by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Exile is a state of mind and quite necessary in the kind of critical awareness, imaginative empathy and artistic autonomy that go into a work of excellence, a “global work.” Our lists of poets we consider as “world poets,” assuming that “world poet” is indeed a meaningful category, may vary dramatically but the criteria we are likely to agree upon for such a category, are: an agile imagination, an intuitive bond with humanity, a finely tuned connection with history, and an ability to go beyond merely utilizing language— to reach for the universally unsayable and cast it in a renewed, common language, and above all: an ability to move the spirit in an authentic way.

I recently had the luxury of conversing with Fady Joudah and Anis Shivani— two writers I admire for their range and gift for innovation. Their approach to literature, as reflected in their poetry and prose, betrays traits of the contemporary “global writer” I’m interested in—traits that ultimately cast the larger literary moment in their art. In other words, the shared and conflicted global histories they address, the deftness with which they assemble disparate cultural perspectives, and the richness of their positions—political and aesthetic—illuminate the present, and in a sense, the future, of an increasing and an increasingly globalized readership.

My conversation with these authors was centered on the idea of our literary moment, mainly keeping Fady Joudah’s book Textu and Anis Shivani’s My Tranquil War in mind.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Why We Argue (And How We Should) is centrally concerned to elucidate the concept of a dialectical fallacy. This concept deserves comment. “Fallacy” is the name given to especially common and attractive failures of reasoning. Works in logic and critical thinking typically distinguish between formal and informal fallacies.

Formal fallacies are pervasive errors of formal inferences. Consider the argument:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is handy.

Therefore, Bill is a carpenter.

This argument fails because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion: the first premise states that being a carpenter is sufficient for being handy; it does not claim that all and only handy people are carpenters. After all, Bill could be a handy car mechanic who has never cut a piece of wood. We call this error the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This error gets its own name because we are especially prone to this kind of mistake. Once one is trained to spot it, one will find that this fallacy is committed frequently.

By contrast, informal fallacies are pervasive errors in informalinferences. Informal inferences differ from formal ones in that the latter propose to demonstrate the truth of their conclusions whereas the former aspire only to show that their conclusions are most likely true. A familiar informal fallacy is the ad populum fallacy. Consider:

Most people think that Joe is guilty.

Therefore, Joe is guilty.

This argument fails because it appeals simply to what “most people” think, without any regard for questions concerning the level to which “most people” are informed of the relevant facts of Joe's case. The mere fact that “most people” agree about some claim is no evidence at all for its truth.

The important thing about fallacies is that they are attractive and so pervasive errors of reasoning. Part of what accounts for their popularity is the way in which they mimic or ride piggyback on proper inferences. The fallacy of affirming the consequent is a mimic of the obviously successful inference known as modus ponens:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is a carpenter.

Therefore, Bill is handy.

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by Jalees Rehman

The Autocomplete function of Google Search is both annoying and fascinating. When you start typing in the first letters or words of your search into the Google search box, Autocomplete takes a guess at what you are looking for and “completes” the search phrase by offering you multiple query phrases. The queries offered by Autocomplete are “a reflection of the search activity of users and the content of web pages indexed by Google“. Considering the fact that more than five billion Google searches are conducted on an average day, the Google Autocomplete function has a huge database of search information that it can reference. This also means that the Autocomplete suggestions are quite dynamic and can vary over time. A popular new song lyric, the name of a viral video or a recent movie quote can catapult itself to the top of the Autocomplete suggestion list within a matter of hours or days if millions of users start search for that specific phrase. Autocomplete may also take a user's browsing history or location into account, which explains why it may offer a varying set of suggestions to different users.

Autocomplete can be quite annoying because the suggested lists of queries are based on their web popularity and can thus consist of bizarre combinations which are not at all related to one's intended searches. On the other hand, Autocomplete is also a fascinating tool to provide a window into the Zeitgeist of web users, revealing what kinds of phrases are most commonly used on the web, and by inference, what contemporary ideas are currently associated with the entered keywords. The Google Zeitgeist website reveals the most widely searched terms to help identify cultural trends – based on the frequency of Google search engine queries – during any given year.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) recently used the Google Search Autocomplete function in an ad campaign to highlight the extent of misogyny on the web. Searching for “women should…” or “women need to…” was autocompleted to phrases such as “women should be slaves” or “women need to be put in their place”. The fact that Autocomplete suggested these phrases means that probably hundreds of thousands of internet users have used these phrases in their search queries or on web pages indexed by Google – a reminder of how much gender injustice still exists in our world.

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by Misha Lepetic

“And if you can't bear the thought of messing up
your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the
whole idea of life, and become a saint.”

~ John Osborne, “Look Back in Anger”

As the paeans for Nelson Mandela rolled in last week, observers might have been forgiven for thinking that it was not a single human being had passed, but rather an astonishing confabulation of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. The narrative can be encapsulated thusly: a despicable regime unjustly imprisons a passionate activist for 27 years, who upon his release goes on to lead his nation into peaceful democracy and becomes an avuncular elder statesman, unconditionally loved and respected by all. But this narrative tells us little about who Mandela actually was, and why he acted in the world in the way he did. A brief examination of Mandela's involvement in the ending of non-violence and the initiation of armed struggle in the early 1960s serves to illustrate some of this nuance.

