The last Mughal and a clash of civilisations

“East and west face each other across a divide that some call a religious war. Suicide jihadis take what they see as defensive action and innocent people are killed. But this is 1857.”

William Dalrymple on lessons from the Raj for the neo-cons, in the New Statesman:

Zafar3The Siege of Delhi was a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. Finally, on 14 September 1857, the British assaulted and took the city, sacking the Mughal capital and massacring swathes of the population. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart, a 19-year-old British officer. “It was literally murder . . . The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful . . . I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference . . .”

Delhi was left an empty ruin. Those city-dwellers who survived were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor’s 16 sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. “In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar,” Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. “I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.”

More here.  [Image shows the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.]

Finland makes Latin the King

Johnny Dymond at the BBC News:

Screenhunter_1_22Finland is one of the quieter members of the EU. But now its turn at the EU presidency has thrust it into the spotlight – and exposed an unusual passion.

Like the boy at the party with cheese straws stuck up his nose, it has been caught doing something vaguely disturbing – indulging a penchant for Latin.

It is the only country in the world which broadcasts the news in Latin.

On its EU presidency website one can find descriptions of meetings in Latin. But love of the language of Rome goes deep.

More here.

alexander herzen: making an idol of disillusionment

Medherzen

The Russian radical writer and philosopher Alexander Herzen loved Rome for its warmth and spontaneity, but he was a little chagrined to find himself there when the revolution of 1848 erupted in Paris, seven hundred miles away. Luckily, the Romans were equal to the event. As Herzen watched, they gathered at the embassy of the oppressive Austrians, pulled down the enormous imperial coat of arms, stomped on it, then hitched it to a donkey and dragged it through the streets. “An amazing time,” Herzen wrote to his Russian friends. “My hand shakes when I pick up a paper, every day there is something unexpected, some peal of thunder.” He raced to Paris, where the provisional government was handing out grants, like some gonzo arts foundation, to anyone willing to spread the revolution abroad. Herzen’s old friend the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had already started east to foment revolution against the Tsar; another friend, the German Romantic poet Georg Herwegh, was raising a battalion of émigré workers and intellectuals to march on Baden-Baden. Herzen stayed in Paris to see what would happen next.

more from the New Yorker here.

optical juju

Saltz_5

I used to underestimate the optical juju in the paintings of Mark Grotjahn (pronounced Groat-john). When he first showed in New York, about five years ago, I privately dismissed the art of this Los Angeles-based painter as alluring but repetitious, overly simple, and too op. Now I think he may be painting a sort of unstable parallax vision where space oscillates and perspective is disrupted. Whatever he’s doing, I suddenly can’t see enough of his work. The Whitney Museum’s current lobby show, organized by associate curator Shamim Momin, of eight large drawings by Grotjahn–though it may feature too many monochromes and it’s a real shame there are no paintings on hand–proves that even though this artist is repetitious, his work is far from simple. It is more than alluring, even a little insurrectionary in its implications.

more from The Village Voice here.

Lucas Samaras’ new shapes

Kuspit1062s

Lucas Samaras, a self-proclaimed narcissist — a narcissist in a long line of avant-garde narcissists — but one who, like all narcissistic flashers, needs a public to acknowledge the importance of his existence (and especially his body), has come up, in his latest tour de force iFilm Ecdysiast, with the perfect audience: other artists (Jasper Johns and Claus Oldenburg among them) and art people (critics and museum people) and, of course, his long-time dealer Arne Glimcher. They all once posed nude for him (Sittings, 1978-81), and in Ecdysiast he turns the tables on them: on one wall of the installation we see him on a video screen, taking off his clothes in excruciatingly slow motion, and on the opposite wall, we see the faces of the audience, each framed on a video screen of its own — they’re clearly an exclusive club, but they’re all very individualistic, not to say incommensurate egomaniacs, which is why each needs a space of his or her own (like Samaras, who can only relate to them from a distance and by using them in his art) — watching Samaras do his strip tease. The faces are solemn and sober, full of fake and impatient interest, none cracking a smile until the end, probably more out of relief that the 5½-minute ordeal was over than in amusement at Samaras’ antics.

more from Artnet magazine here.

More on Mircolending

In the wake of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Grameen, some more critical looks at microlending:

[Walden Bello in The Nation] There is no doubt that Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, came up with a winning idea that has transformed the lives of many millions of poor women, and perhaps for that alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize. But Yunus–at least the young Yunus, who did not have the support of global institutions when he started out–did not see his Grameen Bank as a panacea. Others, like the World Bank and the United Nations, elevated it to that status (and, some say, convinced Yunus it was a panacea), and microcredit is now presented as a relatively painless approach to development. Through its dynamics of collective responsibility for repayment by a group of women borrowers, microcredit has indeed allowed many poor women to roll back pervasive poverty. However, it is mainly the moderately poor rather than the very poor who benefit, and not very many can claim they have permanently left the instability of poverty. Likewise, not many would claim that the degree of self-sufficiency and the ability to send children to school afforded by microcredit are indicators of their graduating to middle-class prosperity. As economic journalist Gina Neff notes, “after 8 years of borrowing, 55% of Grameen households still aren’t able to meet their basic nutritional needs–so many women are using their loans to buy food rather than invest in business.”

And Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch:

[W]hat have microloans achieved? I put the question to P. Sainath, author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought and India’s most outstanding journalist on rural destitution and the consequences of economic policy. Yes, he said, microloans can be a legitimate tool in certain conditions, as long as you don’t elevate the tool into a gigantic weapon. No one was ever liberated by being placed in debt. That said, a lot of poor women have eased their lives by using microloans, bypassing bank bureaucracies and money lenders…

Sainath points out that the interest rates micro-indebted women are paying in India are far higher than commercial bank lending rates.

