Month: March 2018
David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience
This crushing weight of self-consciousness is at the heart of Oblivion’s most famous story, “Good Old Neon,” which n+1 called the collection’s “one indisputable masterpiece.” The pseudo-narrator of “Good Old Neon,” Neal, has spent his life tortured by “the fraudulence paradox”: “the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud.” The pressure eventually becomes so great that Neal kills himself. The crucial point is that all of Neal’s extensive and extensively described suffering can be located in the makeup and character of the human brain, not society or culture. By the end of the story the strong impression is that Neal’s condition is but a particularly acute version of a basic human predicament. As he puts it, it’s “not as if this is an incredibly rare or obscure type of personality.” In the modern neuroscientific paradigm, Neal’s suspicion that “in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self” is absolutely correct. There is really nothing outlandish about Neal’s fears; within Oblivion’s neuropessimism, they are simple truisms. We do experience time poorly; language is in many ways a weak tool. The same goes for his fear that he is “unable to love:” from a hard Darwinian viewpoint, we are all unable to love, really—or more accurately, what we think we are doing when we love is actually not loving at all as we understand that word. Neal recognizes this himself: “we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.”
more here.
Why you should give money directly and unconditionally to homeless people
Don’t just give to people who ask you directly, but to the guy with his head in his hands and a Styrofoam cup on the ground in front of him. Give to the woman who’s blind drunk. Give to the guy with meth-rotted teeth. Give to the spice addict who can’t look you in the eye.
Many street beggars are addicts, yes. Do addicts not deserve food? Wouldn’t you want to drink if you were in their position? Don’t you get drunk every weekend to cope with work stress anyway? Who are you to tell them what to do with their bodies?
As the founder of User Voice, a charity led and staffed by former homeless addicts, says: “If your money funds the final hit, accept that the person would rather be dead. If your act of kindness makes him wake up the next morning and decide to change his life, that’s nice but not your business either.”
Of course, it is true that your drinking habit and theirs are fundamentally different. Addiction is rooted in material circumstance – alcohol is the obvious example, but think how many skiing accidents end in courses of opiates far stronger than anything you’d find on the street without any long-term compulsion developing. It can only be tackled by raising people out of poverty, and a brute-force severing of cash flow is not going to starve people into seeking help from authorities they know will not, or cannot, help them.
more here.
#MeToo, Said the Shulamite
The shift of #MeToo into #TimesUp suggests that we moderns should long since have eradicated sexual abuse and harassment, consigning them to a barbaric past. Their endurance is indeed beyond frustrating. But while some attribute them to an interruption of progress, to the fact that we have not reached a utopian modernity, others argue that modernity itself has prolonged these behaviors. They are seen as products of the sexual revolution, which must be reversed.
Yet both approaches are mistaken. Neither modernity nor tradition have, in and of themselves, offered solutions to sexual harassment and violence. In fact, the biblical Song of Songs, one of the oldest extant love poems, can be read as an extended protest against the sexual oppression of women. Since ancient times, the struggle against it has required the voices of women who can speak without shame about their own desire, their experiences of violation and their rights of refusal as full-fledged humans.
The central figure of Song of Songs is an unnamed young woman, referred to variously including as “the Shulamite,” who asserts her sexual and emotional agency while others attempt to control her.
more here.
Ignoring Science at Our Peril
Jane Brody in The New York Times:
It took nearly four years for Parliament to pass the Clean Air Act of 1956 that restricted the burning of coal in urban areas and helped homeowners convert from coal to less harmful ways to heat their homes. The parallels of this catastrophic weather event to current concerns about climate change are hard to ignore. Already as the world’s climate warms, there has been an increase in devastating droughts and life- and property-destroying wildfires, mudslides and floods.
All the while the polar and Arctic ice caps are melting and, despite dire warnings from highly reputable scientists, the current administration is taking little action to protect its citizens from future climactic disasters that scientists say are sure to come. Instead, there has been a push to bring back coal and rescind regulatory measures that helped to clean the air and water of pollutants. Likewise, a loosening of regulations and appointments of agency administrators with strong ties to the industries they oversee threaten the safety and healthfulness of the foods and beverages we consume and feed to our most vulnerable: children, the elderly and those with compromised immunity. Agencies tasked with protecting public health are under fire and working with diminished resources.
More here.
Have kids or do not have kids, but let’s not blame climate change
My turning to nature was a physical one to be sure, but my late teen years were also a time of reverie inspired by those Irish writers that cared about both people and wild landscapes: Liam O’Flaherty, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, for example, and by all the earthy shenanigans recorded in the Irish mythological cycles. An apposite ratio of nature hikes and of literary contemplation provided me a foundation for optimistic living.
