Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

Nations today seem divided down the middle on critical issues – whether Catalonia over independence, Britain over Brexit or America over Donald Trump. This is not just a western phenomenon. A week ago, Cyril Ramaphosa won the election for the ANC leadership by the narrowest of margins – 2,440 votes to his opponent Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s 2,261. Earlier this year, the referendum called by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to extend his powers approved the measures by 51% to 49%. Every electorate seems divided and uncertain.

Many see in such polarised nations societies that no longer possess a sense of common values and so have little material with which to bind themselves together. The consequences, many fear, are more unstable societies with governments that lack authority among large sections of the electorate and a political system open to exploitation by extremists, especially far-right extremists.

From a historical perspective, though, contemporary polarisation does not seem particularly acute. Go back a generation. Is Britain more polarised now than it was in 1984, at the height of the miners’ strike? Today, newspapers might describe judges, of whose decisions they disapprove, as “enemies of the people”. Then, it was government ministers who called striking miners “the enemy within”. The full force of the state – from the police to propaganda – was mobilised to crush the strike, leading to mass invasions of mining communities, bloody confrontations, as at Orgreave, tens of thousands arrested and a Britain far more divided and embittered than it is today.

Sheri Berman in Foreign Policy:

Democracy today seems to be in constant crisis. Democratic backsliding has occurred in countries from Venezuela to Poland, and autocratic leaders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, proudly proclaim that the era of liberal democracy is over. Perhaps most worrying, even in the West where it has long been taken for granted, liberal democracy is under attack from populists, and, according to some scholars, it is no longer highly valued by many citizens.

In seeking to explain these troubling trends, most observers focus on the challenges currently facing democracy. They argue that globalization and rising automation have made life more insecure for the working and middle classes, privileged highly educated city dwellers over the less educated who live in rural areas, and made capitalism more of a zero-sum game. Alongside economic challenges, changing social norms and rising immigration — the percentage of foreign-born citizens is at an all-time high in many European countries and at levels last seen during the early 20th century in the United States — have left many citizens feeling uncomfortable and out of touch in their own neighborhoods.

But analyses that focus on only these challenges cannot explain the woes of an entire political system. Just as a healthy body fights off myriad viruses, so too do healthy political systems identify and respond to the challenges they face.

More here.

J.M. Coetzee at Literary Hub:

As Hugh Kenner explained to us long ago in his essay “The Cartesian Centaur,” Samuel Beckett is a philosophical dualist. Specifically, Beckett writes as if he believes that we are made up of, that we are, a body plus a mind. Even more specifically, he writes as if he believes that the connection between mind and body is mysterious, or at least unexplained. At the same time Beckett—that is to say, Beckett’s mind—finds the dualistic account of the self ludicrous. This split attitude is the source of much of his comedy.

According to this standard account, Beckett believes that our constitution is dual, and that our dual constitution is the fons et origo of our unease in the world. He also believes there is nothing we can do to change our constitution, least of all by philosophical introspection. This plight renders us absurd.

But what is it exactly that is absurd: the fact that we are two different kinds of entity, body and mind, linked together; or the belief that we are two different kinds of entity linked together?

more here.

Massimo Pigliucci in New Humanist:

Robert Goldfarb in The New York Times:

That I have lived as many years in the new millennium — 18 — as I did in the time from birth to finishing high school seems inconceivable to me. I’m 88, and between 1930 and 1948 went from newborn to adult, from toddler to leader of an infantry squad. Those first 18 years were a journey into manhood, while the millennium seems merely its epilogue.

I’m certainly not the same man at 88 I was when the millennium began. But changes in me — stiffness, skin that invites angry bruises, occasional memory lapses — are insignificant compared to the growth spurt at 17 that shot me from 5-foot-8 to 6-foot-2. I hope I’ve gained additional wisdom during the millennium, but feel I’m essentially the same man I was 18 years ago. That contrast came into sharp focus recently when I renewed my driver’s license. A motor vehicle clerk, glancing from me to the photograph taken seven years earlier, said I hadn’t changed enough to require a new picture. So little physical change in seven years! Only my mother would have recognized me in photographs taken seven years apart during my first 18 years of life. Aging has put me on a conveyor propelling me through days as though there were only two in a month, the first and the last. Daily rituals like shaving, brushing my teeth, dressing have me puzzling, didn’t I just do this? I sometimes think of time as slices of a pie. Summers were endless when I was 6, just as one-sixth of a pie is a generous portion. Even with a scalpel and hands steadier than mine, cutting a pie into 88 slices is beyond most of us. That thought alone reminds me that the slice of life remaining to me is very small.

More here.

The Heart of Herakles

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the Cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

by Kenneth Rexroth

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta Magazine:

QUANTA MAGAZINE: The title of your talk was “Mathematics for Human Flourishing.” Flourishing is a big idea — what do you have in mind by it?

