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S C O P ESpring 2011

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www. sco pe -mag. com | S p r ing 2 011 | S C O P E 1

It was an age of borderless thinking,of democratic access to scientific, technical,and financial knowledge.It was an age of obsessives, of dilettantes,of hucksters and eccentrics.It was our past. It may well be our future.

Convention of cranksby Rob MacDougall, page 12

S C O P E

ART BY DALE LAWRENCE

2 S C O P E | S p r ing 2 011 | www. sco pe -mag. com

S C O P E4 On mere suspicion

CHRISTOPHER MICHAELSEN

After the 1998 bombings ofU.S. embassies

in Africa, the United Nations instituted a

sanctions list to freeze the assets ofsuspected

supporters ofterrorism. It has been violating

due process rights ever sinceART BY BETH RHODES

24 The singularityLUKE GRUNDY

Blues-punk band TheWhite Stripes broke up

in February 2011, but their unique and

stylistically hybrid sound will live on

through other bands. A hard act to follow,

as they say—and a necessary oneART BY PRISCILA FLORIANO, GUSTAVESTUDIO CRÉATIF, AND MARCOS TORRES

40 The way of the abstractGIOVANNI VIGNALE

We tend to like our science laden with

comforting amounts ofexperimental data,

the word “proven” stamped on the side. But

there are physical truths that experiment

cannot reach, and only theory can grappleART BY CRISTIAN BOIAN


S C O P ESpring 2011 Vol. 1, No. 2

Publisher & editorI. Garrick MasonOnline contributorsLuke GrundyZachary KuehnerKristen MaranoAbby PlenerMarketingSandra Janus

SCOPE is published quarterlyin Toronto by Hassard Fay Inc.Subscriptions (all countries)US$20 for 4 digital issues/yr.www.scope-mag.com/subscriptionsWebsitewww.scope-mag.comContacteditor@scope-mag.comAdvertising information availableupon request.

Copyright © 2011 Hassard Fay Inc.All rights reserved.

Front cover:“River to the Sky” (2009), Brian Rolfehttp://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=527872723&sk=photosBack cover:“La mémoire douloureuse” (2009),Marc Giai-Miniethttp://www.marc-giai-miniet.com

48 Our invented universeJOHN H. ARNOLD

The predictably curmudgeonly and the

surprisingly modern co-exist in John Lukacs’

new book, The Future of History

52 ArtifactABBY PLENER

A fourteenth-century illuminated

manuscript sparks the thought that in some

ways the Trojan War never really ended

31 SpectacleA selection ofstartling work from the artists,

photographers, sculptors, and designers who

have impressed us—and will impress you too

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On mere suspicionAre the Security Council’s efforts to combat thefinancing ofterrorism violating fundamental rights?

BY CHRISTOPHER MICHAELSEN

ART BY BETH RHODESI n the early 1990s, Somalia was acountry rapidly descending intochaos. Political upheaval, combinedwith the effects of civil war and a

severe drought, had led to the collapse of theSomali government and banking system, andto a general breakdown in the social structure.Amidst this turmoil, a charity organisation,the Al Barakaat Foundation, stepped in toprovide aid to the Somali people. It set up asystem that enabled Somali immigrants in theUnited States, Europe, and elsewhere to senda significant part of their earnings back totheir families. Over the next few years AlBarakaat grew to become Somalia’s largestbusiness group, with subsidiaries involved in

banking, telecommunications, andconstruction. Close to eighty percent ofSomalis depended on its services.

Then came 9/11, and with it franticefforts by the U.S. and other governments tocombat the financing of terrorism. AlBarakaat quickly found itself under suspicionof supporting Al-Qaeda. In early November2001, President George W. Bush declaredthat the foundation was “a group of money-wiring and communication companies ownedby a friend and supporter of Osama binLaden.” He announced that the TreasuryDepartment would force Al Barakaat toclose. This, stated Bush, would send “a clearmessage to global financial institutions: You

Beth Rhodes, “To Be Alone With You”, 2011


are with us, or you’re with the terrorists. Andif you’re with the terrorists, you will face theconsequences.” U.S. officials nowacknowledge that the evidence of Al Barakaatbacking terrorism was rather flimsy.

Nevertheless, one of the immediateresults of the U.S. allegations was that AlBarakaat was included on the United Nations1267 sanctions list maintained by a sub-committee of the Security Council. Initiallyestablished by the Security Council as aresponse to the bombings of the U.S.embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the1267 sanctions regime required all states tofreeze the assets of any individual or entityassociated with Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Ladenand/or the Taliban as designated by the 1267Committee.

The listing of Al Barakaat had severeconsequences. It effectively deprived Somaliaof its most significant employer and financialinstitution, and cut Somalis off from theremittance payments on which they relied. Infact, the freezing of Al Barakaat’s assetsworldwide resulted in the collapse ofeconomic activities in Somalia as thousandsemployed by the foundation had to stopworking, while those receiving money fromrelatives and friends abroad struggled tomake ends meet. As Somalia’s ambassador tothe United Nations, Ahmed Abdi Hashi, put

it in 2003, “depositors cannot access theirfunds. Businessmen cannot do business.Many are going bankrupt.”

