From CBC News:

“Infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual,” the Yale University psychology researchers report in the edition of Nature to be published Thursday.

“The findings reported here constitute the first evidence that young infants’ social preferences are influenced by others’ behaviour towards unrelated third parties,” they say. The findings show humans make social evaluations at a much younger age than previously thought.

Kiley Hamlin and colleagues tested groups of babies, either six or 10 months old, to see how they evaluated individuals based on how the individuals acted toward others.

More here.

Speaking of populism, Abbas Milani looks at Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the Boston Review:

The regime in Iran today is deeply divided, and tensions between different factions have recently intensified. Moreover, of the two-dozen clerics who have dominated Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, the youngest are septuagenarians. The “spiritual leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, is known to suffer from cancer, and there is no clear heir apparent to his mantle. Many of the younger clerics in Iran, particularly among the advocates of Ayatollah Sistani’s quietist version of Shi’ism, have been more openly critical of the regime’s interpretation of Shi’ism. According to the quietist school, an Islamic government is a government of god on earth; obeying its words and commands is incumbent on all citizens and leaves no room for error. Until the “return” of the twelfth Imam, then, no such government can be created. In the meantime, according to Ayatollah Sistani and others in this school, the duty of the clergy is simply to supervise the moral life of the flock. This view is in direct conflict with Ayatollah Khomeini’s activist version of Shi’ism, which holds that the clergy can and must seize power any time the opportunity avails itself.

An even larger number of those working with the regime, particularly among the thousands of often-Western-educated mid-level managers, are increasingly aware that the status quo is untenable. As the economy continues to falter, and as radicals like Ahmadinejad seek more stringent enforcement of Islamic laws—by, for example, charging more than 160,000 women in the past two months of being insufficiently veiled—it is easy to imagine the emergence of a grand coalition, consisting of technocrats within and outside the regime, disgruntled reformists, quietist clerics, members of the Iranian private sector, women demanding equality, students, democratic parties, and labor unions, all willing to compromise in favor of a better society. That coalition, joined by Iran’s civil society organizations and even members of the Diaspora, could come together on a program of building a more democratic republic, free of the despotic power of the guardian-jurist. Prudent U.S. policy—principled, unconditional negotiations with the regime in Tehran on all outstanding issues, and continuing insistence on the democratic and human rights of the Iranian people—can help expedite the formation of such a coalition.

“A spectre is haunting the world: populism. A decade ago, when the new nations were emerging into independence, the question asked was: how many will go Communist? Today, this question, so plausible then, sounds a little out of date. In as far as the rulers of the new states embrace an ideology, it tends more to have a populist character.”[1] This observation was made by Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner forty years ago. A period of time long enough for “populism” first to disappear and then to re-emerge as the global phenomenon it is today. Now, like then, the significance of populism cannot be doubted, though now, like then, it is unclear just what populism is.

On the one hand, the concept of “populism” goes back to the American farmers’ protest movement at the end of the nineteenth century; on the other, to Russia’s narodniki around the same period.

more from Eurozine here.

Scott Atran at Edge:

More here.

Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:

Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air. Morning and evening its one soak and the sun’s more or less a sponge, and lately comes up frozen quite stiff.

This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words so that the stretched perception is completed.

more from the LRB here.

Crime fiction flourishes in hard times. The fiction reflects the times, and the times color the fiction. There is a rawness in the pulp stories, even those by “literary” writers such as Chandler and Hammett, that is not due entirely to the exigencies of the marketplace. At their best, and even, perhaps, at their worst, these yarns express something of the unforgiving harshness and dauntless optimism of life in America in the decades between the wars. Of course, the plots are almost uniformly absurd. As Penzler writes:

It was a black-and-white world in the pulps, a simple conflict between the forces of goodness and virtue and those who sought to plunder, harm, and kill the innocent. In the pages of the pulps, and between the covers of this book, Good is triumphant over Evil. Perhaps that is the key to the enormous popularity they enjoyed for so many years.

Who can wonder at such popularity, given the low, dishonest decades in which the pulps sold by the millions?

more from Bookforum here.

From Edge:

While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That’s the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)

What Are You Optimistic About? Why?

Richard Dawkins:

I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein’s dream and discover the final theory of everything before superior creatures, evolved on another world, make contact and tell us the answer. I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem. I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that’s in it including ourselves. And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.

More here.

From The Guardian:

On the morning of March 11 2004, as thousands of commuters made their way to work, 10 bombs packed with nails and dynamite exploded on four trains heading into central Madrid. The blasts killed 191 people and injured nearly 1,800. It was the worst Islamist terrorist attack in European history. Clara Escribano, who was travelling to work when her train was torn apart in one of the attacks, still lives with the memory. “I have a film of that day constantly playing in my head,” she said. “I still haven’t been able to get on a train. In fact, I cannot even walk on the same side of the road as the station where I got on the train.”