“They are paying between 24 and 36 per cent on loans for productive expenditures while an upper class person can finance the purchase of a Mercedes at 6 to 8 per cent from the banking system.”

The average loan of the Grameen bank is $130 in Bangladesh, lower in India. Now, the basic problem of the poor in both countries is landlessness, lack of assets.

Subliminal Nude Pictures Focus Attention

From Scientific American:

Nude Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye’s image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract–and visually arresting–shape. “Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict,” he explains. “We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image.”

More here.

Stay trim to cut cancer risk

From Nature:

Fat Fat could send the wrong signals to sick cells.

In studies with mice, shedding a bit of weight acted as a preventative against cancers. And they didn’t even have to exercise to get the benefit: the mouse equivalent of liposuction did the trick. Allan Conney and his colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey chopped the excess fat from some mice and exposed them to UV light, damaging some of their skin cells and inducing sunburn. The fat reduction boosted the rate of helpful cell suicide, called apoptosis, in skin tumour cells: cancerous cells died twice as fast in the slimmed-down mice as in the fat ones, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mice kept slim by regular exercise also felt a benefit. The team saw no effect on non-cancerous cells in any of the mice.

“Fat tissue may be preventing the death of damaged cells,” says Conney. He and his team suggest that fat cells might be secreting proteins called cytokines, which usually act as cellular messengers and could send signals to tumour cells telling them to interrupt apoptosis. They also implicate another molecule called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), known to have a similar anti-suicide effect on cells. But these are speculations that the group has yet to test.

More here.

A Case of the Mondays: Science is Cumulative

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense

Science is a cumulative process. Although as Thomas Kuhn noted, scientific paradigms overthrow earlier paradigms and bring forth brand new theories, the process remains almost linearly progressive. Facts get tacked onto other facts; new observations falsify theories or prove them more solid; methods improve as scientists’ understanding of measurement and statistics becomes more complete.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn explains that there is normal science and revolutionary science. Normal science is completely cumulative, and is based on just one paradigm, or way of viewing things. Physics had Newtonian mechanics, and then General Relativity; chemistry has atomism; biology has the gene-centric view of evolution. The basic paradigm then colors the experiences of scientists, who modify it a little bit whenever a dissonant fact comes up. Revolutionary science occurs when the body of dissonant facts becomes so huge that the paradigm becomes more of a liability than an asset, at which point a new paradigm, which incorporates that body of facts, crops up and replaces the old one.

The above description is nearly trivial. The only observation that would distress a positivist is that initial dissonant facts are incorporated into the theory instead of falsifying it. But in reality, rational people make generalizations all the time, switching to different frameworks only when the body of conflicting facts becomes too massive to ignore. In scientific terms, the modified paradigm is usually still able to make falsifiable predictions. For example, the epicycles that were invented to account for observational discrepancies between the Ptolemaic model and astronomic observations were a perfectly understandable invention, at least before the evidence piled up that the epicycles were centered at the Sun. Paradigms that remain even though they outlive their predictive power tend to be like the theory of the luminiferous ether, which took a few decades to be discarded because it took that long for someone to come up with a better alternative.

But where Kuhn makes a nontrivial statement is when he says that paradigms are in a way incomparable. It’s impossible, he says, to just decide based on evidence, since evidence itself depends on the framework you see it in. If you are a proponent of a deterministic physical theory, in particular classical physics, you will be inclined to ignore statistical mechanics.

However, in reality, classical physicists did consider statistical mechanics, and paradigms are comparable. Even Kuhn admits that given an unordered list of paradigms, it’s always possible for the historian of science to tell the order they appeared in. In that sense, and in several more senses, science is the accumulation of a body of facts and theories, as opposed to the phoenix-like creature Kuhn imagines it as.

At this point, I would like to take a detour and show cumulativity in two other areas of science. Science can be viewed as a body of observed and inferred facts, a body of tested theories strung together to explain the facts and predict future facts, or a body of methods to test theories and discover new facts. I am going to focus on the first and third formulations first, and only then come to the second, the one Kuhn deals with.

In a certain trivial sense, facts are invariably cumulative. Existing facts may be emphasized or deemphasized, but they are only stricken out when they’re discovered to be the result of misunderstanding, experimental error, or fraud, none of which is common. What can change is the body of facts inferred by theory. Evolution, even speciation, is an observed fact, but the large-scale evolution of phyla and kingdoms—including, for example, events like the Cambrian Explosion and the Permian Extinction—is merely inferred from a gigantic body of geological evidence. Advances in technology can promote inferred facts to observed facts, as the discovery of the parallax effect promoted heliocentrism. More rarely, they can overthrow inferred facts that are based on relatively little evidence; in the early 1920s, physicists considered it a fact that the Sun was primarily composed of iron, based on faulty inference. But they cannot overthrow directly observed facts, and have yet to impeach any fact based on overwhelming inference such as the fact of evolution or the existence of black holes.

Similarly, methods may become better or worse than others because of technological improvements, but on their own they never become worse. It may be considered silly to make astronomic observations using tools developed in the 19th century, but modern technology will ensure that even so, the observations will be at least as good as the ones the same tools produced when they were invented. It’s far more common for a new tool to suddenly shed light on a theory—the telescope, the electron microscope, the supercollider—than for a theory to dictate the use of a tool. The standard scientific method, which dictates how to interpret experiments using these tools, doesn’t change when a paradigm changes; the closest thing to a real change it has undergone is the incorporation of observational sciences to a method that was invented for use in experimental sciences.

