There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together. Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain. This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn.
more from Timothy Samuel Shah at The Immanent Frame here.
Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012. The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’
Banerjee described the surprising result of a recent experiment in Hyderabad, India. Even with access to small loans, small business owners did not invest in growing their own businesses. This is surprising because other RCTs have shown that such investments would reap returns of 60-100 percent a year.
Banerjee suggested several explanations. Perhaps the scale is simply too small. Perhaps lack of education constrains the potential of these businesses. But the most convincing explanation according to Banerjee is that for the poor, the returns are huge incrementally, but small in absolute terms. The owners of these very small businesses think that whatever profits they might earn are unlikely to dramatically change their lives.
The larger point is that the whole intellectual journey of finding a surprising research result and formulating and testing hypotheses to explain the puzzle would not be possible without RCTs:
“We Need Experiments”
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Angus Deaton responded that RCTs are of limited value since they focus on very small interventions that by definition only work in certain contexts. It’s like designing a better lawnmower—and who wouldn’t want that? —unless you’re in a country with no grass, or where the government dumps waste on your lawn. RCTs can help to design a perfect program for a specific context, but there’s no guarantee it will work in any other context.
RCTs are so highly regarded because people assume that the randomness of the selection eliminates bias. What people don’t talk about is that there are actually two stages of selection. The first stage, in which researchers start with the entire population, and choose a group which will in the second stage be randomly divided into the study and control groups, is NOT random. Selection in the first stage may be determined by convenience or politics, and therefore may not be representative of the entire population.
One of the hot topics today is the debate about Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities. One easy introduction to the debate is Romer’s TED talk with the full story on Romer’s website. Sebastian Mallaby also did a recent piece in the Financial Times as well as an earlier piece in The Atlantic on the topic. A similar and more explicitly (right-wing) libertarian idea is pushed by Patri Friedman substituting floating cities for Romer’s charter cities (thus solving the land problem) and is called “seasteading” with the story given at his website and his TEDx talk. Patri’s father is David and David’s father is Milton, in case one wondered about the libertarian parentage of these ideas.
One of the interesting sidelights of the charter cities and seasteading debates is how they “out” the lack of any necessary connection between liberalism and democracy. As Mallaby puts it in the FT article about Romer: “In mild professorial language, [Romer] declares that poor countries should hand control of these new cities to foreign governments, which should appoint technocratic viceroys. The better to banish politics, there must be no city elections.”
For classical liberalism, the basic necessary condition for a system of governance is consent. Consent could be to a non-democratic constitution which alienates the right of self-governance to some sovereign–which in the case of a charter city would be the technocratic viceroys, or their principals such as some well-meaning foreign governments. Consent plus free entry and exit suffice to satisfy the governance requirements of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism per se sees no moral necessity in democratic self-governance at all (with or without safeguards). Most modern libertarians are not “against” democracy; it nice if you have it (and it works well with safeguards) but it is also OK if you don’t have it but have a consent-based non-democratic governance regime with good rules and the possibility of exit.
The migratory Pied-Crested Cuckoo is believed by some to ride the seasonal winds of the South West Monsoon to arrive in the sub-continent in late May to early June. It makes the journey from sub-Saharan Africa, traversing the Arabian Peninsula, across the ocean, visiting the Seychelles and Lakshadweep, only to arrive in Kerala at first, as the overheated land solicitously lures the ardent monsoon winds in. They breed during the rainy season, and leave the subcontinent in September. Clamator Jacobinus, the Rain Bird, or the chatak of Indian antiquity, is believed to be the ‘harbinger of monsoons’, proclaiming, as ornithologist Hugh Whistler has said, the imminent rains “with its unmistakably loud metallic calls”. There are several who keep a keen eye out for its mantic presence, but its parasitic proclivities cause much distress to the resident avian populace. I am yet to read of any sightings, far less encounter one, and its typical song is not one of the several songbird tunes that I hear everyday. However, it is raining as I write. Although a steady drizzle now, it was far more animated early this Sunday morning. Lest I am fooled into thinking that the monsoon has arrived, the first “impressions of a chaotic sky”, the teasing, ‘towering cumulus clouds’, are merely bold heralders of the much anticipated annual visitation, at once cooling down the region and giving the city a thorough wash.
