might change enough to make some of the values you have at this point seem worthless in your eyes. That is, there does not seem to be any chance to make yourself still feel attracted to the vision about what sort of person it would be nice to be, that you had earlier.

Is this the same type of problem that Jon Elster discusses, for example in his Ulysses Unbound? Not exactly. There, Elster is primarily focusing on how you can stay committed to a goal, when you know all along that the goal is good. For example, how an alcoholic can stick to his resolution not to drink, although he knows he will want a drink very badly when he gets home after work. The difference between this case and the case I mentioned above is, that the scenarios Elster discusses take it for granted that you know what the right is. You just need to stick to it somehow - you need to avoid temptation, temporal effects of scaling, etc. But you do not face an entirely new set of values. You just get into a situation where you temporarily value the bad thing. The changing-personality scenario is different. It portrays the possibility of a good change which you find meaningless once achieved. This type of problem has a pair in the field of decision making general (not constrained to altering your own personality). 

There is an argument, made by L. A. Paul, in an article in preparation, in connection with having children, according to which no matter what you think now about having kids, that does not really matter. Actually having them is such a life changing experience, that you cannot now put yourself into the place of the person you will be after you already have kids. So, those problems that you might see with having kids are not sure to still be there once you have them. (Of course no one is saying that they might not, or that they disappear without a trace. But your priorities change.) Also, the good parts of having kids might be entirely different than what you expect. And this is just partly an issue of access to information about what it means to have a kid: you can get to know a lot by talking with your parents, relatives and friends, by working with kids, by reading about them, and so on. The information you do not have access to is this: what sort of person you will become. You might be surprised by finding joy in some things you would never have expected. Also, since what we care for influences the way we focus our attention and what we spend time on, you might find that you notice things about kids which you would never have done if you would have stayed your earlier self.

So, why is all this a problem? As Paul suggests, sometimes we need to be a bit crazy and make these decisions. One cannot find out sooner. Well, this might be true of having kids. But what about cases when for example teenagers are supposed to make choices about the job they choose? Or when it is left to politicians to decide about education? Or when one follows some self-help book for successful managers, and accepts its values and sets out to become like suggested? What do we base these decisions on?

There are two risks of making bad decisions in such situations: one is when we get to the point that we have changed, but we become a sort of person who does not care about being like that anymore. The other is that we misjudge what being that sort of person will be like: we thought we would be better, kinder, more courageous and just. But in fact we turn out worse and we don't even mind it anymore. We enjoy ourselves and the measure of what's a good life and a good person is gone.

It seems that in all these situations we cannot rely on anything else than on the experience and advice of those who have gone through changes we are thinking about undergoing. But we have to take into account that they are quite probably not able to occupy once more their perspective from before the change. Another thing that might be helpful is to have an objective value  scale, which is sufficiently independent of our character to hold in place, no matter how our changes turn out to be. Having such a scale of values can help us orient ourselves even if the metamorphosis is a bad one. (Poor Kafka, he saw how many of his contemporaries by becoming 'bugs' adopt to their sad and constrained jobs which do not provide them with any sort of feeling of usefulness and pride in their work.)

I cannot end this post with any more particular suggestions. But I'm more than curious to read what you think, what you recommend me to read and how you handle such problems.

Why scientists who say 'we have discovered free will doesn't exist' don't say anything new

The problem of 'free will' in philosophy is not about your ordinary notion of 'free', which has to do with your political, personal, cultural, etc. freedom. It is a metaphysical thesis. The problem stems from the contradiction of two views that most of us find very plausible, but they also seem incompatible. The first view is that as material beings in this universe whatever happens to us is determined by natures causal processes. The other is that we are human agents who can decide what they do - and we usually think of decision as the power to determine what to do.

The clash is this: if we are determined by previously occurred physical/chemical/

/biological/take-your-favorite-natural-scientific-level-of-explanation causes then there is no more room to determine anything.