What is nontrivial is how theories influence the choice of which facts are to be emphasized. But whenever a paradigm is in crisis—that is, whenever it can no longer easily adapt to new evidence while remaining predictively relevant—the deemphasized facts can come into play. Especially when scientists only hang on to a theory because nothing else is available, as in the case of the Standard Model in quantum physics, they look for every possible avenue that will give them a new theory. They may be attached to the old ways of thinking, but they are even more attached to the fame they will get if they are the first to discover the next paradigm. Evidently, quantization did succeed as a method in a continuous world; at first Planck thought it was just a convenient trick, but once that trick became acceptable, it wasn’t hard to realize that it underlay a real phenomenon.

It’s telling that the final arbiter in a scientific crisis tends to come from a new discovery. Heliocentrism would have never gotten anywhere if Kepler hadn’t discovered that planetary orbits were elliptical, disposing of the need for epicycles once and for all. Neo-Darwinian evolution became a lot more powerful once the structure of DNA was discovered; and even the original Neo-Darwinian synthesis came about because biologists had rediscovered Mendel’s laws of inheritance. Darwinian evolution was dominant long before then, but that was because its best competitor, Lamarckian evolution, was a lot more self-evidently flawed than geocentrism was in the 1600s.

What this suggests is that even the succession of theories is cumulative. This is especially true in physics, where new theories don’t so much overthrow their predecessors as expand them: Einstein showed Newtonian mechanics was an approximation valid when speed was negligible compared to the speed of light, Planck and Einstein showed that continuous light emission was a large-scale approximation of a discrete structure, and physicists after them showed that General Relativity was a large-scale approximation and the Standard Model a low-gravity one. But even in other sciences, there is a similar cumulativity of theories. The neo-Darwinian synthesis proved neither Darwin nor Mendel wrong; it only said that Mendel’s genetics was the mechanism of inheritance Darwin had been looking for.

A change in paradigm may make theory an approximation of reality from another angle. But it is nonetheless a better approximation, so in a way science is cumulative, even linearly. Beyond the trivial sense, in which the scientific knowledge of 1960 was clearly better than this of 1900 and this of 1900 was clearly better than this of 1800, both kinds of science only usher in further progress. Normal science is clearly cumulative; and revolutionary science replaces a paradigm that outlived its usefulness with an objectively better one.

Below the Fold: Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime? On Microfinance and a Nobel Prize

11620239Nine days ago, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi economist and spark plug of the worldwide microcredit movement. In a nutshell, community organizations and non-profit organizations loan poor people bits of money so that they can start or improve their tiny businesses. Microcredit is widespread in poor and not so poor countries. In 2005, 100 million people received loans via 3000 lenders in 130 countries.

Praise for the microcredit movement is well nigh universal. The Nobel committee in awarding the prize noted that “microcredit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions.” (New York Times, October 14, 2006, p.1) The United Nations designated 2005 as the “year of microcredit.” Former President Clinton began funneling development assistance via nongovernmental organization into microcredit, and the present regime devotes the majority of its foreign monies to microcredit lending. Senator Clinton announced on September 22 that Citicorp would lend $100 million to microlenders worldwide. A Swiss investment bank has floated bonds for microcredit institutions based on the securitization of their loan portfolios. Big money managers are not far behind: TIAA-CREF, the pension and annuity people for college teachers, will invest another $100 million in loans to microcredit agencies.

Professor Yunus himself deserves all credit for converting an astonishingly simple observation into an ambitious and extensive self-help scheme. He realized that the homely truth that the essence of poverty is the absence of money, and because banks don’t lend money to people without it, the poor were locked out of credit markets. They were doomed, as Max Weber observed about nineteenth Century Naples, to spend their days trading the same gold piece back and forth, ending each day just as poor as when they started. Yunus in an interview with the Times recounts his eureka experience. In 1976, he emptied his pockets of $27 dollars on the spur of the moment to 42 Bangladeshi villagers who asked for help. To his surprise, the villagers immediately made money on his money, and repaid him as if his charity had been a loan. “If you can make so many people happy with such a small amount of money,” Yunus recalled that day for the Times, ‘why shouldn’t you do more of it?”

And just so, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh under Professor Yunus’ tutelage, was born. The bank has loaned money to more than 7 million people, and has focused primarily but not exclusively on serving women. The average loan now is $130 dollars. Typically, loans are made to a group of 5 women whose co-involvement provides the bank with additional security that the loan will be repaid. With high repayment rates, investment bankers are seeing banks like the Grameen as a good business risk. As the Swiss banker noted in an interview with the Financial Times: “We believe that although the microfinance sector is small today, it will become an established asset class in the future.”

With Citibank, Swiss bonds and a US pension fund leading the way, it is likely that via your savings and pension and mine, we will be a beneficiary of microcredit, albeit as a lender. What is your money and my money channeling or to be channeled through microcredit doing or not doing for the world’s poor?

Though Yunus has performed a modern version of the loaves the fishes, there is increasing acknowledgement that microcredit is not a panacea for world poverty. The World Bank and even the New York Times in its report on Professor Yunus admits it. But if we press a bit further we find that microcredit is not helping the really poor – the 1.5 billion one dollar a day poor, and it is not clear what good it is doing for the 3 billion two dollar a day poor. Both groups need money, not loans. The International Fund for Agricultural Development in 2001 explains:

Microfinance alone is not a magic bullet for poverty reduction… the claims that microfinance assists ‘the poorest’ and ‘the poorest of the poor’ are unfounded within national contexts. Microfinance institutions virtually never work with the poorest … and many microfinance institutions have high proportions of clients who are non-poor, using national poverty lines.