As Alexander Frater writes in Chasing The Monsoon, he too gets caught up in the collective febrile anxiety leading up to the first rain, and then:
At 1 p.m. the serious cloud build-up started … At 4.50, announced by deafening ground-level thunderclaps, the monsoon finally rode into Cochin. The cloud-base blew through the trees like smoke; rain foamed on the hotel’s harbourside lawn and produced a bank of hanging mist opaque as hill fog… At Fort Cochin they were ringing the bells in St Francis Church. In the dark harbour small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously, with pink light. The jetty, set under a small wooden gazebo, vanished beneath heavy surf.
The monsoons, “a creature of grandeur and complexity that defies comparison with anything”, in the words of MS Rajagopalan of the Trivandrum Meteorological Department who Frater meets early on, are meant to officially arrive in Bombay on the 10th of June. This year they have been announced in Kerala on the 5th of June, which is five days late, according to a press release (and weekly update) by the local Meteorological Department of Mumbai, and the cumulative seasonal rainfall in the first week for the entire country is 32% below the LPA (Long Period Average). The department however predicts that the monsoon will be a normal one this year. (See here).
The ‘big bang’ theory, of the rains arriving in one dramatic burst is disputed, and some researchers claim that there will be “less rainfall if it sets in suddenly”.
If you search on Google or Wikipedia for “Pierre Bourdieu,” the results will paint you a picture of a man who was very much a theorist, an intellectual in the fullest sense of the word. Bourdieu contributed to the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and politics; he was influenced by Bachelard, Pascal, and Durkheim, and himself became an influence on younger intellectuals such as Loïc Wacquant. In an obituary in the Guardian, after Bourdieu's death in 2002, Douglas Johnson described him as being “as important to the second half of the 20th century as Sartre had been to the generation before”; you could easily imagine an ivory-tower life. What cursory internet searches and obituaries do not reveal, however, is Bourdieu's beginnings as a photographer, and the importance of his photography to the rest of his work.
In Picturing Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu (Columbia University Press), the sociologist Franz Schultheis and the curator Christine Frisinghelli offer the reader an unprecedented selection of Bourdieu's photographs from Algeria, where he traveled for the first time as part of his national service, at twenty-five. He was to return again a few years later, as a lecturer at the University of Algiers, and he joined a research effort run by the Algerian arm of the French statistical institute. He helped produce two important books – one on labor migrants, and another that depicted the impact of brutal French resettlement policies. The photographs in Picturing Algeria date mostly from the time of this research, between 1957 and 1960, but they aren't just the snapshots of a researcher with a camera and some free time. Bourdieu's experiences in Algeria were to have a profound impact on his later life and work; as Craig Calhoun notes in his foreword, in Algeria Bourdieu was learning his trade, and “photography was one crucial way in which [he] gathered data – and developed his sociological eye.”
There is a strange kind of distance and balance in Bourdieu's photographs. Calhoun writes that “they are neither the completely naive snapshots of a newcomer nor products of a fully formed sociologist” – that is, they are neither picturesque, touristy snapshots, nor rote illustrations of theories. Even without any background information, the pictures suggest study, learning, research. They are usually square (he used a medium-format camera, rather than the standard Leica, partly to be more unobtrusive) and generally harshly lit – the highlights (a turban, a veil, a white teacup in the sun) can be almost painful. The picture that most struck me was of an elderly woman sitting in the dirt outside her home. She's sitting in the shade, but has one arm, elbow on her knee, stretched out, and in the sun her forearm bleaches transparent, pure white, like a negative or an X-ray.
