Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar icons — Big Ben, double-decker Routemaster buses, Marmite — in cold, damp reality. More of it may be induced by the country’s simultaneously thoroughgoing cultures of normality and eccentricity, an endless source of inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus and much other British comedy since. Yet England came relatively late to Surrealism, or rather, Surrealism came late to England. When the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries behind London’s Royal Academy in the summer of 1936, the Manchester Evening News decried it as “a travesty of everything that’s decent.” Naturally, the show was a smash hit.

On display was work by artists including Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, who turned up in person to deliver a lecture on “Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms.” In order to “descend to the subconscious” with a properly Surrealist literalism, he rented a diving suit and helmet from a local outfitter for his appearance. (You can see an actual image from 1936 here.) “The diving suit had extremely heavy lead shoes which I could barely lift,” he writes in his autobiography, as translated by Haakon Chevalier. “I therefore had to walk very slowly, leaning on friends who helped to move me, as though I were completely paralyzed, and thus I appeared before the audience holding two luxurious white Russian wolfhounds on a leash.”

Only after he’d been talking for a few minutes did Dalí realize that “it would be impossible for me to deliver my speech through the glass window of my helmet. Moreover, I had been shut up in this thing for ten minutes and became heated from the exertions I had made in walking across the stage to reach my chair, so that I was dripping with perspiration, and felt faint and on the point of suffocating.” With the technician who’d screwed the helmet on in the first place nowhere to be found, his wife Gala and friend Edward James worked desperately to free him, eventually taking a hammer to the bolts. “At each blow I thought I would faint.” When Dalí finally emerged, the audience, having assumed it had all been an act, “was impressed by my really deathly pallor, which constituted the accurate gauge of that Dalinian dramatic element which never fails to attend my most trivial acts and undertakings.”

As uncompromisingly as they made their declarations to change the world through sheer force of nonsense, the Surrealists also understood that the show must go on. Dalí moved on to the visual portion of his lecture, presenting slides out of order and, for the most part, upside down. This was just one of the attractions with which the International Surrealist Exhibition drew 30,000 visitors during its three-week run, and “had it not been for the gathering storm clouds of war in Europe,” writes the Guardian’s Joanna Moorhead, “it might have gone on to achieve far more.” The old English intolerance for Gallic self-seriousness would also have made things difficult for Surrealism as the likes of Dalí, Duchamp, and André Breton conceived it. Or perhaps the domestic variety was simply enough: as critic and poet Herbert Read puts it in the exhibition’s catalog, a nation that has produced both William Blake and Lewis Carroll is to the manner born.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

In 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet propaganda films ever produced.

First, the film is animated using not only traditional cel animation but also collage and stop motion, giving the work a queasy, disorienting feel. A bit like looking at a painting by Henry Darger.

Then there is the film’s story. As an intertitle proclaims, this is “a tale about Comrade Coninternov, the Red Army Warrior who flew to Mars, and vanquished all the capitalists on the planet!!” This already sounds better than John Carter.

The movie, however, is rather hard to follow without either the appropriate amount of revolutionary fervor or, perhaps, hallucinogens. Interplanetary Revolution opens with a wild-eyed, ax-wielding bulldog with a top hat – a capitalist, obviously. Other capitalists, with swastikas on their foreheads, suck the blood from a hapless member of the proletariat. (By the early 1920s, Germany’s nationalist right had adopted the swastika, and Soviet propagandists quickly used it to brand capitalists as fascists.) Then the revolution comes and a pantless capitalist demon loses his mind after devouring a copy of Pravda. Next, the capitalists board a giant flying shoe and fly off into space. From there, the film gets kind of weird.

You can watch the whole thing above. It’s also added to our list of Free Animated Films, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. 

There was a time when you could just go out and buy an Enigma machine. In the early nineteen-twenties, any organization with a need to keep its communications secret could order a few of those brand-new devices from Germany and rest assured that any messages encoded using them would be safe from prying eyes. It didn’t take long for the military to catch on to the Enigma’s usefulness. Just a few years after the machine came on the market, it had been adopted by the German Navy, Army, and Air Force, and made possible the rapid, secret coordination central to the technique we now call blitzkrieg. When World War II began, Axis forces were confident, as anyone in possession of an unbreakable code might well be.