Who then does it help, and how? It helps people in poor surroundings who are already just a little or more ahead of their fellows. Let’s not exaggerate, but given the universal acclaim accorded microcredit, it is important to note that it mostly enables recipients to do just a tad better than before. Call it the two-rutabaga problem. Suppose you start a little stand in a local market selling the spare rutabaga from your garden. A microcredit loan might help you to acquire another, and you sell that too. You have doubled your income, acquired a debt, and are still caught in what economists call a poverty trap. Most loans are too small to do more. Most environments where loans are made are too poor to support small-business growth. Max Weber’s Naples observation is still too true. You don’t starve, but you don’t gain a little fat either.

But it helps the American saver, or perhaps I should say our surrogate banks, funds, and pensions, and thereby you and me. No one, not even Professor Yunus, makes microcredit loans for free. In fact, despite the benevolent urges of the movement, the microfinance agencies act just like banks. When they have sub-prime customers, and customers in this case without an collateral whatsoever, they do just as sub-prime lenders in the United States do: they charge a premium interest rate for the money. Tim Weiner, an experienced and careful Times reporter who didn’t let his enthusiasm for microcredit blind him to the more uncomfortable facts, reports a 2003 story among Mexican women recipients of microcredit loans. Amidst praise and reassuring quotations from a clay pot maker for whom a loan has allowed her to double her production, Weiner also notes that the non-profit organization making the loan charges an interest rate “five times higher than any United States credit card company could legally charge.”

I imagine every one of us feels a bit ripped off by the interest rates credit card companies charge American users. Multiply those rates by five. Does the concept of usury come to mind? You might say that usury like water seeks its own level. The further down it goes, the worse it gets.

Defenders of microcredit’s high lending rates argue that it beats resort to the local loan shark. Money is money, and if microcredit is cheaper than the local loan shark, so much the better.

But juice is juice. High returns are high returns. Irony of ironies, many microcredit institutions, according to the Economist, have higher rates of profit than Citibank. In 2004, for instance, Citibank made about a 17% profit relative to equity. According to the Economist, seventeen of the largest microcredit institutions made at least as much on their equity as Citibank, the median profit rate among them being 25%. This might explain the enthusiasm of Citibank and others for investing in microcredit institutions. It is one way for international banks to get better profits by serving the poor, heretofore simply bystanders in the game of world finance. They can turn what economists disparagingly call (and blame them for) a “market failure” into a market success, and be better off for it. You and I will be too.

Microcredit activities also do something important to poor communities: they create what Mrs. Thatcher would call “enterprise societies.” No more sodden poor, slacking workers, sullen unions. The poor will be sent on their way, becoming just a buzzing world of fruit stalls, street vendors, and little craft and tourist shops, amidst less edifying hustles of all kinds. A sort of Naples where the gold coin goes round faster and faster, to no greater result perhaps than the growing sensation of envy among those who rub its gleaming surface briefly, but for the first time.

Congratulations to Professor Yunus for a job well done. But the real work of eliminating poverty and increasing economic equality is not yet really begun. In future columns, I will take up discussion of alternatives to microcredit that can eliminate poverty and bring greater economic equality in poor and not-so-poor countries.

Random Walks: The Trouble With Harry

12harrypotter     “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

    — Exodus 22:18

It’s that time of year again, one short week before Halloween, when a refreshing crispness begins to creep into the air and the leaves begin to turn. It’s also the season when the religious wingnuts raise their usual objections to what they perceive as a Satanic holiday. This year, those objections come on the heels of news that a devout mother of four in Atlanta, Georgia, has asked the local Board of Education to ban all Harry Potter books from the public schools, insisting they are an “evil” attempt to indoctrinate children into the Wicca religion. Fortunately, common sense prevailed, and Harry still has a place in Atlanta public schools, at least for the time being.

This is hardly the first time objections have been raised about J.K. Rowling’s best-selling books, featuring the heroic boy-wizard’s adventures at the fictional Hogwarts School. The recently released film Jesus Camp features a now-notorious scene in which the camp’s director denounces the Harry Potter series as “evil” because it celebrates warlocks and witchcraft, among other cited “sins” — even insisting that the fictional title character deserves to be put to death for his magical practices. But Harry has been embroiled in controversy since at least the second or third book in the series, with calls for its removal from classrooms and school libraries occurring in Minnesota, Michigan, New York, California, and South Carolina, among other states.

The ruckus prompted bestselling author Judy Blume — whose own books have been banned from schools in the past because of their frank treatment of teen sexuality and the onset of puberty — to write an Op-Ed in the New York Times in 1999, mourning what she sees as a disturbing trend extending beyond religious zealots to target any number of other “isms.” (She pointed out, for example, that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has been targeted by politically-correct would-be censors for promoting racism.) “[S]ome parents believe they have the right to demand immediate removal of any book for any reason from school or classroom libraries,” Blume lamented. “The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students’ right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.”

Imagination is a powerful thing, and good stories stoke the imagination, especially in children. Blume recalled reading L. Frank Baum’s Oz books as a child — another series rife with those evil witches and wizards — and dreaming of being able to fly: “I may have been small and powerless in real life, but in my imagination, I was able to soar.” The enduring appeal of good story-telling and its profound effect on imagination — coupled with the need for young girls to feel powerful in a tightly controlled religious environment that frowned upon, and severely punished, any dissenting voice — were among the myriad of factors that converged into a perfect storm of mass hysteria and blood lust in the late 17th century: the infamous Salem Witch Trials.

It’s a particularly dark period in American history, one that has been well documented and carefully studied from every possible angle. Over the course of several months in 1692, nineteen men and women were wrongfully convicted of witchcraft and hanged. Two dogs were executed as accomplices, and hundreds of others were accused and jailed for months without being brought to trial. An 80-year-old man who refused to undergo trial was pressed to death under heavy stones, and the four-year-old daughter of one accused witch was also arrested and jailed for eight months. (Yes. A four-year-old was accused of witchcraft.) The sight of her mother being carted off to the gallows ultimately drove the little girl mad with grief. All this was done in the name of god and the safety and security of the community.