“…The show´s title is inspired by music, where “Riff” stands for a rhythmic figure, a musical phrase that some players add to a written score. Riff relates also to the rugged Rif mountains of Morocco, home to insurgencies and a splinter Republic, and to the art deco Rif Cinema, which houses the Tangier Cinémathèque.”
In my previous posts on the subject, I have assumed, or anyway not worried about, a basic knowledge of what spacemusic is, and simply presented sets of classic or recent vintage. But that was negligent of me, as for most people this material remains an entirely closed book. Maybe they've seen a movie (Risky Business, or Sorcerer) with music by Tangerine Dream – which band does turn up in the Rolling Stone Record Guide (described there in a five-line review of two mid-70s LPs as “kings of the synthesizer, German-style”, with all that that implies to rock 'n' rollers) – but they'll draw a blank on “Berlin-school spacemusic” in general. Today we rectify that omission, so if you skipped the other installments you may want to check this one out. We begin at the beginning, long before our story actually begins….
From the perspective of the new millenium, the origins of electronic music are obscured by the mists of a bygone era. Indeed, the term seems no longer to refer to anything worth picking out as a distinct type of thing, as many rather different types of music-making nowadays are dependent in some sense on electricity. We still use the word, but usually to mark an emphasis on electronic means in some one music relative to another: we can refer to techno as “electronic” relative to other types of dance music, without denying the use of electricity in making, say, funk. If we want to make an absolute distinction, we often speak of “acoustic” music rather than its opposite (although here too a relative use is available).
Even in the dawn of time, however (= the 1950s or so), there was an important disctinction to be made. “Electronic music” was made with electronically generated sound, e.g. with voltage-controlled oscillators and amplifiers. But another important use of electricity, one which had been around for many years without (significantly, in our context anyway) affecting musical composition or performance, was the electronic capturing of sound, or recording. This was the basis for the other main approach for making music electronically in the early days: rather than generating sounds electronically, musique concrète pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry composed by manipulating recordings of previously existing, often non-musical, sound.
Abbas: Some months ago when Morgan told me he was going to come and visit me in Südtirol from Sri Lanka in the first week of June, I stupidly agreed to go on an extended trek through the alps with him for several days. The idea was that we would hike to the tops of various peaks in the Italian alps around here, stay in huts overnight, and then move on to a different peak, doing this several times. Luckily, I quickly realized that neither he nor I was in good enough physical form to last more than at most one day of climbing followed by a day of coming down, plus I also realized that what the locals call “walks” could pose a severe challenge to my fear of heights. After consultations with my wife and a few other local denizens of Brixen whom I now suspect of being talking mountain goats disguised as humans, it was decided that we would do a hike/climb from the Seiser Alm to the Tierser Alpl Hütte, the red-roofed hut shown in the center of the picture above, stay there overnight, and come back down the next day. Lest you think this looks easy, consider that we were planning on coming over the ridge that you see directly behind the hut from the other side. We would then take the easier route coming down towards the lower left in the picture. You should also know that in the four years since moving to the Tyrol I’ve done lots of little two-hour hikes in the mountains, but never anything like this. I was scared. And as you’ll soon see, for good reason. [Click photos to enlarge a little bit.]
Why would a work on legalizing prostitution have thirty five pages of closely printed notes and a bibliography running to almost sixteen pages? The answer lies in the incendiary nature of the subject matter. Emotions frequently run high when it comes to discussing the sex trade and there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Ronald Weitzer, Professor of Sociology at George Washington University is determined to bring some calm dispassionate reasoning based on solid research to the debate. Too often, he says, this debate is still stuck in what Popper termed the pre-scientific stage. Arguments are formulated on impressionistic, untested assumptions. Hence when it comes to prostitution, given that only a minority of the population ever experience prostitutes in the flesh as it were – between 15 – 18 per cent across the Western world – then the debate is coloured by impressions gathered from the media, from literature, from films and plays and from the more high profile street prostitutes on view in any large city.
