Robert Reich on Saving Capitalism and Democracy

From The Browser:

ScreenHunter_04 Mar. 24 15.03In a recent post on your website, you said there was “moral rot” in America. And you say: “It’s located in the public behaviour of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.” Can you expand on this?

An economy depends fundamentally on public morality; some shared standards about what sorts of activities are impermissible because they so fundamentally violate trust that they threaten to undermine the social fabric. Without trust it has to depend upon such complex contracts and such weighty enforcement systems that it would crumble under its own weight. What we’ve seen over the last two decades in the United States is a steady decline in the willingness of people in leading positions in the private sector – on Wall Street and in large corporations especially – to maintain those minimum standards. The new rule has become making the highest profits possible regardless of the social consequences.

In the first three decades after World War II – partly because America went through that terrible war and also experienced before that the Great Depression – there was a sense in the business community and on Wall Street of some degree of social responsibility. It wasn’t talked about as social responsibility, because it was assumed to be a bedrock of how people with great economic power should behave. CEOs did not earn more than 40 times what the typical worker earned. Rarely were there mass layoffs by profitable firms. The marginal income tax on the highest income earners in the 1950s was 91%. Even the effective rate, after all deductions and tax credits, was still well above 50%. The game was not played in a cutthroat way. In fact, consumers, workers, the community, were all considered stakeholders of almost equal entitlement as shareholders.

Around about the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of this changed quite dramatically.

More here.

Is Free Will an Illusion?

800px-ToppledominosOver at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jerry A. Coyne, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Hilary Bok, Owen D. Jones and Paul Bloom address the question. (Image from wikipedia.) Bloom:

Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying “no” when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.

This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.

I agree with the consensus, but it's not the big news that many of my colleagues seem to think it is. For one thing, it isn't news at all. Determinism has been part of Philosophy 101 for quite a while now, and arguments against free will were around centuries before we knew anything about genes or neurons. It's long been a concern in theology; Moses Maimonides, in the 1100s, phrased the problem in terms of divine omniscience: If God already knows what you will do, how could you be free to choose?

More important, it's not clear what difference it makes. Many scholars do draw profound implications from the rejection of free will. Some neuroscientists claim that it entails giving up on the notion of moral responsibility. There is no actual distinction, they argue, between someone who is violent because of a large tumor in his brain and a neurologically normal premeditated killer—both are influenced by forces beyond their control, after all—and we should revise the criminal system accordingly. Other researchers connect the denial of free will with the view that conscious deliberation is impotent. We are mindless robots, influenced by unconscious motivations from within and subtle environmental cues from without; these entirely determine what we think and do. To claim that people consciously mull over decisions and think about arguments is to be in the grips of a prescientific conception of human nature.

I think those claims are mistaken. In any case, none of them follow from determinism. Most of all, the deterministic nature of the universe is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought.

On the Origin of Everything

ALBERT-articleLargeDavid Albert reviews Lawrence M. Krauss's A Universe From Nothing, in the NYT:

The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

A Kennedy for Pakistan?

Mohsin Hamid in the New York Review of Books:

ScreenHunter_03 Mar. 24 14.32Most likely to be cast as heroes are the media, the country’s independent-minded Supreme Court, which has recently indicted the Prime Minister on contempt of court charges (related to the corruption investigation of Zardari), and the Pakistani “people.” There is much talk of democratic ideals, but little love for the country’s current crop of politicians, and so there seems to be a yearning for a new kind of leader able to break the cycle of weakness and mediocrity.

Into this situation has surged the former cricket superstar Imran Khan, who in recent months has suddenly become the country’s most popular political figure. My first intimation that people might be taking Khan seriously as a politician came in February 2011, in Karachi, when I asked the driver of a car belonging to my publisher whom he’d vote for if elections were held today.

“Imran Khan,” he replied without hesitation.

I was surprised. Khan’s fifteen-year-old party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), or Pakistan Movement for Justice, had never managed to win more than a single seat in the country’s 272-member parliament. Yet my publisher’s driver was on to something. By October, well over 100,000 people were thronging a Khan-led PTI rally in Lahore, an event that seemed to change Pakistan’s political landscape. It had been billed as a make-or-break chance for Khan to show, finally, whether he was capable of building a true mass movement.