Even before the witch hunt began, that community had its challenges, most notably an ongoing frontier war with Indian tribes a mere 70 miles away, bringing a constant fear of imminent attack to the little town of Salem. It was also becoming increasingly polarized, thanks to (a) a bitter rivalry between two clans vying for social prominence in (and thereby control of) the community; and (b) an economic rift between the rural/agricultural Salem Village and the more mercantile-oriented city of Salem, which was flourishing from a lively sea trade.

Against this backdrop of social tensions, unrest, and discontent, the daughter of the new village minister, Samuel Parris, fell mysteriously ill, diving under furniture, contorting in pain, and complaining of fever. Many theories have been bandied about as to the exact nature of young Betty’s “illness,” but one possibility is that she had read Cotton Mather’s recently published popular book Memorable Providences, which described the “crimes” of an Irish washerwoman suspected of witchcraft in great detail.  Stories fuel the imagination, after all, and six-year-old Betty was at an especially suggestible age. Furthermore, Parris’ household included Tituba, a Caribbean slave from Barbados, who often regaled the local children with voodoo tales from her native folklore. On the advice of a well-meaning neighbor, Mary Sibley, Tituba even baked a rye cake with an unusual ingredient — Betty’s urine — and fed the cake to a dog, believing the dog to be a witch’s agent and the cause of the little girl’s “affliction.”

Young Betty suddenly became the center of attention, so it shouldn’t be surprising that other girls in the village quickly began exhibiting the same mysterious symptoms. Why should Betty have all the fun? As the cause (and cure) of these “illnesses” continued to elude the local doctor, the superstitious town folk fell back on witchcraft as the only likely explanation. Soon, the finger-pointing began: Tituba was accused of witchcraft, along with a local beggar woman, Sarah Good, and a querulous old woman named Sarah Osborn, whose greatest sin (apart from being unpleasant) was that she had not attended church for over a year. The initial judicial “examination” of the accused women was hardly fair, based entirely on hearsay, local gossip, and the suspect testimony of the afflicted girls, who made up wild tales of specters cavorting with devils, and fell into their well-practiced “fits” almost on cue. Anything bad, no matter how minor, that had happened in the village was also attributed to the three accused women: cheese and butter mysteriously going bad, or the birth of deformed livestock. And god forbid if a woman accused had some abnormal birthmark on her body, widely viewed at the time to be a mark of the devil.

One would think that rationality would prevail; surely someone could see the hysteria for what it was. A few people did, including a judge named Nathaniel Saltonstall, who resigned from the court in protest at the way the “trial” of an accused witch named Bridget Bishop had been conducted. Bishop was convicted and hanged anyway — the first victim of the Salem witch trials. Saltonstall managed to escape with his life despite voicing his objections to the proceedings. An outspoken local tavern owner named John Proctor — immortalized in Arthur Miller’s fictionalized account of the events, The Crucible — wasn’t so fortunate: he was summarily accused of witchcraft himself and hanged. (His wife, Elizabeth, was also convicted, but her life was spared because she was pregnant.)

In short, the town was a powder keg; suspicion of witchcraft was the spark that set it off. The accusations multiplied as the hysteria escalated, with more and more women finding themselves targets of the afflicted girls’ dramatic “testimony.” Anyone slightly difficult or different, emotionally disturbed, or independent-minded and outspoken was likely to be accused of witchcraft. Denied such basic rights as legal counsel, witnesses to testify on their behalf, and no formal means of appeal — although they were allowed to speak on their own behalf, produce evidence, and cross-examine their accusers — the alleged witches quickly learned that the best way to avoid being hanged was simply to confess and repent.

CraftscourtEventually cooler heads prevailed, as people began to realize that it was highly unlikely that there were so many previously unsuspected devil worshippers in their midst, masquerading as devout Christians. The execution of a former minister, George Burroughs, caused great consternation, as he refused to recant, professing his innocence and reciting the Lord’s Prayer before he was hanged — something witches weren’t supposed to be able to do. In fact, the assembled crowd might have set Burroughs free if Cotton Mather hadn’t intervened and insisted that the hanging proceed. (If there is an afterlife, Mather had a lot to answer for when he got there.)

Ironically, Mather’s son, Increase, helped spear-head the movement that essentially ended the madness, as more and more of the “intellectual elite” began to speak out against the proceedings and question the truthfulness of the accusers. However, only one of the main players, a judge named Samuel Sewall, publicly apologized for his role in the witch hunt and the innocent lives it claimed. Most sought to shift blame, and the chief justice, William Stoughton, stubbornly stuck to his assertion that his “good work” had been interrupted just as he was on the verge of ridding the land of witches for good. More frightening than Stoughton’s pig-headedness is the fact that he was elected the next governor of Massachusetts.

The Salem Witch Trials were an aberration, but they are not unique. This sort of hysterical mob mentality appears to be inherent in human nature, popping up repeatedly throughout history, in every culture. Miller’s timeless drama was ostensibly about the Salem era, but he also intended it as a criticism of the anti-communist “witch hunts” and hearings led by US Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s — conducted under the aegis of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here, too, the “hearings” were dominated by wild accusations (often motivated by personal antipathy), hearsay, circumstantial evidence, and a shocking disregard for civil liberties — again, all in the name of god and preserving national security. Very few of those accused turned out, in retrospect, to be communists, and many lives and reputations were ruined in the process.