As history played out, of course, that code turned out to be breakable. That this came as a surprise to the Nazis makes sense if you watch the new video above from Veritasium, which opens up an actual Enigma machine and explains its inner workings. Each letter typed into its keyboard passes through a series of interchangeable rotors wired together, then comes back through in the opposite direction, resulting in a particular substitute letter.

Each character entered advances at least one of the rotors, each of which turns at a different speed, meaning that the already complex substitution cipher constantly changes. To make it even trickier, the Nazis made modifications to their Enigma machines, including a telephone-operator-style plugboard that expanded the possible encryption keys to 7 x 10¹⁸: an infinite-seeming number that fairly cried out for the mathematical services of Alan Turing.

Already famous for having come up with the “Turing machine,” which could theoretically manipulate strings of symbols in what we’d now call an algorithmic fashion, he was recruited by Britain’s wartime codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, where experts were already hard at work reverse-engineering the Enigma machine. There he considered flaws in the design of the device, such as its inability to encrypt any given letter as itself, and the ways in which its human operators used it, such as making predictable weather reports. Exploiting these weaknesses required building a non-theoretical computation engine, the Bombe, to grind through all possibilities at what would then have seemed an unfathomable speed. The intelligence the Bombe produced contributed to the success of the surprise D‑Day invasion and may have taken years off the potential ravages of World War II. It wouldn’t have happened without Turing’s formidable intelligence — or his understanding that you need a machine to outsmart a machine.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirely wrong. Over and over we see even the most subversive art, literature, film, and music has a way of being tamed and Bowdlerized. Global mega-corporate industries don’t need to censor what they don’t like; they only need to buy it, rebrand it, or price it out of reach.

So what? Why do we need challenging, independent art when we have endless entertainment? Is the concept a nostalgic, elitist, Eurocentric idea? Artists have justified the need for art since antiquity, with poetic and logical arguments of every kind. But Dada artists of the early 20th century broke ranks, building their movement on the insight that no defense could possibly mean anything when it came to art’s purpose, especially in the face of the technocratic slaughter of World War I.

When the hyperrationalism of modernity led to mass death and destruction, the only humane response was to declare war on rationalization—to “destroy the hoaxes of reason,” as French artist Jean Arp put it. “For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement,” the Museum of Modern Art explains, “the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought.”

Dada took a combative stance against, for one thing, the insistence that art justify its existence to win establishment approval. “All activity is vain,” declared poet Tristan Tzara in his 1918 “Dada Manifesto,” including the “monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring…. The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust” with the ossified culture of the “nice, nice bourgeois,” who would preserve at any cost “the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat.”

“And so Dada,” wrote Tzara, “was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity.” Such declarations aside, the movement was decidedly unified in its aims. “For us, art is not an end in itself,” poet Hugo Ball wrote. “It is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” This critique required new experimental techniques that deformed and repurposed the technologies of mass culture.

The undertaking would not have been possible without a Dada publishing wing that turned out scores of journals, magazines, books, leaflets, essays, manifestos, etc., written, designed, edited, illustrated, photographed, and controlled by the artists themselves. They might find no small amount of irony in the fact that their productions have received the ultimate institutional sanction: housed in “nice, nice bourgeois” museums, libraries, and universities around the world.

The University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive has amassed a considerable number of Dada publications and offers a wealth of high-quality scanned images of the originals on their site. “The first section” of their Digital Library “includes some of the major periodicals of the Dada movement from Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere.”

The second section of the site “includes books by some of the participants in the Dada movement, as well as some of the more ephemeral Dada-era publications, such as exhibition catalogs and broadsides.” You’ll find writings by all of the artists mentioned above, as well as other well-known names like Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, George Grosz, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and more.

All of these publications are, of course, in their original European languages, though you can find translations of many documents online. The most influential Dada magazine in English, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291, will give monolingual readers a flavor of the larger scene. Published in New York between 1915 and 1916, the short-lived journal included many of the major European names. Its first issue covered experiments like “simultanism,” “sincerism,” and “idiotism,” and introduced visual poetry to American readers. Issue 5–6 featured on its cover one of the weird, nonsensical machines of Francis Picabia.

