Scratchband by John Adams

Scratchband was written expressly for the Ensemble Modern with that group’s unique mixture of virtuosity and stylistic adaptability always in mind. The instrumentation is that of a hybrid of a rock band. With the use of electric guitar, electric bass, drum set, and amplified winds and synthesizers, the timbres and style of orchestration make it a close sibling to the pit band of Ceiling/Sky, the 1995 song play I composed in collaboration with June Jordan and Peter Sellars.

During the preparation periods for the various productions of Ceiling/Sky, I noticed that the traditional "rock" instruments were capable of extraordinary power and virtuosity, but that these abilities were rarely, if ever, realized in commercial music. Technical "chops" displayed by even the greatest of rock musicians -- a Jimi Hendrix or an Eric Clapton, for example -- tended to rest comfortably within the accepted language of the tradition. Understanding and transcending this limitation may have been Frank Zappa’s most lasting contribution to the future development of the art. Zappa understood that the language of rock could be vastly expanded by an informed cross-fertilization from the world of classical music. He chose musicians for his bands who could move beyond the simple structures of popular music and respond to his experiments in rhythm and counterpoint with skill and audacity. For listeners familiar with my recent music, Scratchband will probably appear as a strange shotgun wedding, one that marries the busy, terrier-like activity of the chamber symphony to the pop timbres of the Ceiling/Sky score. As I write this note, the piece is barely more than half completed, so my comments are not unlike an attempt to fill in a full personality sketch on the basis of a single ultrasound scan. What strikes me about the piece, however, is the way in which minimalist gestures are beginning to reappear in my music after a significant absence (the overture to Ceiling/Sky being the only other significant exception).

After a frantic explosion of scales charging up and down the gamut in a garish panoply of constantly shifting modes, the music stabilizes in the key of B major, boogying back and forth across modal borders that suddenly and dramatically alter the color and mood of the action. Eventually, this hyperactive energy levels off into a series of panels that introduce motivic material in a more formal "minimalist" guise. But the emotional underpinning here is far more volatile than in pieces from the '70s or '80s. Nevertheless, this same volatility provides the stimulus for real virtuoso writing, a kind of writing that falls so naturally within the capacities of a group like the Ensemble Modern.

From John Adams' Program Note

Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble (Stravinsky, Mingus, Adams, Mozart)

George Vosburgh, Director

Stephen Story, Associate Director

Bobbi Zimmmelman, clarinet

Camden Wentz, cello 

حنظله بادغیسی

 

مهتری، گر به کام شیر دراست
رو خطر كن ز كام شير بجوى
يا بزرگىّ و عزّ و نعمت و جاه
يا چو مردانت، مرگ روياروى

John Dewey and the Shortcomings of Industrial Education

 There is a trend that emphasizes success and revolves around a successful career before anything. The financial aspects, being defined as the ends (not the means) are ruining the foundation of education and the well-being of society. I have had a philosophical clash with this mentality from the get-go. I've seen this ideology spread throughout the educational system and respected in professional spheres.

The concept of being this money-generating machine and obtaining this social status is dorky, stale, and in many instances, a fantastic breeding ground for concealed fascism while acting politically correct. There is no two ways around this pseudoscience of evolutionary humanism or societal classes founded upon god-given privileges. The consequent hubris is one of the prime examples of post-industrial banalities. 

While this social superiority is attributed to inherent characteristics and essential differences, the root causes lie in a secure childhood in an affluent household and a protected track to a flourishing career. We witness a certain class arrogating to itself the right to be leaders as if being born in an affluent suburban neighborhood dismisses any need to hustle and bustle for a competitive position. The old stories of royal blood in someone's blood are as alive as ever.

 These trends are anti-meritocracy, anti-progressive, anti-humanistic, and basically at odds with all the values the Enlightenment era bestowed upon Western civilization. As long ago as 1670, mankind embarked on pursuing happiness and progress regardless of an individual's indulgence in fantastic social classification or genetic lineage.

This notion is in line with a part of John Dewey's ideas that I recently read. The following lines are excerpted from "Democracy and Education", published in 1916. While Dewey shows the importance of having an education that empowers individuals and ultimately provides financial independence, he warns about the grave dangers of the  "industrial education":

...social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. if he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of the mere display and luxury, should receive more emphasis. 

There is however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, exisiting economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial constitution of society is like every society which has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control means subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is danger that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences of economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of individuals are to be.  We have an unconscious revival of the defect of the Platonic scheme without its enlightened method of selection.

Dewey, John, Democracy and Education, p. 219

As mentioned above, this model has several limitations. First, it's constructed upon multitudes of inequities, unsolicited advantages, and unqualified privileges. Second, it is inherently protective of the status quo of the industrial society's constitution. Third, it is too specific to be adjustable to the dynamic social scene of modern life. Therefore, trainees will be kept high and dry amidst the shifting sands of modern life. The current consensus of many private education institutions and the sidelining of liberal arts and the opprobrium they hold against public engagement will jeopardize social integrity.

