The Passion of the Urban

by Shawn Crawford

Urban Frank Meyer III

Oatmeal for breakfast. Kale salad for lunch. Surely a slice of pie with dinner won’t ruin the diet after you’ve been so disciplined all day?

Welcome to Moral Licensing, the term psychologists and researchers use to describe the process by which we use a “good” behavior to later justify a “bad” choice. Example? I voted for Obama, so let the racist remarks begin! Obviously the strategy proves more subtle, from Fox News insisting we had entered a post-racial society after President Obama’s election, to the refrain, “I don’t want to hear about racial inequality; we elected a black president.”

Moral licensing occurs in research studies regardless of age, gender, or economic situation. But what happens when religion gets introduced into the mix? In a study conducted by the neuroscientist Jean Decety, 1170 children aged 5-12 years old, from six countries (USA, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa) were given 30 stickers and asked to share as many as they liked with a child of similar age and background to create a “generosity score”. Most kids came from households that identified as Christian (24%), Muslim (43%) or not religious (28%).

The children from secular homes had the highest generosity scores. When parents were asked to score the empathy of their children in the study, the religious parents rated their children as very moral, far beyond the scores of the test.

To see just how powerful moral licensing can be in shaping behavior, consider that in a poll conducted by ChristiaNet.com, 50% of evangelical men and 20% of evangelical women said they were addicted to porn (which they consider sinful). The time of highest viewing? Sundays, after they had gone to church. Read more »

On Tact

by Joan Harvey

I am deeply convinced that it is tactless to speak of tact (unfortunately that is what I am doing). —Roland Barthes, The Neutral

By Indischer Maler des 6. Jahrhunderts – The Yorck Project 

A married doctor, a relative of the novelist Amitava Kumar, is having illicit sex with a medical receptionist at a gym across the street from the hospital where he works. (It’s hard not to write “hot illicit sex” but of course the quality is unknown). Kumar’s piece from The Baffler is not about the adultery, but about the decision to expose it, as well as a few other incidents also having to do with the uncomfortable outing of other people’s sex lives and bad behavior. Kumar describes how this story (which he overheard while eavesdropping and recorded in his notebook) was first published in a national newspaper in India where that doctor lives, and the subsequent worry of his sister, who read the piece, that the doctor would find out. Kumar’s reasoning was that in publishing his notes about the day, it would be false to omit this particular note.

We’re all interested in the sex lives of others, particularly when they are transgressive. But clearly in writing this follow-up explanatory piece Kumar had some conflicts about what a writer is justified in saying, and on what subjects he should remain silent. (And the Freudian in me couldn’t help noting that in discussing his prior decision to reveal the doctor’s secret sex life, Kumar made sure that an even larger audience was made aware of it, as if somehow he hadn’t exposed it quite enough the first time round.)

Kumar is doing difficult work for us, showing how he came to justify his choice. This is what happened, he writes; this is how I recorded it, I will tell the truth. But if a somewhat throwaway line in a notebook causes unnecessary pain, is it justified? If Kumar had been completely comfortable with his act he would have had no reason to explore it. Kumar writes “ I might sound brazen here, but what I’m actually calling for is greater vulnerability. Even shame…I respect the ethical bent, but am impatient with it. In fact, I see it as a privilege. It is easy to be righteous; much more difficult, but also preferable, in my opinion, to be real.” Read more »

Rape Culture: Teaching Greek Tragedy

by Abigail Akavia

A few years ago I taught an undergraduate seminar on Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis and late 20th century adaptations of the play. Halfway through the quarter, a student confided in me that she was a sexual assault survivor, and that the content we were dealing with in class was bringing the traumatic experience back to her. I was caught off guard. I do not wish here to get into the fraught questions of whether or not trigger warnings are appropriate in higher education, or of whether or how instructors should attend to students’ emotional needs when dealing with potentially triggering subject-matters; this was not the point of the conversation with my student, nor was she trying to excuse herself from any assignment or to modify her participation in the seminar. (Indeed, she was one of the students whose contribution to class was most consistent and significant.) Our conversation was and still is momentous for me because I had not realized until then that a statement like “this play evokes rape” is an appropriate preface to a discussion of Iphigenia in Aulis.