My own impressions were formed when the neighbourhood where I live, at the time a decaying inner city suburb of large Victorian houses, many of them sublet, was invaded by a posse of street prostitutes who had been driven out from the city's traditional 'red light' area by angry residents taking direct action. His broadly researched description of this form of selling sex match my own observations as we, as residents, strove with the help of the police, the civil courts, city officers and social workers to get them to desist or move on and stop using our neighbourhood as their place of work and all the attendant ills it visited on us. He lists these: the initial transaction is in a public place: the sex act takes place in a public or semi-public place: many underage prostitutes are runaways in a new locale with no resources and little recourse but to engage in some kind of criminal activity – theft, drug dealing, selling sex. They sell sex out of dire necessity or to support a drug habit.
Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the collection “Native Guard,” was named U.S. Poet Laureate last Wednesday. Her poetic voice has deftly positioned her to inherit the laureate tradition and usher it into the future. Trethewey’s writing mines the cavernous isolation, brutality, and resilience of African American history, tracing its subterranean echoes to today.
Her poem, “Native Guard,” for example, draws its title and narrative focus from the so-called Union Army regiment of black soldiers, primarily liberated slaves, who watched over Confederate prisoners of war. Trethewey, in an agile shift from poetry to prose, past to present, and national to personal history, continues her investigation of race relations in her non-fiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” Here, Trethewey applies an autobiographical lens to the vertiginous power dynamics and fractured identity politics of being black in America. She delves into her memories of childhood as the daughter of an interracial marriage, deemed illegal under Mississippi law at the time of her parents’ union.
This week, U.S. officials announced that they had killed al Qaeda’s second-in-command with a drone strike. The news came soon after the New York Timespublished the fullest account to date of the process by which the United States selects lower-profile targets for drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen. The most startling revelation was that President Obama personally supervises the “nomination” of potential targets and gives final approval for killing them.
The lengthy Times story isn’t based on a leak—it is clearly news that the White House wants the world to know. The reporters interviewed three dozen current and former Obama advisors to assemble their picture of the target-selection process. In his new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency,Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman notes that Obama’s presidential campaign “is painting a portrait of a steely commander who pursues the enemy without flinching.” Three days after the drones article, the Timesran an equally detailed article, again with obvious White House consent, about U.S. cyberattacks against Iran, reporting that “Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings . . . was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory.” This image of the president firmly in command of the drone campaign is precisely what the White House wishes to convey in the run-up to the election.
So why did the president put his hand on the helm? The Times reports:
Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.
This image of a president schooled in just war theory is remarkable. At least one Catholic Web site has poured scorn on “the wise, judicious philosopher-king consulting Aquinas and Augustine before sending a drone missile on a ‘signature strike’ on a group of picnickers in Yemen or farmers in Pakistan.”
Angelique Richardson in the Times Literary Supplement:
Reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species straight after publication, Friedrich Engels wrote to tell Karl Marx that it was quite splendid. Excepting, that is, its “clumsy English method”. Turning to it on his sickbed a year later, Marx responded that “although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the natural history basis for my view”. Closer to home, Darwin’s readers were not always more enamoured of his style. Within weeks of its appearance, George Eliot wrote that she thought the book “ill-written”, and that she didn’t think it would be very popular. But few could doubt its significance, and writers were among the first to see this. Hitting the bookshops in November 1859, it sold out on the first day, Darwin’s publisher John Murray told him. Eliot said “it will have a great effect in the scientific world . . . . So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty!”, and Thomas Hardy, who read it as a teenager, declared himself to be one of its first champions. Rereading the Origin (“slowly again for the nth time, with the view of picking out the essentials of the argument for the obituary notice”), T. H. Huxley remarked that “nothing entertains me more than to hear people call it easy reading”. “Exposition”, he insisted, “was not Darwin’s forte – and his English is sometimes wonderful.” This wonderful English, the extraordinary prose that could puzzle Darwin’s Victorian readers, is the subject of George Levine’s new book, from which Darwin emerges as an artist as well as a scientist, a master of argument, analogical reasoning, hypothesis and anecdote.
