by Brooks Riley
Category: Monday Magazine
Though we are an aggregator blog (providing links to content elsewhere) on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and the length of articles generally varies between 1000 and 2500 words. Our writers are free to express their own opinions and we do not censor them in any way. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t.Below you will find links to all our past Monday columns, in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Within each columnist’s listing, the entries are mostly in reverse-chronological order (most recent first).
Who are the terrorists?
by Ahmed Humayun
The inclusion of this second group of organizations has perplexed Western governments, who have asked the UAE for an explanation. There is no real mystery here, however. The UAE alleges that these groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which tops the UAE list, and is the dominant Islamist organization in the Middle East. In outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood and organizations that are alleged to be connected to it, the UAE is following in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia, which declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization in March.
The antipathy of the dynastic Arab rulers to Islamists is well established. Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood call for political reform but Arab tyrannies see this as the end of their stranglehold on power. Hence, the opposition of the Gulf states to the Muslim Brotherhood after its success in the 2011-2012 elections in Egypt, and their subsequent support for the overthrow of Mohammad Morsi, the elected President. Of course, Islamists are far from Jeffersonian Democrats and they are illiberal on many issues, but they represent an ideological alternative to the status quo that has local appeal, a terrifying prospect for the current crop of Arab rulers.
This terrorism designation, then, is a signal to Muslim groups worldwide that they should align with the Arab status quo or else expect to be stigmatized, even when they are an innocous organization like CAIR, which has actively worked to counter terrorism in partnership with American law enforcement.
So much for the politics of this ‘terrorism' list. That the rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE think they can define terrorism and be taken seriously is extraordinary in itself. It is well and good that they condemn ISIL today but they provided the key financial support that fueled ISIL's conquest of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq as part of their war against Shiite influence in the region.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Monday Poem
Elemental
Earth
Today I troll for a poem of humus
dark and rich as the French Roast
which always starts my day
and always is a gift
In this four billion year terrapoem
fungi, woodlouse and eelworms
spend millennia decomposing
in concert with nematodes
actinomycetes and protozoa
doling water and, with bacteria,
fix nitrogen in a scheme
age old and symbiotic,
while on it men
women and other animals
troll and plow,
think and sweat
—animals who draw their own life from it,
who build their lives upon it,
from which come their bones
and to which their bones
and breath go (come and go)
in intervals of comets
Air
in this rambling walkabout
with friends who’ve shed
conceits together, dropping them
as one sloughs old clothes:
into the low pressure system of our lungs
comes new atmosphere, November cool
and out
and in again
and out
in a rhythm old but not antique
for which we thank our
lobe-finned fish progenitors
who learned to suck sweet gas to reap its oxygen
and in return (until we’re absolutely through)
we essentially reply with gusts of CO2
Fire
Heraclitus said that all is flux
or, I’d say, fire
never still
the more we yearn
the more things move
they hotter burn
.
Water
rivers fall by rules of space
obliged by banks that hem obedient livers in,
pulled, it seems, by tugging mass we acquiesce,
are dragged to bottom
— inclined to give, to toss
to push to swell and plunge
(by some dark scripts)
from Paradise to Sodom
.
by Jim Culleny
11/20/14
Intersections in Middle America
by Mara Naselli
~
Every September since 2009, Grand Rapids, Michigan, has hosted an open art contest called ArtPrize. Anyone can enter. Anyone can judge. Anyone can win. ArtPrize winners are elected by popular vote. The rules have been adjusted each year, but the basic idea has remained intact: bring art to the public, let the public judge art.
Grand Rapids is a small, quiet city. But when ArtPrize opens, art is everywhere: parking lots, rooftops, bars, bridges, abandoned buildings, churches, even the river. This reserved city transforms into a minimetropolis of raucous, unedited expression.