This conversation was pivotal for my understanding of Euripides’ play; it changed the way I see my role as a teacher in general and a teacher of classical texts in particular. So focused was I on the ancient version of Iphigenia’s story, even when reading its reformulations in contemporary texts, that I failed to acknowledge the centrality of gender-based violence to this story. This, despite the obvious importance of the topic in one of the modern adaptations of Iphigenia we read, Caridad Svich’s 2004 Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell that was Once her Heart. Something about my experience and my training allowed me to go on thinking that Euripides’ play is not really about assault; after all, Iphigenia is not raped in any conventional sense of the term (some might say: nor in any sense of the term). But once I had met that student–truly met her–it became clear to me that Euripides’ play is, indeed, “about” sexual violence against women. The next realization, following close on its heels, was a gestalt switch, at once radically transformative and absolutely obvious. Of course it is about sexual violence against women: isn’t most of Greek tragedy and classical myth about that? Read more »

The Unbearable Whiteness of Racist Speech

by Joseph Shieber

The controversy over the hiring of Sarah Jeong by the New York Times has largely subsided. However, we can still learn some important lessons from the discussion of Jeong’s social media posts that were – depending on your perspective – cases of either ironic troll-trolling or of anti-white racist speech.

Jeong’s hiring came close on the heels of another controversy, sparked by an apology by the editors of The Nation for a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee, a young white man who wrote in African American vernacular and employed ableist imagery. While critics of the magazine from the left decried the tone-deafness of the poem, critics on the right took the magazine’s editors to task for silencing the poet.

Since I’m gearing up for a fall semester in which I’ll be offering a course on the philosophy of language, the juxtaposition of the two controversies was particularly striking for me. In particular, I want to examine the way that two prominent conservative critics reacted to the controversies and show how their responses reveal a glaring lack of understanding of how language works. Read more »

To Be Fair

by Samia Altaf

“This girl will never be able to find a husband,” declared Baiji, big mother, my maternal grandmother, soon after she took her first look at me.

“Hai hai,” she almost beat her chest, “look at her, just look.” She points at me holding herself back as if from a contaminant, appealing to the women — assorted aunts and cousins milling around, who hid their faces in their chadors and shook their heads — “her nose is too big, her eyes too small, she is bald.”

“And worst of all, hai hai,” — here Baiji’s voice drops ominously and a trembling hand goes to cover her mouth at the horror of it — “her color! It is not… not…not fair. It is… quite dark.”

She looks pityingly at my mother standing beside her in all her Kashmiri “fairness” and youthful glory — my mother of the fairest, luminous, skin that she took intact and unlined to her grave seven decades later — and puts a loving hand on her head. “My poor daughter… what a fate for you, hai hai. Well, at least these genes have not come from your side of the family.” (One of the aunts present at the occasion swears Baiji said germs and not genes.)

Baiji might as well have added, while on the roll, that the girl is also toothless and incontinent for I was all of a year old. Read more »

Against Culture; For Cosmopolitan Wisdom

by Thomas R. Wells

The main job of ‘culture’ in a modern society seems to be shielding people from the demands of morality. In its intellectual role it justifies inequality between citizens. In its national history role it gives citizens a delusional sense of their country’s significance and entitlement, followed by a dangerous sense of grievance when this isn’t sufficiently recognised by the rest of the world. In its identitarian role it deflects demands for justification into mere proclamations of fact: ‘Why do we do this or that awful thing?… Because shut up. It is who we are.’

None of these ideas of culture is worth keeping. We should throw them all out and focus on a different idea of culture as integration in a social world, and of a cultured person as one who can hear and speak to many worlds.

I

First there is there is the idea of culture as a moral hierarchy between citizens. Individuals are supposed to strive to become better, more civilised people. Which turns out to mean, not better at being good people; not better at making and living up to ethical judgements, such as our obligations to the less fortunate. Rather, it means becoming a connoisseur of certain arcane and unpopular art forms.

