Still, even if empirical methods enable us to understand subrational processes better, the crucial question is, How are we to use this kind of self-understanding? Brooks emphasizes the ways in which it can improve our prediction and control of what people will do, but I am asking something different. When we discover an unacknowledged influence on our conduct, what should be our critical response? About this question Brooks has essentially nothing to say. He gives lip-service to the idea that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement, and that reason has a role to play, but when he tries to explain what this means, he is reduced to a fashionable bromide about choosing the narrative we tell about our lives, “the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.” On what grounds are we supposed to “choose a narrative?” Experiments show that human beings feel greater sympathy for those who resemble them — racially, for example — than for those who do not. How do we know that it would be better to counter the effects of this bias rather than to respect it as a legitimate form of loyalty? The most plausible ground is the conscious and rational one that race is irrelevant to the badness of someone’s suffering, so these differential feelings, however natural, are a poor guide to how we should treat people. But reason is not Brooks’s thing: he prefers to quote a little Sunday school hymn about how Jesus loves the little children, “Be they yellow, black or white / they are precious in his sight.” This is an easy case, but harder ones also demand more reflection than he has time for. Brooks is right to insist that emotional ties, social interaction and the communal transmission of norms are essential in forming individuals for a decent life, and that habit, perception and instinct form a large part of the individual character. But there is moral and intellectual laziness in his sentimental devaluation of conscious reasoning, which is what we have to rely on when our emotions or our inherited norms give unclear or poorly grounded instructions.

more from Thomas Nagel at the NYT here.

Michelle Roberts at the BBC:

People living in England enjoy better health than Americans, despite less investment in healthcare, research published in the US has revealed.

Across all ages, US residents tend to fare worse in terms of diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease markers, data on over 100,000 people show.

The reason remains a mystery, says the US team, and challenges the idea that resources necessarily improve health.

It may be due to the UK's bigger drive on disease prevention, they say.

More here.

David Kroll in Take As Directed:

Today marks 12 years since you died.

Well, it might have been today, possibly yesterday, I hope not too many days ago.

You see, you died alone in your apartment you rented from your sister downstairs. Yet no one checked on you as your mail accumulated Monday and Tuesday. One of your drinking buddies from the Disabled American Veterans post told me proudly at your funeral that he probably had with you your last beer that Saturday night. So, maybe it was the 8th or 9th?

When I think back, though, I believe you died some eight years earlier, just after your 50th birthday party. For your wife, my Mom, it was even long before that – she is a saint for staying with you as long as she did – no offense, Dad – and I know she still loves you no matter what.

Our family runs rich with depression and alcoholism but you died exceptionally early; my Dad – the young, fit, handsome fella you were in those pictures with little me at the Jersey shore, at home, or with me in that horrible Easter outfit – had died back then and was replaced for the last eight, ten, fourteen years by someone else.

More here.

Overland to the Islands

Let's go—much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard. The
Mexican light on a day that
'smells like autumn in Connecticut'
makes iris ripples on his
black gleaming fur—and that too
is as one would desire—a radiance
consorting with the dance.
Under his feet
rocks and mud, his imagination, sniffing,
engaged in its perceptions—dancing
edgeways, there's nothing
the dog disdains on his way,
nevertheless he
keeps moving, changing
pace and approach but
not direction—'every step an arrival.'

by Denise Levertov
from Overland to the Islands
publisher: Jonathan Williams, 1958

From Guernica:

Questions concerning the ethical treatment of the dead have been with us at least since Sophocles, for whom a single act of leaving a corpse unburied brought mayhem that threatened the stability of society. In Antigone, the punishment King Creon gives to the murdered Polynices is so severe that it extends beyond the limits of life. According to Polynices’s sister Antigone, death is only the beginning of the torments a body can face: “As for the hapless corpse of Polynices, it has been published to the town that none shall entomb him or mourn, but leave him unwept, unsepulchred, a welcome store for the birds, as they espy him, to feast on at will.”

For Sophocles, to leave the dead unburied is an insult not just to the deceased or his family, but to the gods. That proper treatment should be given to human remains, Antigone insists, is among “the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven.” She defies the state and risks her life in the attempt to see these statutes carried out, and calls upon others to do the same, even asking her reluctant sister, “Will you aid this hand to lift the dead?”