Philosophers in general aren't committed to a soul which would exist independently of the body and therefore wouldn't be affected by natural causes. But there are some who do. Someone holding such a view would be a libertarian and a dualist.

There are also another group of libertarians among professional philosophers, who don't think we have any part which exists independently of our bodies, but our biological working is so special that it gives rise to higher order processes and capacities, one of which is the ability to reason and decide. Some people try to give evolutionary accounts of how this might have developed, how it might work. There is lots of sophisticated work done on such theories in collaboration with cognitive psychologists. These people are libertarians and naturalists.

But in fact, most philosopher think the opposite: that we are beings whose behavior is determined causally. These people can be divided into two groups: compatibilists and determinists.

Compatibilists think something like this: there is no free will in the classical sense. But the thought that there is, is so deeply embedded in our social practices (law, schooling, choosing your job, spouse, house, etc.) that there are practices that make use of the idea. Accordingly, we have to understand these practices. So, we have to figure out how we think of morality, of action, of being free and how this relates to our attributions of responsibility. There seems to be a system to it, so there might as well be some implicit criteria controlling this behavior that can be uncovered.

Determinists are usually skeptics about any form of making sense of being free (be that a full-blooded or a practice-based sense). They try to explain why we think that we are free, or how we should conceive of our behavior and morals if there really is no freedom. 

So, when scientists, neurologists or psychologists announce again that they have discovered there is no freedom don't get scared. Many of us knew long ago what they 'discovered', in fact knew more and did more constructive work than they did. And even most of the experiments carried out so far to disprove the possibility of the libertarian philosophers being right suffer from serious flaws. On this see A. R. Mele's easy to understand book which is a serious study of the experimental data on free will since Libet's experiments up to about 2008.

I personally think that despite most experiments being flawed  and quite short-sighted, there isn't much chance to prove libertarian views right. If I would have to place my bets I would argue that all behavior has underlying biological processes that realize it, and which are determined. But I also think that there is a very interesting social practice related to our evolution, our emotions, our cultural development and our higher order abilities, and the notion of free will is a component in this practice.

If you want more goodness from heavy weight clever philosophers go read a bit on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and on Flickers of Freedom. And please, oh please, do not buy the books of the Sam Harris style amateurs, who are struck by realizing the possibility of determinism! They did not prove anything new. Just realized a very-very old point of philosophy and write about it in an amateurish way.  Of course this is not to say that they are not clever people or excellent researchers in their own field. Neither am I claiming that they are bad people who want to harm anyone. They are just ignorant of a lot of important work having been done in a field that they don't know much about.

It seems today every fifth neurologist feels bound to write a book about free will. They thereby make their more clever and subtle colleagues appear in a bad light as well. Also, if you are interested in good research done on actions on how behaviors and actions are caused on the neural level there is lots of amazing stuff about it, for example here.

In Exeter

I spent a few days in Exeter during this summer, visiting a conference. When I travel and I can get the time I like to read a bit about the place where I'm going. In this case I was lucky: I could read a short summary of Exeter's history and also, I arrived a day before the event started so I had time to look around a bit. After a nice walk in historical downtown I had a lovely coffee in the main square while preparing for a seminar I'm teaching.


Suddenly, after years, the urge to write a poem rose up again. I wrote it in Hungarian, but proceeded to make a quick translation. Here is the result:


In Exeter, on the 11th of July 2013

The long buzz of the bell of the Cathedral,
While I lay in the grass reading the Meno,
And above the green square seagulls flew.
Cloudless, blue sky, cheerful,
But how different this sounds from that heard seventy-one years ago,
The humming and the company of speakers both changed.
Behind me the Spanish chatter,
Sometimes the sound of airplanes,
No traces of the scare, caused five years ago,
By a young Arabian man,
Who exploded the toilet on himself.
I'm going to the loo, it was nice to see you,
And I walked by 'the house that moved'.