Of course, the self-appointed Thought Police aren’t limited to religious fanatics or xenophobic political conservatives. I recall a conversation one Halloween in a friend’s living room, where another guest — a schoolteacher by trade — ranted at great length about her objections to the Harry Potter books, which she had forbidden her own children from reading. (The irony is that she considered herself to be an ultra-leftist liberal.) Her objections stemmed from her insistence that because Harry is rewarded for defying authority and breaking school rules, Rowling’s books therefore teach children that it’s “okay to break the rules,” undermining the authority of schoolteachers in the real world.

This is, at best, a bit of a stretch, and easily refuted via internal textual evidence. Do Harry and his friends occasionally flout school rules? Absolutely. But note that when they break rules for no good reason, they are summarily punished. How often has Harry suffered detention, been denied certain privileges (like playing in a Quidditch match), or earned demerits for his “house” because of his disregard for the rules? It’s only when they must break rules to save lives — theirs or their fellow students — or when rules are imposed for no good reason, that their “disobedience” is ultimately “rewarded.”

If Rowling is teaching children anything with the Harry Potter books, it’s how to think for themselves and take responsibility for their decisions and actions, thereby fostering critical thought, as opposed to blind obedience. The danger of the latter is aptly illustrated in the film Ella Enchanted, an inventive re-working of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. In this case, the princess is cursed with uber-obedience. The fairy who bestows this particular “gift” thinks she’s doing the parents a favor, giving them the world’s perfect child. The problem is, Ella has to do whatever anyone tells her — even when it goes against her own desires, her basic nature, or her own (or others’) best interests. Needless to say, people quickly figure out how to exploit this aspect of her personality — until she is able to break the spell through sheer force of will (and, of course, true love), releasing her long-suffering, independent-minded inner rebel. Compare the plight of poor Ella to that of Harry Potter and crew, who can still choose when and where to disobey, and suffer the consequences (and, occasionally, the rewards) of their decisions.

That’s the real trouble with Harry, and all his free-thinking, independent-minded ilk. There’s a certain type of person for whom “bucking the system” through vocal dissent or civil disobedience is tantamount to being a traitor. (Paging Ann Coulter!) The underlying emotional motivation is fear: fear of those who are different, fear of change, and mostly, fear of losing order and control. Such people exhibit no qualms about crushing the infidels underfoot, and they usually find some noble, patriotic or religious excuse for rationalizing their vicious behavior. This is as true today as it was in 17th century Salem, or during the 1950s McCarthy Era. And it’s true in the world of Harry Potter: the fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was surprisingly unflinching in its depiction of the lengths to which the Ministry of Magic would go to deny the reality of Lord Voldemort’s return and hence the impending threat facing the wizarding world — not to mention the Ministry’s ruthlessness in perfunctorily squelching any voices daring to disagree with them.

Perhaps I found that fifth book so unsettling because there are disturbing signs of a convergence of trends in America today that bear striking parallels to Salem and the McCarthy eras. There is an ongoing war, the threat of imminent attack on American soil, an increasingly partisan and divided populace, economic tension between the “haves” and “have nots,” and a outspokenly zealous religious  sector  that values faith and superstition over provable fact, and considers itself at “war” with “unbelievers.” Our country’s leadership seems intent on revoking some of our most cherished basic human rights — most recently, habeas corpus — ostensibly in the name of god, patriotism, and national security. Those same leaders are also growing more and more desperate, as the war they are waging becomes increasingly unpopular, with no sign of victory in sight. (It’s worth noting that many of the Salem judges played leading roles in the unpopular 17th century frontier war, with a comparable lack of success.)

Fortunately, cooler heads — and common sense — can ultimately prevail. This Halloween, as we gear up for a critical mid-term election that could change or stay the present course of our nation, let us take a moment to reflect on the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyism of the 1950s. From that historical perspective, let us take a long, hard look at the madness of the last five years, and ponder how fear and hysteria have held sway, often to the detriment of our personal freedoms. And let us cast our votes accordingly, each man being true to his conscience, with no fear of ugly reprisals from the self-appointed Thought Police — of any persuasion. For the time being, at least, we are still a democracy. Let us exercise our rights as independent, free-thinking citizens and take steps to preserve those rights for future generations… while we still can.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette writes about science and culture at Cocktail Party Physics.

Emily Dickinson: The Poem of Ecstasy

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Very occasionally in art comes the miraculous, the words, music or paint that permanently transform the history of culture. On these mountains we slouch below, looking up at the brilliant slopes, the yawning abysses, wondering how such gigantism came about. For surely it would be the ultimate hubris to allow ourselves to think we could be like them, or understand where their greatness came from. It is not dead white male/female stuckism to say a Beethoven, a Goya or a Goethe went where we can not go. And such is Emily Dickinson, one of the most inexplicable examples of genius in the history of Western culture. 

Upstairs, alone in her bedroom, the world turned in Emily Dickinson’s head, the dash-filled poems stitched into packets, lying in wait for their eternity. Which was some time in coming, owing to the world’s usual decrepitude in recognising gifts of this dimension. A few poems, published in botched form, were all the fame she was allowed, and then kidney disease claimed her too early. Now she lies in her Amherst grave. ‘Called back’ reads the gnomic gravestone farewell to the earth, taken from a last letter, brilliantly elliptical to the last. Called back where? To whom? This poet forces you to ask questions about life and art that can leave you nonplussed.

And yet some people don’t see what the fuss is about. Maybe it’s a temperamental thing. Some find Finnegans Wake pretentious and unreadable, others greatness personified. In the gallery one person will go into a posture of awe before a Rothko where another will be scornful. Dickinson is not light reading. She is taking you under the wing of the whirlwind of her feelings, which can be savage indeed. Her metaphysical wit crushes together the most unlikely images. What might appear to be the dullest rhythmic enclosure for psychic swings and roundabouts—hymn tunes—turns out to be something casting forth atom-splitter ecstasies of pain, loneliness, battles with God, the flesh, and desire [texts Johnson]:

             Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
             Were I with thee
             Wild Nights should be
             Our luxury!

