Victimology R Us : the case of “Human Trafficking”

We earlier posted about the curiously skewed reporting (in particular on NPR) concerning events in Syria, struggling to keep a horribly complicated reality (which has just taken yet another intricate turn, with a number of rebel factions at each other’s throats, or falsely reported as having united) in line with a politically-correct narrative.

And now the Victimology Sweepstakes has involved India.

On NPR tonight, their reporter summed up the controversy as follows:  “According to the United States, the maid is the victim;  according to India, the diplomat is the victim”  -- these alternatives exhaust the spectrum of possible ways of looking at the affair.  Both principals, note, are female;  and the twin faces actually belong to a single narrative Janus:  if two women are unhappy about something, at least one of them must be a ‘victim’.

The background story is:  A maid was brought to America by an Indian, er, something-or-other (India just promoted her so that she will enjoy -- they hope -- retroactive diplomatic immunity, for which she was technically not eligible at the time of the alleged crime), to work at a fancy Manhattan address, where she received less than what New York City has decreed to be the minimum wage.   Whether (as with waiters) there were other perks to the job, such as free room and board at a place most of us could not afford to live, I have no idea, and these are scarcely mentioned in the ruthless drive towards simplification (though, legally, they would certainly be relevant; even Wikipedia makes no mention of this).   The wage, such as it was, compared favorably to what she could have made in India -- but who knows.  Her beef with her employer probably had other dimensions as well.  In any case, the U.S. legal case against the employer primarily involves visa fraud -- which after all was carried out on behalf of the prospective employee, and not (in itself) to her victimization.  (If there are victims in such visa fraud, that would be the American workers who might otherwise find employment.) To make good-guy/bad-guy out of all this, is a stretch.

What seems to have happened is that the United States, in its zeal for P.C., has got entangled in a strand of its own recent mythology:  the spectre of “Human Trafficking”.   India, not sharing this mythology, can make nothing of it, and sees pure persecution.   American zealots, not understanding that polytheist India does not worship at this particular shrine as well, thinks it is being impossibly perverse.   Serious international consequences have been developing out of this absurd sideshow.

Most Americans know next to nothing about the phenomenon or the way it is being portrayed by certain lobbies.   But at my workplace, everyone -- tens of thousands of us -- are required to take a “course” every year, on the horrors of human trafficking, basically warning us all against even dreaming of indulging in such a thing.   Now, we all have our foibles, but I rather doubt if (the background of the folks there being what it is) even a single employee has ever come close to what a normal person would consider “human trafficking”.   Some of us (not you, not me) might just possibly do other bad things: take a sick day for less than a life-threatening illness, use government e-mail for sending humorous items about cats and whatnot, take the Lord’s name in vain upon striking one's thumb with an errant hammer, exceed the speed limit in harmony with surrounding traffic, and wantonly tear tags off mattresses despite explicit warnings not to do so:  but there are no courses, required or otherwise, warning us against those.   The Awful Warning concerns “human trafficking”, and that alone.

To get credit for the course, we have to pass an “exam”.   My advice to newcomers is:  Ignore the course content, skip right to the exam, and give whatever answer Hillary Clinton would want you to give.  That is the one they want.

So, what is behind it?  They don’t really imagine that any of us are about to rush out and buy slaves on eBay  (“Buy two -- get one free!”), or smuggle boatloads of Rwandans into our cul-de-sacs.   No, what they really mean is:  If you travel abroad, even on vacation, and visit a fille de joie, then, even if The World's Oldest Profession (and still among the most lucrative) is completely legal in that country, the Prudery Police will come after you, and ruin you.   In this one area, your time and your activity is not your own;  the long arm of Correctness will find you, wherever you are.

[Historical note]  Connoisseurs of American cultural history will notice the parallel with the “white slavery” scares that caused our great-grandmothers’ hearts to flutter and shudder.  Cf. the Wikipedia article on “Moral Panic”.

~

There is a striking parallel between this case, and that of Diallo-vs-DSK, which has been little remarked upon if at all.   In both cases, the combination of

(1)  A maid from Third World country, present in the United States as a result of fraud,

plus

(2)  The savagery of the New York City legal system

plus

(3)  A motivating narrative of political correctness

led to a serious international incident.