Familiarity with opera, for instance, largely functions as a compass for orienting the socio-economic class structure between the civilised and the rest. Most people who attend opera performances do so as a performance of their class identity, not for genuine aesthetic delight. They have at best a superficial aesthetic appreciation of what is going on. This can be seen in their reliance on a handful of classic brands which substitute for independent taste or judgement. See for example the dominance of the odious Wagner, the Manchester United of opera. The best explanation of the popularity of opera among the upper classes is that it happens to be absurdly expensive and difficult to enjoy and therefore functions as a good – difficult to fake – signal of who is in the club. Read more »

Poetry and Apologies: The controversy over Anders Carlson-Wee’s poem “How-To”

by Emrys Westacott

On July 5 The Nation published a 14 line poem by Anders Carlson-Wee entitled “How-To.” The speaker in the poem is giving advice on how to beg. The poem begins:

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,

say you’re pregnant–nobody gonna lower

themselves to listen for the kick.

The speaker exhibits a fairly sophisticated understanding of how the sensibilities of potential givers can be manipulated:

If you’re crippled don’t

flaunt it. Let ‘em think they’re good enough

Christians to notice.

The outlook of the speaker can reasonably be described as cynical, both regarding acceptable strategies to use when begging, and regarding the motives of the people targeted, who are taken to be moved not so much by compassion as by a desire to uphold a certain self-image. The poem concludes:

Don’t say you pray,

say you sin. It’s about who they believe

they is. You hardly even there.

The poem provoked fierce criticism on social media. People objected to Carlson-Wee using black vernacular speech patterns, to his making the speaker black, and to his inclusion of the word “crippled,” which some viewed as “ableist. The criticism prompted the editors at The Nation to issue an apology in which they wrote:

We are sorry for the pain we have caused to many communities affected by this poem….When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization. We can no longer read it that way.

Anders Carlson-Wee also offered an apology on Twitter, writing:

I am sorry for the pain I have caused, and I take responsibility for that. I intended the poem to address the invisibility of homelessness, and clearly it doesn’t work. Treading anywhere close to blackface is horrifying to me and I am profoundly regretful.

One of the downsides to social media is that controversies can easily reduce to a few verbal missiles–brief assertions, sharp put-downs, expressions of incredulity or outrage–tossed back and forth. For example, essayist Roxanne Gay, condemning Carlson-Wee (who is white) for using black vernacular locutions, offered all writers this advice: “Know your lane.” Katha Pollitt, who writes regularly for the nation, opined that the magazine’s apology “looks like a letter from a re-education camp.” What is needed, though, is a more careful reflection on the theoretical issues involved. Read more »

Music, Emotion and Forms of Vitality

by Dwight Furrow

That music and emotion are somehow linked is one of the more widely accepted assumptions shared by philosophical aesthetics as well as the general public. It is also one of the most persistent problems in aesthetics to show how music and emotion are related. Where precisely are these emotions that are allegedly an intrinsic part of the musical experience? Three general answers to this question are possible. Either the emotion is in the musician—the composer or performer—in which case the music is expressing that emotion. Or the emotion is in the music itself, in which case the music somehow embodies the emotion. Or the emotion is in the listener, in which case the music arouses the emotion.

I suspect the most popular view among the public, since it draws on the romantic views of the self and creativity which is still very much with us, is that music expresses the emotional state of the artist. But this is implausible. I doubt that song writers when writing a sad song are in a state of sadness. At best the song could be expressing a composer’s understanding of sadness or perhaps a memory of a previous emotional state. But even if that were granted, we usually know little about the emotional states of composers, song writers, or musicians and so the listener is forced to somehow “read off” the emotion from the music itself. The emotional state of the artist just seems irrelevant to the process of determining the emotive content of the music. No doubt some composers and musicians are expressing their emotions in specific cases. But the only way to know that, short of inferring it from biographical details, is to infer it from the music itself, which seems to locate the emotion in the music. Read more »

A Comment On Honneth’s “The Idea of Socialism”

by Carl Pierer

Socialism is in crisis. Until a few years ago, this mantra kept being repeated and a terminally ill sickness was constantly diagnosed for the once powerful idea. And still, after the impressive Sanders campaign of 2016, the electoral success of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 general election, as well as the – for many – surprising victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the democratic primary in New York, writers continue to assure us that the idea is, if not dead, having serious problems. In any case, the idea of socialism seemed until recently a relic of the industrial past with little to say about contemporary society.