I'd heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen's new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run. Then at the party – marked, as a consequence of this error, by the absence of the book it was intended to launch – a gatecrasher plucked Franzen's glasses from his face, ran off into the night and demanded a ransom of several thousand pounds. (He's blind as a mole without his specs, apparently; probably the result of having subjected his peepers to every page of William Gaddis's The Recognitions and about half of JR.)
When the plane lifted off from Heathrow, Franzen must have breathed a sigh of relief and said to himself that it would be a cold day in hell before he'd set foot on that loud-dump again. So I admired the courage it took to revisit the site of these serial traumas in print.
Except, it turns out, the essay is about another, less ferocious place: Más Afuera, the island way down in the South Pacific where Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) was a castaway. Franzen retreats there after months of promoting his book, armed with a tent, a copy of Defoe's novel and some of the ashes of his friend David Foster Wallace. Once installed on the island – installed in the sense of barely able to erect his tent – Franzen reflects on the ludicrousness of the endeavour (“I hadn't felt so homesick since, possibly, the last time I'd camped by myself”), the rise of the novel in the age of Defoe and on his “friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete” with Wallace.
Lubna graduated from Mina Art School in Karachi, Pakistan in 1967, and at a very young age became one of the most recognized painters in the country. In the 1960s she painted colorful abstract compositions, exhibited at the Arts Council as well as newly established galleries in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. She sold her work at a time when collectors were few and very selective.
In the 1970s, she became famous for her White series, delicate minimalist paintings with cotton ball shapes delineated by calligraphic lines and sweeps of black and red paint. The press reacted as never before. Each journalist, trying to outdo one another, saw something symbolic in these paintings, from the erotic to the sublime. These paintings were purely formalist concerns but Lubna enjoyed the spin. In 1973, when she was in her 20s, Lubna was awarded second prize in the National Exhibition in Pakistan, an exhibition dominated by senior Pakistani artists.
At the height of her career in Pakistan, Lubna and her family moved to Sacramento, California. Lubna took up drawing, print making and painting small watercolors in her new home. Her drawings expressed feelings of alienation from her home in Pakistan. California was truly a foreign place for her. Her watercolors held similar meaning with falling figures and limbs detached from their bodies. Several exhibitions, including one-person shows, followed both in California, the United Kingdom and on her periodic return to Pakistan. By the year 2000, Lubna was gripped by political concerns. She produced the Ja-namaaz series to address her grievances. Pakistan, her homeland, had become increasingly dependent on foreign institutions. She painted prayer rugs mocking allegiance to these institutions, including the White House, the IMF and even McDonalds.
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Why is it that, most of the time, life-changing events appear to come out of nowhere? Or are we always unconsciously preparing for that moment, and the destiny-diverting collision (even with a book) is never as coincidental as it seems? There are few books that I have read which have not shaped my mind and fate in some way, especially when I was growing up. Whether it was the PG Wodehouse Jeeves series, or the collection of Oscar Wilde stories I constantly enjoyed…or Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daphne du Maurier. I was a greedy monster, devouring them all.
But it was only in my thirties that I stumbled upon two Urdu authors, Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991) and Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), whose work had a seminal impact on me – and whose rebellious lives I carry about with me like a talisman. Since I was drawn to the unconventional, was I searching for iconoclastic writers who challenged social and moral attitudes, but who had roots in the East? Their image of the “outsider” was something I could identify with, and they wrote in a very accessible style. It was a collection of short stories by the perceptive and outspoken Muslim woman author Ismat Chughtai, which contained an astonishingly provocative story called “Lihaaf” or “The Quilt” (originally published in 1941), that finally deflected my staid career as a TV professional in the 1990s. The other stories could be considered equally inflammatory, but “Lihaaf” was an unusual narrative for a woman writer in India. It was about a rather thinly disguised lesbian relationship.