Plus much money, moving  from left  to right ...

[Update 11 January 2014]   One thing that has no doubt been a conundrum for the popular psyche, and the media that mold it, is what to do about the diplomat.

The mass media have only two principal roles for young women in news stories these days:  (1) victim  (2) heroine.  (If her transgressions are too awful, there is a third.)    Now, normally a beautiful and somewhat prominent woman like Devyani the (not-quite-)Diplomat  would be cast as heroine;  however, since she was required in the role of victimizer of the maid (the narrative that launched the weepie in the first place, and no males being present on the sidelines to serve in that role), she couldn’t really wear both hats.  Yet she is far too good-looking to remain in so ambiguous a position.

The answer, we see today:   She is indeed a heroine -- in India.   Here we see her saucy and sashaying as she returns home in tinsel triumph, wrapped in her entitlement like a sari:

 

Her parting unpenitent words to American diplomats:

She told the official, ‘You have lost a good friend. It is unfortunate. In return, you got a maid and a drunken driver. They are in, and we are out.’ ”

[Update 29 May 2014]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/asia/anti-trafficking-activist-quits-amid-charges-stories-were-fabricated.html?hp&_r=0

[Update 17 Nov 2015]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/gynaecologist-and-nurse-guilty-of-enslaving-houseboy-for-24-years-a6738496.html

In this case as well, the servant was brought into the country illegally.  In a further Narrative-balking detail, the perps in this story are black.

Why is Mathematics?

In an earlier essay, we considered “What is Mathematics?”   Whereas now, the question is:  Why.  -- We have deliberately given this post an awkward-sounding title, rather than the breezy and dismissive “Why math?” (the sort of thing Jughead might toss off with a shrug), aiming for a slight Entfremdungseffekt,   along the lines of Heidegger’s  Was heisst Denken? or Dedekind’s Was Sind und Was Sollen  die Zahlen?

Thus written, the sentence “Why is mathematics” sounds oddly as though translated from one of the more obscure dialects of the Carpathians, or perhaps an incomplete phrase of the sort that leads into a formulaic punning riddle -- “Why is mathematics like French plumbing?” “Because …”  (Prizes for best completion).

(Cf. Varro, De lingua latina V 2):  cur et unde sint verba 'Why and whence are words?')

Anyhow, here is a serious reply to the question:

Mathematics intrigues people for at least three different reasons:  because it is fun (the most important reason for inclusion in this book) because it is beautiful, or because it is useful.

-- Ian Stewart,  How to Cut a Cake (2006), p. 89

For myself, it is rather for a fourth reason:  because it is true.   And true, without contingency -- Necessary, like the Necessary Being.   From Whom, indeed, we receive it.

Like Christianity, were it not true, it would have no more inherent interest than sports or stamp-collecting.

Seen in that perspective, the ugling-duckling of a phrasing, “Why is mathematics?”, spreads the wings of a swan.   It becomes its own special philosophical language, like the innovations that the Pietists made to German.   What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him?  And whence cometh this “mathematics”, that it should contain things true before all worlds, before ever Man came into it, and that remain truths through all eternity:  yet are revealed, piecemeal, like Scripture itself, over the millennia?

~

There are some syntactic and semantic subtleties to that odd little phrase, “Why is mathematics.”   It is not quite idiomatic English, just as the epigrammatic questions of Heidegger and Dedekind are not quite German, though in a way that is difficult to put your finger on.  And yet we do (as linguists say, in a phrase that is not quite English either)  “get a reading” on them -- that is, an interpretation (albeit hazy) immediately suggests itself in each case.

Further, that interpretation is highly sensitive to syntactic and perhaps to lexical perturbation.  Thus,  “Why mathematics?” would most readily be understood quite differently:  Why do mathematics?  Why go into mathematics?  (rather than biology or whatnot).  As for “Why maths?”, I don’t know British English well enough to know if that would be taken exactly  the same way or not.  (Ditto for “Pourquoi les mathémathiques?”)  As for “Why is maths?”  (“Why are maths?” ??), or “Pourquoi sont les mathématiques?”, I’ve no idea whether you could even say it.

(For the sense, if any, of “Warum ist die Mathematik?”, we must consult the shades of Dedekind and Heidegger.)