Dada splintered into other movements before its artists were forced out of Europe or hounded into obscurity by the Nazis. Their unified attempt to fragment and disrupt the dominance of mass culture was itself fragmented and disrupted by a horrific new war machine. But while their ideas may have been co-opted, their spirit may yet live on. Inspired by their work, perhaps a new generation will take up the Sisyphean task of making radical, critical, experimental art to subvert the homogenizing juggernaut of the culture industry.

Enter the University of Iowa’s Digital Dada Library here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. 

We venerate Galileo Galilei for daring to speak the scientific truth in the face of severe institutional opposition. He publicly acknowledged that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a time when the Church would rather he didn’t, displaying a bloody-mindedness that he seems to have acquired with age. Decades earlier, in the first stage of his career, he found himself (circa 1588) tasked by the Florentine Academy with calculating the precise dimensions of hell as described in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dutifully applying himself to this now-absurd-sounding work, he determined that the underworld’s roof had to be centered in Jerusalem, as wide as the radius of the entire Earth, and no less than 600 kilometers thick.

Not that any of this was based on frivolous reasoning. As a model for the dimensions of hell’s roof, for instance, Galileo looked over to Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome, which had topped the Florence Cathedral for a century and a half at that point. Galileo’s calculations of hell’s dimensions contradicted an earlier model proposed by the scholar Alessandro Vellutello. Instead, they supported a model developed by architect Antonio Manetti, whose drawings appear here.

That Manetti was a fellow Florentine, and Vellutello was from Florence’s longtime rival Lucca could well have counted among the motivating factors. But we must bear in mind that, in the sixteenth century, people really did want to get these facts straight — if “facts” be the proper term.

The attempt to reconcile scripture with objectivity absorbed the lives of many highly intelligent people throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. However hopeless that goal could be, the thought Galileo devoted to the problem may have resulted in a genuine breakthrough. Mathematician and science historian Mark Peterson, previously featured here on Open Culture, has argued that his calculations of Dante’s non-Euclidean, topology-curved universe — as we might plausibly describe it today — laid out the basis for what would become mathematical physics. In any case, the young Galileo’s lectures at the Florentine Academy landed him a job as a mathematics lecturer at the University of Pisa, as good a reason as any for him to keep his private doubts to himself. When it comes to science and religion, as he must have known, you’ve got to pick your battles.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Before he became a novelist, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo, and music has filled his novels ever since. For your listening pleasure, NTS Radio has created two playlists of the jazz and classical music referenced in his fiction. Together, they run nearly five hours and feature everyone from John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk to Schubert, Liszt, and Mozart. Our suggestion: Pick up a Murakami novel, press play, and let the music become the soundtrack to your reading. Enjoy!

via Kottke

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One often-repeated anecdote about Milton Friedman has the famous economist visiting a canal under construction in nineteen-sixties China. Noticing the sheer number of human laborers digging away with shovels, he asked the official in charge why they weren’t getting the work done faster with excavators and other modern machines. The bureaucrat explained to him that doing it by hand created more jobs. Friedman’s reply: “If it’s jobs you want, you should give those men spoons instead.” Whether or not this exchange ever actually happened, it illustrates a conflict that’s arisen more than once in the history of civilization, possibly since the dawn of industrialization — and at least since the heyday of the Luddites.

According to the University of Cambridge, that heyday came in 1812, the year of “an assault by some 150 armed laborers on a Huddersfield mill, in which soldiers opened fire on the mob to stop them breaking into the premises, fatally wounding two attackers.” This was the culmination of a series of protests across England, all of them inspired by anger at “new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry in place of the skilled work of artisans, threatening their livelihoods as a result.” These desperately infuriated protesters, whose documented actions include the murder of a Yorkshire mill owner, loudly expressed allegiance to one Ned Ludd, a weaver said to have taken the bold step of smashing a couple of newfangled stocking frames some 25 years before.