Yet Al Barakaat was neither informedabout the exact reasons for its inclusion inthe UN’s list, nor was it given anyopportunity to prevent the listing bydemonstrating that its inclusion wasunjustified. What is more, even after its assetshad been frozen, the foundation’s ability tochallenge the listing in a court of law wasseverely limited. This was mainly due to thefact that UN Security Council resolutionsenjoy primacy over other rules ofinternational law, making it difficult to submitthem to any form of judicial review.T he case of Al Barakaat was not an

isolated incident. While thefoundation was eventually removed

from the list in 2009, as of 28 April this year487 persons and entities remain listed.Indeed, the Security Council continues toconsider the 1267 sanctions regime as acornerstone of the UN’s counter-terrorismefforts. This was recognized by the Council,most recently, in resolution 1904.Emphasizing that sanctions were “animportant tool under the Charter of theUnited Nations in the maintenance andrestoration of international peace and

Beth Rhodes, “Deathbed”, 2011


Beth Rhodes, “We Will Become Silhouettes”, 2011

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Beth Rhodes, “Flint”, 2011





Dr. Christopher Michaelsen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law of theUniversity of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. He teaches and specialises inpublic international law, human rights, and international security. Prior to joining UNSW, heserved as a Human Rights Officer (Anti-Terrorism) at the Office for Democratic Institutionsand Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Warsaw,Poland. http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/staff/MichaelsenC/About the artistBeth Rhodes is a painter and designer from Biloxi, Mississippi. Her work incorporatesexpressive marks and loose brushstrokes, reminders of human presence in a digital world. Inher most recent series of paintings, she focuses on the loneliness felt from an increasinglyindividualistic society. You can view her entire portfolio here:http://cargocollective.com/bethrhodes


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P ravda, Russian for “truth”, wasthe official newspaper of theSoviet Communist Party from thestart of the Bolshevik Revolution

to the final days of the Soviet Union. Afterthe collapse of Soviet communism, Pravdafell on predictably hard times. The newspaperwas sold to foreign owners, who reinvented itin the 1990s as a rather shamelesssupermarket tabloid. The pages that oncedelivered the ponderous dictates of theKremlin were given over to breathless reportson extra-terrestrial invaders, ghostly

apparitions, and the curative properties ofgoat testicles. This may be a fitting fate for anewspaper whose truth was never muchmore than titular. But Pravda’stransformation (liberation? decline?) strikesme as a kind of metaphor for our wholeinformation environment, as we pass fromthe top-down mass media of the twentiethcentury to the interactive digital media of thetwenty-first.

The shorthand story of our ownrevolution is by now familiar. In the twentiethcentury, we built powerful tools by which a

Convention of cranksWhy the nineteenth century's golden ageofpseudoscience may be a precursor ofour own

BY ROB MACDOUGALLART BY DALE LAWRENCE

Dale Lawrence, “2.1.1 Invention to Pass Time (I)”, 2010


few people could broadcast their version oftruth to a mass audience. In the West, at least,such power was supposed to come withresponsibility. Around our presses and bullypulpits we built codes of professionalconduct and hierarchies of expertise. Butnow the world has turned. Networked digitaland social media are toppling the old businessmodels and the intellectual authority oftwentieth-century institutions. Today, we aretold, everybody can broadcast to everybody,or at least speak to themselves. We havemoved from the cathedral to the bazaar, fromthe one voice of our own CentralCommittees to the post-Soviet cacophony ofTwitter and YouTube, Wikipedia and web 2.0.To some, this is the happy dawn of a moredemocratic marketplace of ideas. To others, itis a descent into crankdom, quackery, anduntruth.

It is hard to judge a revolution still inprogress, and harder still to say much abouttoday’s social and technological changes thathas not already been said. Whatever else newmedia does, each innovation incommunications turns us, if only briefly, intohistorians of technology. Until the novelty ofthis or that tool fades, we are all MarshallMcLuhan, conscious of and curious aboutthe media we use. Blog posts about blogging,tweets about Twitter, books about theobsolescence of books: every new form ofcommunication produces a similar moment,if only a moment, of critical self-reflection.

But I really am a historian of technology.Does that expertise equip me to offeranything new to this debate? One thing mytraining has taught me is to be very wary ofmaking predictions about the future. Anotherthing is that, when in doubt, a historian canalways say: This has all happened before.Which, in fact, it has.The golden age of crankdom

There have always been people whobelieve in odd things, and those who fixate onimpossible inventions or miracle cures. Themarket for comforting falsehoods remains

bullish in good times and bad. But the cranksand pseudoscientists of the nineteenthcentury were remarkable in terms of the wideexposure they achieved, the large audiencesthey reached, and the banquet of strangenessthey laid out before their era’s marketplace ofideas. Quack doctors hawked patentmedicines to cure all ills, backyard inventorstoiled over perpetual motion machines, andpolitical prophets brought forth strangecommandments to lead their faithful to somepromised land.

Historians of science have identified aparticular “discourse of eccentricity” thatflourished in nineteenth-century Britain.Britons borrowed a word from geometry andastronomy—as in the orbit of a comet, aneccentric circle is one that is not concentricwith another circle—to describe individualswho would not fit into the social orintellectual categories of the day. VictoriaCarroll’s 2008 book Science and Eccentricitydescribes the era’s fad for eccentricbiographies, its close association of scienceand strangeness, and a correspondingfascination with boundary-crossing “freaks”or hybrids of the natural world. EarlyVictorian eccentrics were an eclectic bunch:cross dressers and nudists, hermits andmisers, vegetarians and gluttons. Yet as thecentury wore on, the label more oftenbecame affixed to amateur scholars whosetheories transgressed emerging boundariesbetween literary genres or scientific fields.This nineteenth-century discourse ofeccentricity helped to define and entrench anew intellectual order, hardening linesbetween the disciplines, betweenprofessionals and amateurs, and betweenlegitimate and illegitimate ideas.

In nineteenth-century America, theclosest equivalent label was not astronomicalbut mechanical: the crank. The etymology ofthe word “crank” in this sense is not clear—itwas probably a conflation of crank’s originalroot, meaning crooked, and the word“cranky,” meaning irritable—but the termtook hold in the nineteenth-century United


States as a way to describe anyone in the gripof an implausible idea. American ideas aboutcrankdom worked in much the same way asCarroll’s discourse of eccentricity, but with amore political edge. American cranksroutinely conflated mechanical, social, andfinancial ideas. The dotty, pontificating crankbecame a recognized symbol of the age, andallegations of crankdom and quackery flewback and forth in the boisterous politicalcombat of the era.A convention of cranks

The overlap between crankdom,invention, and political reform was on cleardisplay at the so-called “Convention ofCranks,” a meeting of the AmericanBimetallic League at the Chicago World’s Fairof 1893. Six hundred delegates attended thisconvention in order to promote theremonetization of silver. The money debate

between advocates of gold, silver, and papermoney was central to American politics in the1890s in a way that is hard to fathom today.Wall Street and Washington orthodoxyfavored a gold standard, and would-bereformers like the Bimetallic League facedharsh derision from the establishment.Speaking of the pro-silver convention in1893, the Chicago Herald said, “The airseems to breed cranks, and the demon ofdestruction is abroad in the land.” But themayor of Chicago, Carter Henry Harrison,welcomed the Bimetallists. He opened theconvention with a speech saying, “It is saidyou are lunatics… I say I am rather glad towelcome such lunatics as you.” Members ofthe Bimetallic League warmly applaudedHarrison’s remarks, and spent the rest of theconference addressing each other as “fellowlunatic” and “brother crank”.

