Myths of the American Revolution

From The Smithsonian:

War We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history. Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War are reassessed.

I. Great Britain Did Not Know What It Was Getting Into

In the course of England’s long and unsuccessful attempt to crush the American Revolution, the myth arose that its government, under Prime Minister Frederick, Lord North, had acted in haste. Accusations circulating at the time—later to become conventional wisdom—held that the nation’s political leaders had failed to comprehend the gravity of the challenge. Actually, the British cabinet, made up of nearly a score of ministers, first considered resorting to military might as early as January 1774, when word of the Boston Tea Party reached London. (Recall that on December 16, 1773, protesters had boarded British vessels in Boston Harbor and destroyed cargoes of tea, rather than pay a tax imposed by Parliament.) Contrary to popular belief both then and now, Lord North’s government did not respond impulsively to the news. Throughout early 1774, the prime minister and his cabinet engaged in lengthy debate on whether coercive actions would lead to war. A second question was considered as well: Could Britain win such a war?

More here.

The Science Wars Redux

Fifteen years after the Sokal Hoax, attacks on “objective knowledge” that were once the province of the left have been taken up by the right.

Michael Bérubé in Democracy:

What, you ask, was the Sokal Hoax? While I was chatting with my colleagues at the Postmodern Science Forum, New York University physicist Alan Sokal, having read Higher Superstition, decided to try an experiment. He painstakingly composed an essay full of (a) flattering references to science-studies scholars such as Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, (b) howler-quality demonstrations of scientific illiteracy, (c) flattering citations of other science-studies scholars who themselves had demonstrated howler-quality scientific illiteracy, (d) questionable-to-insane propositions about the nature of the physical world, (e) snippets of fashionable theoretical jargon from various humanities disciplines, and (f) a bunch of stuff from Bohr and Heisenberg, drawing object lessons from the uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics. He then placed a big red bow on the package, titling the essay “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The result was a very weird essay, a heady mix–and a shot heard ’round the world. For Sokal decided to submit it to the journal Social Text, where it wound up in a special issue edited by Ross and Aronowitz on . . . the “Science Wars.” Yes, that’s right: Social Text accepted an essay chock-full of nonsense and proceeded to publish it in a special issue that was designed to answer the critics of science studies–especially, but not exclusively, Gross and Levitt. It was more than a great hoax on Sokal’s part; it was also, on the part of Social Text, one of the great own-foot-shootings in the history of self-inflicted injury.

More here.

Metaphysics, history and a hermaphrodite

Shabnam Mahmood interviews H. M. Naqvi for the BBC:

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the DSC Prize?

_50420811_processed-0028 It feels wonderful – I have been writing since the age of five and will continue to do so until I die. Although it's lovely to be acknowledged, I write because it allays my anxiety. I write 300 words of prose a day so I can contend with myself. I guess my reasons for writing are very personal.

Homeboy is your debut novel – tell us a bit about the story?

It's based around three Pakistanis from different regions of the country. It's set post 9/11 because I wanted to write about the changes in the US after the attack on the twin towers. The events take you from Karachi to New York. It's a coming of age story of a young male trying to blend into a new and different world – a world removed from his life in Karachi. So it deals with grave issues yet there are comedic elements to it. The idea was to fuse different genres and styles so there's Punjabi, there's Yiddish, Spanish and even Urdu in the texture of the language.

Is your own personality reflected in this novel?

I think all novels, especially debut novels, are autobiographical. I was in America in the wake of the tragedy. It was an unsettled time. And as a writer, one writes to make sense of one's self and the world. But Homeboy is not a memoir. It is fiction, a permutation of reality. If I am compelled to assign a percentage to the autobiographical component of Homeboy, it would be 14%.

I like to think the three main characters are facets of my persona. At the same time, they are amalgams of people I know, people I care about. I could conceivably introduce you to AC [character in Homeboy], who in the flesh is also larger than life.

More here.

The Holocaust We Don’t See: Lanzmann’s Shoah Revisited

Shoah_jpg_470x367_q85More on Shoah 25 years later by Timothy Snyder in the New York Review blog:

Lanzmann’s aim was to bring the viewer into contact with the seemingly impossible, the unqualified nothingness of mass death, which he called, in a term that is inextricable from Sartre, “le néant.” During the last quarter century, libraries and archives have paid homage to his film by collecting or recording tens of thousands of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. These are a precious record of individual lives and a valuable bulwark against forgetting, but they present difficulties as material for historians. Very few of them have been transcribed, and watching them all is simply impossible.