The story of Ludd’s early stand against mechanization may be even more questionable than the one about Milton Friedman and the spoons, but his name survives today nevertheless. In fact, it’s undergone somewhat of a revival thanks to the artificial-intelligence boom of recent years, during which even the modern “knowledge workers” have come to fear the trampling of their livelihoods under technology’s inexorable march. Their calls for restrictions on the development and deployment of AI are, in one side’s framing of the argument, merely the latest public spasm of Luddism, a movement explained in the video above from The History Guy. How many here in the twenty-first century, after all, would argue that the mass production of socks ultimately constituted a real loss for humanity?

Luddism never did count a large proportion of the English labor force as its own. Rather, the movement appealed to “a relatively ‘elite’ group” of legally protected workers only allowed into their professions after years of apprenticeship, at which point “they tended to feel that they were owed a living.” Nor did the conditions, hours, and compensation at the factories then springing up seem favorable compared to the way of life enjoyed by their predecessors. Similar sentiments may underlie the “Luddite clubs” forming on college campuses, on which NPR has reported, or this year’s social media-free “Summer of Ludd” at the New School, to say nothing of ongoing protests against data-center construction. It would be fascinating to hear what genuine nineteenth-century Luddites would make of our situation. Perhaps, one day, we can use AI to resurrect them.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play Minecraft. Yet there really are implications worth considering if we accept that our cognitive systems didn’t evolve to process text in the same way as they evolved to handle vision and speech. Speaking on an evolutionary historical scale, “we haven’t had enough time to develop a dedicated reading brain,” says UCLA neuroscientist Rebecca Gotlieb in the BBC World Service video above. For the time being, in a kind of cognitive jerry-rigging, “we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing and language and attention and affect.”

That was true for readers and writers of Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics five millennia ago. It still is for readers and writers of the many scripts in use today, from the Latin alphabet to Chinese characters to the Arabic abjad, each of which has its own influence on its users’ neurological architecture. One of the biggest differences between then and now is the scale of reading: ancient Sumeria and Egypt seem to have had literacy rates around one percent, a number comprising mostly scribes, priests, and nobles, while the global average today comes in around 88 percent and rising. Another is the medium of reading: the shift from papyrus to paper may have seemed remarkable at the time, but the more recent one from paper to electronic screens has already changed the way we think about our world.

“When we read on screens, we tend to skim, and when we skim, we’re more susceptible to misinformation,” says Gotlieb. So we’ve been told, many times and many ways, amid the past decade’s ever-more-troubled political reportage. In 2018, Maryanne Wolf, author of Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argued in the Guardian that the “subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy” apparently caused by technology-encouraged skimming “affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”

So much for us adults. What about the children? In the BBC World Service video, Wolf bluntly sums up the results of studies so far on the effects of early reading experience on later intellectual performance: “the more digital, the worse academic.” If a young brain is “constantly being distracted and hyperstimulated, you’re going to have them not able to really move from one stimulus to the next without a desire for ever-quicker intervals between stimuli.” For our part, as parents, teachers, or other visible examples of grown-uphood, we can do nothing to counteract that more effectively than to model and enjoy a rich “reading life” for the next generation. We must, in other words, pick up books and not put them down, which may strike an Open Culture reader as an easy task. But ask yourself this: how many times did you click over to something else before getting to the end of this post?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

With the Bayeux Tapestry now on display at the British Museum, Deep Down History presents a deep dive into the embroidery’s full story:

“The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most remarkable survivals of the Middle Ages — a 70 metre embroidered account of the events leading to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…”

Enjoy!

via Kottke

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Most of us can rattle off the first few words-that-stand-for-letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Alfa, Bravo, and Charlie no doubt come right to mind, and depending on how many war movies you’ve seen, so may Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. But how many of us would recognize Kilo, Mike, and Sierra? For that matter, how much do any of us know about how these particular words came to be used to spell out other words when communicating over walkie-talkies or other low-fidelity communication systems? In the video above for his YouTube channel RobWords, YouTuber Rob Watts explains the development of and logic behind the NATO phonetic alphabet, wasting no time in clarifying that it isn’t a phonetic alphabet, nor was it created by NATO.