The cultural context of ArtPrize—that is, the culture of Grand Rapids, Michigan—bears mentioning. When ArtPrize began, I had just moved here from Chicago, and so I watched with some interest at what looked like a large-scale democratic experiment. Some called it a rich kid's art party (the founder, Rick DeVos, is the grandson of the co-founder of Amway). But I thought of it as an experiment in civic discourse, where good art and bad art would duke it out through the intelligent discernment of public opinion. In many ways, the location of ArtPrize made perfect sense. The city has a venerable history in furniture making and design. There's a vibrant arts community here, a grassroots artists' collective, a sculpture garden, a symphony, a ballet, an opera, and a fine art museum—all this in a town of fewer than 200,000. The community in many ways is steeped in arts funded by local philanthropic families such as the DeVoses. Grand Rapids is also conservative and Christian. The fact that ArtPrize was in a very red region of a blue state made the democratic aspect of the contest all the more interesting to me. Taste, culture, and politics would converge as the public would play patron.
An anthropologist among sartorialists
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
My sartorialism is highly suspect in any case; dressing up for particular environments has always been a particularly harrowing task. Fashion never came easy. My sensibilities were shaped, first and foremost by a socialist secular republic of few choices and many cut corners. During childhood, a popular sitcom lampooned the state of the market thus; the titular character of Wagle Ki Duniya (Wagle's World), Mr.Wagle marks a festive occasion by procuring large quantities of the same bolt of cloth out of which emerge clothes for himself, his wife, his children, and the drawing room curtains. Despite this situation, I did marvel at the effortless beauty of my parents' and their friends' wardrobes, chiffon and polyester saris and factory uniforms. I, however, thanks to particularly unfashionable school uniforms and awkward teenage years, had no possibility of displaying either ingenuity or taste.
Graduate life in America brought forth another set of quandaries. While well schooled by now and comfortable in “Western” clothing, I longed uncharacteristically for loose cottons and salwar kameezes and allowed myself in the Texas heat to switch back and forth, even as I kept away from events conducted by the Indian Cultural Association. Neither their Diwalis nor their Holis held any attraction to my thoroughly disdainful anomic self. But those few kurtas declared my allegiance to some culturally specific India, and brought me attention nevertheless. Many years later, I was told that people had seen me as performing ethnicity for their benefit.
Music to watch girls go by
by Sarah Firisen
“The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by…” so sang Andy Williams in 1967.
Boys looking at girls, and then reacting with admiration; what could be more natural? In movie after movie a barrage of wolf whistles following Sofia Loren and Marilyn Monroe as they sashay down the street are meant as innocent signs of appreciation. To today’s men, who often react with a distinct lack of sympathy to modern women’s complaints about callcalling and its associated behavior, what we’re complaining about is no different, at least in intent, to behavior that 40 years ago was seen as a badge of honor for attractive women. I have no idea whether it was really felt and taken that way by women in past generations, perhaps that is nothing more than a romantic rose colored view of what was clearly felt as harassment even then. I truly have no idea. What I do know is how the modern forms of this behavior looks and feel to me and any woman I’ve ever asked about it.
If you’re on some form of social media these days, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t witnessed some of the latest volleys in the catcall wars. There has been a steady stream of women trying to fight back in one way or another: one of my personal favorites, a young lady who handed out cards to the men harassing her on the street trying to educate them, almost always without success, about how it felt to be the recipient of that attention. Another one I really like is http://stoptellingwomentosmile.com/; because what could really be more innocuous than telling a woman how pretty she would be if only she would smile, or telling her “hey, smile, it could be worse”? Except, how the hell do you know it could be worse? Perhaps someone just died. Perhaps I just got a cancer diagnosis. Or maybe I have really bad cramps. Or maybe, it’s none of your business whether I smile or not.