The size of the support it generated clearly shook Punjab’s traditional power-brokers, the brothers Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif, leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N). I know a university professor who went, and he said it was the largest such gathering he had ever seen. He was particularly struck by the socio-economic diversity of those present, by the large numbers of women as well as men, and by the orderliness and unforced enthusiasm of the crowd, in contrast to the rent-a-mob environment typical of big political gatherings.

More here.

Saturday Poem

Blueberries

I am in California. The moon –
colour of grandmother’s Irish butter – is lifting
over the Mount Diablo hills and the sky
is tinged a ripening strawberry. You sleep
thousands of miles from me and I pray your dreams
are a tranquil sea. Eight hours back
you watched this moon, our love-, our marriage-moon,
rise silently over our Dublin suburb, and you
phoned to tell me of it. I sit in stillness
though I am called where death is by; I am eating
night and grief in the sweet-bitter flesh
of blueberries, coating tongue and lips with juice
that this my kiss across unconscionable distances
touch to your lips with the fullness of our loving.

by John F. Deane
Publisher: PIW, 2012

Mummy Dearest

From The New York Times:

HaPerhaps every autobiographical first novel serves its author as Jeanette Winterson’s did — as “a story I could live with.” But “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” buoyant and irrepressible, was published in 1985, for its author half a lifetime ago, and what one can live with changes over time. “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” is a memoir as unconventional and winning as the rollicking bildungsroman Winterson assembled from the less malignant aspects of her eccentric Pentecostal upbringing, a novel that instantly established her distinctive voice. This new book wrings humor from adversity, as did the fictionalized version of Winterson’s youth, but the ghastly childhood transfigured there is not the same as the one vivisected here in search of truth and its promise of setting the cleareyed free. At the center of both narratives is “Mrs. Winterson,” as the author often calls her mother in “Why Be Happy.” It would be easy to dismiss this formality as an attempt to establish retroactively something that never existed between Winterson and her adoptive mother: a respectful distance governed by commonly accepted standards of decency and reason. But, even more, the form of address suggests the terrible grandeur of a character who transcends the strictly mortal in her dimensions and her power, a monolith to whom any version of “mother” cannot do justice.

“Tallish and weighing around 20 stone” (in other words, about 280 pounds), Mrs. Winterson, now deceased, was “out of scale, larger than life,” “now and again exploding to her full 300 feet,” a force that eclipsed Winterson’s self-effacing father, who couldn’t protect himself, let alone his child, from the woman he had married. It wasn’t her physical size that tipped Mrs. Winterson from mere gravity toward the psychic equivalent of a black hole, vacuuming all the light into her hysterical fundamentalism, so much as it was her monumental derangement. “A flamboyant depressive . . . who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge,” Mrs. Winterson waited not in joyful so much as smug anticipation for the apocalypse that would destroy the neighbors and deliver her to the exalted status piety had earned her. Opposed to sexual intercourse, as she was to all forms of intimacy, Winterson’s mother adopted her in hopes of raising a friend, the author speculates, for her mother had no other. But the trouble Mrs. Winterson found in reading a book, “that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late,” is the same trouble that complicates parenthood. Or, as Mrs. Winterson explained it: “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.”

More here.

Memories reside in specific brain cells

From PhysOrg:

HipOur fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams. But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories really do reside in very specific , and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire — explaining, for example, how Marcel Proust could recapitulate his childhood from the aroma of a once-beloved madeleine cookie.

“We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature. “This is the rigorously designed 21st-century test of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s early-1900s accidental observation suggesting that mind is based on matter.” In that famous surgery, Penfield treated epilepsy patients by scooping out parts of the brain where seizures originated. To ensure that he destroyed only the problematic neurons, Penfield stimulated the brain with tiny jolts of electricity while patients, who were under local anesthesia, reported what they were experiencing. Remarkably, some vividly recalled entire complex events when Penfield stimulated just a few neurons in the hippocampus, a region now considered essential to the formation and recall of episodic memories.

More here.