1893 was a year of economic panic.

Dale Lawrence,“3.2.1 Ursa Nova”,2010


League members shared a belief that aninjection of silver currency into the Americaneconomy would relieve suffering farmers andrestore prosperity to the West. But silver wasfar from the only topic discussed. While thewealthy and powerful saw the gold standardas a basic tenet of economic prosperity andeven moral probity, something dreweccentrics and oddballs to the silver cause,and drew silverites to ever more radical ideas.At a moment when America seemed to teeteron the brink of financial ruin, the conventionof cranks offered an explosion of nostrums,inventions, theories, and cures. Flat earthersand spiritualists rubbed shoulders with rainmakers and prognosticators of all kinds.

One of the stars of the convention wasMinnesota Congressman Ignatius Donnelly.Donelly is remembered today as a Populistleader; he wrote the ringing preamble to thePopulists’ Omaha Platform in 1892. He alsowrote several books about the lost civilizationof Atlantis, the end of the world, and thesecret messages encoded in Shakespeare’splays by their “true” author, Francis Bacon.At Chicago in 1893, Donnelly debated CarlBrowne, a California showman who dressedlike Buffalo Bill—and in private, like AnnieOakley—who combined his own political

activities with trying to invent a flyingmachine and hawking a patent medicinecalled “Carl’s California Cure”. It was also atthe Convention of Cranks that Browne metJacob Coxey, a “Greenback” advocate socommitted to monetary reform that henamed his youngest son “Legal Tender”.Coxey had invented his own patentmedicine—the evocatively named “Cox-E-Lax”—and had his own technologicalprescriptions for the nation’s economic ills.Together, Browne and Coxey would go on toorganize Coxey’s Army, a famous protestmarch to Washington by hundreds ofunemployed workers, hoboes, and tramps.

Crankdom was at once a mechanicalactivity and a political one, and the two wereoften intertwined. Cranks slipped easilybetween the political, technological, andscientific realms, often trying to bring thetools of one to bear on the problems ofanother. Each had their own individualhobby horse, but on the whole theConvention was an optimistic gathering. Thecabinet of cures on offer for America’seconomic ills testified to a deep belief, ordesire to believe, that politics, economics,science, and society remained understandableand perfectible by ordinary folk.

Dale Lawrence“Of the Wesule”2011


Ben Franklin’s ghostJohn Murray Spear was a Universalist

minister in nineteenth-century New England.Spear was a reformer: an opponent of thedeath penalty, an advocate of women’ssuffrage, a staunch abolitionist, and anoperator in the underground railroad. In1844, Spear was attacked by an anti-abolitionist mob and beaten within an inch ofhis life. He received severe head injuries andspent several days slipping in and out of acoma. Some time after this experience, Spearwas, he believed, contacted by the friendlyghost of Benjamin Franklin.

This was not as unusual as it might sound.In the middle to late nineteenth century,millions dabbled in spiritualism, visitingséances, decoding table rappings, pushingOuija-style planchettes, and watchingmediums emit ectoplasmic goo. And no spiritfrom the other side—no messiah, no richdead uncle, no lost child—communicatedwith American spiritualists more frequentlythan the unquiet shade of Benjamin Franklin.From beyond the grave, Franklin transmittedmessages to and from dead loved ones, spokeout on the issues of the day, and lectured onscientific topics like magnetism and balloons.The industrious Franklin had apparently keptbusy in the afterlife, for he often provided hisliving correspondents with descriptions ofnew inventions: self-adjusting window blinds,an improved flush toilet, and the like. AndrewJackson Davis, a leading spiritualist known asthe Poughkeepsie Seer, offered an ingeniousexplanation as to why Franklin appeared sofrequently in spiritualist séances, and whyspirits in general had only recently become sotalkative. It was Franklin’s spirit, Davis said,that had posthumously invented the“Celestial Telegraph” by which the deadcould send messages back to the living world.

Reverend Spear spent the next twentyyears doing Franklin’s bidding andconstructing inventions of Franklin’s design.Before being contacted by Franklin, Spearhad shown no particular interest or aptitudefor invention or technology. Indeed, a friend

called him “quite destitute of inventivegenius, scientific knowledge … or evenordinary mechanical abilities.” But this, thefriend went on, made Spear “all the betteradapted” to being Franklin’s instrument,since he was “neither disposed nor able tointerpose any undesired suggestions of hisown.” Despite this lack of mechanical ability,every task that Spear undertook for the spiritworld combined the technological and thepolitical. His improved sewing machine wasmeant to liberate women from drudgery. Hisnetwork of telepathic mediums was meant tobreak the grip of the hated telegraphmonopoly. His perpetual motion machine,the New Motor, was a mechanicalrepresentation of America itself. It was notmeant “merely” to run forever, or to producemore energy than it used. The aim of themachine, he said, was the “radical agitation”of an “inert society”, converting poverty intoabundance and prejudice into love.

John Murray Spear was undoubtedly acrank. He was also a tireless advocate for thepoor and oppressed. And he was emblematicof a type. If Spear was one of a kind, hisstory would illuminate little more than hisown psychology. But he was not. Scratch aneccentric nineteenth century inventor andyou find a reformer. Scratch a nineteenthcentury reformer and you generally find anattic full of mechanical inventions orschemes.

