Is Tchaikovsky dangerous?
Great Masters Stuck in No Man's Land
Martin Bartels
31 March 2022
Many artists, scientists and engineers are compelled to spend long periods of their lives at the sacrifice of wealth and lack of recognition until the fruit of their labour becomes visible. Many of them live with the risk that the value of their life's work will be recognised only after their demise. This is why they need not only talent for their achievements, but qualities of determination, absolute concentration on their field, perseverance, the ability to constantly question what they have achieved in order to improve it, as well as discipline to a degree that is hardly imaginable for uninitiated people.
Artists, scientists and engineers are pioneers of human progress and without their contributions, societies become culturally desolate, dull and lapse into technical regression.
When the great masters appear in public, they may smile. Behind their friendly faces, however, may also be the continuous experience of pressure from a variety of directions. This élite is vulnerable.
War Drums
Since the nation states have not yet learned to settle differences of opinion in a civilised way, i.e. through a continuous and respectful dialogue and, if necessary, through the International Court of Justice, we hear the war drums again and again.
Although politics is not their area of expertise, the present terrible noise has persuaded various masters to turn to one side in a visible way.
That is their right. Maybe their bets will work out, or maybe they will suffer great damage in the end. However this group of partisan masters is not the object of this post.
Our focus here is solely on the masters who distance themselves from acts of war or do not take positions. In fact, withholding public criticism is often the only possible reaction when one fears that relatives back home may be subjected to reprisals.
Indiscriminate rage
In times of serious conflict, overpowering adrenaline flows determine not only how many people feel, but increasingly also how they think. The masses’ collective reactions generate an experience of ostensible legitimacy that drowns out scruples. This goes hand in hand with the fact that nuanced thinking, supposedly the pride of citizens of nations that perceive themselves as particularly civilised, is on the wane. Regardless of the level of education, the impact is mighty. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine empathy has suddenly become a scarce resource.
Institutions taking action against Russian artists
The following examples illustrate typical situations. This does not imply any claim to completeness. The scope of developments is considerable and only isolated incidents have become known to the public.
On 9 March the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal cancelled three performances of the Moscow-born young pianist Alexander Malofeev who had unequivocally distanced himself from the invasion of Ukraine.
The artful explanation is unique : “The OSM feels that it would be inappropriate to receive Mr. Malofeev this week. We continue, however, to believe in the importance of maintaining relationships with artists of all nationalities who embrace messages of peace and hope. We look forward to welcoming this exceptional artist when the context allows it.”
His and five other Russian pianists’ invitation to take part in an international competition slated to have the finals in Calgary later this year were revoked.
This fate is shared by the Russian pianist Roman Kosyakov, a graduate of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, who was excluded from the Dublin International Piano Competition along with all other participants of Russian nationality. Kosyakov disclosed the email with the cancellation to the press:“We appreciate the efforts and commitments of every hopeful competitor. We hope that shared cultural values will help to once again bring the world together peacefully in the future. . . . We wish you all the best as you pursue a rewarding career as a pianist.”
There are similar reports about a film festival.
Institutions taking action against Russian art
While Ukrainian artists find it natural to play Tchaikovsky even when they are sheltering in bunkers, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has decided to cancel the performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from a concert scheduled for 18 March, because it felt “the previously advertised programme including the 1812 Overture to be inappropriate at this time.”
In early March, the Irish Trinity Orchestra and the UCD Symphony Orchestra announced that they will remove all works by Russian composers from their repertoires.
The Russian pianist Ludmila Berlinskaia, who has lived in France for 30 years and has also suffered cancellations despite her condemnation of the invasion, commenting on the banning of Russian culture, pointed out that, “it is discrimination that does not lead us to peace but even more to war” and “You can't ban reading Tolstoy and playing Tchaikovsky.”
Institutions supporting Russian art
Nevertheless, while some have reacted to the drums of war with censorship, more clearer heads have prevailed throughout the arts world.
For instance, the Vienna State Opera has firmly committed itself to keeping Russian and Ukrainian artists on its stage.
La Monnaie/ De Munt in Brussels announced its plan to create a season of Russian operas to underscore its role as “an anti-war and pro-peace institution”.
When the promoters of the "Ittlinger Sunday Concerts" in Germany bluntly cancelled a concert with the cellist Anastasia Kobekina because of her Russian nationality, there was a strong public backlash. Now, as part of the "Boswil Master Concerts", she will participate at the "Concert for Humanity and Peace" together with artists from Ukraine and Switzerland.
The Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya, whose grandfather was chief conductor in Odessa and who has been working in Hamburg for 20 years, made it clear in a moving radio interview what suffering the invasion of Ukraine has inflicted on her. She contributed to a very emotional charity event in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie, where the Ukrainian national anthem was played. It is clear that her concern is humanity, not politics.
Kirill Petrenko, the Russian chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, made no secret of his stance and held concerts to express solidarity with Ukraine. One of them took place in the Federal President's Palace.
World Federation of International Music Competitions
The organisation issued a statement that “using the universal language of music, we encourage young artists to act as ambassadors of dialogue, understanding and bridge building between people.” , . . . and “artists from Russia and Belorussia are fighting for a better future, and they are in dire need of all the support we are able to extend to them.”
Scientists and engineers in the crosshairs
It is not just artists who have found themselves in uncomfortable positions, but other professions too. While a great many scientists and engineers in Russia have shown courage by signing a resolution against the war, many of their colleagues in the West have gotten into trouble if they are of USSR origin or just have Russian names. For example, their employers, especially in the defence industry, have started removing them from "sensitive areas of work".
The word "anti-Slavism" strikes a very sensitive nerve with Germans.
In this time of erratic geopolitics, it is not only Russians or persons of Russiann origin that are facing this discrimination, but people of Chinese origin as well. Time and again, there are investigations against researchers with Chinese roots who are suspected of espionage.
Example 1 The judicial authorities functioned correctly, but they cannot repair the damage done to the person concerned.
How would you feel if, many years after a dramatic, difficult, and mostly involuntary emigration, following a struggle to get to the top of your field in research and engineering, you were suddenly publicly suspected of being disloyal? Does such humiliation strengthen loyalty? What conclusions might other immigrants draw from this? What is the message to a society that is in urgent need of many more highly skilled immigrants to defend its competitive position among industrialised nations?
In fact, in most cases the highly skilled immigrants appreciate the quality of their new home country better than the citizens who were born there and take it for granted. Such immigrants are deeply loyal.
Clearly, the suspicious approach of of some employers is extremely harmful to society as a whole.
Who sets the rules?
Like a game of football or an argument in private, the attacker is the one who sets the tone of engagement. Almost instinctually and often in small increments, we tend to follow their lead, until finally we end up playing within the framework they created.
In order to truly win, however, it is preferable not to follow that impulse, but to reflect rationally and in keeping with one's own ethics so that we may push back against irrational framing and impose our own rules. In this way, the probability of winning goes up significantly. And in doing so, we prevent the values of our societies from being diluted. It is the test of these values that they can be applied in stormy as well as fine weather.
The aforementioned institutions, which support Russian artists and do not put Russian art on hold, are those who have defined their own rules with sovereignty. They will win.
To set the stage
Lao Tzu’s words sum up a dramatic contemporary scenario: While in some parts of the world people are increasingly affected by water scarcity, others face the growing threat of too much water due to extremely heavy rainfall and rising sea levels.
While the poem captures the ambivalence of water perfectly, the words "soft and weak" also seem to describe the way modern civilisations have responded to it. Their foggy perception and sluggish action is just as dangerous as the threats themselves.
Why Water?
The focus of this essay is to use the prominent example of water to help identify concrete approaches for dealing rationally with the issue of climate change. Climate change affects us in many ways, including the expansion of deserts, forest fires, the salinisation of soils, landslides, extreme weather events, agricultural crop losses, loss of biodiversity, spread of disease and human and wildlife migration.
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Scientists and engineers have laid the foundations for our prosperity. And only these elites can show us the way to overcome the harmful externalities of these very engines of our wealth. This article supports the thesis that we are technologically and organisationally in a position to successfully meet these challenges, step by step.
One obstacle to the mobilisation of existing resources lies in the fact that the general public has only a vague understanding of the issue. They do not realise that, unless we make controlled sacrifices, nature will impose uncontrollable sacrifices on us.
We urgently need to overcome the human tendency to trivialise and understand with our minds and hearts what will happen if we do not listen to the guidance of our scientists and engineers. However, while these experts hold the keys to the right strategies, they are only trained to communicate with other scientists. This leads to a situation of misunderstanding and therefore a lack of adequate action.
Blurred perception of facts
Every day, we are all exposed to an overdose of reports about minor and major disasters in all forms of media. We more or less defend ourselves against this by ignoring some news, i.e. reducing the strain on our nerves by filtering information. It is human nature to rely on the mostly correct assumption that unpleasant developments will eventually end and change for the better. In the case of climate change, however, looking away and hoping things resolve themselves doesn’t appear to be a winning strategy.
A wealth of scientific analyses on climate change is available to everyone, but these are mostly comprehensible only for other scientists.
