16.11.09

I didn’t go to the chess club this week. Instead I went to see a ballet performance of Romeo and Juliet. It was the second ballet I had visited in Russia, the first being Swan Lake at a famous theater in St. Petersburg about a year ago. The Rostov ballet didn’t match the one in Petersburg. Juliet wasn’t quite as fluid a dancer as the head swan, but I’m not picky when it comes to ballet.
Unlike Swan Lake, I was very familiar with the story of Romeo and Juliet, and it was fun to see it again in a new genre. The best scenes were when the stage was full with the two fueding families (the Capulets and the Montegues, if I remember correctly). In the beginning, there was a fight with many people dancing around, waving and thrusting swords at one another. Then, after intermission, just after Romeo took revenge on one of the main characters from the other family, there was a scene with members of both families mourning their loss and cursing their enemies at the other side of the stage. It was remarkable how they managed to express everything through dance.
To top it all off, one of the main musical themes was a classical peace that I like very much. I’ve written about it before, though not so recently that it’s been included in a blog entry. It starts with tubas sounding two full beats alternating at the lowest two notes, and then violins come in at I think eight beats to a measure with a rather macabre melody. I forget what it’s called, but I think the title has something to do with witches. I’ll call it the Jugernaut’s lied, beacuse the first movement is especially fit for an omnipotent entrance. It was used for the party at one of the family’s places, where Romeo and Juliet first met. For the first movement the family enters their dance hall and starts the ritual dance. Then the second movement comes in, much calmer and more soothing than the first, and that’s when Juliet enters and begins to dance. By the end of the party, the main theme sounds again as the stowaway Romeo is discovered.

I worked a lot last week. Saturday brought some interesting discussions. The previous evening I had somehow decided on the topic of war and peace. I found a chart of the US federal spending in 2008 on wikipedia and shared it with the class. I expressed my disapproval that, according to the chart, the governement spends ten times as much on war as it does on education. I posed the usual question after telling a little bit about America: how does it work in Russia? Nobody knew. They said that the government kept that information secret.
Here’s a naive thought that I shared with my students: when it comes to making progress, a society does best by investing resources in education and research. This is how society comes up with things like computers, mobile phones, the cure to polio, etc. By investing in the military (and military research), society takes a step backwards: the only use for a bomb is for destroying something. What’s the point of that? No student had anything to say. Maybe they were too afraid of bursting my peaceful bubble. A few students did point out that societies without militaries don’t last very long. I don’t disagree. Look at the Native Americans.
Taking the discussion even further in a eutopian direction, we listened to John Lennon’s Imagine, after which I asked the students if such a world (without religion, countries, the need to kill…) is possible, and if so, what needs to be done to achieve such a world. The younger students said that John Lennon was singing about Eutopia, and anybody knows that such a world is impossible. Many of the adult students felt the same way, although there were some who weren’t so readily dismissive. One student suggested that people have to change their souls. I asked for clarification. Russians use the word soul very often. I think the student might have expressed herself clearer by saying that people must change their nature. I found this very interesting. We ended class with the question of how people must change their nature in order to live in John Lennon‘s imaginary world.
I think it was a good note to end the class on. It’s not often that we have something interesting from which to start the next class, but that people should change their nature leads well into a discussion on nature versus nurture, as well as the extent to which a human is not an animal, a topic on which I should probably tread lightly so as not to offend people by suggesting that the difference between a person and a dog is the same as the difference between a dog and a cat - that it is no more than physiological.

What is the difference between a human and an animal? (“Here we go again,” my family members are groaning, but let me share my heathen thoughts with others in the audience.)
Religious people might say that humans have souls whereas animals do not. I think that the existence of a soul is as axiomatic as the existence of a God. Furthermore, I find it axiomatic to say that animals don’t have souls. In short, the religious explanation strikes me as what many religious explanations do: an axiom; it just is so.
Less religious people have suggested that people are intelligent and animals are not. This doesn‘t say much, for why is intelligence more important than the hundreds of qualities that humans lack? After all, the cheeta is the fastest, and the whale is the biggest; why are they considered animals and we not? Most recently someone suggested that animals either don’t feel pain, or somehow feel it in a different way. I contorted with the following thought experiment. Take a dog, a bear, an eagle, several other animals, and one human, impale them all with a spear through the belly and observe that all creatures react in pretty much the same way. How is pain perceived differently for the non-human creatures in the experiment?
Maybe there are other reasons why people are not animals. Please let me know, they might be useful in the discussion. Indeed, if the discussion developes, I should be familiar with all sides, so that I spur them on by disagreeing with everything!

I bought a USB modem yesterday, and am sending this entry from home for the first time. The word processor doesn’t have any spell checking in English. Would you have been able to tell the difference?