Charles McGrath in the NYT:

Christopher Hitchens, probably the country’s most famous unbeliever, received the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America here on Saturday. Mr. Hitchens was flattered by the honor, he said a few days beforehand, but also a little abashed. “I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do,” he explained, adding: “I’m not sure we need to be honored. We don’t need positive reinforcement. On the other hand, we do need to stick up for ourselves, especially in a place like Texas, where they have laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff.”

Mr. Hitchens, a prolific essayist and the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” discovered in June 2010 that he had Stage 4 esophageal cancer. He has lately curtailed his once busy schedule of public appearances, but he made an exception for the Atheist Alliance — or “the Triple A,” as he called it — partly because the occasion coincided almost to the day with his move 30 years ago from his native England to the United States. He was already in Houston, as it happened, because he had come here for treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he has turned his 12th-floor room into a temporary library and headquarters.

Mr. Hitchens is gaunt these days, no longer barrel-chested. His voice is softer than it used to be, and for the second time since he began treatment, he has lost most of his hair. Once such an enthusiastic smoker that he would light up in the shower, he gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago. Even more inconceivable to many of his friends, Mr. Hitchens, who used to thrive on whiskey the way a bee thrives on nectar, hasn’t had a drink since July, when a feeding tube was installed in his stomach. “That’s the most depressing aspect,” he said. “The taste is gone. I don’t even want to. It’s incredible what you can get used to.”

Joshua Knobe, Wesley Buckwalter, Shaun Nichols, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian, and Tamler Sommers in the Annual Review of Psychology:

it may seem natural to ask: “How exactly is the project of experimental philosophy, thus defined, distinct from that of social psychology?” The best answer is that this is precisely the sort of question that experimental philosophers want to reject. A guiding theme of the experimental philosophy movement is that it is not helpful to maintain a rigid separation between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. Experimental philosophers explore issues that are central to traditional philosophical concerns, but in practice many papers in experimental philosophy are coauthored with psychologists, and many have been published in psychology journals. Much as in psycholinguistics or experimental economics, what we see emerging is an interdisciplinary research program in which philosophers and psychologists work closely together by combining the tools once thought native to each field in the pursuit of questions of renewed interest to both disciplines. (For contrasting perspectives on the more general nature of experimental philosophy, see Alexander et al. 2009, Knobe & Nichols 2008, Nadelhoffer & Nahmias 2007, Sosa 2007.)

Perhaps the best way to become acquainted with the field of experimental philosophy is to look in detail at the actual research findings. To illustrate the substantive contributions of experimental philosophy, this review focuses on research programs in four specific domains. Within each domain, recent work has involved a complex collaboration among philosophers and psychologists, and the resulting research draws on insights from both disciplines. Though research in each of the domains is concerned with a distinct substantive question, our hope is that, together, they will serve to illustrate the general approach that has been characteristic of the experimental philosophy movement as a whole.

David Runciman reviews Pinker's new book in The Guardian:

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. As Pinker shows, it is both a long story and a relatively recent one. The first thing that had to happen was the move from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence (where your chances of meeting a violent end could be as high as 50:50) to settled communities. The trouble was that early governments showed themselves at least as capable of cruelty as anyone else: most of the truly horrific instruments of torture Pinker describes were designed and employed by servants of the state. As the 17th-century philosopher John Locke remarked of the escape from the state of nature to so-called civilisation: why run away from polecats only to be devoured by lions?

So the next thing that had to happen was the state had to be properly civilised. This took place over the course of what we have come to call the enlightenment, thanks in part to philosophers such as Locke. In both private and public life – covering everything from table manners to bills of rights – the means were found to restrain our worst instincts. Slowly, painfully, but ultimately successfully torture was outlawed, slavery was abolished, democracy became established and people discovered that they could rely on the state to protect them.

Yet the enlightenment has acquired something of a bad name. Why? The answer is simply put: the 20th century, surely the most appallingly violent of them all, scarred by total war, genocide and other mass killings on an almost unimaginable scale. All those table manners and bills of rights didn't prevent the Holocaust, did they? At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline.

Alan Lightman in Salon, via Andrew Sullivan:

I am an atheist myself. I completely endorse the Central Doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree with Collins and Hutchinson and Gingerich that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. Obviously, vast territories of the arts concern inner experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. The humanities, such as history and philosophy, raise questions that do not have definite or unanimously accepted answers.

Finally, I believe there are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but, in the end, we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.

Is the Muslim anti-Western prejudice due to ignorance, or is it the consequence of a very selective view of Western society?