We should openly acknowledge that most people in the northern hemisphere have a sense of empathy for people "in the south" who are plagued by overpowering rains, flooded lowlands, islands disappearing into the water, eroding coastlines or droughts. However, the geographical distance and lack of awareness of the frequency of such disasters dilute solidarity. Collective psychological repression can set in quickly.
Most people in the northern hemisphere do not consider an increase in average temperatures of a few degrees to be alarming. Many even express relief that the winter is often milder than in the past. Loud protests by campaigners are experienced and understood by most citizens as a disturbance or perhaps exaggerated fearmongering.
At the level of policy, scientifically informed decision-makers attend international conferences on climate change, where they negotiate with other decision-makers on action plans that have no teeth but are presented as hard-won progress. And they are increasingly supporting “green” sectors of the economy. However, they are often reluctant to share the full extent of their knowledge about the problem because they do not want to jeopardise their recognition by “rocking the boat”.
The factual impact level is decisive for citizens
There is controversy about the interplay of causes of climate warming (industrial emissions, volcanic activity, ocean currents, etc.). We don't want to debate that here. What is more relevant are the changes in global average temperatures and their trends, as determined by scientific methods.
- Uniqueness: The most important fact is that a warming of 1.5%, 2% or even more is highly unusual in geological terms. If we are looking for a comparable global warming of this magnitude, we have to go back to the Pliocene: "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum". This period was 5.3 to 1.8 million years before our era. The causes back then were different and the temperature rise did not occur at the same speed as today. A comparison with the more imaginable “Medieval Warm Period” in the years from 750 to 1350 CE may appear plausible at first sight. However, this consideration cannot reassure us, because the temperatures were lower than today, and it was not a global phenomenon.
- Causality: Increasing global warming is causing glaciers and polar ice sheets to melt. At the same time, the increased temperatures in the oceans are causing the mass of water to expand. The combination of both factors has an impact on islands and the coastlines of the continents. These include the rising of sea levels and temporary or long lasting floods inland. The number of extreme rainfall events inland with destructive power has increased significantly in recent decades, with regional differences. East Asia is most affected. An additional knock-on effect results from the release of the greenhouse gas methane, much of which has been previously locked up in frozen land and is now being released as it thaws.
- Dimension: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) has concluded that there has been a 1% increase of average temperatures since preindustrial times until 2017. The IPCC projects another 0.5% increase over the next 20 years. This assumes what is not certain, namely that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced immediately, quickly and on a large scale. However, the latest "sclerosponge thermometry" research results suggest that the rise in average temperature is 0.5°C higher than the IPCC consensus. This means that by the end of this decade, almost 20 years earlier than expected, global warming could already be 2°C above pre-industrial levels. . In the following, however, we continue to refer to the lower IPCC estimates. According to IPCC calculations, it is to be expected that water levels will rise between 0.65 and 1.1 metres by the year 2100. Other models project between 1 and 3 metres by the year 2100. Not all coastal areas will be exposed in the same way. Ocean currents, tidal range and the topography of the coastal areas will make major differences. Through simulations, readers are given a vivid idea of how water will change our living conditions. It is important to note that the northern hemisphere does not enjoy a privilege, meaning that torrential rain, flooding and storm surges are increasing and will continue to do so there too. It should be noted that sea level rises of up to 30 metres are not unusual in geological history.
- Other causes:
There have been dramatic rises in sea levels in history that were linked to the melting of ice at the end of an ice age, i.e. not to the CO2 content of the atmosphere. At the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, there was a rise of up to 120 metres, albeit through a slower process than the change caused by climate gases today. The result was a significant retreat of coastlines.
Instantaneous interruption or reversal of a climatic process?
Changes to the climate are not new in human history, and certain events have triggered reductions in temperature. A striking example of a break in climatic developments is the eruption of an Icelandic volcano in the year 536 CE, whose dust made the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere so opaque to sunlight over a period of more than 20 years that temperatures fell drastically ("Little Ice Age").
Recently, it has been hypothesised that ice ages were triggered by asteroids.
It may be tempting to pin our hopes on the possibility of such events helping us to mitigate climate change, but while we cannot rule them out, events of this kind are rare and unpredictable, we must not include them in projections. It would be absurd to hope for random external causes that could interrupt or stop the progress of global warming. While hope is a human propensity, it is not suitable for contingency planning.
Our real bottleneck
What is preventing us from taking appropriate action to minimise and reverse the rise in average temperatures?
