///
What is Mind?  No matter.  What is Matter?  Never mind.
–Bishop Berkley

A Meating of Mind
Jim Culleny

If my brain
does not tell my arm what to do
nothing much will happen.
Without a brain my arm is
not much smarter than
a leg of lamb

In fact, meat
without mind
is never going to get
much done, while
mind without meat
wouldn’t have any
point in space/time

but when they mate
-when Mind and Meat meet,
when they kiss and make love
things fecund soon become
and run the gamut from
dumb-and-dumber
right on up to the sublime:
from Rush Limbaugh to
Albert Einstein

It’s just the way it is with
sentient being:
Mind needs Meat
to do its work
and Meat needs Mind to
have the inclination to do
anything

but Mind-meets-Meat
is a crap shoot

sometimes it’s a match made in heaven
sometimes it’s a hell of a thing

///

My brother in law (BIL) has ‘flu’: his dry throat and raspy cough bother him, but it his mucus laden stuffy nose that is the cause of his misery. He cannot smell and food has lost its flavor. If I were sentimental about food like BIL, I would sympathize; instead, I congratulate him, “Celebrate your anosmia BIL, you will loose a few pounds and come out slimmer.”

“Anosmia, what is that?”

“The loss of ability to smell.”

BIL, the laid off hedge fund manager, cannot unshackle himself from the clutches of his limbic system and hates any loss. He fears, he would not be able to enjoy the aroma of Indian cuisine during his first trip to India, where we plan to travel together in two weeks. I console him, “It is temporary, and you will get your smell back in a week.”

Sense of smell is perhaps the first sensory system where the molecular mechanism of the process of olfaction has been established. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck jointly published the fundamental paper in the journal “Cell” on the functioning of olfactory system in 1991. They won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1994 for their work on “Odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.” The researchers, working on mice, discovered a pool of more than 1,000 different genes (about 3% of all genes) that encode olfactory receptors in the nose, which can distinguish over 10,000 distinct odors.

BIL carries right number of genes but cannot smell; mucus has stuffed his nose, which prevents air from reaching the olfactory membrane at roof of his nose. Nerve cells or neurons, that line this area of about 10 square centimeters, dangle hair like projections (cilia) into the nasal cavity, where they work as receptors of smell. Odor molecules, mostly volatile organic oils and some inorganic compounds, fit snugly into of receptor sites – a pocket made by a chain of amino acids (protein molecules) – which triggers the coupling of G protein and the process of olfaction through a chain of chemical reactions generating electric signals, which the biologists call ‘transduction’. These olfactory receptor cells are the only neurons in the nervous system that regenerate regularly and replace the old ones every 4 to 8 weeks.

Most of the nasal cavity – about 95% – works as a conduit for air and does not participate in the act of smell. At normal air speed of 250 ml per second in the nose, only some inhaled air comes in contact with the olfactory membrane. Sniffing or deep breathing enhances turbulence in the nose, which gushes more air to contact olfactory receptors.

Nerve processes (axons) from about 10 million odor receptor cells travel into the base of skull to regroup into about 2000 micro-bunches (glomerulus) and form olfactory bulb. Each receptor cell carries only one type of odorant and signals from the same types of receptors end in same glomerulus.

The nerve extensions from the olfactory bulb emerge to form an olfactory tract, which relays information to two parts of the brain: primitive regions of limbic system and neo-cortex. Biologists believe that direct limbic connection of smell is due to its earlier appearance in evolution compared to sight and hearing.

Most common odoriferous substances emit complex mixtures of hundreds of different smells, which activate multiple receptors leading to a combined odor pattern. The cortex recognizes it as a pattern relying on about 10,000 patterns in its memory.

Olfactory sensitivity deceases with age; older people over 70 have over 10 times less sensitivity compared to young adults and older males are less sensitive than females. Alterations in the sense of smell carry various names: hyposmia for diminished sensation; dysosmia suggests distorted sensation; cacosmia is sensation of foul smell and parosmia describes smell without a stimulus. About 2 million people in the United States have no sense of smell, called anosmia.

How do our friends and foes – dogs and mosquitoes – compare with us?

The size of the olfactory lining and the number of receptors determine the prowess to smell. Dogs have 170 square centimeters of olfactory lining and have one hundred times more receptors per square centimeter than humans, hence their ability to recognize more odors.

Sensory organ of the mosquito is the maxillary palp on its head, which probably works as a long range smelling system. The palp contains specialized receptor cells that detect octenol and carbon dioxide, which leads it to its target: human prey. Knowing this, I had advised BIL to apply a mosquito repellant and wear long sleeves while in India.

