The Dish

Research suggests that the feeling of taking joy in someone else’s misfortune appears in children as young as four:

[Researcher] Katrin Schulz and her colleagues presented simple picture stories to 100 children aged four to eight years (52 girls). The stories involved a child performing a good or bad deed – such as a girl climbing a tree to collect plums for her little brother, or climbing the tree so as to throw plums at her little brother – and then experiencing a misfortune, in this case falling from the tree and hurting herself.

The kids of all ages showed evidence of schadenfreude, suggesting their emotional response to another person’s distress was influenced by their moral judgements about that person. That is, they were more likely to say they were pleased and that it was funny if the story character experienced a misfortune while engaging in a bad deed. They were also less likely to say they’d help a bad character. These effects were strongest for the children aged over 7. And it was only for this age group that intensity of schadenfreude mediated the link between a character’s good or bad moral behaviour and the participants’ willingness to help.

Rose Eveleth adds:

If you prefer your children sweet and kind, you can take solace in the fact that while they did find schadenfreude in these kids, the levels were far lower than you might see in adults.

Update from a reader with a great little story:

When my twin sons were eight months old, one could crawl and the other could not. Both were on the floor with a number of toys surrounding them. My crawler (Milo) was playing with a rattle; his brother (John) watched him closely.

Milo dropped the rattle within reaching distance of John and scooted to a corner of the room to get a new toy. John picked up the rattle, examined it, and then began shaking it. Upon hearing the sound, Milo whipped his head around, then turned his whole body, raced over to John, and ripped the rattle out of his hand.

As John looked on both helplessly and indignantly (but, interestingly, he did not cry), Milo began shaking the rattle vigorously. Milo shook it so hard that almost immediately he whacked himself in the head and burst into tears, dropping the rattle. To John, it was as if the skies had opened up and a choir of angels had begun to sing. I have never seen a look of joy as ultimately pure as the look on John’s face as his brother cried. He didn’t even remember the rattle was there. It was in easy reaching distance. He just grinned a giant grin as he enjoyed the show of his brother wailing.

So I believe I can categorically state, at least for some children, they feel schadenfreude as young as 8 months. Do they know what it is? Probably not. (Then again, they don’t understand that you shouldn’t eat your own poop.) However, I think it’s a safe bet that it is ingrained in us from a very early age.

(Photo: Flickr user dullhunk)

John Brownlee traces the ubiquitous @ symbol from its obscure beginnings:

Ever since the 1500s, and for hundreds of years after, the only people who used @ were bookkeepers, who used it as a shorthand to show how much they were selling or buying goods for: for example, “3 bottles of wine @ $10 each.”

Since these bookkeepers used @ to deal with money, a certain degree of whimsical fondness for the character developed over time.

In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.

Even with such cute names to recommend it, though, @ languished in obscurity for three and a half centuries, only ending up on a new invention called the typewriter when salesmen realized that accountants and bookkeepers were buying them in droves. In 1971, however, a keyboard with a vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked up to an ARPANET terminal manned by Ray Tomlinson, who was working on a little program he’d come up with in his goofing-off time to send messages from computer to computer. Tomlinson ended up using the @ symbol as the fulcrum of the lever that ultimately ended up lifting the world into the digital age: email.

Previous Dish on the origins of Internet symbols here.

(Image: Evidence of the usage of @ to signify French “à” (meaning “at”) from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish lower court and magistrate, via Wikimedia Commons)

Scott L. Montgomery, author of Does Science Need a Global Language?, believes that English has become the mother tongue of science. In an interview, he argues that a global tongue makes scientific communication more efficient and also “opens up the potential for participation in the scientific enterprise to the greater span of humanity”:

Q: You argue that English should be “fully integrated into the science curriculum.” What would that entail?

A: It would entail treating English as a core subject of scientific training for non-native speakers. It would also mean unburdening English of any necessary association with a specific country or set of countries, so it could be handled as a normal and necessary skill, like mathematics. This is already done in a number of countries, like the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, and Switzerland. All of these have succeeded in teaching their scientists to use English and to publish at the international level. What their success shows, however, is that a significant amount of investment has to be made here — good teacher training, student motivation, adequate classroom facilities, good instructional content, are needed. There is no way all of this can be done overnight, especially in developing nations, where resources are lacking. It took Finland over two-and-a-half decades to put everything in place. But if scientific work is to become truly global, something like this has to happen. Otherwise, in many countries, scientists will only ever emerge from the rich elite — something we all hope the world has largely left behind.

Montgomery considers the potential disadvantages for native speakers:

Q: Why do you say that “the real casualty from the global spread of English may well be the native speaker himself”?