The events of 11-M, as the attacks are known in Spain, initially divided the country along political lines. The bombings were carried out just three days before a general election, which saw the incumbent conservative Popular party (PP) of José María Aznar defeated by the Socialist PSOE led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. From the moment the attacks took place, the PP argued that they were the work of the Basque separatist group Eta; Mr Aznar went so far as to phone national newspaper editors, assuring them this was the case. Despite evidence soon emerging of a van containing detonators linked to the attacks and a recording of verses from the Qur’an, the PP stuck to its line.

More here.

Saul Smilansky, author of 10 Moral Paradoxes, over at Ethics Etc.:

While each of the questions of my four previous posts in this series could be answered fairly decisively, this question is naturally more open. So I will be able to give only some indication as to why moral paradoxes matter, and why investigating them further should be worthwhile. But there is another reason why it is difficult to speak here with confidence: moral paradoxes, in the strict sense (as we explicated their nature in the first post) have been almost completely neglected. To the best of my knowledge, my recent book 10 MORAL PARADOXES is only the third book ever on this topic, at least within analytic philosophy (the predecessors, in a broad sense, being Derek Parfit’s REASONS AND PERSONS which introduces various paradoxes, and the late Gregory Kavka’s MORAL PARADOXES OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE; both of them from the 1980s).

The neglect of moral paradoxes is important, and seeing this will at once give us the first reply as to what moral paradoxes might be able to teach us. The importance of paradoxes in other areas of philosophy (epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of science and so on) is manifest, with hundreds of books and papers available and more coming out all the time. While there are many survey articles, special journal issues, and numerous collections of papers devoted to paradox in these areas, and indeed often to some individual paradoxes, there is nothing similar concerning moral paradoxes. So something very ODD is going on here: either moral paradoxes are just as important within morality as logical or epistemic paradoxes are to philosophical logic and epistemology – in which case, the neglect of moral paradoxes is outrageous.

Tony Judt in the NYRB:

We live in an economic age. For two centuries following the French Revolution, Western political life was dominated by a struggle pitting left against right: “progressives”—whether liberal or socialist—against their conservative opponents. Until recently these ideological frames of reference were still very much alive and determined the rhetoric if not the reality of public choice. But in the course of the past generation the terms of political exchange have altered beyond recognition. Whatever remained of the reassuring fatalism of the old left narrative —the inspiring conviction that “History” was on your side—was buried after 1989 along with “real existing socialism.” The traditional political right suffered a related fate. From the 1830s through the 1970s, to be on the right meant opposing the left’s account of inevitable change and progress: “conservatives” conserved, “reactionaries” reacted. They were “counterrevolutionary.” Hitherto energized by its rejection of now-defunct progressive convictions, the political right today has also lost its bearings.

The new master narrative—the way we think of our world—has abandoned the social for the economic. It presumes an “integrated system of global capitalism,” economic growth, and productivity rather than class struggles, revolutions, and progress. Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, this story combines a claim about im-provement (“growth is good”) with an assumption about inevitability: globalization—or, for Robert Reich, “supercapitalism”—is a natural process, not a product of arbitrary human decisions. Where yesterday’s theorists of revolution rested their worldview upon the inevitability of radical social upheaval, today’s apostles of growth invoke the analogously ineluctable dynamic of global economic competition. Common to both is the confident identification of necessity in the present course of events. We are immured, in Emma Rothschild’s words, in an uncontested “society of universal commerce.” Or as Margaret Thatcher once summarized it: There Is No Alternative.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

[O]nce a devout Muslim, now an atheist and feminist firebrand, Hirsi Ali brooks no compromise with religion, religious-based customs or the notion of a community organized around religious identity. “Enlightenment fundamentalist” is a rather unfair term, actually: isn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment to rely on reason and empiricism, not, like fundamentalists, the revealed truth of a sacred text? As I said in my last column, I admire Hirsi Ali, despite her conservative associations (she’s a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) and lone-wolf style. Not every feminist has to be a social worker or a grassroots organizer. I’ll bet plenty of women, Muslim and not, have been given courage by her books and example. Just to speak out is a feminist act. Still, it’s probably the case that once you’ve described yourself as a nonbeliever, believers aren’t going to take your view of their faith too seriously: you’ve written yourself out of the story. This would be true even if you had an encyclopedic grasp of your religion, which Hirsi Ali does not.

