Georgiana Houghton: Glory be to God (1864)
Georgiana Houghton was a Victorian spiritualist and medium whose many paintings include descriptions on the reverse detailing the various spirits and angels that influenced her in producing them. Houghton called these works “spirit drawings.”
Martin Johnson Heade: Twilight, Singing Beach (1863)
Denis Villeneuve, director: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Stefan Johansson: The Bridge in Fog (1942)
After being fired from her job as a teacher for refusing to renounce her membership in the NAACP, Septima Clark became the Director of Education at the famous Highlander Center in Tennessee—a training school for civil rights activists and trade unionists. There, she began her work of establishing “Citizenship Schools” to teach literacy to and politically empower African-Americans in the South. These schools not only educated people in response to racist voting registration laws that included literacy tests, but became a core network from which to recruit leaders for the civil rights movement. Ultimately, the program became so large that it was brought under the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and trained more than 10,000 teachers to lead citizenship schools throughout the South. Hundreds of thousands of men and women registered to vote as a result.
Rosa Parks recalled working with Clark at the Highlander Center:
At that time I was very nervous, very troubled in my mind about the events that were occurring in Montgomery, but then I had the chance to work with Septima. She was such a calm and dedicated person in the midst of all that danger. I thought, “If I could only catch some of her spirit.” I wanted to have the courage to accomplish the kinds of things that she had been doing for years.
Parks returned from Highlander to Montgomery having gained from Clark a newfound sense of conviction and self-confidence—and used it to step into history.
“I just tried to create a little chaos,” Clark once said. “Chaos is a good thing. God created the whole world out of it. Change is what comes of it.”
Do human beings act purely out of self-interest? The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a classic puzzle designed to test and explore this question:
Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:
If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison.
If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa).
If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge).
What would you do? If both prisoners act purely in self-interest, they will betray each other, yet if they cooperate and keep silent, they will get a greater reward.
In one experiment, in which many participants played the game repeatedly over several days, researchers found the following:
Roughly 60% of the player population is “rational” in the sense [that they act in their own perceived self-interest once burned by attempts at cooperation] and thus is susceptible to “unravelling” dynamics [in which all players begin to defect from cooperation]. Second, however, roughly 40% of the player population is not rational in this sense, instead [cooperating] for the duration of the experiment even as they are exploited by the rational majority. Finally, the existence of these resilient cooperators appears to stabilize the unravelling dynamics after several days, thereby conferring long-run benefits on both the resilient minority and the rational majority. Strikingly, the overall rate of cooperation stayed above 84% throughout the experiment, meaning that players collectively extracted roughly 84% of the maximum average payout possible. Our results therefore cast prospects for long-run cooperation in a hopeful light; as long as a sufficiently large minority of people are determined to act as conditional cooperators, high levels of cooperation can be sustained indefinitely even when the majority is willing to cooperate only when it is in their pragmatic self-interest to do so. (source)
Warren Sheppard: Sunrise, Bay of Fundy; I made up the date.
William Ruthven Wheeler: Great Lakes Marine Disaster (c. 1860)
William Trost Richards: Second Strait, Lake Placid (1893)
Florian Maier-Aichen: Untitled (Seascape with Monument) (2003)
corvusfugit.com 