A: Because the rest of the scientific world will be multilingual and will have access to scientific material in at least two — but often three or more — languages. The native speaker, feeling encouraged to resist the learning of other tongues (everyone wants to learn his language, after all), will be without this capability. Put differently, the rest of the world will have access to everything s/he does, but s/he will have access to little or nothing beyond the edges of his own tongue.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

— Friedrich Nietzsche (@Nietzsche) October 13, 2011

Mark Vanhoenacker argues that philosophy’s profile could use some raising, especially considering how thought experiments are so well-suited to our times:

Thought experiments (TXes TM, we’ll brand them) are the perfect philosophical consumer product for our age. The high they produce—a gratifying puzzlement, a perfectly framed issue, an “A-ha!” moment of insight into you and your society’s intuitions and contradictions—is quick and addictive. TXes are accessible and democratic, often by design. They strip out extraneous details and walk the user straight to the heart of a complicated issue. They’re much more democratic than science: By definition they don’t require a lab, special equipment, or any pesky numeracy skills. They’re easily remembered and shared (many fit into 140 characters). They’re fun on your own but wouldn’t be out of place at those dinner parties, either.

So how should we reintroduce philosophy to the masses?

Philosophy needs a slogan.

If I say “The Other White Meat,” “The Fabric of Our Lives,” or “Good to the Last Drop,” you know just what I’m eating, wearing, or brewing. When I lived in the United Kingdom, I was fond of the “Nobody Forgets a Good Teacher” campaign. “Philosophy matters” isn’t a bad slogan. Or “Philosophy? That’s a Good Question.” … Once philosophy has a logo and a slogan, it needs a campaign. One option would be to put some controversial thought experiments onto posters. E.g., using [a] gun control TX:

What’s the difference between supporting gun control and taking the gun out of the hand of a gun owner at the very moment he or she comes face-to-face with a home intruder?

Philosophy. The best answers come from the best questions.

Morgan Meis urges you to approach Marcel Proust’s writing without a rigid interpretive scheme, letting his beautiful prose carry you along:

The entire structure of Remembrance of Things Past, insofar as it has a structure, is meant to create a loose scaffolding for these incredible sentences, for these moments when Proust burrows his prose deepest into the murky core of his own existence and shines a light on aspects of his being, and thus our own experience, that we rarely get to see. For this reason, reading Swann’s Way can feel like falling into a dream. Pages will drift by light as ether. You sometimes forget you are reading. You get lost in the stories, the memories. Is Proust still unfolding that memory of his grandmother in Combray or have we moved back to the present tense again? You have to re-read Proust more than you do other authors. You have to move back and forth in the text, finding your place again. The dream world puts you to sleep. That’s okay. Let it do that. Let yourself fall away into the sleepy prose and then you will have the experience of snapping awake, suddenly, when Proust goes into one of his rhapsodies. The prose itself will shake you awake. “Now,” Proust will say, “now, I really have something to tell you.”

You cannot have an entire book of luminous sentences, just as you cannot have an entire musical composition made of poignant “little phrases.” The endless trivial babble of Proust’s various great-aunts provides necessary resting places, stretches of boredom from which extraordinary moments of Being can finally be plucked. But that is how experience is. Proust found a way to make his prose as numbing as the emptiest of conversations. And then, when you’ve started to loose the thread of the narrative completely, the urgency of his writing will start to jump and tremble on the page again and you’ll feel yourself convulsed “in one of those sobs which a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming news will wring from us.”

Update from a reader:

I began reading Remembrance of Things Past back in 2008, and I have very slowly been making my way through the series since then. I am currently about a third of the way through “Cities of the Plain”. One of the more interesting aspects of these books, I find, is that as I have gotten deeper into the series they seem to be less and less defined by the hypnotic prose-poetry that Meis describes.

The Guermantes way takes place almost entirely in drawing rooms and society parties, and is preoccupied with the social rises and falls of its dozens of characters. Proust himself seems to acknowledge as much, going so far as to justify his change in focus as an examination of the changing society in which he grew up. Just like great works of art, he says, the fortunes of Parisian socialites are worth our scrutiny because they can show us how a new age is coming into being. In Proust’s view, the telltale sign is the dispute over the Dreyfus case. The anti-Dreyfusards/Nationalists, symbolizing the old world aristocracy with its easy condescension and thoughtless anti-Semitism, are fading away in the face of the Dreyfusards: modern, wealthy, of low birth but high station.

Compare this social analysis to the beautiful opening passages of Swann’s Way and the difference is striking. One has the impression that memories that are nearer to Proust’s present are less enshrouded in the beautiful poetic fog that immerses his younger days at Combray. Swann himself makes a dramatic reappearance at the end of The Guermantes Way, as an older and sicker man whose confession of a terminal illness fails to move his once close friend, Oriane Guermantes, that emblem of old world high society.

Proust closes this third volume with Basin Guermantes’ utterly vulgar encouragement to Swann (a Jew and a Dreyfusard): “Don’t worry old boy, I’m sure you’ll outlive us all!” In one moment, Proust captures the entirety of his social critique. The callousness and racism of the old guard, condescending to the new high society even as it predicts the very rise of that new high society. Swann himself (I assume) will not fulfill Basin’s prediction, but the irony is that Basin is quite right: the Dreyfusards will write history, and they will write aristocrats like the Duc de Guermantes out of it.

Ok, now back to my day job. You probably catch flak for it but let me say I always love your Proust coverage (if that’s the word for it).