Again and again, reformers and inventorsin this era reached for machine metaphors,describing democracy or the economy as amarvelous but malfunctioning machine.Nineteenth-century Americans admired theirConstitution as a “machine that would go ofitself.” Crank inventors literalized thismetaphor, conflating the dream of a

John Murray Spear was undoubtedlya crank. He was also a tirelessadvocate for the poor and oppressed


perpetual motion machine with political orspiritual renewal. The machinery ofgovernment, they said, was run down orstuck. But if the nation was a malfunctioningmachine then it stood to reason it could befixed like a machine. There had to be somesmall adjustment—a priming of the pump, oran application of axle grease—that wouldresolve all contradictions between moralityand progress, or poverty and prosperity.

Metaphors are used for poetic effect, ofcourse, and this makes them slippery sourcesfor historical analysis. Yet to the crank,metaphor was more than poetry. It was anargument in itself. “As above, so below” wasthe ancient credo of Hermetic magic, andcranks and other marginalized thinkerscarried that philosophy into the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. Over-literalizedmetaphors and analogies were engines drivingcrank and pseudoscientific thought.The information explosion of thenineteenth century

The Burgess Shale, in the RockyMountains of British Columbia, is one of theworld’s most celebrated fossil deposits. Thesoft-bodied creatures fossilized there wereproducts of the Cambrian explosion, a greatflowering of life that began some 570 millionyears ago. They are bizarre to human eyes:spiny worms and finned crustaceans, limblesspredators with serrated gullets, five-eyedopabinias with vacuum-like snouts. In his1989 book Wonderful Life, Stephen JayGould made the Burgess fossils famous asevidence for the strangeness and contingencyof life. He argued that the Cambrianexplosion contained far more diversity and

variety of life forms than exist today.The nineteenth century was a kind of

Cambrian explosion for intellectual life. Themental soil of the era was crammed with anextraordinary diversity of notions andenthusiasms, many now extinct. Theirremains can be found nearly everywhere,deposited in the great libraries andinstitutions of North America and Europeand in dedicated collections like theMassachusetts Institute of Technology’sArchives of Useless Research.

We need not embrace or endorse theextinct ideas of the nineteenth century tolearn from them. Gould saw the diversity ofthe Burgess Shale as powerful evidenceagainst all self-congratulatory visions ofevolution as an upward path towardsourselves. It is easy, but not illuminating, todismiss the cranks of the past. What if weapproached them instead as paleontologistsapproach the Burgess Shale? We might wellask, what was it about the nineteenth centurythat allowed such intellectual diversity toflourish? And what changes in thatintellectual environment led to the massextinction of so many theories,pseudosciences, and memes?

The eighteenth century—Ben Franklin’sday—had been marked in both Britain andAmerica by the scarcity and control ofinformation. As the historian Richard Brownput it, “the most obvious feature of theAmerican information environment at thebeginning of the eighteenth century was therelative scarcity of information, its limitedtopical range, and the crucial importance ofsocial stature … in determining whopossessed access.” Franklin himself didagitate for more open flow of information.Knowledge should not be locked in librariesand learned colleges, Franklin argued: “thegreat book of Nature is open to all.” Hepromoted the circulation of newspapers, thepostal service as a mass medium, and thedemocratization of science as a crucial civicgood. In 1774, Franklin was fired aspostmaster of all British colonies in America

Knowledge should not be lockedin libraries and learned colleges,Ben Franklin argued: “the greatbook of Nature is open to all”


after leaking government documents to thecolonial press. (He became the firstpostmaster general of the United States thefollowing year.) But then as now, the loudestadvocates for the free circulation ofinformation were often the most connected,and not always self-conscious about theprivilege on which their access to informationrested. As a printer, a postmaster, and anactive participant in the trans-Atlanticrepublic of letters, Franklin was wired in tonetworks of fairly up-to-date informationincluding scientific and technical knowledge,political and economic theory, gossip andcurrent events. This set him apart from allbut a few of his contemporaries. Informationand learning were luxuries, available to onlyan elite few, and the authority to speak onmost topics was tightly controlled by law andcustom.

All this changed in the informationexplosion of the nineteenth century. Cheapprint and a profusion of presses cranked outa flood of books, pamphlets, newspapers, andbroadsides. Technology played a role in thisexpansion, but just as important were politicalchoices and cultural shifts. Rising literacy

created a mass audience—or audiences—forthe printed word, and a profusion of genresand styles both catered to and created newcommunities of politics and taste. Expandingand increasingly affordable postal servicesput all these documents in motion. Britainintroduced a uniform penny post in 1840; theUnited States democratized its postal rates in1847. In both countries, postal servicerepresented a grand civic endeavor, a majorinvestment in information infrastructure at atime when governments were relatively smalland disinclined to intervene in economic life.By 1831, the United States Postal Service wasbigger than the army and represented overthree-quarters of the entire federal civilianwork force. The French traveler Alexis deTocqueville reported from the hinterland ofthe Appalachians in that year: “There is anastonishing circulation of letters andnewspapers among these savage woods.”

The first half of the century witnessed asimilar explosion in public speech. Previously,secular oratory had been rare and confined toa narrow range of speakers and topics. By the1820s and 1830s, public speaking had enteredits own golden age. Reformers, educators,

Dale Lawrence“Of the Goos”2011


scientists, and salesmen combinedinformation and entertainment to reachaudiences big and small. Competition foreardrums, the attention economy of thenineteenth century, bred diversity rather thanuniformity, with an audience for everyopinion and a platform for every cause. Theera’s menagerie of warring politicaltribes—Greenbackers, Copperheads,Goldbugs, Anti-Masons, Anti-Monopolists,Yellow Dogs, and more—was one expressionof this fragmentation. A bull market inmillennial movements and religious splintersects was another. By the middle of thecentury, Richard Brown concluded, “Americahad gone from a society where publicinformation had been scarce, and chieflyunder the control of the learned and wealthyfew, to a society in which it was abundant andunder no control other than the interests andappetites of a vast, popular public ofconsumers.”