In his brief book “The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal”, which first appeared in its German version in 2015 and then again in 2017, appended with 2 talks given during award ceremonies, Axel Honneth attempts to update socialist ideas for the 21st century. Honneth observes that what once was an idea to inspire enormous popular movements and demanded to be taken seriously even by its most ardent detractors, has lost almost all of its force. The formulation of socialist utopias, if it has not ceased to exist entirely, has become rarer and their attraction diminished. To cite Jameson: “(…) it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”[i]. Honneth, a current descendent of the Frankfurt School and drawing inspiration from Hegel, Dewey, and Habermas, thus raises the question of why the idea of socialism has lost its ability to unveil the reification of the status quo. Read more »

Meet the ‘Change Agents’ Who Are Enabling Inequality

Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:

First came the books describing just how much worse economic inequality had become over the past 20 years, with all the dramatic political implications now impossible to ignore. Then there were the tomes about globalization (including my own, I admit), detailing the West’s unfettered pursuit of neoliberal policies that abetted all this unfairness.

Well, prepare for a new genre: books gently and politely skewering the corporate titans who claim to be solving such problems. It’s an elite that, rather than pushing for systemic change, only reinforces our lopsided economic reality — all while hobnobbing on the conference circuit and trafficking in platitudes.

Anand Giridharadas, a former columnist for The New York Times, spoke about this phenomenon at an Aspen Institute conference in 2015, and he takes his ideas further in his entertaining and gripping new book, “Winners Take All.” As the Democratic Party struggles to figure out its future and global demagogy thrives, it’s worth considering where we went wrong and how best to save the world from the dangerous turn it has taken. It’s now very clear that globalization, technology and market liberalization did not bring their promised benefits — at least not for the vast majority of Americans and those in advanced countries around the world.

More here.

ALPHA experiment takes antimatter to a new level

Ana Lopes at the website of CERN:

In a paper published today in the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration reports that it has literally taken antimatter to a new level. The researchers have observed the Lyman-alpha electronic transition in the antihydrogen atom, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen, for the first time. The finding comes hot on the heels of recent measurements by the collaboration of another electronic transition, and demonstrates that ALPHA is quickly and steadily paving the way for precision experiments that could uncover as yet unseen differences between the behaviour of matter and antimatter.

The Lyman-alpha (or 1S-2P) transition is one of several in the Lyman series of electronic transitions that were discovered in atomic hydrogen just over a century ago by physicist Theodore Lyman. The transition occurs when an electron jumps from the lowest-energy (1S) level to a higher-energy (2P) level and then falls back to the 1S level by emitting a photon at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometres.

It is a special transition. In astronomy, it allows researchers to probe the state of the medium that lies between galaxies and test models of the cosmos. In antimatter studies, it could enable precision measurements of how antihydrogen responds to light and gravity. Finding any slight difference between the behaviour of antimatter and matter would rock the foundations of the Standard Model of particle physics and perhaps cast light on why the universe is made up almost entirely of matter, even though equal amounts of antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang.

More here.

Dreaming of Walter Benjamin on Walter Benjamin Platz

Roger Gathman in Book and Film Globe:

When I got to Walter Benjamin Platz, I figured I was in the wrong place. It wasn’t that I was lost, or had failed to follow the map correctly—it was that the place was wrong.

What I saw before me was a broad square, marked on both ends by small concrete posts meant to impede any motorized traffic, with smooth square slabs of stone paving and a tame trickle of a fountain extending to two facing buildings that defined the Platz. These mixed use buildings, which went up eight stories, had a sleek, grayish look. On the rez-de-chausséethere was a colonnade, with shops and restaurants. It was all as bland and corporate as a focus group.  It wasn’t that there was anything noxious about this site—but it had the look of a space that would never be missed if it were, for some reason, to be utterly changed. Above all, it said nothing about Walter Benjamin, the great explorer of the city as labyrinth, the theorist of the private life of public spaces, one of the founding spirits of psychogeography. There were definitely no minotaurs here.