More here.

From The New York Times:

When we meet Joshua Foer, his memory is “nothing special.” A year later, he is able to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than two minutes and the names of 99 people he’s just met. He has also etched in his brain images of his friend urinating on Pope Benedict’s skullcap, of Rhea Perlman involved in indelicate acts with Manute Bol, and of other things most of us would try hard to forget. Let it never be claimed that there is no cost to self-improvement.

A mere millennium ago, being able to remember and recite a text verbatim was not a game or a party trick. It was an art. More than that, it was part of being cultured: a person without memory was a person without ethics or humanity. Today, memorization is limited to Shakespeare monologues and Robert Frost poems in high school. Phone numbers and friends’ birthdays are “remembered” by cellphones and computers. Indeed, much of our daily memory has been offloaded onto external devices. The advantage to this is clear: information is portable and searchable, and not taking up valuable space in our noggins. Until you lose your iPhone.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our Arts & Literature prize (details here) is over. A total of 1,516 votes were cast for the 70 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Tolstoy Is My Cat: Flash Fiction: Snow
2. The Millions: Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction
3. The Millions: Brideshead Revisited
4. Jadaliyya: The Poetry of Revolt
5. Accidental Blogger: The Leopard _ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
6. Plum: Hair Myth
7. The Millions: Her Story Next to His: Beloved and The Odyssey
8. The Millions: Beyond Harry, Oz, and Narnia: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians
9. The Millions: On Bad Reviews
10. 3 Quarks Daily: New York’s Empire State of Mind: The Colonization of ‘Up’ Part I
11. The Millions: Chasing the Whale: Banksy, Obsession, and the Sea
12. Fernham: Pearls and Power
13. Stuck In A Book: Is there no balm in…
14. Millicent and Carla Fran: On The Face That Launched a Thousand Clicks, Or What The Social Network Isn’t About
15. Millicent and Carla Fran: Why Don't Women Submit?
16. 3 Quarks Daily: Joothan: A Dalit's Life
17. Chapati Mystery: The Stay-at-Home Man
18. M. A. Peel: Oh Frabjous Day: Woolverton's FanFic Love for Alice
19. Writing Without Paper: Consider the Pomegranate
20. The Millions: The Sorry State of the Rejection Letter

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists very soon to Laila Lalami. We will also post the list of finalists here then.

Good luck!

Abbas

Madhusree Mukerjee in Dissent:

ON CHRISTMAS Eve, 2010, an Indian court sentenced Binayak Sen, a doctor who has for decades given medical care to indigenous people in forests of central India, to life imprisonment for sedition and conspiracy. Sen’s real crime was to have investigated and publicized the forced expulsion, accompanied by killing, rape, torture, and house-burning, of about 350,000 aboriginal villagers in a state-sponsored campaign against Maoist guerillas. Months earlier, policemen had shot dead Maiost leader Cherukuri “Azad” Rajkumar, who had emerged from his jungle hideout to engage in peace talks with the Indian government; a journalist accompanying him was also killed. The close range from which the shots were fired point to murders in custody. (According the Asian Centre for Human Rights, the Indian administration reports the deaths, in police and judicial custody, of more than 1,500 prisoners each year, and the number has increased steeply in recent years.) In October 2009, when security forces razed the village of eighteen-month-old Katam Suresh, they chopped off three of his fingers and killed his mother, grandmother, grandfather, and eight-year-old aunt. His twenty-year-old father was saved by being away. But this January, possibly because their names had featured in a court petition filed by human rights workers, the boy and his father were taken away by the police. Both remain missing.

Why is the world’s largest democracy “killing its own children,” as a judge on India’s Supreme Court recently remarked? There are several answers, but when it comes to the jungles of central India, most observers point to a 2009 statement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: “if [Maoist] extremism continues to flourish in important parts of our country which have tremendous natural resources of minerals and other precious things, that will certainly affect the climate for investment.” Almost all of India’s Maoist guerillas are indigenous people who shelter in rugged terrain that is rich in minerals and water. As the state fights them back, it appears to be clearing the land of residents in order to access these resources—and motivating ever more of the dispossessed to join the insurgency in the process. The real reason behind India’s worsening human rights record could be the investment boom and resource rush that underpin its explosive economic growth.