What we actually have here, Watts says, is a “spelling alphabet,” and its story goes back to the invention of the telephone in the eighteen-seventies. “Early telephonists found that if ever they needed to spell something out, like someone’s name, one letter would get misheard as another.” The idea of expressing each letter with a common word starting with that letter arose naturally, though figuring out exactly which words to use took a lot more trial and error.

In the early nineteen-tens, Western Union published a spelling alphabet consisting mostly of the names of people and places: Adams, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Edward, and so on. By World War I, the British army had also implemented a rather more eccentric version, using words like Beer, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, and Yorker; by World War II, “every armed service in Britain and the U.S. had developed its own spelling alphabet.”

In light of the rapidly globalizing nature of human affairs, and not just the military kind, the need for a single universal spelling alphabet became pressing. It wasn’t until the establishment of the International Civil Aviation Organization, meant to oversee the skies in peacetime, that earnest work began on a revision of the U.S.-U.K. combined forces’ existing spelling alphabet, incorporating English words easily pronounceable by non-English speakers, while also being minimally confusable for one another. By 1956, ICAO finalized its list, which has remained the NATO phonetic alphabet (or, officially, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet) we all know today — or we at least partially know. It may well be worth your time to memorize the rest, since you never know when you’ll have to keep your Papas and Quebecs straight.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

For decades following World War II,  the world was left wondering how the atrocities of the Holocaust could have been perpetrated in the midst of—and, most horrifically, by—a modern and civilized society. How did people come to engage in a willing and systematic extermination of their neighbors? Psychologists, whose field had grown into a grudgingly respected science by the midpoint of the 20^th century, were eager to tackle the question.

In 1961, Yale University’s Stanley Milgram began a series of infamous obedience experiments. While Adolf Eichmann’s trial was underway in Jerusalem (resulting in Hannah Arendt’s five-piece reportage, which became one of The New Yorker magazine’s most dramatic and controversial article series), Milgram began to suspect that human nature was more straightforward than earlier theorists had imagined; he wondered, as he later wrote, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

In the most famous of his experiments, Milgram ostensibly recruited participants to take part in a study assessing the effects of pain on learning. In reality, he wanted to see how far he could push the average American to administer painful electric shocks to a fellow human being.

When participants arrived at his lab, Milgram’s assistant would ask them, as well as a second man, to draw slips of paper to receive their roles for the experiment. In fact, the second man was a confederate; the participant would always draw the role of “teacher,” and the second man would invariably be made the “learner.”

The participants received instructions to teach pairs of words to the confederate. After they had read the list of words once, the teachers were to test the learner’s recall by reading one word, and asking the learner to name one of the four words associated with it. The experimenter told the participants to punish any learner mistakes by pushing a button and administering an electric shock; while they could not see the learner, participants could hear his screams. The confederate, of course, remained unharmed, and merely acted out in pain, with each mistake costing him an additional 15 volts of punishment. In case participants faltered in their scientific resolve, the experimenter was nearby to urge them, using four authoritative statements:

Please continue.

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have no other choice, you must go on.

In a jarring set of findings, Milgram found that 26 of the 40 participants obeyed instructions, administering shocks all the way from “Slight Shock,” to “Danger: Severe Shock.” The final two ominous switches were simply marked “XXX.” Even when the learner would pound on the walls in agony after seemingly receiving 300 volts, participants persisted. Eventually, the learner simply stopped responding.

Although they followed instructions, participants repeatedly expressed their desire to stop the experiment, and showed clear signs of extreme discomfort:

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse… At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.” 

Milgram’s study set off a powder keg whose impact remains felt to this day. Ethically, many objected to the deception and the lack of adequate participant debriefing. Others claimed that Milgram overemphasized human nature’s propensity for blind obedience, with the experimenter often urging participants to continue many more times than the four stock phrases allowed.