Some things that help you understand it:
- In front of the cathedral there is a nice, big grassy field.
- Plato's dialogue 'The Meno' is about knowledge and virtue.
- In the second world war the Germans bombed Exeter heavily and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. They didn't rebuild them in the same style, so you see some beautiful older buildings besides very simple or ugly modern ones.
- In 2008 a young Arabian man wanted to blow up a bomb in the toilet of a cafe in the city center, but the bomb wasn't effective and it only hurt him.
- There is a house called 'the house that moved'. During the 1950's when the city's road system underwent large developments this old house happened to be in the way of one of the new roads. Instead of destroying it they laid down rails, lifted the house on the with some cranes and moved it out of the way. There it stands in it's news place. Lovely building, see some more photos here.
Some things that help you understand it:
- In front of the cathedral there is a nice, big grassy field.
- Plato's dialogue 'The Meno' is about knowledge and virtue.
- In the second world war the Germans bombed Exeter heavily and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. They didn't rebuild them in the same style, so you see some beautiful older buildings besides very simple or ugly modern ones.
- In 2008 a young Arabian man wanted to blow up a bomb in the toilet of a cafe in the city center, but the bomb wasn't effective and it only hurt him.
- There is a house called 'the house that moved'. During the 1950's when the city's road system underwent large developments this old house happened to be in the way of one of the new roads. Instead of destroying it they laid down rails, lifted the house on the with some cranes and moved it out of the way. There it stands in it's news place. Lovely building, see some more photos here.
Some things that help you understand it:
- In front of the cathedral there is a nice, big grassy field.
- Plato's dialogue 'The Meno' is about knowledge and virtue.
- In the second world war the Germans bombed Exeter heavily and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. They didn't rebuild them in the same style, so you see some beautiful older buildings besides very simple or ugly modern ones.
- In 2008 a young Arabian man wanted to blow up a bomb in the toilet of a cafe in the city center, but the bomb wasn't effective and it only hurt him.
- There is a house called 'the house that moved'. During the 1950's when the city's road system underwent large developments this old house happened to be in the way of one of the new roads. Instead of destroying it they laid down rails, lifted the house on the with some cranes and moved it out of the way. There it stands in it's news place. Lovely building, see some more photos here.

I was fascinated with how people tried to destroy Exeter again and again, but it is still there and it is so peaceful and lovely, and some of the buildings still stand and are used. This contrast between the earlier and more recent horrific events, and the cheerful, careless atmosphere of the main square before the Cathedral struck me.

On the role, usefulness and value of the humanities

When one studies a subject in the humanities or works in any of its fields one can often encounter complaints from students and even from professionals that the humanities are useless and it does not make sense to learn or practice them.

Most of these complaints come from students in other fields. Accordingly, the source of their complaints is probably that they don't know what one could be working on in the humanities. They have no knowledge of what is studied, how it is studied, what one working as a professional in the humanities does, how this relates to society and whether it is useful or not. Their ignorance and intolerant attitudes can usually be dispelled quite easily if one spends a few minutes explaining what they don't know.

The problem is worse if one encounters serious grown ups voicing such concerns. A few years ago in one of his books for wider audiences Stephen Hawking pushed that the job philosophy did earlier is now entirely taken over by science and therefore we should stop doing philosophy. Hawking is surely a great physicist but we should treat his claims regarding other fields with due suspicion. Of course they can be right, it is just that he is not a professional on education, on teaching or on research, but on physics. Thus we should require a bit more detailed information and argument before we accept big - and superficial - words.

Another instance of condemning the humanities occurred just recently in Hungary. The leading party, Fidesz, is in a governing-frenzy. The country's economic situation is bad, Fidesz enjoys two-thirds majority in the parliament, that is they can pass any law they want, and accordingly they try to reform everything. The under-secretary responsible for higher education, István Klinghammer, voiced the view in an interview with him that "In today's world it is the natural sciences and the mechanical sciences are producing value. The humanities, and culture, are very important, but they do not produce values, they give people delight and  enjoyment."