And of course, one of the more infamous recent examples, where a woman (an actress hired for the video) walks around New York for 10 hours with a cameraman surreptitiously recording what this woman has to put up with. She doesn’t say anything to these men, she doesn’t look at them, she’s not dressed in provocative clothing and she engages with them in no way, and yet she is harassed over 100 times. As female Facebook friend after friend reposted this video, there was a very predictable explosion of comment threads and some got pretty nasty. One friend posted an interesting observation, which I’ve now tried to verify for myself: she says that when she’s all dressed up (as she often is quite beautifully), she actually attracts less attention from men. But it’s when she’s in her sweats, no makeup, hair unwashed that she can’t seem to shake the catcalls, the men following her, harassing her.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
The aural time traveler
by Charlie Huenemann
The earliest recordings were made before there were any amplifiers, let alone mixers or equalizers. Recording artists played into a horn, and some mechanism translated their sound waves into a wavy line scratched into wax. (We should all devote a moment to marveling at the fact that the sound of a singer accompanied by strings and tuba can all get squashed into a single wavy line.) That wavy line was then wrapped into a spiral and stamped upon many shellac disks, which were sold through record stores. Consumers would then buy the discs, take them home, place them upon their turntables, and place a needle at one end of the spiral, and send the disc into motion. Then the whole process would reverse itself: the wavy lines would vibrate the needle, and those vibrations would be sent out the horn for all to enjoy.
The point is that the sound travels from producer to consumer without ever disappearing into some electronic circuit to be changed or shaped. Jascha Heifetz plays his violin into a horn, those vibrations become scratches, those scratches become vibrations, and I hear Heifetz play. Everything is on the surface; nothing ever goes into a black box. I am one step away from direct, physical connection to Heifetz, as I would be if I handled his bow or tried on his hat. It is a form of aural time travel.
The continuing relevance of Immanuel Kant
by Emrys Westacott
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is widely touted as one of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western civilization. Yet few people other than academic philosophers read his works, and I imagine that only a minority of them have read in its entirety the Critique of Pure Reason, generally considered his magnum opus. Kantian scholarship flourishes, with specialized journals and Kant societies in several countries, but it is largely written by and for specialists interested in exploring subtleties and complexities in Kant's texts, unnoticed influences on his thought, and so on. Some of Kant's writing is notoriously difficult to penetrate, which is why we need scholars to interpret his texts for us, and also why, in two hundred years, he has never made it onto the New York Times best seller list. And some of the ideas that he considered central to his metaphysics–for instance, his views about space, time, substance, and causality–are widely held to have been superseded by modern physics.
So what is so great about Kant? How is his philosophy still relevant today? What makes his texts worth studying and his ideas worth pondering? These are questions that could occasion a big book. What follows is my brief two penn'th on Kant's contribution to modern ways of thinking. I am not suggesting that Kant was the first or the only thinker to put forward the ideas mentioned here, or that they exhaust what is valuable in his philosophy. My purpose is just to identify some of the central strains in his thought that remain remarkably pertinent to contemporary debates.
1. Kant recognized that in the wake of the scientific revolution, what we call “knowledge” needed to be reconceived. He held that we should restrict the concept of knowledge to scientific knowledge–that is, to claims that are, or could be, justified by scientific means.
2. He identified the hallmark of scientific knowledge as what can be verified by empirical observation (plus some philosophical claims about the framework within which such observations occur). Where this isn't possible, we don't have knowledge; we have, instead, either pseudo-science (e.g. astrology), or unrestrained speculation (e.g. religion).
3. He understood that both everyday life and scientific knowledge rests on, and is made orderly, by some very basic assumptions that aren't self-evident but can't be entirely justified by empirical observations. For instance, we assume that the physical world will conform to mathematical principles. Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason that our belief that every event has a cause is such an assumption; perhaps, also, our belief that effects follow necessarily from their causes; but many today reject his classification of such claims as “synthetic a priori.” Regardless of whether one agrees with Kant's account of what these assumptions are, his justification of them is thoroughly modern since it is essentially pragmatic. They make science possible. More generally, they make the world knowable. Kant in fact argues that in their absence our experience from one moment to the next would not be the coherent and intelligible stream that it is.
Monday, November 17, 2014
More Is Different
by Tasneem Zehra Husain
Emergence is a word deep enough to lose oneself in. It alludes to realities appearing, not suddenly or out of nothing, but slowly dissolving in to our consciousness – like a fuzzy picture, coming into focus. It refers to a gradual process, one that is smooth – not jerky – and yet results in an outcome that could not have been predicted, given the origin.