In the clip above, you can watch original footage from Milgram’s  experiment, frightening in its insidious simplicity. (See a full documentary on the study on YouTube.) The man administering the shock grows increasingly uncomfortable with his part in the proceedings, and almost walks out, asking “Who’s going to take the responsibility for anything that happens to that gentleman?” When the experimenter replies, “I’m responsible,” the man, absolving himself, continues. As the person receiving the shocks grows increasingly panicked, complaining about his heart and asking to be let out, the participant makes his objections known but appears paralyzed, sheepishly turning to the experimenter, unable to leave.

Although Milgram’s work has drawn critics, his results endure. While changing the experiment’s procedure may alter compliance (e.g., having the experimenter speak to participants over the phone rather than remain in the same room throughout the experiment decreased obedience rates), replications have tended to confirm Milgram’s initial findings. Whether one is urged once or a dozen times, people tend to take on the yoke of authority as absolute, relinquishing their personal agency in the pain they impart. Human nature, it seems, has no Manichean leanings—merely a pliant bent.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in November 2013.

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Written by Ilia Blinderman.

We no longer live in a time when college freshmen get shocked by much of the reading material assigned to them. Counterintuitively, the texts that do retain their power to disturb young minds (presuming they can read texts in the first place) tend to skew old — and in one prominent case, about 2,400 years old. Even the most superficial interpretations of Plato’s Republic challenge the political assumptions held by almost every student today, at least in the developed West. Many of them hold those assumptions so deeply that they’ve never articulated them. Encountering the arguments made by Plato’s Socrates in favor of a society ruled by an enlightened upper class, tightly controlled from above in everything from the division of its labor to the content of its art, prompts them to do so.

Or rather, it prompts them to do so in an ideal educational setting, but then, Plato was dedicated to nothing so much as the ideal. When he casts Socrates as making the case for the best possible relationships between ruler, state, and individual, he creates less a how-to manual (as Machiavelli did nineteen centuries later, in a brutally quasi-satirical spirit) than a means of better understanding extant societies by bringing their characteristics into relief through comparison.

We may reflexively quote Churchill’s remark about modern democracy, vulnerable as it is to manipulation by all manner of unsavory actors, being “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” but we nevertheless flinch from holding it up too closely against any kind of ideal system.

It’s tempting to declare that we wouldn’t want to live in the republic of the Republic. (Some of us may have succumbed to that temptation in the political-philosophy lecture hall.) But a more reflective reading reveals a good deal about Plato’s time as well as our own. In the 78-minute video above, Jared Henderson takes us through the Socratic dialogues that propose and refine this Utopia, with its philosopher-kings, noble lies, spiritual aristocrats, breeding festivals, and guardians trained from the cradle. He arrives at certain unfashionable ideas, such as the ultimate task of refining one’s own soul and the necessity of persuading those impervious to philosophy with myth. Even those of us who regard ourselves as sophisticated thinkers, impervious to the crude rhetoric of ideologies and demagogues, would do well to ask ourselves: how much of that thinking has been shaped by the stories we’ve heard all our lives?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

The business world has long had special jargon for the Kafkaesque incompetence bedeviling the ranks of upper management. There is “the Peter principle,” first described in a satirical book of the same name in 1968. More recently, we have the positive notion of “failing upward.” The concept has inspired a mantra, “fail harder, fail faster,” as well as popular books like The Gift of Failure. Famed research professor, author, and TED talker Brené Brown has called TED “the failure conference,” and indeed, a “FailCon” does exist, “in over a dozen cities on 6 continents around the globe.”

The candor about this most unavoidable of human phenomena may prove a boon to public health, lowering levels of hypertension by a significant margin. But is there a danger in praising failure too fervently? (Samuel Beckett’s quote on the matter, beloved by many a 21st-century thought leader, proves decidedly more ambiguous in context.) Might it present an even greater opportunity for people to “rise to their level of incompetence”? Given the prevalence of the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” a cognitive bias explained by John Cleese in a previous post, we may not be well-placed to know whether our efforts constitute success or failure, or whether we actually have the skills we think we do.

First described by social psychologists David Dunning (University of Michigan) and Justin Kruger (N.Y.U.) in 1999, the effect “suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately.” So says the narrator of the TED-Ed lesson above, scripted by Dunning and offering a sober reminder of the human propensity for self-delusion. “We frequently overestimate our own abilities,” resulting in widespread “illusory superiority” that makes “incompetent people think they’re amazing.” The effect greatly intensifies at the lower end of the scale; it is often “those with the least ability who are most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent.” Or as Cleese plainly puts it, some people “are so stupid, they have no idea how stupid they are.”