Because he wants to see Muslim immigrants well integrated in a Europe that currently marginalizes them, [Ian] Buruma is interested in world-famous philosopher Tariq Ramadan, who says he wants to create a modern Islam, an Islam for Muslims in the West, an Islam that would provide an alternative to the jihadist fire-breathers attractive to the disaffected young. For his profile of Ramadan in The New York Times Magazine, Buruma was attacked at tremendous length and with staggering ferocity in The New Republic by Paul Berman, who thinks Ramadan is a dangerous apologist if not a covert jihadist. Certainly (as Buruma would agree) Ramadan is no friend of women’s rights. One of the more troubling charges against him is that he has called for a moratorium on stoning of unchaste women–not a ban. Ramadan justified his wording by arguing that Muslims wouldn’t accept a total ban. But somehow one expects a bit more leadership from the man who wants to guide millions of European Muslims–who don’t, after all, practice stoning. Buruma himself famously described Ramadan as a cultural conservative, the Muslim equivalent of Jerry Falwell on social issues. Beside the important question of whether Falwellian values are a good thing, there’s also the question of whether they make for the peaceful civic relations Buruma wants.

Every schoolchild in America knows the story of the original Thanksgiving. In 1621 in Plymouth, émigré English Calvinists struggled to make their way in the harsh climate of this New World. Wampanoag Indians helped them, teaching them to grow corn. In gratitude the Pilgrims invited the Native Americans to join in their harvest feast. On this secular holiday, with our extended families around us at the Thanksgiving table, we may be moved to give thanks not only for the feast but also for our families, our country, and our many other gifts.

But this modern version of Thanksgiving would horrify the devout Pilgrims and Puritans who sailed to America in the 17th century. The holiday that gave rise to Thanksgiving – a “public day” that they observed regularly – was almost the precise opposite of today’s celebration. It was not secular, but deeply religious. At its center was not an extravagant meal, but a long fast. And its chief concern was not bounty but redemption: to examine the faults in oneself – and one’s community – with an eye toward spiritual improvement.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Washington Post:

After decades of blissful ignorance, Americans have begun pondering how the food we consume each day arrives on our plates. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) forced readers to face the fact that our demand for a range of reasonably priced meats and produce comes with serious environmental consequences. Now two new books, Ann Vileisis’s Kitchen Literacy and Sarah Murray’s Moveable Feasts, give us even more reason to reevaluate the meals we take for granted. But they come to very different conclusions about whether to embrace or decry our increasingly complicated food web.

Kitchen Literacy chronicles how the growth of the increasingly complex food distribution system — railroads transporting animals and factories producing canned goods — eventually led consumers into a “covenant of ignorance” with supermarket chains, food manufacturers and advertising firms. All of them insisted that sleek packaging and catchy slogans mattered more than the traditional, hard-earned expertise homemakers had relied on for years.

More here.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

I recall very clearly sitting with a cup of coffee in upstate New York one morning last autumn, reading the now infamous section of the Martin Amis interview and thinking, “Where’s the punch line which turns it all on its head?” I scanned quickly through the rest of the article, then returned to the quote about Muslims, reading very slowly now, sure I’d missed the moment when Amis pronounced those awful views only in order to excoriate those who held them. When it became clear that, far from distancing himself from the views, he was attempting to implicate the wider world with the rhetorical use of “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it?” my first thought was to contact a newspaper in the UK and offer to write a heated response. But then, as I read the Amis article out to my roommate, and she (American and Jewish) responded with as much horror and disbelief as I (Pakistani and Muslim) had felt, I thought, it shouldn’t have to be me.

By which I meant, I was convinced that disgust for Amis’s remarks would be widespread enough in the UK that other British, non-Muslims – those implicated in the “don’t you have it?” line – would step forward and say, “No, I don’t, and it’s reprehensible that you do.” It would be a far stronger attack on him, I thought, to have someone other than a Muslim foreigner hold him to account. After all, of course I would object to him suggesting that I should be strip-searched, prevented from travelling, made to suffer for my failure to prevent Muslim boys from becoming suicide bombers (ah, Mr Amis, if only I had that power…).

More here.

Lessig’s TED talk:

First, the Saletan piece from Slate:

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t “the same as ours.” “Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” said the Federation of American Scientists. “Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,” declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.”

I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

More here.  And here’s Cosma:

William Saletan’s recent venture into demanding that we squarely face the harsh light of his pseudo-scientific prejudices is, in itself, intensely boring — we’ve played this scene over and over again — but becomes more interesting when we try to trace it back to causes, and then forward again to effects.

His writing the story may be explained in one of two ways.

1. He may be ignorant and stupid enough to be gulled by charltans like Rushton or Richard Lynn;
2. More charitably, he may not believe the bullshit himself, but may repeat it to his readers because he hopes that doing so advances some agenda of his own.