Citizen perception of the nature and dimension of the threat is inevitably blurred, because the daily reports from the media are mostly unstructured and not comprehensible to non-scientists. The reports do not allow us to recognise the essentials.
Citizens need an overview that is communicated in an honest, understandable and clearly structured way. Only when citizens have realised the nature and scale of the problem will decision-makers have the courage to take action with determination. In essence, it is about legitimising protection strategies that are considered unpopular today.
Given that citizens do not have access to graspable knowledge, we have a transformation problem. And this can be overcome if science presents the overall scenario from a certain distance. Figuratively speaking: It is not about describing every pixel point of an image, but about showing the image as a whole. The holistic representation deviates from the usual approach of scientists, because each of them is professionally held to focus on "pixel points" in their respective area of specialisation. This is the only way science makes progress, but that's not what is needed here.
The contours of the hologram can be communicated in an understandable way using e.g. the key points mentioned above:
- uniqueness: there has never been a rise in atmospheric temperatures as fast as now
- causality: the most important trigger is industrial emissions
- dimension: a rise in atmospheric temperatures of 1.5 or 2° Celsius or more above pre-industrialisation levels will massively weaken our civilisations
- other causes: additional factors can further exacerbate the process
If the effect of a detail is not legible, the presentation of the measurement can be improved. In particular, the exponential impact of very small changes in average temperatures in the atmosphere goes very much against human intuition. We can compensate for this disadvantage in perspective: Instead of referring to changes in temperature in degrees Celsius, we should consistently communicate changes in basis points, i.e. in hundredths of a degree Celsius. For example, labelling a temperature rise as "32 basis points" would be correct and would make the difference easier to comprehend than "0.32 °C". This method is a common practice in the financial industry. There, too, this method of representation is helpful in raising awareness that a small change can have massive implications.
Comparing our planet with human bodies helps us to comprehend the effect of changes in temperature: If your body temperature rises by 1° Celsius, you have a fever and are not feeling well. If the temperature rises by 1.5 or even 2° Celsius, you are very ill and hardly able to work. It is similar with our planet: If it experiences increases in average temperatures of this magnitude, it shows the symptoms of a "serious illness". However, this "fever" does not go away after a few days.Truthful and comprehensible holographic description will work like a call to action as sensible citizens will refuse to accept the idea that their lives, that of their children or that of their grandchildren, will be exposed to significant and unparalleled danger.
Here is a simple example of a call to action: It is true that the onset of toothache does not necessarily trigger a reaction in us straight away. We are perhaps still hoping that it will go away on its own. But at some point we turn to the dentist for help. We may later find the dentist's bill stressful, but the relief of finding a solution to the problem outweighs this. It is necessary that we anticipate, that we sense the expected greater pain, in order to take the initiative.
Governments will only act vigorously when informed citizens demand it vigorously. There has been pressure from sections of the population for a long time, but its direction has always been vague and therefore not sufficiently effective.
And like a dentist, a government cannot act for free, but will send bills to taxpayers. The later the comprehensive strategy is implemented, the higher the bill.
Defensive and offensive measures
The necessary government action plans are not the subject of this article. It should only be mentioned that defensive measures are necessary first, e.g., improved meteorological warning systems, raising and strengthening of dams and dykes on the sea coast and rivers, preparation for the abandonment of non-defensible areas. In addition, measures are needed to halt the dangerous trend and then slowly reverse it. These essentially consist of avoiding emissions and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Desperate measures?
The keyword for desperate actions is "geoengineering". This could imply approaches such as making either the atmosphere or our oceans absorb less sunlight or bind more CO2. While these approaches sound exciting, they are not fully developed and run the risk of causing irreversible damage. As such it is unlikely they will be used.
Sabotage of the communication of scientific work
There are two groups working against open and fair communication between science and the citizens.
Refuseniks who are not interested in facts work against this. They are used to believing their own feelings and those of their friends from social networks. There should be no discussion with them, because deviations from their assumptions act as fuel for them. Science will not lead them out of their dream worlds.
Then there are the sceptics, who may have expert knowledge but only select those parts of it for their thinking and communication that seem to support their rejection of action. This is a dangerous species, because “expert” sceptics can claim some credibility and can disrupt societal communication successfully. The only way to weaken these people is to persistently ask them for better and well-founded alternatives. Then they have to provide verifiable answers or quietly hoist the white flag.
Acknowledgements:
My heartfelt thanks go to Professor Reinhard Gast. As a practising geologist and experienced researcher, he has helped me to grasp the exponential impact of seemingly minimal changes in the temperature of our atmosphere, similar to our own bodies, and the uniqueness of the current situation.
Authorship disclosure:
Fully human generated