Jalees Rehman in Guernica:

A recent international Pew Research Center report (PDF), with the innocuous title “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist,” discusses the extent of Muslim anti-Western prejudice. The report summarizes the results of a survey of Western stereotypes of Muslims living in predominantly Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan. A median of 68% of the Muslim respondents associated “selfish” with Westerners, while only a median of 35% of non-Muslims living in countries such as Great Britain, the United States, or Germany associated “selfish” with Muslims. One could conceivably attribute anti-Western hostility to the fact that Muslims living in predominantly Muslim countries may not have come into personal contact with Westerners. After all, this Pew survey report did not provide data about the attitudes of Muslims living in the West. However, an earlier Pew Research Center report released in 2006 titled “The Great Divide: How Muslims and Westerners View Each Other” (PDF) also surveyed Muslims living in European countries and offered a fairly bleak picture of the anti-Western prejudice among European Muslims. Muslims in Britain had an especially negative response, as 69% of those surveyed attributed three or more negative traits such as “greedy,” “selfish,” “arrogant,” or “immoral” to Westerners. This antagonistic attitude was in sharp contrast to the comparatively positive views of the non-Muslim general public in Britain, of whom only 30% attributed three or more negative traits to Muslims.

The “selfish” or “greedy” traits attributed by Muslims in Britain to Westerners are especially noteworthy, since the majority of the top-ranking ranking countries in terms of charitable behavior, as measured by the World Giving Index of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) (PDF), happen to be countries that are typically associated with “Western culture,” such as Australia, Canada, Switzerland, USA, or Great Britain.

More here.

Larry Derfner in Forward:

As an Israeli who sees the occupation as a plague both on Palestinians and on Israelis, I think it’s a good thing that Congress just held back $200 million in economic aid to the Palestinians as punishment for their statehood bid at the United Nations. It’s a good thing, because now that the Republican Party (and much of the Democratic Party) is indistinguishable from Likud USA, American involvement only makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worse, so the less influence America has over here, the better.

And the withholding of the $200 million gives the United States even less influence over the Palestinians than it had after President Obama, at Israel’s behest, did them in at the United Nations.

The Arab League has already offered to make up the $200 million to President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The United States can even hold back on all $600 million it gives annually to the P.A.; there are plenty of oil-rich Muslim regimes that would love the honor of displacing America in Palestine. And if the P.A. goes broke, the 76-year-old Abbas says he’ll have no qualms about closing down the whole operation and letting Israel police the refugee camps, villages and cities and float the economy of 2.5 million Palestinians.

So who’s threatening whom? Congress has no leverage whatsoever over Abbas. This gray eminence has become, for the first time, a national and Third World hero by defying America and going for it at the U.N.; if anybody thinks Abbas now going to bow down to Congress’s demands, withdraw his statehood bid and thereby become a national and Third World quisling, it ain’t gonna happen.

America has taken itself out of the picture in Middle East peacemaking. It can help Israel go to war and even win a war, but not make peace.

More here.

Charles J. Shields in Writing Kurt Vonnegut:

Kurt Vonnegut was the inheritor of two legacies— one through Clemens Vonnegut, the social reformer, and the other through a beer baron named Peter Leiber.

The Vonnegut side, as I wrote in an April post about Clemens Vonnegut, championed civic responsibility and personal and social improvement. His descendants built schools and transformed the skyline of Indianapolis through architecture.

The Lieber side, on the other hand, was hell-bent on making money as fast and as profitably as possible. Wealth elevated them quickly into the German-American aristocracy of Indianapolis, which Kurt indicated to me, and also in his writings, he was proud to be descended from.

The Liebers realized their dream of riches not by building with bricks, stones and progressive ideas, but by creating an ocean of beer.

Peter Lieber, Kurt’s maternal great-grandfather, arrived in 1848 the same year as Clemens Vonnegut, though his reasons for emigrating are unknown. Leaving his family in Düsseldorf, Germany meant abandoning a future of almost assured affluence. The Liebers were a clan of upper middle class lawyers, judges, administrative officers of government, bankers and merchants, one notch below hereditary aristocrats.

More here.

Peter Singer in the New York Times Book Review:

It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of “The Language Instinct,” addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future?

If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more. In 800 information-packed pages, Pinker also discusses a host of more specific issues. Here is a sample: What do we owe to the Enlightenment? Is there a link between the human rights movement and the campaign for animal rights? Why are homicide rates higher in the southerly states of this country than in northern ones? Are aggressive tendencies heritable? Could declines in violence in particular societies be attributed to genetic change among its members? How does a president’s I.Q. correlate with the number of battle deaths in wars in which the United States is involved? Are we getting smarter? Is a smarter world a better world?