Now, William Saletan is a journalist. He is paid to write stories, in the belief that they will attract readers, who can then be advertised at. But his job, the reason why this would not be a purely exploitative manipulation of those readers, is that his stories ought to tell his readers things which will make them better informed about the world, better able to make their way through it. He has just demonstrated that he is either unable or unwilling to do his job. His readers might attempt to extract information from his words by undoing the distortions imposed by his folly and manipulations, but life is too short. His words are worth attending to only as specimens, rather than communications.

William Saletan is the national correspondent of Slate, and published this multi-part heap of rubbish there.

Update: See next post before complaining.

More here.  [Thanks to Ian McMeans.]

Jennifer Homans in The New Republic:

When Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961, he became a legend overnight. He was a great dancer; but he was also a Russian, our Russian, and the instant he threw himself into the arms of the French authorities and declared, in English, “I would like to stay in your country,” the cultural cold war seemed for a brief moment to have been won. If Nureyev himself appeared stunned by the international media blitz that followed, gazing glassy-eyed into the flashing cameras, he adapted quickly to his new role. And this was not the last time he would touch a cultural nerve: he went on to become an avatar of 1960s style; and an exemplar of the celebrated vanity of the 1970s “Me Generation”; and an unabashed homosexual and, sadly, a victim of AIDS, which killed him in 1993 at the age of fifty-four. He did all of this while dancing–not sexy cutting-edge works, but nineteenth-century Russian classics such as Swan Lake and Giselle. Nureyev was the most unlikely of creatures: a serious classical ballet dancer who was also an international pop superstar.

More here.

From the New York Sun:

We speak for a growing number of faculty members at Columbia University who believe that President Bollinger has failed to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom. Academic freedom lies at the heart of what we do as faculty members: teach, generate new knowledge, and sustain the critical capacities of the society at large. It encompasses, among other values, the autonomy of the University in the face of outside threats and pressures, a determining role for faculty in the governance of the University and especially in the shaping of its research and teaching programs, the insulation of tenure and promotion decisions from outside interests, and the creation of an environment that enables the fullest and freest exchange of ideas. The events of the past few years have created a crisis of confidence in the central administration’s willingness to defend these principles.

We note, in particular, the following issues:

1) In the face of considerable efforts by outside groups over the past few years to vilify members of the faculty and determine how controversial issues are taught on campus, the administration has failed to make unequivocally clear that such interventions will not be tolerated. When outside groups attempted to sway tenure decisions, the President of Barnard issued a forthright statement rejecting such efforts; the President of Columbia has failed to do so.

More here.  [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]

Pervez Hoodbhoy in the LA Times:

Why has Musharraf failed so dramatically to stop the insurgency? One reason is that most of the public is hostile to government action against the extremists (and the rest offer tepid support at best). Most Pakistanis see the militants as America’s enemy, not their own. The Taliban is perceived as the only group standing up against the unwelcome American presence in the region. Some forgive the Taliban’s excesses because it is cloaked in the garb of religion. Pakistan, they reason, was created for Islam, and the Taliban is merely asking for Pakistan to be more Islamic.

Even normally vocal, urban, educated Pakistanis — those whose values and lifestyles would make them eligible for decapitation if the Taliban were to succeed in taking the cities — are strangely silent. Why? Because they see Musharraf and the Pakistan army as unworthy of support, both for blocking the path to democracy and for secretly supporting the Taliban as a means of countering Indian influence in Afghanistan.

There is merit to this view. Army rule for 30 of Pakistan’s 60 years as a country has left a terrible legacy. The army is huge, well-equipped, armed now with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and has perhaps the world’s richest generals. Sitting or retired army officers govern provinces, run government agencies, administer universities, manage banks and make breakfast cereals.

Over at Infinite Thought, warning explicit images (via Crooked Timber):

What would humanist pornography look like? Chances are that even the most adamant defender of the charms of adult material would struggle to find much evidence of compassion or affection in today’s relentlessly lurid output. Contemporary pornography informs us of one thing above all else: sex is a type of work, just like any other. What matters most is quantity – the bigger the better. It is not for nothing that one of the most successful sex videos of all time, starring Annabel Chong, features 251 sex acts performed with approximately 70 men during a ten hour period. Contemporary pornography is realistic only in the sense that it sells back to us the very worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality.

The pornography industry itself is a veritable juggernaut, generating an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide. It makes more money than Hollywood and all major league sports put together. 300,000 internet sites are currently devoted to its propagation, and 200 new films are estimated to be made every week. Almost any genre and type of sexual taste is catered for, just so long as you aren’t looking for anything as recherché as sweetness or wit.

On one level, we might say, so what? Pornography serves a certain practical purpose, why expect anything more from it? If you want romance, go and read Mills and Boon! Alternatively, we might side with anti-pornography feminists and argue that the genre is so irredeemably associated with violence and misogyny that we should steer well clear of it, and perhaps even campaign for its abolition.

But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummelling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn’t always function and purr like a well-oiled machine?