The undisciplined age of scienceAs access to information exploded,

science came along for the ride. For much ofthe nineteenth century, there was little effortto define the boundaries of legitimate andillegitimate science. For centuries before, thetypical scholar of nature had not been aspecialist but a generalist, dabbling in a varietyof academic disciplines. Indeed, the term“scientist” only came into general use afterthe 1840s.

Americans in particular embraced theideal of a democratic science, knowable andaccessible to all. Franklin became the patronsaint of this tradition in the century after hisdeath—an exemplar of Yankee know-howand practicality, the archetypal “scientificAmerican”. The magazine of that name

began publishing in 1845, promoting aFranklinian faith that the common mancould, and should, be a participant in theworlds of science and technology. Scientificshowmen like Benjamin Silliman and EdwardHitchcock reached huge audiences withlyceum lectures. Industrialists fundedmechanics’ institutes, public libraries, andtechnical schools to educate skilled workers(and to keep them out of pubs). The spreadand popularity of such institutionsencouraged hopes that widespread scientificenlightenment could be achieved. “Thecharacteristic of our age,” declared WilliamEllery Channing, “is not the improvement ofscience, rapid as this is, so much as itsextension to all men.”

The middle nineteenth century has beencalled the “democratic age” in Anglo-American science. One can easily overstatethe egalitarianism of science in this era, justas one can overstate the egalitarianism ofnineteenth-century democracy itself. But it iscertainly true that amateurs and dabblersoutnumbered professionals or specialists inthe intellectual life of the period. Thenineteenth century enjoyed, if not ademocratic, certainly an undisciplinedmarketplace of ideas—undisciplined both inthe sense that it lacked much order orrestraint, but also in the sense that it lackedformal academic disciplines. The linesbetween science, politics, invention, reform,and entertainment remained blurry. And thelines dividing subfields within those fieldshad hardly yet been drawn. Autonomousfaculties, specialized journals, andprofessional guilds were largely latenineteenth-century inventions. The hyper-narrow specialization of twentieth-centuryacademe lay decades in the future.

The darker side of this intellectualdiversity was a real hostility to expertise. In1844, Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior—nopopulist he—warned the graduating class ofdoctors at Harvard Medical School that therabble would balk at their professionalauthority. “The ultra-radical version of the

Caricatures of the political activistas crank inventor were increasinglyused to discredit political reform


axiom that all men are born free and equal …has invaded the regions of science,” Holmesdeclared. “The dogmas of the learned havelost their authority, but the dogmas of theignorant rise… to take their place.”

The result of all this was a fairly lawlessmarketplace of ideas where theories andpractices flourished not because they weretrue but because they could find a buyer.Titles like “Doctor” and “Professor” wereappropriated by anybody who wanted them.Barbers called themselves “professors,” as didbanjo teachers, tailors, phrenologists, andacrobats. Nineteenth-century Americansexperienced medicine, one historian haswritten, “as a smorgasbord of possiblepanaceas, some from licensed doctors in theiroffices and some from quacks selling fromcarts on street corners.” It would be hard todesign an intellectual environment morehospitable to quackeryand crankdom, toeccentric scholars andodd ideas.

Yet the climatechanged as thenineteenth centurywore on. As theleading edge ofscientific knowledgeadvanced, mostsciences became lessdescriptive and more abstract. The workbeing done in fields like physics, chemistry,and astronomy increasingly required trainedspecialists with expensive equipment. Andvirtually all of the disciplines developedelaborate theoretical structures and precisetechnical terms. Institutional changesmirrored and reinforced these trends.Professional societies became more formaland exclusive. Colleges and universitiesestablished graduate schools and specializedresearch institutions. Scientists and inventorsbecame increasingly dependent on corporateor government funding. By the twentiethcentury, most inventions or advances couldnot be made by solitary dabblers but were the

work of teams of professional researchers atelite universities or corporate labs. Thegrowth and bureaucratization of governmentpushed political amateurs away from thelevers and gears of democracy in much thesame way.

This was a period of aggressive boundarywork, as professionals of all sortscampaigned to consolidate their authority andpurge their guilds of amateurs.Professionalization involved the identificationand removal of dabblers and dilettantes.Terms like “crank” and “quack” weredeployed as accusations and epithets as theolder, participatory vision of democratic orundisciplined science declined. By thetwentieth century, a would-be Franklin whodabbled simultaneously in electrical, political,and moral experiments would surely bedismissed as a kook or a crank.

The politics ofcrankdom

Like scientificoutsiders, radicalreformers could belabeled “cranks” and“lunatics”, and caricaturesof the political activist ascrank inventor or patentmedicine quack wereincreasingly used to

discredit political reform. The consistency ofthe label is remarkable. “Crank” was not alabel that everybody used against theirpolitical opponents; it seemed to get usedagain and again in the same specific ways.

When the newspaper editor HoraceGreeley ran for president against UlyssesGrant in 1872, he was compared to “thecrank of a hand-organ, continually grindingout the same old tunes.” The politicalcartoonist Thomas Nast, famous for hissatirical images of Boss Tweed and TammanyHall corruption, was equally cutting indepictions of Greeley as a crack-brained,pontificating crank. What was HoraceGreeley’s crime? He was a spiritualist, an


abolitionist, and a vegetarian. He was chubby,with wooly hair and little round glasses—atempting target for Nast’s pen. He did dabblein science and invention; he wrote a bookabout scientific farming that Nast workedinto almost every cartoon of Greeley hedrew. But Greeley also challenged thefinancial orthodoxies of the day. When thephilosopher John Fiske was a librarian atHarvard in the 1870s, he undertook to cullHarvard’s library of what he called “insane”or “eccentric literature”. In an essay Fiskewrote about “Cranks and their Crotchets”,what did he single out for particular ridicule?Not spiritualism, not phrenology, notperpetual motion, but free silver and financialreform.