In seeking answers to these questions Pinker draws on recent research in history, psychology, cognitive science, economics and sociology. Nor is he afraid to venture into deep philosophical waters, like the role of reason in ethics and whether, without appealing to religion, some ethical views can be grounded in reason and others cannot be.

More here.

per il Mulatto Brischdauer
gran pazzo e compositore mulattico
––Ludwig van Beethoven, 1803

The Bridgetower

If was at the Beginning. If
he had been older, if he hadn’t been
dark, brown eyes ablaze
in that remarkable face;
if he had not been so gifted, so young
a genius with no time to grow up;
if he hadn’t grown up, undistinguished,
to an obscure old age.
If the piece had actually been,
as Kreutzer exclaimed, unplayable––even after
our man had played it, and for years,
no one else was able to follow––
so that the composer’s fury would have raged
for naught, and wagging tongues
could keep alive the original dedication
from the title page he shredded.

Oh, if only Ludwig had been better-looking,
or cleaner, or a real aristocrat,
von instead of the unexceptional van
from some Dutch farmer; if his ears
had not already begun to squeal and whistle;
if he hadn’t drunk his wine from lead cups,
if he could have found True Love. Then
the story would have held: In 1803
George Polgreen Bridgetower,
son of Friedrich Augustus the African Prince
and Maria Anna Sovinki of Biala in Poland,
traveled from London to Vienna,
where he met the Great Master
who would stop work on his Third Symphony
to write a sonata for his new friend
to premiere triumphantly on May 24th,
whereupon the composer himself
leapt up from the piano to embrace
his “lunatic mulatto.”

Who knows what would have followed?
They might have palled around some,
just a couple of wild and crazy guys
strutting the town like rock stars,
hitting the bars for a few beers, a few laughs . . .
instead of falling out over a girl
nobody remembers, nobody knows.

Then this bright-skinned papa’s boy
could have sailed his fifteen-minute fame
straight into the record books––where,
instead of a Regina Carter or Aaron Dworkin or Boyd Tinsley
sprinkled here and there, we would find
rafts of black kids scratching out scales
on their matchbox violins so that some day
they might play the impossible:
Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47,
also known as The Bridgetower.

by Rita Dove
from Sonata Mulattica
W.W. Norton, 2009

On Bridgetower
.
.

Tony Curzon Price in openEconomics:

Slavoj Žižek has been pointedly critical of the “Western Bhuddism” that Jobs' [Stanford] commencement speech so exemplifies. Zizek analyses it as part of the the legitimating fabric of ideology coming out of the West Coast. As he sees it,

… George Lucas explained the personal level through a type of pop-Buddhism: “[Skywalker-father] turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things.”

This is pure Jobsianism. But for Žižek, what is really notable is:

the parallel political question: How did the Republic turn into the Empire, or, more precisely, how does a democracy become a dictatorship? Lucas explained that it isn’t that the Empire conquered the Republic, but that the Republic became the Empire. “One day, Princess Leia and her friends woke up and said, ‘This isn’t the Republic anymore, it’s the Empire. We are the bad guys.’ [… Star Wars'] key insight [is] that “we are the bad guys,” that the Empire emerges through the very way we, the “good guys,” fight the enemy out there.”

As so often with Žižek, there is an important element of truth here that we should not allow his bluntness to obscure. The nugget to keep is that the Jobsian message of authenticity, of quasi-Randian pursuit of the dream, of perfectionism is not just value neutral – it is a platitude that these virtues can be put to the most terrible uses; ironically and terribly, the virtues actually engender the worst vices.

Chapter 1 of George Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton's Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being, over at Princeton University Press:

Our work on identity and economics began in 1995, when we were both, by coincidence, based in Washington, DC. We had been together at Berkeley—George as a professor, Rachel as a graduate student. George then went to the Brookings Institution while his wife was serving on the Federal Reserve Board. Rachel was at the University of Maryland.

Identity Economics began with a letter from Rachel to George telling him that his most recent paper was wrong.8 He had ignored identity, she wrote, and this concept was also critically missing from economics more generally. We decided to meet. Quite possibly, we thought, identity was already captured in the economics of the time; perhaps it was already included in what we call tastes.

We talked for months. We discussed the research of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, and literary critics. We discussed the focus on identity: how people think they and others should behave; how society teaches them how to behave; and how people are motivated by these views, sometimes to the point of being willing to die for them. We worked to distill many ideas and nuances, to develop a basic definition of identity that could be easily incorporated into economics. And we saw that including identity would have implications for fields as disparate as macroeconomics and the economics of education.