“Soil and Myself” was published, the world turned, and I moved along as writers are wont to do. Several years later, I got a letter from a reader—perhaps the essay's only one—who remarked on how the piece had moved her. She was getting on, she wrote, and was latterly attempting to draw consolation from the same sources I had. As a codicil, she noted that she had elected not to have children because of her worry about nuclear armageddon. Why bring a child into this damned world? She concluded wistfully that had she had a child that child would be my age now. By the time I got that letter I had survived nearly four decades without facing down any real calamities.
This small but arresting exchange came to mind on encountering several discussions that assume a bleak environmental future. For example, a recent Onion headline quips dolefully “Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say to Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can.” Less drolly, the “Climate Change and Life Events” app allows users map their future against projections of future global temperatures. The future will not look like the past. The New York Times reports on some couples’ deliberations about their reproductive future in the light of such realities: “No Children Because Of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It” (New York Times, Feb 5, 2018). A new generation considers the prospects of raising children in perilous times. Unlike nuclear annihilation, which, so far, has failed to materialize, the bombs of climate change, so to speak, have already left their bunkers, though there is some uncertainty about their yield. Facing an uncertain environmental future, and occupying a planet that horrifyingly may be unable to sustain its burgeoning human population, determining to have, or not have, a child is a fraught decision.
Monday Poem
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives —Bob Dylan
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament.….—Martin Buber
____________________________________________________
Luminous Debris
…… through the debris of ages
…… too deep to grasp I spin
but you are with me in this thing so vast
that distances lose meaning
and time is neither slow nor fast
…… some spend years slicing its flesh
thin as shaved salmon into membranes
so fine the fabric of universes pass
without tangling warp or woof
……(though certainty snaps
….. with the slightest look)
…… others count and rout particles that nest
without rest:
………………….atomic bábushka–Matryoshkas
of prosaic electricity
in ghost orbits
…………………… being like us,
both here and there in bodymind
ensconced
……………… while others
fire duet lasers to catch ageless hints
of enormous pebbles that once dropped
into a ballooning lake of spacetime
stalking gravity waves of bygone quakes
like Greeks on a hill hailing Helios,
marking arrivals, noting,
watching his horse and chariot
drop with precision
blazing into a wine-dark sea
leaving a jetblack wake
…… but you are with me
in this vast shadow
i and thou among receding sparks
luminous debris
…… under eternal sky
…… you and me
…… i and i
.
Jim Culleny
3/9/18
Men and Intimacy, Physical and Conversational
by Samir Chopra
While on air, when speaking about the cross-cultural differences in male intimacy I had experienced in my three ‘homes,’ I noted that growing up in India meant being socialized in a domain of relationships with men where physical contact was relatively unproblematic: I put my arms around my male friends’ shoulders, did not rigorously negotiate inter-personal physical space, and demonstrated affection and companionship through a variety of physical gestures—including hugs. (Avuncular affection almost always took these forms.) As the time approached for my move to the US, I was warned—by those Indians who had preceded me and were now already resident in the US—to not expect such ‘intimate’ contact when I crossed the waters, to desist from such overt displays of friendship and affection in my relationships with American men. Those warnings spoke to a culture that set much store by the careful maintenance of a physical and emotional space between its male members; ‘keep your distance’ applied to many dimensions of social interactions. I took these warnings to heart. There was no reason to disbelieve them; moreover, I was keen to ‘fit in,’ to not ‘stick out,’ to not take the risk of being called a ‘homo’ or a ‘fag’—as seemed to be the fate of those who transgressed in this domain. This was the 1980s; America seemed—from a distance—to be suffering a national crisis of masculine insecurity. I suffered from my own variant of it.
So the manner of my relationships with men changed once I moved to the US; besides the obvious psychosocial distance pertaining to matters of familial and filial structure, and political and cultural tastes and inclinations, I found men in my new home structured and conducted their relationships and friendships with each other quite differently. American men were not physically demonstrative in their claims of friendship; they did not hug their male friends; they did not put arms around male friends; they carefully established the requisite physical space between themselves and their friends. Immigration induced many changes in the qualitative and quantitative nature of my personal and social relationships with men and women alike; the parameters of male relationships in my new home denied me a very particular—and much desired when missed—kind of emotional sustenance.
When the Pentagon Looked to Chomsky’s Linguistics for their Weapons Systems
by Chris Knight
Students protesting against military research at MIT in 1969.
Noam Chomsky is the world’s most prominent anti-militarist campaigner and, wearing a different hat, the acknowledged founder of modern scientific linguistics. Any attempt to understand Chomsky’s huge influence on modern thought must appreciate the connection between these two roles. And to do this we must begin with a paradoxical fact: Chomsky has spent his career in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in what was originally a military lab. As he himself says about MIT in the 1960s:
[It] was about 90 per cent Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics [RLE].