The perpetuation of the saccharine narrative is enabled by, among other things, the cherry-picking of Mandela's own words. One endlessly quoted passage has been the end of Mandela's opening statement at the start of his trial on charges of sabotage, at the Supreme Court of South Africa, on April 20^th, 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

This is stirring stuff, and worthy of being engraved into the marble of a monument, but only if you bother to read the preceding 10,000 words. In a far-reaching statement notable for its pellucidity, Mandela lays out the circumstances and philosophy that resulted in armed struggle against the regime.

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto [we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC]. I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

Without this context, Mandela's lofty concluding paragraph is as cheap as a Hallmark card. It's now clear to the reader exactly the lengths to which Mandela would be willing to go to die for his beliefs – not as a lamb to slaughter, but as a fiery revolutionary. It is difficult to conceive of Gandhi initiating such actions. But why was Mandela prepared at that point to resort to violence?

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by Madhu Kaza

During the month or so that my father spent in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in suburban Detroit, my travel habits changed in peculiar ways. Not knowing ahead of time the duration of my stay in Detroit nor how long I would be back home in New York before being called again to the Midwest, I was hardly able to pack anything at all. Yet I could not help but take luggage with me, so more than once I travelled with an empty suitcase, which brought to mind the image of an out-of-work businessman who still carries his briefcase everywhere. What I did pack were vegetables. I found myself regularly transporting produce from one state to the other. If I had lettuce in my fridge in New York I would carry it with me on the flight to Detroit imagining the salad I would make at my parents' house. One time, I took two carrots from my mother's fridge and put them in my vacant suitcase so that I could use them in a lentil soup I planned to make when I returned to New York. Suddenly, using an airline carrier to transport the ingredients I had gathered for the day's lunch or dinner not only made sense, but also seemed vital to my well-being. I think it allowed me to feel a kind of continuity between morning in the ICU with my father in Michigan and early evening alone in my apartment in New York at a time when I felt quite dislocated from the routines of my life. During this same period of time there was another odd development, which I understood far less: I became a person who felt compelled to take a fifteen hour train journey instead of a routine one and a half hour flight.

I bought my ticket for the Lake Shore Limited departing from New York on September 21^st. The #49 train departs daily from New York Penn Station at 3:40pm and reaches its final destination, Chicago's Union Station at 9:59 the following morning. Another section of the Lake Shore Limited departs from Boston. In Albany, the New York and Boston trains are hitched together for the journey to the Midwest. I would be getting off in Toledo, OH around 5:55am and would continue by car for another hour to Detroit.

I had enough experience on Amtrak's well-trafficked Northeast Corridor routes to not be romantic about American train travel. But I also knew that the railroads had been fundamental to the (often mythologized) American past. 19^th century railroads, including those regional lines that were consolidated into the powerful New York Central Railroad, facilitated the economic development and westward expansion of the country. Given the proliferation of railroad companies in the 19^th century, many ventures bankrupted investors and owners. On the other hand, the success of the New York Central Railroad made the Vanderbilt fortune.

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by Asif Faiz

There has been a flurry of doomsday scenarios in US political circles predicting the collapse of the Afghan regime following the US/NATO withdrawal and grim consequences for Pakistan if it continues to pursue its Great Game policies of the last three decades. However, few of these dire predictions take cognizance of Afghanistan’s turbulent history and the long, uneasy relationship, first between British India and Afghanistan and after 1947, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is the internal ethnic divisions of Afghanistan that have prevented the emergence of an Afghan nation state and no foreign intervention or assistance can remedy that.

One needs to view the Afghan- Pakistan relationship through the prism of history. There have been over a dozen changes of monarchial ,republican and emirate regimes, mostly violent, in Afghanistan since 1901. The cavalcade of Afghan flags over this period (see here) is a testament to the political volatility of the country and the forces that have influenced its recent history. Pakistan was unilaterally involved (with military and financial support) in just one of those regime changes, i.e. the installation of the Taliban emirate in 1996; in another two it served as a US proxy, and in the bargain brought violence, instability, and mayhem to its borderlands and now its urban centers. What foreign intervention does in Afghanistan is unite the Afghans temporarily against a perceived common enemy and once the foreign intervention is over, they go back to their internal squabbling and scramble for power.

Overlay on this historical background, the mosaic of Pashtun tribes and clans, artificially split by the Durand Line. British India had the strategic depth to treat the Frontier as a borderland buffer to protect
its political and commercial interests in the context of the Great Game. Pakistan unwittingly has followed the same colonial policies to this day, notwithstanding the fact that the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line have a common heritage, culture, language and history. Any mischief or turmoil on either side of the Durand Line invariably spills over to the other, with Peshawar and Quetta (and now Karachi) absorbing the shocks of instability and displacement in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

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