When our plane landed, I was ready for the forthcoming assault: in a few moments my olfactory system would be overwhelmed by the first smell of Delhi. The volatile, water-soluble and partially lipid soluble molecules would fly into my nose and attach to the smell discriminating nerve receptors at the roof of my nose.

If a perfume maker were to imitate the aroma, he would have to mix early morning dew, tall grass, gasoline fumes, charcoal smoke, runway tar, summer dust, construction steel and human sweat. The product would be a mixture of nostalgia and hope; poverty and progress; a juncture of future and past.

Having landed often at the Palam airport, I should have got used to this expected welcome. But no: not to the nostril-piercing gust. India evokes strong emotions. Love or hate starts at the first whiff.

I wanted BIL to love his first trip and was grateful that BIL had anosmia.

I enquired to confirm. “Can you smell?”

BIL paused, stared at the steel scaffold holding the granite walls of the new construction. The greedy glint in his eyes betrayed his limbic system.

“Yes, I can smell opportunity.”

For those America-Bound

Justin E. H. Smith

Hi-ho, brave trail-cutters! Won’t you please tell us whether it is true what the French explorers say, that America is “une nation avec quantitez de beuffles,” so many buffaloos in fact that one can scarce walk from door to street without risking a sharp poke in the rump? Is it true they have descended upon the great cities, and greedily muzzled the garbage there, as in New-Jersey’s Camden, and the Dutch strong-hold of Coxsackie?

Can you please tell us also, whence comes this place-name, Coxsackie? Does it have to do with cocks? With sacs? Why does it reduce even learned men to puerile snickering? (Why, even as I dictate this, my loyal old secretary, Isaac, appears on the verge of an infarctus!)

But let us come to the pressing matter of that land’s electoral politics. We have heard that all men in America have “the vote,” and that this was the result of a tragic twist of fate some years ago in which “the vote” was rudely and unexpectedly “rock’d.” Won’t you please tell us wherein this rocking consisted, how many were injured, what was the role of the Red Indians, what the Negroe’s, &c.?

Our explorers in the Great Northern Ocean –sent there to collect samples of Iceland spar, which, we are told, is a stone with many rare qualities, such as the power to produce “electricity,” and to make men lactate– have met there travellers from Minsk, who tell them that the leader of all White Russians, Alexander Lucasenckough, correctly predicted some months ago the outcome of the Americans’ primary elections. How did he exercise such prescience? Do the Bello-Russians, perhaps, have some “friends on the inside”?  Were they “pulling the strings” in Denver and Saint-Paul? Could their immense reserves of Iceland spar be giving them the “upper hand” in world affairs?

We have heard that Americans wish for their political leaders to be “like them.” Do they wish for them to grow corpulent like Bahama mer-cows, then, and to ignore the manners and customs of men beyond their shores? Do they wish for them to pass their time watching situation comedies on tele-vision? It is clear from reports that Barack Obama is not at all like them, whereas John McCain is, so it is said, like their uncles. Sarah Palin is reported to have “shaken things up” by the alarming likeness of her person to the Americans who would elect her. Wherein does this likeness consist? We know that a French adventurer has recently returned from those parts, and has been causing the women of the Parisian salons to drop to the floor in obscene laughter with his report that she looks like nothing so much as “un cochon maquillé.” Could this be the likeness that pleases the Americans?

We have learned from ordinarily reliable sources, who learned from a drink-besotted Esquimau while anchored off the coast from Godthab, that McCain fathered a bastard child with Palin, a half-wit, and that she used this to black-mail him into naming her as his “first lady.” It is reported that McCain never appears in public holding the bastard, on the grounds that, so he says, “men do not lactate.” Yet there are other parts of this grotesque family epos that do not hold together, such as the story of the “red-neck” who defiled Palin’s eldest daughter, only to be suddenly and without warning propulsed into the role of a virtuous husband and father. 

We have heard that Palin bravely annulled the plan to build a “bridge to nowhere.” Could this have been the great land-bridge of Beringia? But if so, did she not know that it leads not nowhere, but to Chukotka, home of the brutish and bear-like Chuckchee tribe?

It is said that Palin hates ear-marks, yet collects eye-glasses. It is said that the American people now wish to wear spectacles that resemble hers, but that they too hate ear-marks, and moreover that these ear-marks are sometimes found on “pork.” Could it be that in that land the pigs are decorated with pendants about the ear-lobes as well as rouge à lèvre? Why does Palin promote the one sort of adornment, while combatting the other?