             Futile—the Winds—
             To a Heart in port—
             Done with the Compass—
             Done with the Chart!

             Rowing in Eden—
             Ah, the Sea!
             Might I but moor—Tonight—
             In Thee!                            #249

Well, she might be wishing to rendezvous with God, but I somehow doubt it. Yes, as Auden put it in another context, love made her weep her pints like you and me. But everyone weeps their pints. It is her memorability, the yoking together of such disparate elements, the passion leaping off the page, which is so amazing. Of course such a sensibility, with its skin less—or is it one skin more—was bound to get into the most appalling depressions, and the predations on her hypersensitive spirit were cruel. 

Dickinson commits the great literary virtue of taking her emotions seriously, and of taking her future readers’ emotions seriously too. Remember, she imagines her future readers. She only had a few in her lifetime. ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers.’ How simply put, and yet how true to human experience. Most poets never get around to writing a simple, memorable line like that. You can huff and puff as much as you like; in art, you cannot, as has been said elsewhere, make a person bigger, or smaller, than they are. Emily was sent to solitary confinement until well after her death, but nothing was going to stop the tidal wave of her influence once the stitched packets had evaded the bonfire that could so easily have claimed those precious manuscripts. One wonders what has been consumed, unknown, in the past, or now. There are bound to be Dickinsons we will never hear of.

How very odd it is that this writer turns out to be the epic voice of wounded Modernism, but with so much more behind it than just a Slough of Despond. Beckett, for example, seems enervated beside Dickinson’s waiting for God knows what. The lyric poems discharged their startling energies along with the New England autumn leaves, Amherst an omphalos as Emily lurched across thresholds of passion and despair. She enjoyed no benefit from the hootenanny critical prognostications that have echoed in her wake. Criticism can neither predict, control nor prevent work of this kind from coming into the world. Indeed it is something wonderful to know that such a thing is possible—to create this memorable expressive world virtually alone. What vision and tenacity! How remarkable the human qualities and character!

There is often an atmosphere of seizure, or rapture, in her poems, where life is held to be at stake. Clothed in a radiant white dress, the poet communes with harsh deities and brutal nature. Intimations of catastrophe are ever present:

              I should not dare to be so sad
              So many Years again—
              A Load is first impossible
              When we have put it down—

              The Superhuman then withdraws
              And we who never saw
              The Giant at the other side
              Begin to perish now.                 #1197

I am one of those strange people who think there is a difference between the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the pile of bricks left on the gallery floor. Dickinson makes short work of most of the claims made by those trying to second-guess literary history. At any rate, good work is going to survive once all the secondary support systems have been put away, isn’t it. With Dickinson the pearl of great price has been recognised as such for a long time now. However, Dickinson does not make it easy on her readers. You have to work to get some of the meaning of her poems. They come without titles, breathless and hard. You can feel the fire off the page, the ice at the window ledge. Just as Dickinson kept strangers at a distance in her household, so she keeps her readers at a distance too. If you put yourself into her work, she rewards with a peculiarly intense aesthetic pleasure.

One has to feel a bit sorry for Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the initial recipient of some of the poems Dickinson first sent forth. It isn’t given to many to stand before a psychic tsunami for the first time. He wasn’t up to the task, but who would have been? Emerson? Thoreau? Wilde, who did meet, and appreciate, Whitman? One can be especially thankful to Mabel Loomis Todd and those who followed after to get Dickinson’s extraordinary work out in printed form. Higginson did his best, but how disappointed the poet must have been with the response. Still, she knew her value:

              Mine—by the Right of the White Election!
              Mine—by the Royal Seal!
              Mine—by the Sign in the Scarlet prison—
              Bars—cannot conceal!

              Mine—here—in Vision—and in Veto!
              Mine—by the Grave’s Repeal—
              Titled—Confirmed—
              Delirious Charter!
              Mine—long as Ages steal!                        #528

Did her poetry live, she asked Higginson (‘Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?’). It lived then, and lives now, and will keep on living through the rest of time.

                                                                  *
                        Emily—

Now the Bride of poetry beckons
From her brutal sleep
With each part of truth protesting
At mortality.

She was lonelier than our suburbs
Yet as true and living
Though the same chimeras beckoned
With the same leave-taking.

On her Amherst springtime forehead
Set with laurel’s fire
She is hymning into being
Dazzled crests of time.

Bird of summer in her hair,
Wing of autumn on her breast,
Wedded to the winter snow
And each joy confessed.

Soldered with transcendences,
In her room a furnace,
Butterfly and bee contriving
Sceptre, crown and chalice.

Now your coronation’s given,
Entrance to imperium,
Veiled with stars and continents,
Your brocade delirium,

Each packet stitched and put away,
Ships of Asian spices,
Harboured to desuetude,
Daguerreotype left over.

For once a passion that will last
Past what rusts and buckles,
There with Walt in double grandeur,
Mystery’s odd couple.

Rushing to the sunlight’s shards,
Toppling to greatness,
Adoration in your nerve
And the bandaged fierceness

We thought closer to our time—
Yours was purer, truer,
With those words that cauterise
The mouthline’s wounded murmur.

There is wonder wide enough
To fold all things within it,
Intoxication offered up
With a goodness granted:

Yours—by right of the burden given,
Yours—by the White Election,
Yours—though centuries steal away,
Yet ours, at the end, your perfection.   