The leap to the visual has temporal costs for students of the Holocaust, of which the nine hours of Shoah are only a small taste; the written word has its advantages as a medium, and history (and so perhaps memory) depends upon it. Lanzmann’s marvelous work of research and selection leaves us with scenes around which the memory of the Holocaust has been framed: the former SS-man Franz Suchomel recalling Treblinka to the hidden camera, the calm mien of Treblinka survivor Richard Glazar as he describes the death facility, the Polish railway engineer Henryk Gawkowski’s gesture of a finger across the throat. The hundreds of thousands of hours of Holocaust video testimonies that we now have, precious though each of them is, are not arranged with such artistry and will never be edited with such skill. It is to be hoped that a benefactor will appear who will fund a team of historians, translators, and lawyers to select, transcribe and annotate some of this priceless material. This would add much to the value of the indexes and finding aides already compiled with much labor.

In Shoah, Lanzmann pays tribute to history in his conversations with Raul Hilberg, the man who wrote the first serious scholarly study of the Holocaust. We are reminded, watching Hilberg speak, of his heroic empiricism, his ability to confirm mass killing on the basis (for example) of records of one-way conveyance by rail. Yet between the scholarship of an extremely cautious institutional historian such as Hilberg and Lanzmann’s visual reconstruction of the Holocaust lies a world of valuable written material about the lives and deaths of Jews—much of it, twenty-five years later, still little used.

The Politics Behind Julian Assange’s Arrest

232px-Naomi_Wolf_at_the_Brooklyn_Book_Festival Amanda Marcotte has noted that we should be able to entertain multiple ideas at once. a) Julian Assange does great work fighting government secrecy; b) He is facing some serious allegations of sexual misconduct for which he deserves a fair trial; c) There are reasons to worry that justice has been politicized; d) It's even possible, though as yet unproven, that Assange's enemies somehow contrived to get him charged; e) Even if the charges are politically motivated, it doesn't necessarily mean they are unfounded. Naomi Wolf suggests reasons to believe that the charges are politically motivated (photo from Wikipedia):

As I have been making the case on media outlets in the past few days that the British and Swedish sex crime charges related actions against Julian Assange are so extraordinarily and unprecedentedly severe — compared to how prosecutors always treat far more cut-and-dry allegations than those in question in this case worldwide, including in the Scandinavian countries, and that thus the pretext of using these charges against Assange is a pimping of feminism by the State and an insult to rape victims — I have found myself up against a bizarre fantasy in the minds of my (mostly male) debating opponents.

The fantasy is that somehow this treatment — a global manhunt, solitary confinement in the Victorian cell that drove Oscar Wilde to suicidal despair within a matter of days, and now a bracelet tracking his movements — is not atypical, because somehow Sweden must be a progressively hot-blooded but still progressively post-feminist paradise for sexual norms in which any woman in any context can bring the full force of the law against any man who oversteps any sexual boundary.

Well, I was in Norway in March of this year at a global gathering for women leaders on International Women's Day, and heard extensively from specialists in sex crime and victims' rights in Sweden. So I knew this position taken by the male-dominated US, British and Swedish media was, basically, horsesh-t. But none of the media outlets hyperventilating now about how this global-manhunt/Bourne-identity-chase-scene-level treatment of a sex crime allegation originating in Sweden must be 'normative' has bothered to do any actual reporting of how rape — let alone the far more ambiguous charges of Assange's accusers, which are not charges of rape but of a category called 'sex by surprise,' which has no analog elsewhere — is actually prosecuted in Sweden.

Guess what: Sweden has HIGHER rates of rape than other comparable countries — including higher than the US and Britain, higher than Denmark and Finland — and the same Swedish authorities going after Assange do a worse job prosecuting reported rapes than do police and the judiciary in any comparable country. And these are flat-out, unambiguous reported rape cases, not the 'sex by surprise' Assange charges involving situations that began consensually.

Indeed, the Swedish authorities — who are now being depicted as global feminist sex-crime-avenger superheroes in blue capes — were shamed by a 2008 Amnesty International report, “Case Closed”, as being far more dismissive of rape, and far more insulting to rape victims who can be portrayed as 'asking for it' by drinking or any kind of sexual ambiguity — than any other country in their comparison group.

Bella Akhmadulina, Bold Voice in Russian Poetry, Dies at 73

30akhmadulina1-articleInline I missed this a couple of weeks ago. William Grimes in the NYT:

Bella Akhmadulina, a poet whose startling images and intensely personal style, couched in classical verse forms, established her as one of the Soviet Union’s leading literary talents, died on Monday at her home in Peredelkino, outside Moscow. She was 73.

Her death was reported by the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, which quoted her husband, Boris Messerer, as saying that she had had a heart attack.