Frances Fox Piven in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Most academics probably paid little attention at the end of January when Glenn Beck explained to his listeners that the protests in Egypt would lead to the establishment of a Muslim caliphate that would engulf Europe while China would extend its domination to New Zealand and, curiously, the Netherlands would fall to Russia. But there is a sense in which we should have.

Glenn Beck claims about two million daily viewers on his TV show, and that in addition to a three-hour radio program, best-selling books, and an Internet “news” site known as The Blaze. True, for more than a year his ratings have been falling from their peak of three million daily viewers. But millions continue to turn to this Fox News personality for an interpretation of their world, and the interpretation they get is lunacy.

Propaganda and its place in American politics is not my academic specialty. But I have been prodded to think about it a lot in recent months because I have been made into a central character in Beck's stories about the evils that have befallen America.

According to Beck, I—together with my husband, Richard Cloward, with whom I frequently collaborated before his death—am the proponent of a theory of “orchestrated crisis” that lies behind an array of threats to American society, including the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society, Acorn, George Soros and the Open Society Institute, the New York City fiscal crisis, the election of Barack Obama, and the recent financial meltdown.

The plan for all that is said to have been laid out in an article we published in The Nation magazine in 1966 and, according to right-wing blogs and those who post on them, the influence of our plan is evident everywhere in American politics and public policy, but especially in the Obama administration.

Online posters eagerly identify the connecting threads that depict me as puppet master: I taught at Columbia University when Obama was a student there, and I probably taught him. I spoke at a conference in the 1980s that he probably attended. I was on Obama's transition team. Obama's policies, and especially health-care reform, are obviously a plan to implement my crisis strategy.

None of that is true, of course. So what was this strategy that excites such paranoid imaginings?

John Holbo over at the Crooked Timber (which for a long time I have look at every morning before I look at the New York Times):

I’ve enjoyed the Kuhn’s Ashtray series (to which my attention was drawn by our Kieran). It has a lot of good points and I’m basically sympathetic to Morris’ skepticism about Kuhn; but, all the same, this may be the moment to nip a pernicious new literary sub-genre in the bud. Wittgenstein’s Poker. Kuhn’s Ashtray. The trope: philosopher reduced to inarticulacy by devastating objection exhibits instability of character by resorting to ineffective physical violence. What’s next? Kant’s Mustard Pestle? Hume’s Sock Full of Pennies? It’s funny until someone gets hurt.

More seriously, there is a problem in Morris’ series that you get a lot in popularizations of intellectual controversies, when you are trying to convey the gist of an allegedly devastating objection to someone’s position. In this case it goes like so: Kuhnian incommensurability is self-undermining. If the view makes sense, then the view says we can’t attain to the vantage point we would need to achieve the view, so it doesn’t make sense.

But a popular, simplified account of the anti-Kuhn argument shouldn’t make it sound as thought the popular, simplified version of the anti-Kuhn argument itself – as opposed to the more sophisticated thing it is simplified down from – is sufficient to knock the actual Kuhn, as opposed to the simplified-for-the-NY-Times Kuhn. It isn’t as though Kuhn had just never heard this objection, before a youthful Morris brought it up.

Of course, if someone threw an ashtray at my head, I might not be feeling intellectually charitable either.

There are stories about the rising jets of steam, that they are the ghosts of old Masai warriors trying to make their way to heaven, and being pulled back, by the gravity of hell. I heard them come in last night, the Masai moran, and their cattle. The strong smell of urine and dung flooded our house; and old throaty songs, and the cowbells. They sang the whole night, and for a while I could pretend that time had rolled back, and I sat among them, as a biblical nomad, or much as my great-grandparents would have. I decide to spend some days travelling around, to avoid my parents, to follow a road and think about things other than what is wrong with my life. What a wonderful thing, I think, if it was possible to spend my life inhabiting the shapes and sounds and patterns of other people.

more from Binyavanga Wainaina at Granta here.