More here.

Inside the intellectual hub where Baghdad’s spirit thrives

Arwa Ibrahim at Al Jazeera:

It is Friday afternoon and a lively and diverse crowd starts to gather under a blazing August sun on the banks of the Tigris River, just metres away from al-Mutanabi Street, the Iraqi capital’s historic bookselling centre.

For several years now, al-Qishla, an Ottoman military barracks-turned-cultural-hub in the heart of Baghdad, has become a space where intellectuals, poets and artists come together to exchange ideas and discuss current affairs.

Regular attendees say al-Qishla provides residents with a safe avenue to share views freely, as well as a sliver of hope that Baghdad – once a major international intellectual and cultural hub – may return to a shadow of its former self before successive wars gripping the country for decades, left it in decay.

More here.

Yes, You Can Catch Insanity

Andrew Curry in Nautilus:

One day in March 2010, Isak McCune started clearing his throat with a forceful, violent sound. The New Hampshire toddler was 3, with a Beatles mop of blonde hair and a cuddly, loving personality. His parents had no idea where the guttural tic came from. They figured it was springtime allergies. Soon after, Isak began to scream as if in pain and grunt at his parents and peers. When he wasn’t throwing hours-long tantrums, he stared vacantly into space. By the time he was 5, he was plagued by insistent, terrifying thoughts of death. “He would smash his head into windows and glass whenever the word ‘dead’ came into his head. He was trying to drown out the thoughts,” says his mother, Robin McCune, a baker in Goffstown, a small town outside Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city. Isak’s parents took him to pediatricians, therapy appointments, and psychiatrists. He was diagnosed with a host of disorders: sensory processing disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). At 5, he spent a year on Prozac, “and seemed to get worse on it,” says Robin McCune. The McCunes tried to make peace with the idea that their son might never come back. In kindergarten, he grunted and screamed, frightening his teachers and classmates. “He started hearing voices, thought he saw things, he couldn’t go to the bathroom alone,” Robin McCune says. “His fear was immense and paralyzing.”

As his behaviors worsened, both parents prepared themselves for the possibility that he’d have to be home-schooled or even institutionalized. Searching for some explanation, they came across a controversial diagnosis called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococci, or PANDAS. First proposed in 1998, PANDAS linked the sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms like Isak’s to strep infections. They didn’t give it much thought. Periodic strep tests on Isak had always come back negative. And his symptoms seemed too dramatic to be the result of a simple, common childhood infection.

More here.

The Silence of the Girls – a feminist Iliad

Emily Wilson in The Guardian:

In The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of women are the objects through which men struggle with each other for status. The women are not entirely silent, and goddesses always have plenty to say, but mortal women speak primarily to lament. They grieve for their dead sons, dead fathers, dead husbands and dead protectors; for the city of Troy, soon to fall, and for their own freedom, taken by the victors of war. Andromache pleads with her Trojan husband Hector not to leave her and their infant son to go back to fight Achilles. She has already endured the sack of her home city by Achilles, and seen the slaughter of her father and seven brothers, and the enslavement of her mother. If Hector dies, their child will be hurled from the city walls, Troy will fall and Andromache will be made the concubine of the son of her husband’s killer. Hector knows this, but he insists that his own need to avoid social humiliation as a battle-shirker trumps it all: “I would be ashamed before the Trojan men and women,” he says. He hopes only to be dead before he has to hear her screams.

Pat Barker’s brilliant new novelistic retelling of The Iliad puts the experience of women like Andromache at the heart of the story: the women who survive in slavery when men destroy their cities and kill their fathers, brothers and children. The central character is Briseis, the woman awarded to Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, after his army sacks one of the towns neighbouring Troy. Agamemnon, the most powerful, although not the bravest, of the Greek warriors – a character whose downright nastiness comes across beautifully in Barker’s telling – has lost his own most recent female acquisition and seizes Briseis from Achilles. Achilles’ vengeful rage against Agamemnon and his own comrades, and the subsequent vast death toll of the Greeks and Trojans, is the central theme of The Iliad.

More here.