FRANCIS SU: When I think of human flourishing, I’m thinking of something close to Aristotle’s definition, which is activity in accordance with virtue. For instance, each of the basic desires that I mentioned in my talk is a mark of flourishing. If you have a playful mind or a playful spirit, or you’re seeking truth, or pursuing beauty, or fighting for justice, or loving another human being — these are activities that line up with certain virtues. Maybe a more modern way of thinking about it is living up to your potential, in some sense, though I wouldn’t just limit it to that. If I am loving somebody well, that’s living up to a certain potential that I have to be able to love somebody well.

And how does mathematics promote human flourishing?

It builds skills that allow people to do things they might otherwise not have been able to do or experience. If I learn mathematics and I become a better thinker, I develop perseverance, because I know what it’s like to wrestle with a hard problem, and I develop hopefulness that I will actually solve these problems. And some people experience a kind of transcendent wonder that they’re seeing something true about the universe. That’s a source of joy and flourishing.

Math helps us do these things. And when we talk about teaching mathematics, sometimes we forget these larger virtues that we are seeking to cultivate in our students. Teaching mathematics shouldn’t be about sending everybody to a Ph.D. program. That’s a very narrow view of what it means to do mathematics. It shouldn’t mean just teaching people a bunch of facts. That’s also a very narrow view of what mathematics is. What we’re really doing is training habits of mind, and those habits of mind allow people to flourish no matter what profession they go into.

More here.

Lixing Sun in Nautilus:

Did the ancient Athenians invent democracy? Or did bugs have it way earlier than the Greeks? Cornell entomologist Tom Seeley knows which option he’s voting for.

Honeybees regularly split from their mother colony. Seeley wondered, with tens of thousands of bees in a swarm, how do they reach agreement? His answer: simple-majority democracy.

In his 2010 book Honeybee Democracy, Seeley described how bees intending to strike out on their own first send scouts in all directions to collect information. On their return, these early scouts buzz and twirl to recruit more scouts. Some gain fans whereas others lose them. Newly deciding scouts go out to look for themselves. After the majority of scouts (which number in the hundreds) have converged on one opinion, the entire swarm takes off for its promised land.

Bees are not alone in using simple-majority rule—Tibetan macaques do it too. In 2014, my colleagues and I were studying how a group of 12 adult macaques coordinated their collective movements. We noticed that once three or more of them ganged up together, the entire group would often follow suit. The success rate in getting the group into action increased with the number of initiators—those who started the process. When the initiators numbered seven or more, exceeding a simple majority, the success rate reached its maximum: 100 percent.

Democracy in collective decision-making has also been observed in African buffaloes, red deer, baboons, and pigeons. Even single-celled bacteria make collective decisions based on a democratic process known as quorum sensing. Their genes control some aspect of their behavior, like how mobile or virulent they should become, based on how many of their bacterial comrades are already engaging in that behavior. Similar democratic processes are also used by cockroaches and other swarming insects.

More here.

Rupert Neate in The Guardian:

The world’s super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families like the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multimillionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra-high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

A report by Credit Suisse found that the world’s richest 1% people have seen their share of the globe’s total wealth increase from 42.5% at the height of the 2008 financial crisis to 50.1% in 2017, or $140tn.

“The share of the top 1% has been on an upward path ever since [the financial crisis], passing the 2000 level in 2013 and achieving new peaks every year thereafter,” the Credit Suisse global wealth report said. The bank said “global wealth inequality has certainly been high and rising in the post-crisis period”.

The increase in wealth among the already very rich led to the creation of 2.3 million new dollar millionaires over the past year, taking the total to 36 million. “The number of millionaires, which fell in 2008, recovered fast after the financial crisis, and is now nearly three times the 2000 figure,” Credit Suisse said.

These millionaires – who account for 0.7% of the world’s adult population – control 46% of total global wealth that now stands at $280tn. At the other end of the spectrum, the world’s 3.5 billion poorest adults each have assets of less than $10,000 (£7,600). Collectively these people, who account for 70% of the world’s working age population, account for just 2.7% of global wealth.

More here.

Over at Open Culture:

If genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, Glenn Gould merits each and every one of the many applications of the word "genius" to his name. The world knows that name primarily as one of a genius of the piano, of course, especially when interpreting the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach, but he also made an impression in his homeland of Canada as a genius of the radio editing suite. Having recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's classical-and-jazz record label CBC Records placed him well to realize his ideas on the CBC's airwaves, most memorably in the form of The Idea of North, an hourlong meditation on the vast, cold expanse that constitutes the top third of the country, which first aired on December 28, 1967.

The broadcast's fiftieth anniversary has prompted Canadians and non-Canadians alike to have another listen to Gould's best-known radio project, back then shockingly experimental and still boldly unconventional today. "The pianist used a technique he called 'contrapuntal radio,' layering speaking voices on top of each other to create a unique sonic environment situated in the space between conversation and music," says the site of CBC's Ideas, which recently aired a new episode about the making of The Idea of North called Return to North.

More here.