Against austerity

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In an essay in her new non-fiction collection, Marilynne Robinson marvels at the enormous number of English words that describe the behaviour of light. “Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine, and so on,” she writes. “These old words … reflect an aesthetic attention to experience that has made, and calls us to make, pleasing distinctions among, say, a candle flame, the sun at its zenith, and the refraction of light by a drop of rain.” “Imagination and Community” is ostensibly about language, but, like all the essays in When I Was A Child I Read Books, it is written through the prism of Robinson’s Christian Calvinist faith. Rather than focusing on mystical awakenings, she calls the everyday material of life a “sacred mystery”, and argues that religion should illuminate, rather than be separated from, science, politics and literature. “My point is that lacking the terms of religion,” she writes, “essential things cannot be said.” As a novelist, Robinson imbues ordinary, concrete details with grace, in the manner of the authors she most admires – Emerson, Whitman, Melville, William James, Emily Dickinson – “for whom creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation.”

more from Emily Stokes at the FT here.

Why Won’t They Listen?

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You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong. This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

more from William Saletan at the New York Times here.

the continent of concrete abstraction

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In this season of marking South Pole centennials, March is the last and cruelest month. On March 17, 1912, a starved, injured and frostbitten Lawrence “Titus” Oates famously crawled out through the tube door of Robert Falcon Scott’s tent to die deliberately in a blizzard. His last words, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” were transcribed two days later by a storm-bound Scott, making notes as his own death closed in, ice crystals already claiming his insensate right foot. Two months earlier, Scott, Oates, Edgar “Taff” Evans, Edward Wilson, and Henry “Birdie” Bowers had reached the South Pole, but instead of a blank nexus of latitude and longitude in an unmapped wilderness of ice, they found Roald Amundsen’s tent and Norwegian flag. The British team’s return was dismal, a trudging descent from the polar plateau into crippling starvation, dehydration, and nutritional deprivation. Having become a limping hindrance to his team’s already slow progress, Titus Oates hoped in his self-sacrifice to give the trio of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers (Taff Evans was already dead) a chance to reach their next depot of fuel and food. They would not, dying instead at month’s end as Oates had, prone and frozen solid under the snows of the blizzard-swept Ross Ice Shelf.

more from Jason Anthony at The Smart Set here.

The lesser-known atrocities of the 1971 India-Pakistan-Bangladesh War

Batool Zehra in The Express Tribune:

ScreenHunter_02 Mar. 23 14.57History is always written by the victors, and in the case of the 1971 war, the dominant narrative has been that of atrocities committed against the Bengali population. But in her upcoming novel, Of Martyrs and Marigolds, Aquila Ismail dredges up the memories of her traumatic past in order to shine a light on the lesser-known atrocities of that conflict.

“My mother forgot how to speak Bengali after the trauma of 1971. It just went out of her head. She cannot speak it to this day,” says Aquila Ismail, as we sip tea in her sitting room on a winter’s evening in Karachi. One of the few Biharis who managed to flee Bangladesh after what is known in that country as the War of Liberation, Aquila now lives in the UAE. But over 250,000 of her fellow Biharis still live in squalid conditions in Bangladesh today, as a stateless minority.

While the atrocities of the Pakistan Army against the Bengali population during the war are well-documented, little is known about the plight of the Biharis who were left stranded when East Pakistan seceded in 1972, and what they suffered during and after the conflict. According to some estimates, 750,000 Biharis were left in Bangladesh in 1972, and not only did they face persecution at the hands of Bengalis, they were also disowned by Pakistan and became stateless overnight…

More here.

Giant Silkmoths: Colour, Mimicry and Camouflage

Anna Lena Phillips in American Scientist:

ScreenHunter_01 Mar. 23 12.54Last spring, the periodical cicadas emerged across eastern North America. Their vast numbers and short above-ground life spans inspired awe and irritation in humans—and made for good meals for birds and small mammals. Such snacks do not come without cost, however: Cicadas emit extremely loud shrieks when captured. Perhaps the pattern of the giant silk moth Citheronia azteca (right) evolved to resemble a cicada as a form of Batesian mimicry—imitation by a nonpoisonous species of a poisonous or unappetizing one. So Philip Howse speculates in Giant Silkmoths: Colour, Mimicry and Camouflage (Papadakis, $40 paper), in which he and photographer Kirby Wolfe showcase these members of the Saturniidae family.