Examples of such behavior abound in the natural world. In stark contrast to human mobs, there are groups that exhibit increasing coherence and/or intelligence as they grow (In fact, intelligence too, is said by some to be an emergent phenomenon.) When birds or fish amass in large numbers, they move in ordered flocks, exhibiting a degree of synchronization and structure that is lacking in smaller groups. The organization of ice crystals is not hinted at in the molecules of water, any more than the structure of hurricanes is stamped onto individual air molecules, or instructions for avalanches are coded into grains of sand. So long as objects are studied in isolation, they display no hint of what becomes possible in groups that exceed a certain threshold. Emergent behavior is a property not of individuals, but the collective; it arises naturally, out of multitudes – a perfect illustration of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
In science, a phenomenon is deemed emergent if it cannot be attributed to the properties of the constituents of a system, but instead arises from the connections between them. It is an ability that resides not in the nodes themselves, but in the network they create. Think of that childhood game of join the dots. With each new dot that is added, the possibilities are multiplied manifold; a new dot can potentially connect to every single dot that already exists, forming bonds that both strengthen, and transform, the system. A network grows exponentially faster than the number of its nodes.
It so happens that in physics, there are many cases where macroscopic and microscopic behavior are best described in different vocabularies. One oft-quoted example is that of classical mechanics ‘emerging' from quantum mechanics. At the turn of the last century, the reluctant revolutionary Max Planck was forced to declare a resolution to a set of problems that had plagued physicists for years. All these contradictions would disappear, he grudgingly said, if one assumed that energy could only be radiated and emitted in discrete blocks – he called these quanta. Barely was the quantum unleashed that it spread like a forest fire throughout physics. Suddenly, it became apparent that many quantities we had considered infinitely divisible, existed instead in multiples of a smallest basic unit. Zeno's paradox finally had a solution – you could simply not keep covering “half the remaining distance” between yourself and something else, because beyond a certain point, even space can no longer be subdivided. The quantization penetrated down to the very structure of the atom, which seemed to allow only certain well-defined orbits in which the electrons could revolve around the nucleus.
Monday Poem
“The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two
basic words he can speak.” —Martin Buber, I and Thou
.
Conjugation
In a diner my elbows rest upon Formica. I hold a book.
Curlicues of vapor rise above the coffee you’ve just poured.
I lure Thou with my take on Buber
hoping to shift the poles of my twofold attitude
from I-I to a here beyond that incarceration
when Thou and I might disappear in conjugation
.
Jim Culleny
9/18/13
7500 Miles, Part III: Ain’t No One Gonna Turn Me Around
by Akim Reinhardt
I once drove non-stop from central Wyoming to eastern Iowa before passing out at a highway rest stop for a couple of hours, waking up with a scrambled brain, driving the short distance to Illinois, then staring with confusion and regret at the chili cheese omelette I'd ordered at a pre-cell truck stop where drivers sat with piles of quarters in front of them at booths hard wired to pay phones.
Another time I went from the Nevada-Utah line to eastern Nebraska, staving off sleep during the last several hours by frequently leaning my head out the window at 80 miles per hour, the wind and rain whipping me in the face beneath the dark night sky.
My most recent super haul was from Windsor, Arizona to northeastern Kansas, where I'd finally pulled over to sleep in a rural parking lot. But that was fifteen years ago. I was in my early thirties back then.
In the months leading up to the trip I've chronicled here, I had wondered: What do I still have left in me? What would the road be like for me in my late forties?
I had no illusions. I knew I wouldn't be busting tail nonstop for 1,200 miles. Even in my prime that was at my outer limits. It was unthinkable now.
But beyond the issue of endurance, I was more intrigued, and even fretful, about how I would take to the road.