Pedram

11/10/2025

Nazism and Evolutionary Humanism

 These lines from Harari's book stood out:

Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on montheist beliefs. The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to eternal souls and a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens.

Another important sect is socialist humanism. Socialists believe that "humanity" is collective rather than individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species  Homo sapiens as a whole. Whereas liberal humanism seeks as much freedom as possible for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans. According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their universal essence. For example, when the rich are privileged over the poor, it means that we value money more than the universal essence of all humans, which is the same for rich and poor alike.

Like Liberal humanism, socialist humanism is built on monotheist foundation. The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped version monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God. The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is the evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives were [are] the  Nazis. What distinguishes the Nazis from other humanist sects was the different definition of "humanity", one deeply influenced by the theory of evolution. In contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into subhuman.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, (pp. 230, 231)

This is curious, since we anecdotally observed human efforts to sideline monotheistic ideologies throughout years/decades/centuries and under various projects. But the most modern attempt is nothing less than prime debauchery and barbarity. More than anything, this dark period indicates the perils of the hegemony of anti-enlightenment sects. Any type of forced distillation of a racial/ethnic, ideological, religious, or cultural milieu is an anti-enlightenment aspiration, and its outcomes have hitherto proven to be tragic human milestones.

Adam Smith's Sympathy (Part II)

 Sympathy, as Smith defines it, is a cognitive capacity rather than an emotional one. It is not to be identified with sympathetic feeling. Smith points out how difficult it is to feel concern for people who are remote from us. If we did not have conscience to give us some sense of proportion, then, says Smith, we would care more about a trifling injury to ourselves than about the entire destruction of China in an earthquake: 

If [a man] was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. 

He dismisses those ‘whining and melancholy moralists’ who claim that we ought to make ourselves unhappy by imagining the unhappiness of people unknown to us. There is no virtue in merely caring (or professing to care) about unknown persons. Passive emotion is feeble and ineffectual, but active virtue is motivated by a far stronger force – that of conscience, originating in a desire for others’ approval and hence for self-approval. 

We have, moreover, a ‘general fellow-feeling . . . with every man merely because he is our fellow-creature’. Our strong emotions, however, are directed towards individuals, beginning with our friends and relatives. General fellow-feeling underlies our attachment to the principle of justice, without which, Smith insists, society would collapse into anarchy. The importance of justice for the good of society is confirmed by reflection. Humane people may well feel sorry for a condemned criminal, especially as, having been captured, he can do no more harm, and may wish him to be spared the death penalty. On further reflection, however, ‘[t]hey counterbalance the impulse of this weak and partial humanity by the dictates of a humanity that is more generous and comprehensive’, and acquiesce in the criminal’s execution. What underlies our love of justice, however, is not an abstract regard for the good of society, but an ingrained feeling, which makes us detest the idea of a murderer escaping punishment. 

Misguided emotions need to be corrected by ‘reason, principle, conscience... the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct’, which has itself a foundation in the deep emotions implanted in us by nature. Smith thinks well of the emotional self-control advocated by the Stoics. He even praises the astonishing ‘magnanimity and self-command’ of native North Americans, who endure torture with ‘heroic and unconquerable firmness’. But the Stoic virtues are one-sided. Stoics are wrong to recommend insensibility. Affectionate feeling is itself a source of pleasure: ‘The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux [sic] and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus.’ They teach ‘that moderated sensibility to the misfortunes of others, which does not disqualify us for the performance of any duty’.

Robertson, Ritchie. The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (pp. 271-272). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Adam Smith's Sympathy

Adam Smith, who attended Hutcheson’s lectures at Glasgow, and subsequently held the chair of moral philosophy there from 1752 to 1764, dissented from his teacher’s ‘amiable system’. He thought Hutcheson expected too much of people’s benevolence. We may remember the famous sentence from The Wealth of Nations: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ When Smith set out his own system of moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he placed the emphasis not on benevolence but on sympathy, and described its working in a complex way. Smith uses ‘sympathy’ to mean not benevolence or compassion, but ‘our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’. Sympathy depends on imagination. It is the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, to imagine what we would feel in their situation. We feel pleasure when our feelings correspond to another’s – that is, when the feelings he expresses are what we would experience in his situation. But we feel displeasure if his feelings appear to be either more or less than we would feel: if someone complains of a misfortune that would not upset us, or if someone pusillanimously accepts an injury which we would resent. 

Smith insists that there is nothing selfish about sympathy. It would be selfish if, condoling with a bereaved father, I were to think about what I would feel if I were to lose a child. Sympathy goes much further: ‘I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters.’ Hence, I can feel sympathy with people whose misfortunes I could never possibly experience myself: Smith gives the example of a man sympathizing with the pains of a woman in labour.

Robertson, Ritchie. The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (pp. 268-269). (Function). Kindle Edition.