Wolfe offers notes on collecting and raising silk moths. But the book’s wealth of photographs serves as collection enough: Viewing page after page of stunning moths from all over the world, I felt the guilty pleasure of seeing more of these creatures than one would ever normally encounter. Caterpillars are well represented also.

More here.

North India and south Pakistan

Tahir Mehdi in Dawn:

290x230-voting-APA huge number of Muslims from Uttar Pradesh migrated in 1947 to Sindh in Pakistan. People with Urdu as their mother tongue are 21 per cent of the province’s population now. Or every fifth inhabitant of Sindh belongs to third or second generation of migrants from India at large and UP in particular. Any reference to forefather’s villages, towns or jagirs still makes many eyes sparkle and send others into nostalgic tailspins. They all had migrated, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly in pursuit of a peaceful society and prosperous family lives and their children’s text books kept on reminding them over the next many decades that the cherished dream could never be realised with Hindus roaming around all over and dominating every thing.

The same Uttar Pradesh recently elected members for its 403-seat state (provincial) assembly. Muslims still live in that Indian state that is bigger than Pakistan in population. UP’s population according to a 2011 census is 199.6 million and 19.8 per cent of these are Muslims. Or every fifth inhabitant of the present-day UP is a Muslim. Muslim candidates were serious contenders for around half of the general seats of the state. In fact 68 of them won to become a member legislative assembly (MLA) and another 64 stood second in contests.

Almost every party fielded Muslim candidates. Samajwadi Party’s Adil Sheikh defeated speaker of state assembly Sukhdev Rajbhar, former minister Nand Gopal Gupta was drubbed by SP’s first-timer Haji Parvez Ahmed and four-time BJP winner Inder Dev Singh lost the battle to Mohammad Ghazi. No one cried foul, no allegations of rigging were hurled, no conspiracy theories of undermining Hindutva made rounds and above all no one saw the infamous ‘foreign hand’ behind the defeat of caste Hindus at the hands of ‘pariah’ Muslims.

More here.

Harvard is Now Cheaper than San Jose State

Richard Anderson in The Nation:

GraduationPublic universities in California may have been dethroned as being cheaper than private schools for middle-income students. According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, schools like Harvard and Princeton provide a cheaper alternative to schools like San Jose State and University of California, Berkeley.

Private schools are generally even cheaper than Cal State Fullerton. To go to Harvard, it costs $4,000 for a family with an annual income of $30,000. At CSUF, it costs $16,331 for a full-time student.

According to the Bay Area News Group, a family of four making $130,000 a year would have to pay $24,000 for tuition, room, board and other expenses to send one child to a CSU. Harvard costs $36,000, but financial aid makes it the cheaper option.

Financial aid drops Harvard tuition costs down to $17,000 a year, under San Jose State’s $23,557 and even under the $19,500 it costs to go to UC Berkeley. While Princeton may be slightly more expensive ($19,830) than UC Berkeley, it is still considerably cheaper than San Jose State.

Private schools used to be considered more expensive than public, but that trend has changed for a couple of reasons.

According to the Social Security Administration’s website, in order for a college student under the age of 22 to receive Supplemental Security Income, the maximum he or she can earn annually is $6,600. However, Harvard’s maximum limit for receiving aid is much higher.

More here.

the lens of Vincent’s tartan vision of inner torment

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Vincent declared himself an artist in 1880, at the age of twenty-seven. He had only ten years left to live. Those years are chronicled with missionary zeal. Crisis follows crisis with numbing regularity. Perhaps that is how it was; what we lack in a treatment of this sort is a sense of what it meant, then and since. The pursuit is indefatigable but the life is shapeless. The death is re-examined, plausibly, but the significance of the life is never considered. A brief epilogue serves to reunite Vincent with Theo in the wheatfields of Auvers. It is as if the authors’ curiosity is sated with his interment. “Finally, Vincent had his reunion on the heath.” So it ends. The starry, starry afterlife is a void. The depth of his self-knowledge is unplumbed. What are we to make of this remarkable creature and his torments? How are we to weigh his work? On these questions Van Gogh: The Life keeps its silence. Vincent Van Gogh subscribed to an art of feeling – “heart-broken, and therefore heartbreaking”. He was a great painter, and very nearly a great writer. His painting is peculiarly life-affirming. His writing is truly heartbreaking. “I do not say that my work is good, but it’s the least bad that I can do. All the rest, relations with people, is very secondary, because I have no talent for that. I can’t help it.”

more from Alex Danchev at the TLS here.