Are such views justified?

There might be many reasons why they aren't. First, there is an organization trying to test whether teaching philosophy in primary schools helps kids develop better skills, needed both for science and humanities related subjects, but of course also beyond school subjects - such as when reading news, instructions, contracts. According to some studies on the effect of their classes critical thinking group-games, with philosophy related material, can lead to such development. They also recently argued for this publicly.

Another function philosophy and other fields of humanities serve is one of being information sources that can shape decision making well. This happens on three levels: first, we all learn the basics of literature, history, the structures found in society throughout school. This shapes both our identities, our notion of what sort of beings we are and what has happened to communities of humans before our birth. An adequate preparation of this sort can help people spot dangers and threats, both on the personal and the community level, thereby guarding them against making immoral judgments, accepting very bad choices from their representatives, and so on. Second, keeping track of good and bad decisions, of different types of states and their relations, on how people conducted themselves and what good and bad effect that had (on their psychology, personal happiness, groups, economy, etc.) is important, both in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and in order to get good ideas for solving problems. Third, many practical questions touch on the lives of individuals, on the lives of communities, nations, institutions. If these questions are to be answered well, they need to be informed by data about how the individuals and the groups behave, what they are, what they value. It is not much use to push certain developments at all costs, if it radically undermines the life-quality of those whom it should serve. This mechanism at large explains why it is a bad decision simply to push forward production rates, without taking into account their effects on our environment, or its effects on small and large scale societal changes.

Any type of humanistic discipline, but especially literature, has an additional virtue: it provides us with a special understanding of others. Understanding isn't used here either its emotional meaning (as to forgive), nor in its scientific meaning (as to give a good causal explanation of it). Understanding in this sense means that we can see the motives for which others act, why those motives are important for them, why they resist forms of rationality that rely on values or reasoning that are external to theirs, and why certain people and groups cannot handle some problems. This sort of understanding can serve the role of disabling our animal instincts to react aggressively and hostile to anyone unknown, or belonging to a different group. Understanding disables our ability to condemn other people for things that stem from their being different from us.
Fostering this form of understanding does not mean - and as clever democrats and liberals know it never did - that one should accept evil, harm bringing means or the condemnation of virtues. A good liberal will stand up and try to show that she or he is right, and act accordingly. But that does not mean that she takes away the right of others to try and defend their views. Bad and faulty views fall, since questions of morality, conduct and norms aren't relative within a group. Nor are they relative on a general human level. (In relation to what would they be relative in the latter case?)
In connection to understanding consider literature for a moment: when one reads a book like Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, the book takes about 10-16 hours to read, depending on your tempo, your imagination and level of tiredness. It tells the story of a single person - in the course of this it touches on other people, but all the way through, the protagonist is in the center. How often do you take the time and effort to pay attention to someone else for this amount of time? How often do you spend time on trying to figure out why and how it happened that one did just what one did? How often do you make so much effort to understand how someone's position in society makes them feel? Literature can enable us to do this.
Of course there are many different types of works, not all of them aim at giving us better understanding of others (some of them do not even aim at being entertaining, but for a good reason), some are just shallow forms of entertainment. There is not much wrong with fun, but those books are not the ones doing a lot of important work. The ones combining entertainment and enabling understanding are the great ones.