Since Spanish has two words translatable by ‘Why…?’, the question splits.  For the interpretation bzw. grammaticality  of things like “¿Por qué (0/es/son) la(s) matemática(s)?”, I defer to my hispanophone colleagues.  But the sense of “¿Para qué …” followed by any of these  seems pretty clear:  You are asking what maths are used for.

(There!  I just used “maths” spontaneously and non-metalinguistically in a sentence.  Time to toddle off to tea…)

As for Russian, here the case is different again, since it does not use a copula in present-tense equative sentences, and so cannot make the distinctions that English can in such cases.

~

In that earlier essay, we proceeded from the rather vaporous question “What is Mathematics?”  to the much more concrete series of questions,  “What is an affine connection?”, “What is a Lie group?” etc., the point being to seek out distillations of the essence of a subject, rather than opaquely motivated formal definitions, in a way that is both intuitive and mnemonic.    Now, likewise, we proceed from the formless blancmange of “Why is mathematics?” to characterizations of specific mathematical objects or topics, this time not in terms of what they “are” exactly, but what they are for (along the lines of:  A hammer is for driving in nails.)

Thus, take your friendly neighborhood Lie group, which in the definitions-oriented essay was thumbnailed as “Roughly speaking, a group in which one can meaningfully define the concept of a smooth curve.”    In the very next paragraph of the same article quoted there, the author provides a What-for motivation:

Lie groups were introduced in order to create an analogue of Galois theory for differential equations.

-- Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 230

Succinct and to the point!

Or (from the next page of the same essay), consider the group-theoretic notion of commutator.   The literal definition is simplicity itself: --   ABA^-1B^-1  -- but what does the thing do?  The answer is equally concise and revealing:  It “measures the extent to which A and B fail to commute.”   That fact established, we get a comparison with the related notion of the Lie bracket [X, Y]:

Informally, it represents the net direction of motion if one first moves an infinitesimal amount in the X direction, then in the Y direction, then back in the X direction and back in the Y direction.

-- Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 231

~

And, with reference to the discovery of p-adic numbers:

At first, most mathematicians seem to have found Hensel’s new numbers interesting in a formal way, but also to have wondered what the point of them was.  One does not adopt a new number system just for fun;  it needs to be useful for something.

-- Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 243

That faint-praise “interesting in a formal way” deserves to be highlighted and memorized;  it hints as well as anything at the appreciation for genuine depth and insight, as against mere symbol-shoving, among real mathematicians.  (Cf. further this Arnoldian epigram.)  One imagines that such is the bemused reaction of many mathematicians and physicists to the extravagent but perhaps inapplicable elaborations of String Theory.

Note too, that dismissive back-of-the-hand to mere “fun”,  which nonetheless figures first in the list of motivators, in the quotation from Ian Stewart  with which we began this essay.  Stewart was essentially writing for amateurs;  for full-time professionals, mathematics is just too darn hard to be nothing but fun.  You don’t devote your entire life to crossword-puzzles or sudoku.

Difficulty is Hard

[Note:  Rather in the spirit of those of our essays which we have labeled “faux-naïf”, the title of this one might be called “pseudo-stupid”.  

Compare a formulation we likewise favor, “Infinity is big.”   That epigram is double-edged.  First, it mimics the naïve astonishment that the novice feels, not only upon being introduced to the idea of infinity, but even large-but-finite things like a googolplex.  (As a child, I marveled over that one, much as I marveled over the brontosaurus, and for the same reasons.)  But beyond that, it alludes to the fact that infinity is much bigger than you can imagine when you first meet it as “1,2,3, …. keep going forever”.  And this, in two qualitatively different ways:  

 (a)  The whole “Hilbert’s hotel” Marx-Brothers-stateroom routines you can play with countable infinity (well described by Rudy Rucker in Infinity and the Mind).   

(b) That countable infinity, for all its capaciousness, is merely the smallest infinity; beyond it lies the uncountable infinity which denumerates the real numbers.   That one you can still kind of get a handle on;  but then in turn, infinitely many much larger infinities  rise beyond.