Ms. Akhmadulina came to prominence during the post-Stalin thaw, when a loosening of censorship led to a flowering of the arts. Along with the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko (her first husband) and Andrei Voznesensky, she became one of the bold new voices in contemporary Russian literature, attracting ecstatic audiences of thousands to readings at concert halls and stadiums.

Her poetry was resolutely apolitical, making her a target of official criticism. Her early poems, usually in rhymed quatrains, offered random observations on everyday life — buying soda from a vending machine, coming down with the flu — in dense, allusive language enriched by coined words and archaisms. A sprightly sense of humor and an audacious way with images marked her from the outset as a distinctive talent.

“More and more severely the shivering/Lashed me, drove sharp, small nails into my skin,” she wrote in one of her most famous poems, “A Chill” (sometimes translated as “Fever”). “It was like a hard rain pelting/An aspen and scourging all its leaves.”

Later, she turned to longer forms in works like “My Genealogy” and “Tale About the Rain,” both published in the collection “Music Lessons” (1969), or short poems laced into a sequence, notably in the collections “The Secret” (1983) and “The Garden” (1987).

Her themes, as she matured, became more philosophical, even religious, or they dwelled on the nature of poetic language. “O magic theater of a poem,/spoil yourself, wrap up in sleepy velvet./I don’t matter,” she wrote in one characteristic verse.

Although apolitical as a poet, she openly supported persecuted writers like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and political dissidents like Andrei D. Sakharov. In 1979, she fell out of favor by contributing a short story to Vasily Aksyonov’s unofficial collection Metropol, a transgression that froze her already chilly relations with the government.

Despite her shaky official reputation, she was always recognized as one of the Soviet Union’s literary treasures and a classic poet in the long line extending from Lermontov and Pushkin.

ever-spawning copies of the universe

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QUANTUM MECHANICS (hereinafter QM) is famously odd. As Peter Byrne notes in this book: ‘A century has passed since Max Planck and Albert Einstein discovered the quantum world. The basic quantum paradoxes — uncertainty, non-locality, and the measurement problem — are either unsolved or remain highly contentious.’ The measurement problem is especially knotty. Down in the subatomic realm, each of the particles that constitute matter is smeared out over a volume of space in a manner described mathematically by a “wave function.” When an observer interacts with this wave function by taking a measurement, the wave function suddenly manifests as a particle with a position and speed to which numbers can be assigned. It ceases to be a quantum-mechanical phenomenon and becomes a “classical” one. This seems to give the observer’s consciousness a privileged position in our description of the world. As well as making physicists deeply uncomfortable, this state of affairs raises difficult philosophical problems. Does QM describe all of reality? Including the observer?

more from John Derbyshire at The Fortnightly Review here.

the rigging crew

Image

Detroit is a union town, but anti-union feeling of this kind (unions organize precisely to get stamped guarantees, after all) is not uncommon. Pro-union and anti-union members of the working class can be as difficult to distinguish, for those who haven’t made a study of the schism, as Shia and Sunni. Unless there’s an obvious giveaway—a UAW jacket or bumper sticker or, as in Duane’s case, a T-shirt that said “Proud to Be Union Free”—there’s typically no outward tell. They live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same churches, share similar conceptions of the good life. Many people unconvinced that unions are an unqualified plus still drive American cars, since love of country trumps any competing dislike. Such folks are often called Reagan Democrats, a term that would make more descriptive sense if they hadn’t also been Bush Democrats, Dole Democrats, Bush II Democrats, and, later, McCain Democrats, by which point it’s both easier and more accurate to call them what they are, which is Republicans. Though I vote with the unions, I find Duane’s philosophy attractive. As approaches to life go, “Now I gotta learn how to build machines” has much to recommend it. It neatly distills working-class self-reliance, a virtue that unions, by their collective nature, can’t, or don’t, particularly encourage. Self-reliant should not be confused with stoic, by the way. You don’t have to be stoic to be working-class; you can complain without ceasing so long as you do so without whining.

more from Paul Clemens at n+1 here.

‘quashed quotatoes’ and ‘messes of mottage’

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Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet’. Joyce, however, said in 1927, some five years into the writing of his last novel, that he hadn’t read Carroll until a friend ‘gave me a book, not Alice, a few weeks ago – though, of course, I heard bits and scraps’. The letter is dated 1627, so there may be a joke here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe this. I will read them both when I get back.’ James Atherton, from whose admirable work The Books at the Wake I have taken these and other details, thinks the book given to Joyce was Sylvie and Bruno, and adds that Joyce promptly ‘began to study the Alice books and Collingwood’s Life’.

more from Michael Wood at the LRB here.