Also, a charge often brought against people studying humanities is, that many of them do not get jobs in their fields. Let us have a more careful look at this claim, and at why it is problematic.
1. What exactly does this mean? What percentage of people getting diplomas in humanities subjects do not get a job in their field? What's the percentage in law, in engineering, in economics, in management? One rarely sees such claims backed up by data.
2. Why is this a problem? A good training is not necessarily a vocational training. One can gain many skills, experiences and value without preparing for one given job. What sorts of skills can one obtain if one gets a decent humanities diploma with a decent result? A) one will be good at organizing large amounts of data quickly, B) learning new theoretical constructs quickly, C) use models to understand meaning, communication, social interactions better, D) communicate clearly.
3. If there are so many people getting humanities degrees that they cannot get jobs in their fields, why did the governments adopt a uniform and unrealistic support scheme for universities, where you get more money if you have more students? Obviously, this led the universities in every field to accept more and more people. Inevitably, the standards dropped. Since to do well in any field of the humanities appropriately one needs to be quite clever, it could easily be foreseen that the faculties will get lots of people who actually won't be able to do well in these subjects, and cannot get a job in this field with their diplomas. This is similar to the huge droup-out rates in informatics, maths or in other difficult fields.
4. Many people make the following mistake. They look at one or a few undergrad(s), someone who is at most average, or below that in his/her subject and conclude that the people studying in that field aren't studying anything useful, since they cannot give a clear account of what they will do, what their professors research, etc. Of course there is no field where, with the exception of a few outstanding students, young people could answer such questions well. They can give you textbook definitions. What can they tell you about the inner workings, the everyday, the many connections of their field to other social institutions? What can anyone without determination and aspiration tell you about such things? So, why not ask the best ones who have finished and have gotten jobs?
5. What exactly does it show that many people getting a diploma in the humanities do not settle for 'a job in the humanities'? It surely does not show that the overwhelming majority of them don't have the abilities, or knowledge to do so. There simply aren't too many jobs in the humanities. So, they work in all sorts of fields.
Where, you ask? At companies, at hospitals, for the government, as writers, and so on. Would it be better if all these jobs were filled by people with different diplomas? Is it so: the good and giving private sector would love to create more jobs, it is only that there wouldn't be enough people to fill them? No, this isn't the situation. And people with humanities diplomas are obviously capable of doing these jobs well.
But wait, couldn't they do these jobs just as well without their diploma? Well, it isn't sure that they could. Think of the following: people after leaving school with 16 or 18 aren't usually very reliable and disciplined. University gives them many skills in this. Even if at a humanities faculty you learn certain things not related to how a business is run, or a car constructed, you do not just read pulp. You have to exercise your capacities in many ways, figure out solutions to problems, prepare for exams, grasp difficult material, organize your life well and get through exams. All tests and experiences that strengthen the confidence and enable you to handle a job much better.

Also, let us not forget that most systems that are important in our lives, including moral, political, cultural systems (and by cultural I mean habits, forms of leisure and punishment, duties, all in all: forms of life) are not systems that emerge simply from the workings from underlying natural systems. Of course they are realized by such systems, but this does not mean that from the workings from the underlying systems we can understand the workings of the higher level systems. Anything in this world has an underlying natural realization. But this does not mean that the logic of a higher order system is always determined by the functioning of the lower one. Also, it does not mean that we can read off good suggestions on how to make a system work better by understanding natural systems.

Of course, no one clever is against cooperation between the humanities and sciences. Why would anyone be? Why wouldn't we use all the methods we have to discover interesting answers to interesting questions? The suggestion simply is, that the material of humanities is well worthwhile funding and studying, even working on it as a vocation, it can change lives, and thus it is valuable. At the same time when more and more people in the humanities understand how the sciences can be used to contribute to the pursuit of truth, the general public should understand why the humanities are doing just fine, doing good work and can solve many of their problems on their own. You just have to study them, before giving an opinion.

Plus: maybe it is not entirely fair to weigh this in, but most fields in humanities are still way more cheaper than research on sports cars, on far away galaxies, on new anti-depressants, on oil mining, etc. Many of these fields also receive large amounts of funding from the private sector. Although they contribute to economy and create jobs, taking into account their negative consequences - such as enforcing bad consumer choices, creating extra profit for already wealthy companies, pushing non-sustainable energy usage, etc. - is it sure that that's where government funding is best spent? Let's rather spend more on cancer research, Alzheimer's, good economic models, and research in ethics.