What would it be like to long haul now compared to back then? What would my state of mind be after 600 miles? Seven hundred? Eight hundred, if that was even feasible. Would I still find driving alone for vast stretches to be meditative? Would I still marvel at the expanse of this continent? Or would I simply be middle aged and grumpy? Would I be helpless to enjoy a solo, long distance drive as I once had? Would I just be petty and impatient to reach my destination?
Even since before I first left Maryland back in late August, I knew this would be the jaunt. From Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to Reno, Nevada. No other stretch of the trip is much more than 500 miles. This one's over 1,200.
Going in, I knew that South Dakota to the Nevada-California border in late September would sort it all out.
American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore
by Bill Benzon
During the course of my adult life I have witnessed the collapse of the political culture of my nation, the United States of America. To be sure, there have been some good things – the Civil Rights movement, for example – but the framework that served from the nation’s founding through the end of World War II no longer functions well.
Over the last three or four decades the prison population has increased enormously, as has economic inequality, and during this century we’ve become mired down in an enormously destructive, expensive and militarily ineffective series of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As far as I can see there is no near-term prospect of ending either the internal problems or the hopeless and ill-founded war on terrorism.
How did this happen?
Cultural Psychodynamics
The problem, I believe, is rooted in the cultural psychodynamics of the nation-state. The sociologist Talcott Parsons diagnosed it in his classic 1947 article, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (full text online HERE). At some length and with great sophistication Parsons argued that citizens of Western nations project many of their aggressive impulses onto other peoples so that, in attempting to dominate those peoples, they are, in a psychological sense, attempting to attain mastery over themselves. I fear this problem is not only a Western one, but that’s a side issue in this context. It’s not merely that I’m writing about America, but that America remains the most powerful nation in the world, with by far the largest military establishment. Through that establishment America has tethered the rest of the world to its internal psychodynamics.
That’s crazy.
If by chance Parsons’ argument strikes you as improbable, well, I urge you to read his essay in full. Pending that, I offer as a bit of supporting evidence an extraordinary statement made by Mario Cuomo, ex-governor of New York, in interview published in The New York Times Magazine on March 19, 1995:
The Second World War as the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let’s all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.
That’s what Parsons was talking about.
I have no idea whether or not Cuomo is familiar with Parsons but, while he is certainly an intelligent and sophisticated man, he is not an academic. When he spoke those words he was speaking as a practical politician skilled at the complex and messy business of governance. The socio-cultural milieu that Parsons analyzed is the arena in which Cuomo lived his professional life. Judging by his political success, he had a good intuitive grasp of those dynamics.
The Undoing of Abraham
by Josh Yarden
Rembrandt, Abraham`s Sacrifice, 1635
On the verge of sacrificing
his own son on an alter
the one he loves
bound for glory
pausing to consider
which he loves more
Abraham says: “Abraham!”
and he says, “Here I am.”
in an inglorious bind
. . .
He caught himself this time
at the line or just beyond
the point of no return
Unbinding Isaac
he averts his glance
they will never meet again
When he raises his eyes
he sees another ram caught
horns locked in the thicket
. . .
Fruit of the tree of knowledge
bursting with ambiguity
hangs on a metaphor
Always ripe
for interpretation
yet often out of reach
At times we gain a good grasp
after matters unravel badly
the lines are not fixed
an obsession with optics (part 2)
by Leanne Ogasawara
His boss was known for his mad pranks. Yes, in the good old days, people valued playfulness, remember? Kings and dukes were known to play around, and this means that an artist working for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy say, might be asked to lend a hand in the fun once in a while. Or maybe job titles were more flexible back then; for in addition to spying missions made on behalf of his liege, Jan van Eyck also almost certainly had a part in creating decorative items for the Duke's fabulous parties and as part of his unending practical jokes. From rainmaking devices that squirted water on ladies from below, to books that sprayed soot on whoever tried to read them, the Duke of Burgundy was even known to have used magical mirrors.
Mirror, mirror on the wall….The history of the late Renaissance has been called by some as the history of optics-– and mirrors show up all over the place. We see this both in science and in art. And yet where art is concerned, most books used in college survey courses in this country at least do not feature the word “lens in their pages,” I have read.