Combine this with the converse effect—the tendency of skilled individuals to underrate themselves—and we have the preconditions for an epidemic of mismatched skill sets and positions. But while imposter syndrome can produce tragic personal results and deprive the world of talent, the Dunning-Kruger Effect’s worst casualties affect us all adversely. People “measurably poor at logical reasoning, grammar, financial knowledge, math, emotional intelligence, running medical lab tests, and chess all tend to rate their expertise almost as favorably as actual experts do.” When such people get promoted up the chain, they can unwittingly do a great deal of harm.

While arrogant self-importance plays its role in fostering delusions of expertise, Dunning and Kruger found that most of us are subject to the effect in some area of our lives simply because we lack the skills to understand how bad we are at certain things. We don’t know the rules well enough to successfully, creatively break them. Until we have some basic understanding of what constitutes competence in a particular endeavor, we cannot even understand that we’ve failed.

Real experts, on the other hand, tend to assume their skills are ordinary and unremarkable. “The result is that people, whether they’re inept or highly skilled, are often caught in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception.” How can we get out? The answers won’t surprise you. Listen to constructive feedback and never stop learning, behavior that can require a good deal of vulnerability and humility.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

You don’t have to spend a long time reading up on the Silk Road before you see the term itself (“Silk Road”) called a misnomer. In fact, what we refer to by that name comprises a whole network of trade routes connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe, whose traffic constantly shifted over a millennium and a half according to climatic, geopolitical, and civilizational conditions. Nor was silk the only, or even the primary type of good carried along those routes. From East to West went tea, dyes, perfumes, porcelain, and paper; from West to East, glassware, horses, camels, honey, wine, and gold, to name just a few items in perennial demand. It was along the Silk Road, or Silk-and-Many-Other-Things-Roads, that gunpowder spread out of China — and the Black Death spread out of Europe.

According to the Knowledgia video above, the roughly 4,000-mile-long Silk Road was officially opened in 130 BC. But it wasn’t without its predecessors: in 500 BC, for example, the “Royal Road” established by Darius I’s Achaemenid Empire “stretched from Susa, which lies in modern-day Iran, all the way, nearly 2,000 miles to the west, to Sardis, which is today a part of Turkey,” with spurs reaching India and Northern Africa.

Whatever its economic impact, the Royal Road had nothing like the cultural effects of the Silk Road, any history of which emphasizes the “new thinking and new ways of life being passed along the network of trade routes,” to say nothing of “the spread of religions or ideologies that would occur thanks to the merchants and travelers themselves.”

This despite the fact that few of those merchants or travelers crossed the Silk Road’s entire length. But we can all name at least one man who made the full journey: the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who as a teenager first made the trek to Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome with his father. (At that point, the Mongol Empire had already unified its routes, but not before laying waste to a fair few settlements along the way.) It is to Polo’s writings that we owe our enduringly romantic image of the Silk Road, but he understood the dangers of that lawless gauntlet across empires as well as anyone. The Urban Atlas video above lists a few of them, including desert heat, diseases, hallucinations, banditry, and slavery. Today, we encounter no such perils on the way from Rome to Xi’an, a journey we can make on a flight with a stopover in Beijing. Perhaps Marco Polo would say we’ve all gone soft, but then, he’d probably be more interested in learning about our roads in the sky.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Image by Dick DeMarsico, via Wikimedia Commons

The influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on the revolutionary philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is well known. Marx wrote a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and claimed to have turned the German idealist philosopher on his head, and the development of Marxist theory among a school of neo-Hegelians, wrote Rebecca Cooper in 1925, occurred in a period “peculiarly auspicious for the birth of a revolutionary social philosophy.”

A century later, on another continent, Hegel’s thought influenced the course of a very different struggle. And while the historical conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and mid-twentieth-century America present entirely different sets of specific concerns, the same general observation applies: the time and place of such radical thinkers as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Huey Newton and a host of other activists presented “peculiarly auspicious” circumstances for revolutionary social philosophy.