One of the innumerable ways of differentiating large cities would be to divide them into the boastful and the conceited, in the certain knowledge that there isn’t a city in the world that doesn’t fit one of those two categories. It might seem, at first sight, that the categories are too alike, inhabit the same semantic area—that the frontier between them is too blurred and therefore pointless. For me, though, there is a big difference, which has to do above all with character, because ultimately it is character, far more than the look of a place or the customs of its inhabitants, that leaves its mark on you as visitor and stays with you when you leave. Boastful cities tend to be insecure, child-like, and chatty (even vociferous), unenigmatic and exhausting, impatient places eager for praise and in a hurry to captivate. If you don’t watch out, they’ll take you off on a tour, or plunge you into the hustle and bustle, and thus not allow you, as a visitor, to go poking around on your own account and at your own pace; they’ll try by every means possible, however disrespectful or loutish, to impose their own wishes on anyone who dares to tread their streets. In other words, they try to draw you in, to subdue and overwhelm you.

more from Javier Marías at Threepenny Review here.

One wishes only to celebrate the twin volumes of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and prose, published this year to mark the centenary of her birth. Bishop was one of the great artists of the twentieth century; her poems now tower over the landscape alongside those of Eliot and Stevens. Before her death in 1979, her sex and her distinctive tones of modesty and good humor may have misled all but her best readers into thinking of her as a minor poet. But by the mid-1980s, when her longtime editor Robert Giroux published the first comprehensive volumes of her poetry and prose, the authority and scope of her work became fully apparent. Modesty and mastery went hand in hand; good humor was the useful conveyance of profound and often shattering wisdom. It is no exaggeration to say that her poems get larger and stranger and more overwhelming with every reading. But there is a vexing problem that these new editions raise. One might call it the new biographical fallacy, born of this age of too much information. If the old biographical fallacy was the use of the life of the artist to interpret the work, the new biographical fallacy results from the impulse to lumber an artist’s work with the detritus, literary and otherwise, of the artist’s life. Correspondence, diaries, jottings, drafts, interviews—the stuff of a life in letters—are piled up for consideration, not just in the relatively circumscribed and well-understood havens of biography or critical study, but in published volumes of what is called the author’s work.

more from April Bernard at the LRB here.

From Salon:

This week's recommendation must be delivered with a caveat: Brian Christian's “The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive,” is billed as an account of the author's participation in a Turing Test, but it's best enjoyed if you don't expect to read much about the test itself. A Turing Test — named for Alan Turing, the 20th-century mathematician who proposed it — asks a judge to converse with two unseen entities, a computer and a human being, then attempt to determine which is which. Turing estimated that by 2000 there would exist a computer sophisticated enough to pass itself off as a person in the course of a five-minute conversation. At that point, Turing contended, “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Christian played the piquant role of “confederate” in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, an annual Turing Test sponsored by an eccentric entrepreneur. His job was to seem more human than the computer software entered by the primary contestants, who are programmers. The prize money goes to the author of the most human-seeming chatbot, but there's also a citation for the confederate rated “most human” by the judges. “Most Human Human” was the title that Christian, a science writer and poet, coveted for himself.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Early comparisons with rats, mice, and other short-lived creatures confirmed the hunch. But now, the first-ever multi-species comparison of human aging patterns with those in chimps, gorillas, and other primates suggests the pace of human aging may not be so unique after all. The findings appear in the March 11 issue of Science. You don't need to read obituaries or sell life insurance to know that death and disease become more common as we transition from middle to old age. But scientists studying creatures from mice to fruit flies long assumed the aging clock ticked more slowly for humans.

We had good reason to think human aging was unique, said co-author Anne Bronikowski of Iowa State University. For one, humans live longer than many animals. There are some exceptions – parrots, seabirds, clams and tortoises can all outlive us – but humans stand out as the longest-lived primates. “Humans live for many more years past our reproductive prime,” Bronikowski said. “If we were like other mammals, we would start dying fairly rapidly after we reach mid-life. But we don't,” she explained.

More here.