Julie Wark reviews Belén Fernández's Letter from Iran, in Open Democracy:

As a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas Friedman represents the acme of establishment journalism. As the man who came up with the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, he might better fit W. B. Yeats’ depiction, viz. “There is nothing in [journalists] but tittering jeering emptiness.” Yet Friedman is actually much worse than a hamburger purveyor since, as Belén Fernández has scathingly demonstrated, he is The Imperial Messenger, complete with guerdons, garlands and garbling. Friedman’s Iran is only scantily parodied in the clever spoof The New York Times Op-Ed generator as a country where “a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. […] If corruption is Iran’s curtain rod, then freedom is certainly its faucet.” What might a curtain rod and faucet have to do with Iran? Meaning here is overridden by function, something Karl Kraus warned of. A Friedman-style journalist “kills our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies”. One reads his rubbish and a desire to smack him red-mists any rational imagining of what he is actually saying. But the message being drummed in is that America must impose its “mindset” on those who are foreign to it, with nuclear weapons if necessary. He literally threatens everyone’s lives.

Belén Fernández is another kind of journalist, more like that described by Marguerite Duras. “Every journalist is a moralist […], someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees […].” This journalist isn’t after establishment awards but offers a gift that only asks in return a response in the same coin: that we see ourselves and others as members of the same species, with the same rights, feelings, wishes, and dreams. Her journalistic standpoint is clear in her recent review of Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World in which she writes that the self-critical Hansen “does the field of journalism a great service with her humility, introspection, and willingness to defy the establishment line.” Much the same could be said of Fernández who, a practitioner of what she preaches, finishes her review saying that the aim is “to become a bit more human”.

More here.

George Scialabba reviews James Scott's Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James Scott in Inference:

Scott is a part-time farmer and founder of Yale’s agrarian studies program. Invited to give some prestigious lectures, he decided to delve into recent scholarship on the origins of agrarianism. To his surprise, he found that his anarchist perspective holds true back to the farthest reaches of prehistory. The standard view—not implausible given the paucity of available evidence until recent developments in radioactive dating, paleobotany, paleogenetics, microbial biology, parasitology, and other disciplines were pressed into service by archaeologists—has been that plant and animal domestication was followed in rapid sequence by population increase, sedentism, and state formation. It was a dramatic narrative, with clear causal links: technological change made possible a new way of life more like our own, which we naturally regarded as progress and therefore assumed that our Neolithic ancestors must also have regarded as desirable and willingly embraced. In fact, however, it appears that a gap of approximately four thousand years separates the domestication of the main cereal grains and the rise of the first enduring states. What were our ancestors up to in those millennia? This, roughly, is the question Scott sets out to answer in Against the Grain.

Domestication, it turns out, was a decidedly mixed blessing for humans. Judging from fossils, cereal-based diets were associated with shorter stature, bone distress, iron-deficiency anemia, and other deficits. The domus—the module including house and outbuildings, livestock yards, gardens, etc.—attracted hordes of commensals: not only dogs, pigs, and other mammals but also rodents, sparrows, insects, and weeds, as well as all their associated parasites and disease organisms, for which the domus was an ideal environment. A loss of alertness and emotional reactivity—the invariable result of animal domestication—may have similarly occurred among human domus-dwellers. And so labor-intensive was life in the domus that, Scott writes, “if we squint at the matter from a slightly different angle, one could argue that it is we who have been domesticated.”

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Skye C. Cleary over at 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’ve linked existentialism to romantic love. Can you sketch the broad contours of this idea; what is it that makes you think that existentialism can help us explore and understand romantic love fruitfully?

SC: How we love is shaped by so many external factors – friends, family, pop culture – that it’s easy to forget about what’s meaningful for the people in the relationship. It’s also so easy to be swept away in a frenzy of romantic intoxication and sexual infatuation which, of course, is one of the best things about love. But it can become a problem if lovers neglect other important parts of their life (like their career and personal ambitions) or make major life decisions (like marriage) based on a transient rush of dopamine. The early stages of falling in love are euphoric, like being addicted drugs. Yet, also as with drugs, the rush gets less intense over time, and we’re forever chasing the love dragon. While may be possible to re-spark that flame, it gets harder, but there’s no need to be too upset if relationships evolve into something else because deeper, more stable, longer-term relationships can be great too. So, an existential approach to romantic loving shows that once we free ourselves from externally-imposed expectations about how we ought to be in relationships, as well as from being slaves to our passions, then we will be free to reinvigorate love in authentically meaningful ways.

3:AM: What do you mean by romantic loving? Has it a history – or is it something decisively contemporary and linked to modern sensibilities and socio-political and economic conditions?

SC: Romantic loving is a fairly new concept. Sure, humans have been falling in love for as long as we know, but until recently, it was rarely the case that you could spend your life with someone you were passionately in love with. ‘Romantic’ was a term that became popular a few hundred years ago when things like art, architecture, and music were described as Romantic (with a capital R), because they were grand and heroic and adventurous, like the Roman empire. In the 19th Century love started to be described as romantic too. And with industrialization, the need for economic and power alliance-based marriages dissolved because domestic production declined, and there was less of a need to keep the family business going within the family. With romance literature reaching a mass market, the allure of the love story spread. The ideal of marrying the person with whom you are in love, to be together forever, is a seductive narrative.

More here.