In any case, Picasso was right

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Modernism is a strange artistic formation. In it, time and again, originality – which remains anachronistically the goal – lies on the other side of subservience. There is no such thing, it turns out in practice, as well-tempered learning in modernism, reasonable apprenticeship, picking and choosing the imitable. And this is a problem particularly for a genteel art culture – for a culture like England’s, whose arrogance over the past century has been most powerfully manifest in its false moderacy. But I get ahead of myself. Two things need establishing. First, that Picasso’s instigation, difficult as it was, did prove time and again in other nations a spur to major art. What Malevich and Tatlin were able to do with Picasso’s Cubism between 1912 and 1917; how Mondrian thought through the same style’s implications in Paris, and what he did, on returning to Holland, to make what he had learned usable in a shared project; the long-distance Picasso-olatry of the New York School; even the scrupulous Cubism of the Czechs before 1914 – these are moments that sum up, for me, the true intensity and dignity of modernism. And for a culture signally to lack such a moment is a weakness – maybe even an indictment.

more from T.J. Clark at the LRB here.

europe: the immigrants are coming

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One evening, as I was taking the vaporetto no. 2 from Ponte dell’Academia to the San Marco stop on the Riva delgi schiavoni, I noticed that entire sections on this part of the Grand Canal were without light. Huge palaces were steeped in darkness, as if nobody lived there. These are the summer residences of the rich. But among them are also palaces that belong to the city and that the city is selling off, explained a friend of mine who lives here. Because change comes in many ways, not just with the poor wretches who make it in one piece to Lampedusa or some other patch of Italian soil; not just through food, fashion, custom and music, but also via banks, investments, money-laundering, corruption of the local administration. And while Europeans ponder future changes and whether to put up a wall around Europe (if only they knew what its boundaries were), while they contemplate measures that will contain immigrants at that same imaginary border and Europe’s culture and the values that need to be preserved (although globalization, in other words Americanization, has already utterly changed them), the Chinese are freely investing, buying palaces in Venice in order to turn them into hotels, thus making even more money out of Europe’s cultural treasures. From the Venetian viewpoint, in comparison with the investments of the Chinese – nota bene, some people here call it money-laundering – fear of Muslim immigrants in France and Germany and further north looks almost pathetic. My neighbour says that Venice is increasingly turning not into a museum, as I romantically thought, but a Disneylandish amusement park owned by the Chinese, who alone profit from it.

more from Slavenka Drakulic at Eurozine here.

India’s Sacred Geography

From Harvard Magazine:

Indiabooks_smThree decades ago, Diana L. Eck—master of Lowell House and Wertham professor of law and psychiatry in society (a scholar of South Asian religions, despite her chair’s title)—wrote Banaras: City of Light, exploring Hinduism through its holiest pilgrimage site. Her perspective has become ever more expansive, as she has explored the interconnected pilgrimage sites throughout India. Now she explicates that interwoven world-view of the sacred and the profane in India: A Sacred Geography (Harmony Books, $27)—a sweeping examination of texts, places, and beliefs that may also help to explain to Western readers the rise of place-based Hindu nationalism in Indian politics. From chapter 2, “What Is India?”

…Students of Hinduism or travelers in India quickly become aware of what prolific mythmakers Hindus have been. The Hindu tradition is famous for its mythologies, and for the multitude of gods and goddesses one encounters in the temples and public spaces of India. Less well known, however, is the fact that Hindus have been equally avid geographers who have described with considerable detail the mountains, river systems, and holy places of India. For the most part, Hindu mythology has been studied by one group of scholars, primarily historians of religion, while the geographical traditions have been studied and catalogued by another group, primarily British and Indian civil servants, historical and cultural geographers. The great geography scholar Bimala C. Law speaks for this latter group when he confesses, “One finds it tedious to read the legendary history of rthas or holy places, but to a geographer it will never be a fruitless study.”

More here.