The Pentagon showed a keen interested in linguistics during this period. Colonel Gaines of the US Air Force recalled why during an interview in 1971. Having referred to the military’s computerised systems of command and control, both for defense against nuclear missiles and for use in Vietnam, he complained about the difficulties of teaching computer languages to military personnel. “We sponsored linguistic research”, he explained, “in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”
If Chomsky’s linguistics was being funded for this purpose, it seems all the more remarkable that Chomsky ended up publicly opposing the Vietnam War and denouncing the very military institutions that were sponsoring his research.
Modestly, Chomsky has always downplayed any moral dilemmas, suggesting that the military had no interest in his work. But I have recently come across restricted-access documents which refer to Chomsky as a “consultant” to a project funded by the Air Force in order “to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.”
perceptions
Can moral virtues become outdated?
by Emrys Westacott
It isn't easy to specify just what makes a virtue a moral virtue. Like certain talents, qualities such as empathy or cheerfulness may be gifts of nature or ingrained by a certain upbringing, and they can also be deliberately cultivated. So the difference between moral and non-moral virtues doesn't lie in their origin, or in the degree to which one is responsible for possessing them.
Moral virtues do tend to be qualities that it is thought good for everyone to have; but that is also true of such things as intelligence or physical fitness. In general, though, we think of particular skills as valuable for some people who engage in particular tasks, while moral virtues are qualities that it is good for anyone and everyone to have. They are those excellences that help one to be a good human being (rather than just a good x) and to live a good life. Something like this underlies the way Socrates talks about virtue in Plato's dialogues.
These days, we tend to think of moral virtues as traits that directly affect our dealings with others; they are traits that make someone a more valuable colleague, neighbor, friend, companion, or compatriot, or fellow citizen. If we adopt Peter Singer's notion of expanding the circle of moral concern, we will also count among "others" humanity as a whole, and at least some non-human animals. But philosophers, like Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics conceive of moral virtues more broadly still, as including traits that have to do with how fulfilling a life one leads. Thoreau, for instance, who could reasonably be described as a modern stoic, views curiosity about the natural world, or an ability to appreciate beauty, as moral virtues in this sense.
Can a moral virtue become outdated? However one conceives of the moral virtues, this is an interesting question to ponder.
Almost no one actually believes Fake News. So what’s the problem?
by Thomas R. Wells
What is going on? Is this something new? Does it matter?
I. Do People Believe Fake News?
One popular interpretation of what is going on is that social media and its associated adtech have isolated us in filter bubbles and made us newly vulnerable to politically or commercially motivated lies. The bubble is a controlled information environment based on what we want to hear and what adbuyers want people like us to believe. Organisations that know how to use this – whether a Russian troll farm or the company hired by the Brexit campaign – can exercise enormous power over the information we are exposed to and thus our beliefs about the world.
I disagree. I think very few people actually believe fake news. Rather, they indulge in believing that they believe it. People’s relationship to such beliefs is much more like the way they relate to icecream than the enlightenment idea of respecting objective truth. Consider Pizzagate, a recent very famous example of fake news.
At the end of October 2016 an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory started circulating on fringe rightist social media and fake news websites like Infowars. Russian troll accounts seem to have been among those helping the story spread. Over the next month, millions of Americans heard or read that top members of the Democratic Party were running a child sexual slavery ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
The Speed of Cavalry Camels
by Holly A. Case
Wilhelm Kotarbiński, Camel Cavalry (1848-1921)
"People who were not born then will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel….But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward."
So wrote Robert Musil in Man Without Qualities, describing the atmosphere in turn-of-the-century Vienna.
*
The historian Carl Schorske used Musil's "cavalry camel" passage to open the third chapter in his famous Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Written over the 1960s and 1970s, Schorske's book explained why the intricacies of Viennese high culture should concern readers of his own time, in which "liberals and radicals, almost unconsciously, adapted their world-views to a revolution of falling political expectations."
Now a mood of pessimism—sometimes of impotence, sometimes of rigid defensiveness, sometimes of surrender—settled over an intelligentsia that, whether centrist or radical, liberal or Marxist, had for several decades been united in social optimism.
Schorske noted how some liberals who had never given a whit for religion became enamored with "neo-orthodox Protestantism," and how "patrician wisdom" overtook "ethical rationalism." In short, what had once been left behind was laid in front like new track.
*
A while ago I went to see Black Panther. The best part was hearing the audience address the screen as though the characters could hear them. It reminded me of the descriptions of cinema's earliest viewers, who fled from their seats at the sight of an oncoming train on the screen.
We have a president who watches the news and calls into the news and tweets the news and is the news. So perhaps King T'Challa does hear. I feel like he even said as much at some point, in response to an outcry from the audience.