But while these figures appear today as the vanguard of radical black thought, Martin Luther King, Jr., the most widely celebrated of Civil Rights leaders, “is often conflated with neoliberal multiculturalism,” writes Critical Theory, his program associated with “the failure of the civil rights movement to dismantle the ongoing systemic white supremacy of the status quo.” And yet, King’s movement not only succeeded in ending legal segregation and hastening the passing of the Civil Rights Act; it also provided direction for nearly every nonviolent social movement from his day to ours. King’s legacy is not only that of an inspiring organizer and orator, but also of a radical thinker who engaged critically with philosophy and social theory and brought it to bear on his activism.

We are generally well aware of King’s debt to Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement that won Indian independence in 1947, yet we know little of his debt to the same thinker who inspired Marx and his contemporaries—G.W.F. Hegel. As philosopher Nolen Gertz has demonstrated on his blog, King was highly influenced by Hegelianism, as much as, or perhaps even more so, than he was by Gandhi’s movement. Marx may have turned Hegel’s system on its head, but King, writes Gertz, “fought White America… by turning the ideas of dead white men against the oppressive practices of living white men.”

King read and wrote on Hegel as a graduate student at Boston University and Harvard in the mid-’50s, where he studied theology and the history of philosophy and religion. He took a yearlong seminar on Hegel with his advisor at BU, Edgar Brightman (see King’s diagram notes of Hegel’s system above), and found a great deal to admire in the “dead white” philosopher’s logical system, as well as a good deal to critique. The two-semester class, King wrote in his autobiography, was “both rewarding and stimulating”:

Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel’s monumental work, Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel’s philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that “truth is the whole” led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.

While King may have disagreed with Hegel’s idealism, he found support for his own philosophy of nonviolence in Hegel’s dialectical method, a mode of analysis that seems particularly well suited to socially revolutionary thought. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote,

The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.

King’s critical appraisal of Hegel extended to other radical philosophical thinkers as well, including Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. Gertz offers many samples of the budding Civil Rights leader’s notes on various thinkers and philosophies, including the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (below), in which King confesses that his encounter with Existentialism often “shocked” him, especially since he had “been raised in a rather strict fundamentalist tradition.” And yet, he writes—in an allusion to Kant’s reaction to David Hume—he acquired “a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis” that “knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.”

In the essay, King writes, “I became convinced that existentialism, in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, had grasped certain basic truths about man.” He seems particularly drawn to Kierkegaard (see his notes on the philosopher below). Yet it is Hegel who seems most responsible for awakening his philosophical curiosity. As King scholar John Ansbro discovered, King “stated in a January 19, 1956 interview with The Montgomery Advertiser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher.” Later that year, King gave an address to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in which he used Hegelian terms to characterize the Civil Rights struggle: “Long ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that justice emerges from the strife of opposites, and Hegel, in modern philosophy, preached a doctrine of growth through struggle.”

Independent scholar Ralph Dumain has further catalogued King’s many approving references to Hegel, including a paper he wrote entitled “An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic—Being, Non-Being, Becoming,” the “last of six essays that King wrote” for his two-semester course on the philosopher. King also approached Hegel by way of an earlier Civil Rights leader—W.E.B. Du Bois, who read the German philosopher while studying with prominent social scientists in Berlin, and who applied Hegelian logic to his own analysis of racial consciousness and struggle in America.

Interestingly, what neither King nor Du Bois remarked on is the fact that Hegel was likely himself inspired by black revolutionaries. The Haitian Revolution, argues scholar Susan Buck-Morss, gave Hegel the impetus for his analysis of power and his “metaphor of the ‘struggle to death’ between the master and slave, which for Hegel provided the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history.” While Hegel’s thought is a philosophical thread that winds through the work of radical thinkers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his own philosophy may not have taken the direction it did without the revolutionary struggles against oppression waged by former slaves in the New World centuries before King led his nonviolent war on the oppressive system of segregation in the United States.

H/T Nolen Gertz

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.