Last month, I wrote the rise of optics in late Renaissance science and the 2012 book, Baroque Science. The book is highly recommended as an absolutely fascinating account of Europe's “estrangement of the senses” vis-à-vis the rise of optical science in the 17th century. While the book was about scientific innovations (microscopes and telescopes), art history loomed large– and so I ended the piece mentioning the famous quote by art historian Erwin Panofsky which suggested that van Eyck's eye functioned “as a microscope and a telescope at the same time.” It was an interesting quote, and this all eventually led me to re-visit the infamous the Hockney-Falco Thesis, where van Eyck also plays a pivotal role.
The British artist David Hockney began his notorious crusade in pure disbelief. How was it possible that the Old Master painters had been able to draw so realistically? In his book Secret Knowledge, he has several examples, which are so perfectly drawn that he suggests it would be absolutely impossible to draw like that today. Look at the chandelier above for example, the arms, Hockney and Falco suggest are simply too perfectly proportioned for having been done by the human eye alone.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Pugachev, Pushkin, Tsvetaeva: A Ramble
by Eric Byrd
Mirsky also said that Pushkin was, at heart, too much an eighteenth century classicist narrator to analyze the grievances behind the revolt to the twentieth century's satisfaction. Certainly – but the book contains plenty to trouble the chauvinist. Nicholas I, Pushkin's personal censor, demanded the original title, The History of Pugachev, be changed to The History of the Pugachev Revolt — because “a rebel,” said the Czar, “could not have a history.” Nicholas like all autocrats plugs one leak merely to open another. To reduce Pugachev to an opportunistic bandit is the raise the question of his opportunity. And Pushkin is very clear that his opportunity was the fundamental discontent of the landless:
Pugachev was fleeing, but his flight seemed like an invasion. Never had his victories been more horrifying; never had the rebellion raged with greater force. The insurrection spread from village to village, from province to province. Only two or three villains had to appear on the scene, and the whole region revolted. Various bands of plunderers and rioters were formed, each having its own Pugachev…
Pushkin's novella The Captain's Daughter elevates the revolt onto the even more ambiguous plane of romance. The background of the revolt falls away. The novella only fleetingly mentions the series of mutinies, going back decades, of the Cossack and other steppe horse tribes that had entered the Czar's service as guards of empire's fluid frontiers with the Ottoman sultan and the Shah of Persia, only to be robbed and oppressed by local officialdom. It says nothing about a significant portion of the Pugachev hordes, the “factory peasants,” serfs uprooted and sent to toil in the mines, foundries and arsenals of the military-industrial base Peter the Great had established to equip the armies and fleets of this newly modern, European state. On the other hand, the Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter is attractive, honorable and merciful at key moments, and thereby spellbinding – the very stuff of Nicholas' censorial nightmares. “It was my first encounter with evil,” Marina Tsvetaeva wrote – The Captain's Daughter was a children's book when she was a child – “and evil proved to be good. After that I always suspected it of good.”
Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: Interstellar and the 2014 Midterm Elections
by Matt McKenna
How can a movie about saving the world via space travel be so political? Well, consider that the primary conflict in Interstellar involves the principal characters considering how long humanity can struggle on a dying Earth before being forced to colonize a new planet and ensure the survival of the human species. As you can imagine, most members of the audience will find the parallels to the recent midterm elections a bit obvious in that these characters are clearly meant to represent American voters who were asked to consider how long their government can struggle in a dying political environment before being forced to break up the toxic two-party system and ensure the survival of democracy in the United States. Well, the good news is the film is pretty optimistic, but the bad news is that maybe it shouldn't be.
Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is Interstellar's quiet-talking protagonist and renaissance man: he is a fabulous engineer, an incredible spaceship pilot, and by the time the film's plot begins, also an excellent agriculturist. This battery of skills comes in handy for Cooper as he is respected by both farmers and scientists for his breadth of knowledge which includes the intricate details of growing corn during the ongoing global blight and the incredibly specific skill of how to reprogram a wayward Indian military drone. It is therefore by fortunate happenstance (or is it?!) that Cooper ends up following a spookily transmitted message to a secret NORAD facility where he learns that Earth will soon become uninhabitable. Cooper is told he must fly a spaceship through a wormhole and locate a new planet to either 1) send the people of Earth or 2) grow a bunch of test-tube babies and reboot the human species.
At this point, you're probably rolling your eyes over the overt political parallels. And yes, even from the very beginning of the film, Nolan drops hints of the politicized nature of the story.
Monday, November 10, 2014
In Trust We Truth
“All this – all the meanness and agony without end
I sitting look out upon
See, hear and am silent.”
~ Walt Whitman
I responded to the commenter by suggesting that we live not so much in a ‘post-truth' society as a ‘post-accountability' society. It is not so much that truth is disrespected, distorted or ignored more than ever before, but rather that the consequences for doing so have (seemingly) dwindled to nearly zero. One could argue that this is vastly more damaging, because the degree of our accountability to one another profoundly influences how and if we can arrive at any sort of truth, period. Prior to the onset of information technology, there were well-established (and of course, deeply flawed) mechanisms for generating and enforcing accountability. Now, this mechanism of information technology that has relieved us of accountability is already so deeply enwoven into our society that not only will we never put the genie back in the bottle, we are at a loss to imagine how to ever get this genie to play nice. Except the problem is that this kind of righteous outrage is, in fact, entirely an illusion.
Instead of arguing about truth as an objective, abstract and hopefully attainable category, let's assume that truth (or whatever you want to call it) is a sort of consensus, and that consensus is reached through processes of trust (we respect each other's right to have a say) and accountability (we take some responsibility for what we say to each other). These are all fundamentally social processes, and as such haven't really changed very much over time. What interests me is how the insertion of technology into this discourse has changed our perceptions of the burdens that these concepts –truth, consensus, trust and accountability – are expected to bear.
WALLS AND ALL
by Brooks Riley
The Cold War was in full swing in the fall of 1966. I was travelling with a friend whose father was US ambassador to West Germany. An embassy driver took us two naïve young things on a tour of various landmarks in West Berlin, including the Wall and Spandau, where only a few hours earlier, Rudolf Hess had become the one remaining prisoner incarcerated there. Guarding Spandau, which now amounted to guarding Hess, was a joint venture of the Allies on a monthly rotational basis. Speer’s release had occurred in the dark of the previous night and U.S. embassy staff had been forbidden to attend the event. By the time our driver parked in front of the fearsome edifice, the French were in charge and no visitors were allowed–not that we were avid to peer inside those walls. Meeting the mentally unstable Hess might have been a kick, but only my friend’s father was given that dubious privilege.
Because of the GDR’s fluctuating policy toward diplomatic passports, my friend had to be issued a temporary non-diplomatic passport in order for us to visit East Berlin on a tourist bus. It was cold and rainy that day, gloomy on both sides of the wall. The bus would be taking a special route to the Pergamon Museum, one that insured that the shabbier vistas of East Berlin would be shielded from prying eyes–or so we were told. I remember glancing down side streets, looking for signs of decay or worse. What I saw were the ordinary streets of any big city in bad weather. So much for propaganda.
At the end of the day, we were taken to a café near the wall and told to be back at the bus by 6 p.m. for our return to West Berlin. At 6:15, the bus was nearly full, but one passenger was missing. As the minutes ticked by, the East German tour guide became increasingly nervous. A hint of ‘international incident’ hung in the air. The idea that someone would defect to East Germany was preposterous, but where was the guy? Was he a spy from the West infiltrating as a tourist? And if he didn’t show up, what would happen when the East Germans found out the American ambassador’s daughter was in their midst? ‘Terribly exciting,‘ we would later agree. At 6:20, the missing passenger boarded the bus with a lame excuse. So much for our le Carré moment out in the cold.