Remember Mayor Harrison, whowelcomed the convention of pro-silvercranks and lunatics to Chicago? Threemonths after the convention, Harrison wasassassinated, shot by a disturbed young mannamed Patrick Prendergast. Prendergast was,it turned out, something of a crank. He wasan obsessive advocate of Henry George’ssingle tax, who wrote long rambling letters tojust about everybody in Chicago’s public life.His trial, in which he was represented byClarence Darrow, turned on the question ofwhether Prendergast was a true“lunatic”—that is, medically and legallyinsane—or simply a dangerous political“crank”. Because of his political leanings, theprosecution was able to convince the jury ofthe latter. Prendergast hung, in part, for hiscrankdom.

We should not be surprised that the crankstory ended up intertwined with the moneyquestion. The money debate was for post-Civil War America a burning, hugely divisiveissue. It fired passions and invited ordinaryAmericans to argue over the nature of theircountry and its new corporate economy.Coin’s Financial School, a pro-silver treatisethat John Fiske ridiculed as alchemy, sold onemillion copies in the 1890s. How many booksabout fiscal policy are read by one millionordinary Americans today? Yet the money

debate is now remembered, if at all, assomething abstract and arcane. This is ameasure of how thoroughly financialconservatives discredited their populist foes.Defenders of the gold standard associatedmonetary reform convincingly and damninglywith all manner of crack-brained inventionsand mechanical schemes. Would-bereformers pushed back, but by the turn ofthe century they were ever more marginal.The twentieth century would be the age ofthe expert—an era of highly specializedknowledge, of clearly defined guilds andhierarchies of professional authority andexpertise.Crank 2.0

But as we’ve seen, the world has turned.The doomsayers and the cheerleaders for ourWeb 2.0 world all seem to agree that the oldhierarchies of knowledge and expertise havebeen toppled or outflanked. Maybe thetwentieth century will prove to be theaberration, with its professional guilds, itselevation of experts, and all its powerful toolsfor letting a few insiders speak to and foreverybody else. If we are entering a new eraof undisciplined knowledge and innovation,it is worth looking back at the last such age.History remembers few eras as innovative asthe late nineteenth century, at least intechnological terms. But one would also havea hard time naming a period that embracedmore flavors of pernicious nonsense. Is thatthe trade-off on the table? Are we entering anew golden age of pseudoscientists, quacks,and cranks?

The parallels are persuasive. As in thenineteenth century, our own informationexplosion was triggered by technologicalchanges, but cultural and political factors giveit form. The Internet is both printing pressand postal service on a scale that Franklin’sghost would never have believed. We use it toconnect across continents and oceans, evenas we subdivide, like our nineteenth-centuryforebears, into tribes of affinity, opinion, andtaste. Web culture is a kind of consilience


About the artistDale Lawrence is a twenty-three year old artist from Cape Town, South Africa. In 2009, Dalegraduated with a degree in graphic design from the AAA School of Advertising, followed in2010 by a post-graduate diploma in Fine Art (New Media) at the University of Cape Town'sMichaelis School of Fine Art. Dale was awarded membership to the International Society ofTypographic Designers in 2009. He currently lives and works as an artist in his home city. Hisother works can be viewed here (http://www.behance.net/DaleLawrence/frame) and on hisblog Ostensibly, Yes ( http://ostensiblyyes.blogspot.com/).

engine, mashing up data and weavingconnections between disciplinary silos.Today’s blogs bear a remarkable resemblanceto the newspapers of the antebellum era: amotley banquet of individual, often partisanvoices, with much content clipped and“curated” from other sources. Contemporarydistrust of experts and disillusionment withtraditional institutions inspires hopes for newmodels of online participation, whilesimultaneously fueling the new crankdom.Frightening economic, political, andenvironmental challenges ensure highdemand for simple cures and easy answers.

One might wish to draw a line betweenscientific and political cranks. Cold fusion is acrank idea because it doesn’t work; it is harderto be as definitive about fringe ideas inpolitics or economics. Yet in the history ofcrankdom, such distinctions are rarelyrespected. John Murray Spear’s quest forperpetual motion was never really about thelaws of thermodynamics. And who can claimthat the battle between creation and evolutionis not as much about politics as science?Confronted with tenacious pseudoscienceslike creationism, or the pseudohistoricalbeliefs of the 9/11 “Truth” movement and

the Birthers, we could just cluck our tonguesat the foolishness of the inexpert masses. Butmaybe it would it be more fruitful to ask, likea paleontologist at the Burgess Shale, whatintellectual niche does this communityinhabit? What emotional or intellectualfunctions does this belief fulfill?

There is much to be said for guilds andhierarchies of authority and expertise. Butthey have their costs. The scientific expertsof the early twentieth century overturned allmanner of superstitions. They also drasticallynarrowed the acceptable range of inquiry andbelief. Progressive-era political experts madegovernment more efficient but lessaccountable, pushing ordinary citizens awayfrom the machinery of politics andcontributing to what Lawrence Goodwyncalled a “mass folkway of politicalresignation.” At a time when political apathyand scientific illiteracy are widespread, theremight be something to learn from a momentwhen so many were so fiercely engaged, andso certain there must be a solution to all theworld’s woes. We may expect our new centuryto be profoundly innovative—but we mustalso anticipate our share of eccentrics,quacks, and cranks.

Rob MacDougall is associate director of the Centre for American Studies at the University ofWestern Ontario in London, Canada. He is a historian of business, technology, and culture,especially information networks in nineteenth-century America. He blogs about history, games,and play at http://www.robmacdougall.org and http://www.playthepast.org. His book, ThePeople’s Telephone: The Rise and Fall of the Independent Telephone Movement, will bepublished this winter by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Tecumseh Lies Here, anaugmented reality game he is designing about the War of 1812, will be loosed upon the worldin the summer of 2012.

http://www.robmacdougall.org

http://www.behance.net/DaleLawrence/frame


Son House was a pioneering bluesmusician in the twentieth centurywho, along with now well-regardedtalents like Robert Johnson,

Charley Patton, and Willie Brown, helped tomould the inimitable Delta blues genre whichwould capture the imagination of youngmusicians for the next eighty years andbeyond. Their lives were not easy as youngblack men in the hostile South, but theirmusic was nevertheless wonderful, telling

tales of unimaginable hardships and prayingfor the fulfillment of their dreams.