Wednesday Poem

The Nature of Words

Except for the order to which they belong,
I do not know the names of the butterflies I follow.
Some words like Lepidoptera delight by their flutter
Demulcent, evanescent, ephemeral, fenestration, moraine.
I do not pin them down or make demands

If I find a word to love, I explore with drunken wonder
Under the covers the convolutions of its typography.
If I am a lover of words, are words my lovers?
Lenticular, gravisphere, arête, paternoster lake.

Who am I with this one? Do I associate with another?
With some, I procreate, turning tender thoughts their way,
Giving birth in springwater. But words can be undisciplined.
Perhaps not innately bad but brought up to slip one by.
Split estate, water rights, the elk harvest in the fall.
Blame their fathers, who act without shame.

They engineer the tongue to click, to claim
through contrivance, to make it stick. Question these words,
call them into account, bust the teeth of despotic jaw
Eminent domain, terrorist threat, hegemony, original sin.
Codified perception is the jail of tiny laws.

by Chavawn Kelley
from You Are Here, 2010

Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction?

From The Guardian:

Lisbeth-Salander-Noomi-Ra-006 On my way back to London the other day, I was clawing my way toward the buffet car when I noticed with a shock that more or less the entire train carriage was reading… novels. This cheered me up immensely: partly because I have begun to fear that we are living in some kind of Cowellian nightmare, and partly because I make a good part of my living writing them. Where were the Heats and the Closers, I wondered? The Maxims and the Cosmos? Where the iPads, the iPhones, the Blackberrys and the Game Boys, the Dingoos and the Zunes? Why neither the ding of texts, nor the dong of mail? Barely anyone was even on the phone, for Christ's sake. They were all reading. Quietly, attentively, reading.

My cheer modulated into something, well, less cheerful (but still quite cheerful) when I realised that they were all, in fact, reading the same book. Yes, you've guessed it: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo who Played With Fire and who, some time later we are led to believe, Kicked the Hornet's Nest. In the next three carriages it was the same story – men, women, toddlers. A glance out of the window revealed that even the cows were at it – nose deep, hay forgotten. And when, finally, I arrived at the buffet car, I was greeted with a sigh and a how-dare-you raise of the eyebrows. Why? Because in order to effectively conjure my cup of lactescent silt into existence, the barrista in question would have to put down his… Stieg Larsson.

In terms of sales, 2010 has been the year of the Larsson. Again. His three books have been the three bestselling fiction titles on Amazon UK. Along with Dan Brown, he has conquered the world.

More here.

Tired bees make poor dancers

From Nature:

Bees We all struggle to communicate after a sleepless night, let alone pull off our best dance moves, and it seems that honeybees are no different. Sleep-deprived bees are less proficient than their well-rested hive mates at indicating the location of a food source to other members of the colony by waggle dancing — the figure-of-eight dance used to communicate the quality and location of nectar supplies to the hive — according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Like all animals, European honeybees (Apis mellifera) rely on a sleep-like state of inactivity to survive — but sleep in insects and the effects of sleep deprivation on their behaviour are poorly understood.

Barrett Klein, who led the study as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, says that sleep deprivation could conceivably affect bees when hives are invaded by predators or parasites, when apiculturists transport colonies over long distances, or as an everyday consequence of the busy nature of hives. “Bees bustle around, frequently bumping into each other,” he says. “It's also possible that sleep deprivation could exacerbate colony collapse disorder,” he adds, referring to recent alarming declines in bee populations worldwide, “although this hasn't been tested.”

More here.

3QD Politics Prize 2010 Finalists

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Mr. Lewis H. Lapham, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

  1. TOP_Quark_Finalist_Politics 3 Quarks Daily, The Trappers and the Trapped
  2. Huffington Post, The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir
  3. Huffington Post, Haiti's Political and Economic Earthquake “Made in the USA”
  4. Muhammad Cohen, Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks
  5. Paul Street’s Blog, A Comeback for Chattel Slavery? Remarkable Revelations from a Top Obama Aide
  6. Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
  7. The Heart of the Matter, It's Just a Leak
  8. The Philosopher's Beard, Politics: Can't Someone Else Do It?
  9. Zunguzungu, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

We'll announce the three winners on December 21, 2010.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

How Can Anyone Defend Kissinger Now?

101213_FW_HenryKissinger_TN Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized, and excluded. No more dinners in his honor; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last. (Click here to listen to the conversation; the offending section begins at 13:56.)

Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

(One has to love that uneasy afterthought …)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon's psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he'd be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It's hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It's actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger—normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing—going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

After I published my book calling for his indictment, many of Kissinger's apologists said that, rough though his methods might have been, they were at least directed at defeating Communism. I never quite saw how the genocide in East Timor, say, had any effect in eroding the Berlin Wall. But I also pointed out that Kissinger did many favors for the heirs of Stalin and Mao: telling President Gerald Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House, for example, and making lavish excuses for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. He is that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism.

Needed: An Economics for Grownups

Over at The National Review, Matthew Shaffer interviews Deirdre McCloskey:

Shaffer: Before Bourgeois Dignity you wrote The Bourgeois Virtues. Do you think our debt-ridden culture is a manifestation of a decline in the bourgeois virtues, or is that just romantic nonsense?

McCloskey: Conservative romantic nonsense, similar to the cries in the 18th century that commerce would corrupt the Spartan virtues. Dr. Johnson, who was a conservative but no sort of romantic, said in 1778, “Depend upon it, sir, every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.” And the blessed David Hume had said in 1742, “Nor is a porter less greedy of money, which he spends on bacon and brandy, than a courtier, who purchases champagne and ortolans [little songbirds rated a delicacy]. Riches are valuable at all times, and to all men.” Of course.

There’s a progressive version of the nonsense, the complaining about “consumerism.”

A more up-to-date reply is that so long as various Oriental protectionists (in the 1970s it was the Japanese, not the Chinese) are so foolish as to send Americans TV sets and hammers and so forth in exchange for IOUs and green pieces of paper engraved with American heroes, wonderful. Would you personally turn down such a deal? If your personal checks circulated as currency, and the grocer was willing to give you tons of groceries in exchange for eventually depreciated Matt-dollars, wouldn’t you go for it? I would, and drink champagne.

Shaffer: Do you think bourgeois virtues can be inculcated by public institutions, including schools?

McCloskey: The merchant academies of England in the 17th and 18th centuries raised up prudent bourgeois boys (they were mostly excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because many of the merchant families were not conforming members of the Church of England). The universities in Scotland had teachers like Adam Smith, and raised up boys (they were very young in Scotland) who admired commerce. Our culture, so corrupt and so little reflecting the classical virtues in the eyes of conservatives like Allan Bloom, admires innovation extravagantly in its rock music and its movies and its ethernet. It’s innovation, not respect for hierarchy or love of military glory, that makes for a successful society.

Against Literary Darwinism

Kramnick_pic Jonathan Kramnick in Critical Inquiry:

Literary Darwinism promises to show that literature played an important role in the evolution of the species, but what adaptive function could be served by bare themes, by subject matter as such? Failing to describe how “the adapted mind produces literature,” literary Darwinism often falls back on more general and even genteel notions of improvement (LD, p. xii). The move has a certain logic. Literary Darwinism has a difficult time finding a place for literary forms in the story of adaptation under selection pressure. At the same time, it is committed to the proposition that literature must have helped us to become the species we are. The result of this curious imbalance is that literature simply is about who we are in a relatively straightforward and uplifting sense. Literary texts provide “lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them.”77 There is something tender-hearted in this bid for the function of literature to create “healthy human possibility” (LD, p. 68). It exchanges a hardheaded naturalism for mushier notions of moral cultivation. and strikes an ethical note reminiscent of F. R. Leavis. But surely this is a most remarkable turn of events. Casting about for a function specific to literature, the friends of adaptation seem to settle for it making us better, more decent, or more complete human beings (see LD, p. 68). Yet value-laden ideas like complete humanity have no meaning in the terms of evolutionary or any other science and tell us very little about any cultural artifact. And this is precisely my point. With the turn to a kind of pabulum, Darwinian criticism seems not very scientific at all.

the roads of Guatemala

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The roads of Guatemala have always been its best and worst theatre. Beautiful dirt roads leading to a vast green nowhere. Old gravel roads winding up active volcanoes, around rivers and lakes, through screaming jungles. Long, eternal roads whose ends dip into two great oceans. City roads that are barely paved, barely straight and barely navigable. A few years ago, after spending some time in Spain, I finally moved back to Guatemala and was struck when friends and family members gave me the same piece of advice. Don’t honk your horn at another car, don’t overtake another car, don’t dare raise your headlights at another car. Why? On several occasions I forgot this advice and was then able to confirm its gloomy wisdom. Once I was chased fiercely for ten or fifteen minutes, until my pursuer either got tired or grew bored. Still another time, and without me ever knowing why, an elderly woman drove for a few blocks right next to my car, screaming and insulting me with the most lavish vocabulary I’d ever heard. Another time a man pulled up beside me at a red light and proceeded to show me, all the while smiling, his handgun.

more from Eduardo Halfon at Granta here.