Daniel Holz over at Cosmic Variance:

I’ve been on somewhat of an unintended hiatus for the past few months, as I try to wrap up some projects, and deal with a few other things in my life. However, I just read something that has given me a kick in the pants. And I don’t mean that in a good way. In late December there was an article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker titled “The truth wears off”. Much more suggestive was the subtitle, “Is there something wrong with the scientific method?”. The story discusses the “decline effect”: an article is published with startling results, and then subsequent work finds increasingly diminished evidence for the initial unexpected result. It’s as if there’s “cosmic habituation”, with the Universe conspiring to make a surprising result go away with time. The last paragraph sums things up:

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

I don’t particularly disagree with any of this. But it’s completely besides the point, and to untutored ears can be immensely misleading. The article is a perfect example of precisely the effect it seeks to describe (there must be a catchy word for this? Intellectual onomatopoeia?). The article gives a few examples of people finding interesting results, only to have them disappear on sustained scrutiny.

Stephen W. Smith in the LRB:

A number of memories connected with Rwanda play in my mind like scenes from a movie, although I don’t pretend they add up to a film. In 1994 a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand hills’, is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem with Rwanda is not only that opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence.

The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even so, he remains a spindly figure with a birdlike face. I can’t warm to him, but I know him well enough by now to hazard the question that has been preying on my mind for a while: ‘Why is it always you, the vice-president, whom I meet when I have dealings with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and not Alexis Kanyarengwe?’ Kanyarengwe was the movement’s president. ‘Don’t worry,’ he chuckles. ‘You’re seeing the boss. Kanyarengwe is only our front man. You’d be wasting your time.’

This was in 1992. The RPF had been set up in 1987 in Uganda by Tutsi exiles. Kagame’s parents had fled with him to Uganda when he was four. At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding the French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he’d just returned to his hotel near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée when the French police called him in for interrogation. They were inquiring into a murky incident that was never entirely elucidated. Police sources claimed that members of Kagame’s delegation were ‘roaming around town with bags full of cash to buy weapons’; Kagame claimed the police were trying to discredit him. Tensions were running high between the rebel movement and France.

Benjamin Pauker interviews Benjamin Barber about Saif al-Qaddafi, Libya and the Monitor Group, in Foreign Policy:

Foreign Policy: How is it that so many people got Saif al-Qaddafi so wrong?

Benjamin Barber: Who got it wrong? I don't think anyone got him wrong. Is that the idea: to go back and say in 2006, 2007, 2008, when the U.S. recognized the government of Muammar al-Qaddafi, when the sovereign oil fund that Libya set up and that people like Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson, or organizations like the Carlyle Group and Blackstone, were doing business with, and the heavy investments oil companies were making while others were running around and making all sorts of money — that those of us who went in trying to do some work for democratic reform, that we somehow got Saif wrong?

Until Sunday night a week ago [Feb. 27], Saif was a credible, risk-taking reformer. He several times had to leave Libya because he was at odds with his father. The [Gaddafi] Foundation's last meeting in December wasn't held in Tripoli because he was nervous about being there; it was held in London. And the people who worked for it and the foundation's work itself have been recognized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as genuine, authentic, and having made real accomplishments in terms of releasing people from prison, saving lives. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in a report in January that: “For much of the last decade, Qadhafi's son Saif was the public face of human rights reform in Libya and the Qadhafi Foundation was the country's only address for complaints about torture, arbitrary detention, and disappearances. The Foundation issued its first human rights report in 2009, cataloging abuses and calling for reforms, and a second report released in December 2010 regretted 'a dangerous regression' in civil society and called for the authorities to lift their 'stranglehold' on the media. In the interim, Saif assisted Human Rights Watch in conducting a groundbreaking press conference which launched a report in Tripoli in December 2009.”

Aside from the foundation, one of the things that I was involved with in my interaction with Muammar as well as Saif Qaddafi was the release of the hostages: the four Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. I had said to the colonel in our first meeting that the release of the hostages was a condition for any more such interactions and, indeed, for the continuation with the rapprochement with the West, and he had said he understood. That modest pressure added one more incentive to the decision to release the hostages. I was called the day before the public announcement of the release by Qaddafi's secretary and told: “You see; the leader has acted on his word.”

Well today of course, it's all radically changed. But second-guessing the past, I mean, it's just 20/20 hindsight.