One boy who found solace in the musicof Son House was a young Detroit nativenamed John Gillis. He would sit listening toold blues vinyls, and recorded covers on areel-to-reel tape in his attic. Gillis wasconsidering becoming a priest, but havingjust gotten a new amplifier (which he wasn’tsure he could take with him to the seminary),he decided against it. Some twelve years later,

The singularityWhat made TheWhite Stripes uniqueis what will make the band’s influence last

BY LUKE GRUNDYART BY PRISCILA FLORIANO, GUSTAVE STUDIO CRÉATIF, AND MARCOS TORRES

Priscila Floriano, “Fairy tales project - Little Red Riding Hood”, 2011


this same boy, now named Jack White, was onstage in Detroit playing a show with his wifeMeg, a local bartender.

The sign on the door read “The WhiteStripes”.F ourteen years and six albums later,

on February 2nd 2011, The WhiteStripes announced they would no

longer be making music together. This wasnot due to arguments or “creative

differences”, the band wrote on its website,but “to preserve what is beautiful and specialabout the band and have it stay that way...The White Stripes belong to you now.”

The announcement was greeted withgenuine sorrow by critics and fans worldwide.Yet the joy that The White Stripes fostered intheir listenership cannot be ignored; the split,whilst upsetting for those who love the band,also enables us to think about the impactthey’ve had since that first gig in 1997. Just as


David Roger, Caroline Leduc, Karine Bernier(Gustave Studio Créatif), “La Nuit”, 2009





Gustave Studio Créatif, “La Nuit”, 2009





Marcos Torres, “Mecanicow” (2010); photo by Alexandre Raupp





Luke Grundy is a writer living in London, UK, who spends most of his time indulging histwin loves of music and film. As well as contributing to SCOPE, he writes for The Independentand maintains his music and film blog, Odessa & Tucson: http://odessatucson.wordpress.com

The artistsPriscila Floriano: http://priscilafloriano.comDavid Roger, Caroline Leduc, Karine Bernier (Gustave Studio Créatif):http://www.gustavestudio.ca/Marcos Torres: http://marcostorres.info/



http://priscilafloriano.com

http://www.gustavestudio.ca/

http://marcostorres.info/

http://odessatucson.wordpress.com



| Spectacle |


| Levi van Veluw: Origin of the Beginning (2011) |http://www.levivanveluw.nl/

http://www.levivanveluw.nl/


| Caroline Leduc, Gustave Studio Créatif: Ambiguïté (2010) |http://www.gustavestudio.ca/

http://www.gustavestudio.ca/


| Amirkhan Abdurakhmanov: "CHANGE IT" prismbased wall concept |http://www.behance.net/Amirko

http://www.behance.net/Amirko


| Michael Cina: Apex (2009) |http://www.cinaart.com/

http://www.cinaart.com/


| Kevin Bauman, from 100 Abandoned Houses (ongoing project) |http://www.100abandonedhouses.com

http://www.100abandonedhouses.com


| Matthew Bradshaw and Sergio Silva, Silva/Bradshaw: “Play” Munny (2010) |http://www.silvabradshaw.com

http://www.silvabradshaw.com


| Wissam Shawkat: Love Flower (2011) |http://www.wissamshawkat.com

http://www.wissamshawkat.com


| Peeta: Two works, Venice industrial port area (2011 top, 2009 bottom) |Photos by Lenny Morandin

http://www.peeta.net

http://www.peeta.net


The way of the abstractThe scientific method has experiment at itsheart—but there are some truths that onlytheory can uncover

BY GIOVANNI VIGNALEART BY CRISTIAN BOIAN

Physics, most of us would agree, isthe basic science of nature. Itspurpose is to discover the laws ofthe natural world. Do such laws

exist? Well, the success of physics atidentifying some of them proves, inretrospect, that they do exist. Or, at least, itproves that there are Laws of Physics, whichwe can safely assume to be Laws of Nature.

Granted, it may be difficult to discern this

lofty purpose when all one hears in anintroductory course is about flying projectilesand swinging pendulums, strings undertension and beams in equilibrium. But at thebeginning of the enterprise there were sometruly fundamental questions such as: thenature of matter, the character of the forcesthat bind it together, the origin of order, thefate of the universe. For centurieshumankind had been puzzling over these

Adapted from The Beautiful Invisible: Creativity, Imagination, and Theoretical Physics, by Giovanni Vignale(Oxford University Press, 2011)

Cristian Boian, "Attempts" series, 2011

http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Invisible-Creativity-Imagination-Theoretical/dp/0199574847


questions, coming up with metaphysical andfantastic answers. And it stumbled, and itstumbled, until one day—and here I quotethe great Austrian writer and ironist, RobertMusil:

. . . it did what every sensible childdoes after trying to walk too soon; itsat down on the ground, contacting theearth with a most dependable if notvery noble part of its anatomy, inshort, that part on which one sits. Theamazing thing is that the earth showeditself uncommonly receptive, and eversince that moment of contact hasallowed men to entice inventions,conveniences, and discoveries out of itin quantities bordering on themiraculous.

This was the beginning of physics and,actually, of all science: an orgy of matter-of-factness after centuries of theology. Carefuland systematic observation of reality, coupledwith quantitative analysis of data and anegregious indifference to theories that couldnot be tested by experiment became thehallmark of every serious investigation intothe nature of things.