Too, the epigram is tricky to turn around into ‘Finitude is small’.  For, although anything finite is immeasurably smaller than infinity -- infinitessimally so -- so too is any given finite quantity, not immeasurably small to be sure (the ratio can be measured exactly, and differs for different quatities, unlike the case when comparing it with infinity), still unimaginably small (in psychologically evident sense which could be more rigorously defined) with respect to some other finite quantity, which therefore is unimaginably larger than it is.  (Think Graham's Number, or some iterated Ackermann function thereof.) There is, indeed, a lot of elbow room in the land of the finite.  To get a handle on it at all, you stop talking about individual quantities altogether, and instead investigate rates of growth of various kinds of function.  Some have been discovered which increase with a dizzying rapidity, next to which the proverbial “exponential growth” is like watching paint dry.

The concept of “difficulty” is not nearly so dizzying as that;  still, here as well there are at least two levels.  (1)  That felt by the ordinary layman, “Gee, this stuff is hard.”  (2)  A sharper and deeper sensation felt by many of those who have devoted a lifetime of study and practice to math and the sciences:  “Some of this stuff is difficult in ways I never even knew existed."

And, rounding out the paradox hidden in the apparent tautology,  the apparent converse is false:  for ease does not come easy, but only with much practice, and a certain gift.]

In the post linked to immediately below, we examined essayistically  the peculiar difficulty of mathematics -- not merely the well-known fact that a majority of schoolchildren find that algebra hurts their head, but that everyone, all the way to the top of the professional pinnacle, eventually butts up against something that baffles them, and weighs on their brain:

            De Stultitiâ

In the following, we surveyed less drastic analogues of the phenomenon, in such fields as linguistics and physics:

           

            On Scope and Difficulty

In the following series of essays, we examined the (difficult) question of intellectual depth, comparing and contrasting that with the (mostly psychological, not particularly deep) notion of difficulty:

           On Depth

Now (in the spirit of that last essay-series), we pass  to views internal to the field;  and this in two perspectives:

(1) Psychological:  simply a scattering of quotations, illustrative of the groans and misereres, of those who have attempted to scale this cognitive Olympus.

(2)  Mathematical:  Hints at ways in which certain areas or aspects of mathematics can be qualitatively “difficult”, quite apart from any intellectual limitations of its practictioners.

~

Psychological

Otto Hahn, My Life (1968), p. 90: "I remember Professor Rubens once asking me: `How do you manage to distinguish between all these names and remember all their chemical properties into the bargain?  It's all so frightfully complicated!'"

Imre Lakotos' catty footnote in Lakotos & Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), p. 114: "Neurath's [1935] shows that he never grasped Popper's simple argument."

Ronald Clark, Einstein: the Life and Times (1971), p. 333: Wolfgang Pauli, quite sure of his own brilliance, nonetheless wrote to a friend in the 1920's: "Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that  and had never heard anything about physics."

Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979), p. 54: at Cornell, "Hans [Bethe] was using the old cookbook quantum mechanics that Dick [Feynman] couldn't understand.  Dick was using his own private quantum mechanics that nobody else could understand."

Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance (1985), p. 112: "I had a look at some of Wiener's work on Brownian motion  but found it extremely difficult to follow."

& p. 115:  Kac contributed to the invariance principle, which is "now textbook stuff".  Yet "a recent book on the subject  is outside my comprehension."  [Note that this does not mean, "contains much material that was new to me", but rather:  "Even after working my way through the book, I cannot understand it.  God willing the next generation will be able to."]

Richard Rhodes, reviewing Abraham Pais' biography of Niels Bohr in NYTimes Book Review, 26 I 92: "It's sometimes heavy going, and I was reminded along the way of Luis Alvarez telling me that when he read Mr. Pais's biography of Einstein  he'd skipped the hard parts.  If a Nobel laureate could skip the hard parts, so can we all."

John Langlands, in his first of a series of IAS lectures (fall 99), said he'd wanted to be a physicist, but physics was "too difficult", so he had to settle for being a humble mathematics professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 97: Ronald Fischer's writings are "not always transparent  to even the most hermeneutic reader".

John Conway, 17 XI 1999: "I studied Quantum Mechanics with Dirac. Quantum Mechanics is hard to understand, even when you can answer the questions on the exams.  And I couldn't answer the questions on the exams anymore."  [Yet another mathematical genius who found physics "too hard".]

David Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm (2000), p. 157: "Gödel lectured on his own results … the mathematicians (and philosophers) at Princeton for the most part could not and did not understand a word of what he said…"  [Note:  Here, nevertheless, the audience was mathematically the most sophisticated in the world.]

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 54:

“Lobschevsky’s colleagues  failed to understand his work.  Since they did not want to write negative reviews, they simply ‘lost’ the text.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 55:

“This symbolic language, using a minimum of words, made it very difficult for Bolyai’s contemporaries to read his great work.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 57:

“His review was extremely negative.  Bunyakovsky failed to understand Lobachevsky’s ideas.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 61:

“The audience listened attentively to Riemann’s lecture “Ueber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen”, but did not understand it.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 78:

“Readers were unprepared for Grassmann’s approach and for his idiosyncratic style… Grassmann’s first book was ignored by mathematicians.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 148:

The letter that Gaulois wrote on the eve of his death was published, “but, obviously, the item was not understood by anyone at the time  and was ignored.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 153:

“Typically, the officers who proposed the problem  refused at first to consider Monge’s solution, being certain that his mathematical training was insufficient for solving it.”

I.M.Yaglom, Felix Klein and Sophus Lie (1988), p. 177:

“Further explanations proving the mathematical validity of all of Klein’s constructions  were not convincing: he who does not wish to see, will not see.”

Hamilton's intellectual biographer calls that mathematician's  Lectures on Quaternions "hundreds  of all but impenetrable pages".

~

Mathematical

First, certain subfields within mathematics are considered inherently substantially more difficult than others, at least for new entrants:

A Vertex Operator Algebra is an infinite-dimensional, Z₊-graded vector space with infinitely many products.  It is not an easy definition, and there are no easy examples.

-- Terry Gannon, in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 539

In reference to a certain operation on elliptic curves:

This construction can be regarded as the very beginning of Hodge theory, a powerful branch of algebraic geometry  with a reputation for extreme difficulty.

-- Jordan Ellenberg, in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 191
[As for garden-variety algebraic-geometry, that is formidable enough:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/12/adventures-in-algebraic-geometry.html ]

Second, certain familiar problems, now considered elementary, turn out to be very difficult to solve in real generality and with proper rigor.    Thus, one of the first problems you meet in freshman physics is that of the Vibrating String.  Later, after mastering calculus and advanced calculus, you move on to Real Analysis -- and meet the thing again. Browsing through the standard textbok of F. Riesz & B. Sz.-Nagy, Leçons d’analyse fonctionelle [translated as Functional Analysis, 1955], I was surprised to find, well towards the end of the book, a chapter “Applications to the Vibrating String Problem”.

Similarly, one author remarks that only in recent times have certain classic problems in physics been settled rigorously, using the full arsenal of topology -- but that topologists are given scant credit, since the physicists imagined they had settled these matters long ago (though their proofs were fallacious).

Or cf. Charles Fefferman, who, in his article on the Navier-Stokes equation, places front and center  its status as a surprisingly tough nut to crack:

The Euler and Navier-Stokes equations describe the motion of an idealized fluid.  They are important in science and engineering, yet they are very poorly understood.  They present a major challenge to mathematics. … Although the Euler equation is 250 years old, and the Navier-Stokes equation well over 100 years old, there is no consensus as to whether Navier-Stokes or Euler solutions exist for all time, or whether instead they “break down” at a finite time. 

in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 193-4

All this is of more than academic interest, since Navier-Stokes rules hydrodynamics which governs the oceans and the atmosphere, and hence determines whether we shall all go blithely on or whether shall one day disappear in a polar vortex or the like.  (As I write [7 January 2014], the temperature has been hovering around zero Fahrenheit, but with a high of 72 forecast for Saturday -- four days from now.  It feels as though we may have entered a region of unstable vorticity.)

(Thus spooked, I read on, and on p. 196 encountered this:

In the Euler equation … solutions can behave very strangely.  A two-dimensional fluid that is initially at rest, and subject to no outside forces, can suddenly start moving …

For the past few days, I’ve been reading a novel by Stephen King, and passages like that cause the hairs on the back of the neck to bristle like quills upon the proverbial porpentine.)

~

For more from this pen, try this:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html