*
Apparently, a good many clock radios in Europe are running three to six minutes slow these days. The German press calls it "Weckergate" (Alarm clock-gate). It has something to do with a conflict between Kosovo and Serbia over payments for electricity in areas of Kosovo where Serbs are in the majority. Somehow this makes a lot of clocks run slow, including German ones.
A day after "Alarm clock-gate" swept the German headlines, it hit the Austrian ones. The day after that, the English-language ones.
POLITICS FOR BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE
There's disagreement about who first described politics as "show business for ugly people": some commentators attribute the zinger to Jay Leno, others to political consultant Paul Begala. But there is broad agreement that whoever it was identified a genuine phenomenon. Politics in the era of mass communication has indeed become more "mediated" – as focused on personalities as it is on ideology and policy, and a prey to the dark arts of image-making and spin. The successful modern politician knows that in order to be successful s/he must defer to the media consultant and submit to the stylistic makeover. Above all, s/he knows to stick to the script.
Now, however, we have a different phenomenon – not new, exactly, but newly prominent: the political celebrity. Actors and other media personalities are increasingly engaged in awareness-raising, social media campaigns and activism, and the news media's appetite for their interventions is huge. When celebrities speak out, their words are reported, analysed, criticised, celebrated. If politics is show business for ugly people, show business is looking more and more like politics for beautiful people.
In the event, last Sunday's Oscars ceremony was a more muted affair, politically speaking, than previous recent industry gatherings, perhaps because the organisers of Time's Up and its analogues are aware that the law of diminishing returns may soon kick in, if it hasn't already. But the broader trend is conspicuous. From the celebrity envoy or "goodwill ambassador" to the "controversial" acceptance speech to the red-carpet anti-fashion statement, the idea that Hollywood and the media more broadly have a responsibility to deal with issues of social justice is now utterly mainstream.
The intersection of showbiz and activism is by no means a new phenomenon. Jane Fonda's opposition to the Vietnam War, Harry Belafonte's involvement in the civil rights movement, and Charlton Heston's advocacy on behalf of the National Rifle Association are just a few examples of celebrities lending their imprimaturs to issues that are important to them. Nor is this an unwelcome phenomenon, necessarily. It isn't incumbent on anyone to shut up about the state of the world just because they have money in the bank and a state-of-the-art home-security system, though an intelligent analysis will account for the skewed perspective such privileges tend to engender. Yes it can be irritating to hear ditsy A-listers wax political about topics they'd never heard of until the day before yesterday. But these aren't crimes against humanity. And, really, Clint Eastwood's heart to heart with an empty chair was no more embarrassing, at the end of the day, than American Sniper.
How ‘the Kingfish’ Turned Corporations into People
Adam Winkler in the New York Review of Books:
Huey Long was Trump before Trump. The fiery populist governor elected on the eve of the Great Depression had an aggressive agenda to make Louisiana great again—and little tolerance for dissent. Long set up a state board to censor newsreels and another to decide which newspapers would be allowed to print profitable government notices. When the student paper at Louisiana State University published an unflattering editorial about him, an outraged Long—referring to himself, as autocrats often do, in the third person—sent in the state police to seize copies, saying he wasn’t “going to stand for any students criticizing Huey Long.”
After Louisiana’s larger daily newspapers came out against him, “the Kingfish” declared war. “The daily newspapers have been against every progressive step in the state,” Long said, “and the only way for the people of Louisiana to get ahead is to stomp them flat.” To do so, in 1934 Long’s allies enacted a 2 percent tax on the advertising revenue of the state’s largest-circulation newspapers. Long said the tax “should be called a tax on lying, two cents per lie.”
More here.
Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:
Many personal computers have installed on them a small command-line tool called wget, which allows you to download webpages, or even whole websites, to your machine. I immediately downloaded the whole of my Tumblr to keep it safe—although if Tumblr did end up being shut down, I wasn’t sure how I would get all those posts back online. But that was a problem I could reserve for another day. In the meantime, I decided that I needed to talk with my students.
I was teaching a course at the time on reading, writing, and research in digital environments, so the question of who owns what we typically think of as “our” social media presence was a natural one. Yet I discovered that these students, all of whom were already interested in and fairly knowledgeable about computing, had not considered this peculiar situation—and were generally reluctant to: After all, what were the alternatives?
More here.
Adam Ruins Everything: Dr Azra Raza on Mouse Model Misconceptions & Other Ways We Can Improve Cancer Research
Azra Raza is, of course, my sister and also a 3QD editor.
The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic:
It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. “We must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century,” write a group of 16 political scientists and legal scholars in an essay also published Thursday in Science. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”
More here.