But even as they were busy observing andexperimenting, the pioneers of physics didnot fail to notice a peculiar feature of theirdiscipline. Namely, they realized that the lawsof nature were best expressed in an abstractmathematical language—a language oftriangles and circles and limits—which, atfirst sight, stood almost at odds with thetouted matter-of-factness of experimentalscience. As time went by, it became clear thatmathematics was much more than acomputational tool: it had a life of its own.Things could be discovered by mathematics.John Adams and, independently, Urbain LeVerrier, using Newton’s theory of gravity,computed the orbit of Uranus and found thatit deviated from the observed one. Ratherthan giving up, they did another calculationshowing that the orbit of Uranus could be

explained if there were another planet pullingon Uranus according to Newton’s law ofgravity. Such a planet had never been seen,but Adams and Le Verrier told theastronomers where to look for it. And, lo andbehold, the planet—Neptune—was there,waiting to be discovered. That was in 1846.

Even this great achievement pales incomparison with things that happened later.In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell trustedmathematics —and not just the results of acalculation, but the abstract structure of a setof equations—to predict the existence ofelectromagnetic waves. And electromagneticwaves (of which visible light is an example)were controllably produced in the lab shortlyafterwards.

In the 1870s Ludwig Boltzmannundertook the task of finding out, bymathematical analysis, how a hypotheticalworld made of atoms would behave. Nobodyhad seen an atom, and very few believedseriously in what, at the time, must havelooked like a very artificial concept. With thehelp of a revolutionary mathematicalapproach in which probability was the mainactor, Boltzmann was able to show that hisartificial world behaved pretty much like thereal world. At least, the behaviour of gaseswas the same!

These examples illustrate three differentways of practising the strange kind of scienceknown today as theoretical physics. In thefirst, one applies a general theory,summarized in a set of mathematicalequations, to the solution of a concreteproblem. In the second, one plays with themathematics to find new equations that aremore satisfactory from an intellectual,aesthetical, or practical point of view. Finallyin the third way—the Boltzmann way—one

Mathematics was more than a tool:it had a life of its own. Things couldbe discovered by mathematics


About the artistCristian Boian is an experimental digital artist from Romania whoseeks to understand and develop connections between traditionaland digital art. He also works as a carpenter and hopes to combinethe knowledge acquired in this domain with visual art andtechnology. http://www.behance.net/boiancristian/frame

Giovanni Vignale is Professor of Physics at the University ofMissouri-Columbia. His main field of study is theoreticalcondensed matter physics—the science of highly organizedmatter. The Beautiful Invisible is his second book.http://web.missouri.edu/~vignaleg/index.htm



http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Invisible-Creativity-Imagination-Theoretical/dp/0199574847

http://web.missouri.edu/~vignaleg/index.htm

http://www.behance.net/boiancristian/frame



W ith a fair degree ofregularity, historians late intheir profession will declarethat “history is in crisis”.

The laments which follow usually argue thathistorical practice has lost its compassbearing, having been foolishly distracted bysome new interdisciplinary or conceptual fad;that fewer and fewer students are takinghistory courses at school or college; and(most often) that historians and the readingpublic have lost all meaningful contact. In theperiod since I started studying history (circa

1990), at least three such “crises” have beenannounced. This lament, if nothing else inhistory, does seem to repeat itself: in 1903George Macaulay Trevelyan decried the factthat whilst “two generations back, historywas part of our national literature” it wasnow “proclaimed a ‘science’ for specialists”.

John Lukacs, author of some thirty bookson modern history and, as he tells us in the“Apologia” with which he ends his book, 87years old, now raises something of the samerefrain. He is very much unhappy with the“fads” which distract academic historians

Our invented universeA review ofJohn Lukacs’The Future of History

BY JOHN H. ARNOLDART BY BRIAN ROLFE

Brian Rolfe, “Before the Storm”, 2010


The Future of HistoryJohn LukacsYale University PressApril 2011200 pages



http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300169560



Brian Rolfe, “Acacia”, 2010





John H. Arnold is author of History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press,2000) among other works on medieval history and modern historiography. He teaches atBirkbeck, University of London (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/professor-john-arnold); some of his thoughts on doing history can be found in thisinterview: http://www.mypodcast.com/fsaudio/radiofreenation_20090908_2034-493285.mp3About the artistBrian Rolfe started his career as a forensic artist in the South African Police Service. He ran hisown commercial art studio for many years, and since 2003 has been exhibiting his originalpaintings both at home and internationally.https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=527872723&sk=photos



http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/professor-john-arnold

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=527872723&sk=photos



ARTIFACT

A page depicting a battle from the Trojan War, from Ancient History until the Reign of Caesar (Histoireancienne jusqu'à César), an unfinished illuminated history produced in Paris in the late fourteenth century. Beginningwith the creation of the world, the book emphasized to lay readers the moral lessons of important historical events.While it is uncertain to what degree the French actually believed that they were the descendents of the Trojans, thispiece echoes a common trope found throughout medieval French culture which evokes the Trojan War as part of amythic tradition (including historical figures like Charlemagne) after which French leaders hoped to model themselves.Illuminations like these thus served a political purpose, connecting their medieval readers with stories of the ancientpast; note the scene’s inclusion of medieval architecture, weaponry, and ships, and the use of French rather than Latinin the surrounding text. The past, of course, continues to be used to support political ends, as demonstrated by Frenchpresident Nicolas Sarkozy's justification of his country’s intervention in Libya as a duty to “assume its role, its rolebefore history.”

– ABBY PLENER

From Ancient History up to the Reignof CaesarIlluminated by the First Master ofBible Historiale of Jean de BerryParis, about 1390 - 1400Tempera colors, colored washes,gold leaf, and ink on parchmentThe J. Paul Getty Museumhttp://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/imagining_past_france/

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/imagining_past_france/

Welcome to the endof the second issue.(We’re glad you’re making this a habit.)

Our Summer issue is just aroundthe corner, but there’s still time for us

to throw all of our work outand start again based on your feedback.

[email protected]

Go on. You know you want to.

mailto:[email protected]

* Page 14, inside

“Whatever else new media does,each innovation in communicationsturns us, if only briefly, intohistorians of technology, consciousof and curious about the mediawe use. Blog posts about blogging,tweets about Twitter, books aboutthe obsolescence of books:every new form of communicationproduces a similar moment,if only a moment, of criticalself-reflection.”*

scope magazine, spring 2011 - preview version

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