Written 1990 Published A Dwelling Place 1997 65–66
Published in Visiting Emily eds. Sheila Coghill, Thom Tammaro University of Iowa Press 2000 69–70

Dante on drugs

Peter Hainsworth reviews Dante: the poet, the political thinker, the man by Barbara Reynolds, in the Times Literary Supplement:

DantealighieriThe shape is familiar – a chronological survey of Dante’s life and career, with ample exposition of all the important works, and with an emphasis on their autobiographical implications. But the novelties come thick and fast, beginning (so far as I was concerned) with the suggestion on page 10 that Dante and other poets he associated with in Florence as a young man might have given their visionary and dreamlike imaginings a boost with the stimulus of love-potions. These herbal stimulants, cannabis perhaps, may, it turns out later, be what Dante is referring to in the comparison, near the start of Paradiso, between his own “trans-human” experience and what Glaucus felt “on tasting of the herb” (nel gustar dell’erba) which made him into a sea-god. As Reynolds explains at greater length when she comes to the final vision of the Godhead, mystics did often use drugs of one kind or another in conjunction with fasting and meditation in their pursuit of visionary illumination. There is no reason, she argues, why Dante should not have done so too.

Dante as a substance abuser? It is not a key argument and Reynolds may be being provocative, even mischievous. She herself gives much more importance to her decoding of the two prophecies that have always been a problem for Dante commentators. Virgil says, in the first canto of the Comedy, that a hound (Veltro) will be coming to chase away the ever-hungry she-wolf that is afflicting Italy. Reynolds goes along with the standard view that Dante is talking of a new, righteous Emperor, but argues that the real interest lies in the puzzling phrase “tra feltro e feltro” (between felt and felt), which she sees as an allusion to the use of felt in contemporary paper-manufacture; Dante, she argues, is referring to the new power of written texts, and specifically to the imminent imposition of the rule of canon and civil law.

More here.

The Conservative Soul

David Brooks reviews Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul.

Sullivan’s antidote to fundamentalism is the conservatism of doubt. “The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know,” Sullivan writes. “As humans we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face,” he argues. So politics should be about acknowledging what we don’t know, and being cautious in what we think we can achieve.

His first great guide is Montaigne, who wrote, Sullivan notes, that God is incomprehensible and that everything we think we know about him is a projection of ourselves. We need to acknowledge that he and his truth are beyond our categories.

Sullivan’s next guide is Michael Oakeshott, the great British philosopher, who brilliantly exposed the limits of rationalism. As Sullivan says, “There is no way, Oakeshott argues, to generate a personal moral life from a book, a text, a theory. We live the way we have grown accustomed to live. Our morality is like a language we have learned and deploy in every new instant.”

Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in this view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one’s balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths.

Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.

In the Land of the Taliban

Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

Screenhunter_3_14One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.

He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday. Pakistan’s religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him safe. With us was Abdul Baqi’s mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing Taliban finances and arranging logistics. He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. “I just tell the border guards that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment,” he told me.

More here.

Get ready for some Chinese novels

Olivia Wu in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Dd_chinabook_wuWhen Fan Wu was feverishly tapping out her first novel in San Jose four years ago, she did not imagine she would star in the launch of a major publishing house. At the 13th Annual Beijing Book Fair, Macmillan Press announced the formation of Picador Asia, its newest imprint dedicated to the Asia Pacific region — the only Asian list created by a mainstream English language publisher — and brought out its first book, “February Flowers,” by Chinese-born Wu. Wu (no relation to this reporter) wrote the novel in English partly to challenge herself in her second language.

Publishers from around the world arrived at the book fair, one of the major publishing events in China, earlier this month to search for, develop and publish Chinese writers. Major houses, such as Penguin and HarperCollins, continued to press forward with translations of English classics into Chinese and emphasis on children’s books. More than 4,000 local and international publishers turned up.

Many consider the greatest loophole in Chinese-English publishing efforts to be contemporary Chinese voices in English.

More here.

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles reviews The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen, in American Scientist:

Darwin_8Since the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, interest in Darwin’s life has waned and eventually waxed, especially after the publication in the last 20 years of his private notebooks and correspondence. Several excellent biographers have used these materials to inform us about the great scientist’s thought processes and to examine details of his everyday life.

Yet even with this new information, Darwin’s behavior is still puzzling. He ached for recognition from his scientific peers, but, as David Quammen suggests with his title—The Reluctant Mr. Darwin—Darwin postponed publishing the very theory he wanted recognition for discovering.

A prize-winning science journalist, Quammen credits the recent biographers, acknowledging that his concise book is not based on original research. He has written a kind of extended essay for those not familiar with Darwin’s life after his famous journey on HMS Beagle or with the truly radical implications of natural selection—the mechanism of evolution Darwin wanted, but also feared, to reveal. To explain this reluctance to publish, Quammen concentrates on Darwin’s intellectual and emotional life beginning in 1837, soon after he returned from five years at sea, setting Darwin in the context of the political, economic and scientific forces then shaping England.

More here.

aquaman, KING OF THE SEVEN SEAS has fuckin had it with you man

Aquaman

First off, I don’t talk to them. OK?

That’s, like, the first thing. Let’s start there.

It’s not like I’m all, Hey, Peter Pufferfish, what’s up? and he’s all, Yo, nothing much, brah.

It doesn’t work like that, all right? I mean, most of them don’t even have brains, for one thing. They have maybe a bump at one end of their spinal cord, a pimply little swelling of ganglia, if they’re lucky.

Language is not a looming issue, is what I’m saying.

No, how it works is: I command them. Period, the end. Command, as in bend them to, you know, my will and whatnot. Fuckin’ A.

more from McSweeney’s here.