This book builds an economics where tastes vary with social context. Identity and norms bring something new to the representation of tastes. Garden-variety tastes for oranges and bananas —to continue with the earlier example—are commonly viewed as being characteristic of the individual. In contrast, identities and norms derive from the social setting. The incorporation of identity and norms then yields a theory of decision making where social context matters.

First, to digress (but not really): I’ve been wondering these last few weeks why Occupy Wall Street hasn’t moved me, even though I am sympathetic to the cause. Partly, I suppose, it’s the relatively small size of the protests, although as Castro proved in the Sierra Maestra mountains, revolution is not necessarily a numbers game. But even more, it’s a lack of focus, the inability of the movement to define itself, a failure to explain its terms. An absence of narrative, in other words — something I didn’t understand fully until, in the middle of Lawrence Weschler’s “Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative,” I came across an essay called “Waking Up to How We Sleepwalk” that cast my reservations in sharp relief. Here, Weschler recounts the experience of watching, on the coastal grounds of Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, a 1982 anti-nuclear protest-turned-performance piece, in which dozens of participants slowed nearly to the point of stillness, “moving, in suspension, maybe a few feet each minute — but moving nonetheless toward the bluff.” Over the course of a couple of hours, these people, in their slow-motion choreography, moved from dry land into the water before returning to shore. “Slowly,” Weschler tells us, “one by one, the sleepwalkers emerged from the water and filed — still trance-slow, dripping, shivering violently — through the doors of a large converted boathouse.”

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

Towards the end of last year it became apparent that the Stourton household was heading for a book crisis. My wife and I both brought substantial collections into our marriage. I get a steady stream of review copies and manuscripts from friends and acquaintances hoping for endorsements. She makes factual television programmes and is often sent books by aspiring producers and presenters. I am incontinent when the urge to buy a new hardback novel comes upon me, and she reads incredibly quickly. All these factors had conspired to fill our shelves. The books had become Triffid-like, taking over our home and lives. Something had to be done. So, almost a year ago, in this paper, I took these vows: “My resolution is that for 12 months I shall buy no new books and shall limit my leisure reading to books already in my library. There are bound to be professional reasons for bending the rule from time to time. But if I devote myself to our existing collection I might learn something about myself and my family … I shall catch up with some of the friends’ books which have been neglected, and I shall attack the many review copies that still have a marker stuck somewhere in the first couple of chapters … ”

more from Edward Stourton at the FT here.

Listen to the economic debates of the past couple of years, and it’s tempting to conclude that no progress has been made in the field in over half a century. There’s John Maynard Keynes on the one side, arguing for deficit spending to offset the aftereffects of a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. On the other side there’s Ludwig von Mises (his fellow Austrians Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek seem too moderate for the role), thundering that all govern­ment intervention in the economy is doomed to failure. Keynes and Mises are of course both long dead. But it is the resilience of their ideas that makes studying the history of economics so rewarding for non­economists. As a rule, economists don’t know much about history. So at times like these, anyone with a bit of familiarity with the giants of the past can weigh in on big economic issues with about as much authority and credibility as the credentialed experts.

more from Justin Fox at the NY Times here.

“Politics also issues from the natural world, but like the stinking
Gongora orchid attracts flies. —Abby Lightsome

On Being Asked For a Ruling Party Membership Card

you asked me, party cadre,
for a membership card
of the ruining party.
what an insult
to the flowers and the birds
of my country
in my heart.

by Chenjerai Hove
from Rainbows in the Dust
Baobab Books, Harare, 1998

Our TV screens may be full of news about war and crime, but this masks a fall in historical terms in the number of violent deaths that’s nothing short of astonishing, says the psychologist. He tells us how and why this happened.

From The Browser:

You are most well-known as a psychologist of language – what got you interested in ideas around violence?

It was an obsession with human nature and its implications. In previous books such as How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought, I argued that evolution endowed us with a rich human nature – an intricate anatomy of emotions and ways of knowing. But the very idea of human nature raises, in many people’s minds, fears of fatalism, pessimism and nihilism. Does human nature doom us to perpetual violence, racism and oppression? I have always argued that it does not.

Human nature is a complex system of many parts. And though it may have components that push us towards violence, it also has components that pull us away from violence. What can change over time is which of these components prevails. In How the Mind Works I briefly pointed out that rates of violence have changed significantly over history. Hunter-gatherer societies were far more dangerous than settled states. Rates of homicide have plummeted since the Middle Ages. Democracies have become more numerous. Forms of institutionalised violence such as slavery, harems and torture-executions – like burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel – have been abolished in most of the world.

All these happy changes, I noted, represented the influence of components of human nature such as empathy, reason and the moral sense. Through a set of accidents, I came to expand those two or three paragraphs into a book of its own, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

More here.