We have learned that Barack Obama, while “liberal,” is also “conservative” with respect to chewing-gum: he will chew upon spear-mint, pepper-mint, and cinnamon gums, but not upon the more whimsical varieties, as the bubble-making resins with fruity aromas preferred by his daughters. Won’t you please explain to us how, in the face of a matter of such great importance, the American voters are content to simply “look the other way”? 

A man named Barney Smith, we are told, was called from his home in Indiana to the Democritickal convention in Denver, in order to declare there his support for Barack Obama, and to announce common cause with this candidate in the war against his arch-rival, the hog-farming baron of Terre-Haute, Smith Barney. Broadsheets here have described Smith as a “king-maker,” and as a veritable “American Richelieu.” Can you please explain to us why this man –who, after all, is said to have the physiognomy of a regular imbecile– wields so much power in that land?

Obama also has the firm support of Teresa Asenap, a woman from New-Mexico (as if Mexico were not new enough!) with, as she is said to have declared triumphantly, a “Doctorate in Education.” How, we would like to know, does he attract not just vulgar cretins like this Smith, but also such a learned and wise woman as she?  In this very important matter, we ask you to confirm for us, and to be very precise: is it certain that this woman has obtained not the degree of Master in Social Work, nor yet that of Associate in Hotel-and-Tourism Studies, but a true Doctorate in Education?  If so, we are dumb-struck with awe and trembling with anticipation, for this is bound to be a union of wisdom and power undreamt of since the immortal Platon founded his Republick. 

It is said that Americans vote for such rough and common candidates as McCain and his consort Ms. Palin not because they agree with the ratiocinations of these persons in matters political, but because their world has been “dis-enchanted” by the onslaught of “modernity,” beloved of the atheistickal party of Democritus, and they are now looking for a means to re-enchant their world with “values,” to see themselves (to quote another learned American doctor) as “part of a normative whole that includes man and nature in a unified and intricate web of meaning.” What do McCain and Palin propose in this connection?  What vital principles do they see as governing natural motion? Souls, perhaps? Entelechies? Psychopyric semina? Hylozoickal archaei?

We must know: What is McCain’s position on hylozoism? If he is against it, then what, pray tell, does he propose to get nature moving again? We have heard reports of his proposals for giving the economy a “boost,” but in God’s name what use will this be if, in the end, our world is nothing more than a great mass of corpuscles rudely knocking each other about?

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

I am a nerd. I used to be an engineer and so I like calculating stuff in my head. I hardly ever use electronic calculators, even when exact calculations of something are needed, preferring to do them by hand (try it, it can be a soothing thing) on chit’s of paper, backs-of-the-proverbial envelopes, etc. But a lot of the time, I am just calculating really stupid things for fun in my head, especially if I am sitting somewhere (doctor’s office, airport, porcelain throne, bed-before-sleep) with nothing to do. I also have other ways of amusing myself in such situations. For example, I might endlessly rewind and replay a conversation I had with someone over and over in my head, like a TV program, which I realize makes me weird but also remarkably patient with things like flight delays. But mostly, I calculate.

Another thing I do is collect weird quantitative facts about stuff in my head (I have a pretty good memory for numbers; for other things… well, not so much–as unfortunately many people have found out upon meeting me for the second time! ;-). Quick, how much does a fully loaded 747 weigh? How much of that weight is fuel? How dense is gold compared to water? What is the radius of the moon? What is Avogadro’s number? I happen to know these and many other (mostly) useless things. I don’t know why, but I suck them up out of magazines and things like that, and some I remember from high school and college textbooks. (It helps that I am a big rereader of books.) I am also the type of person who reads his car manual from beginning to end, and idiotically remembers what the capacity of the windshield-washer-fluid tank is.

I use these useless things to calculate even more useless things (while waiting in the aforementioned doctors’ offices, airports, etc.). But I don’t calculate things exactly (most of the time), I just like to estimate stuff very roughly. Today, for example, I estimated (by looking while sitting on my balcony) that the amount of water flowing by in the river next to me (the Eisack) every minute is enough for everyone living in my city of Brixen to flush his/her toilet about 10 times each day (or enough for about 200,000 flushes). This was pretty simple to do:

• Sometimes, the water management authorities dam up most of the water temporarily in the river, so I have seen the bottom of the river (or at least the larger rocks on the bottom–some water is always flowing), and so I can estimate the (higher today) average depth of the river just by looking at it. I’d say it’s about 2 feet.
• The river looks about 50 feet across over here. (It’s wider in the photo at the right, which I took at a different spot.)
• I timed a bit of driftwood floating down the river and in 10 seconds (one-thousand one, one-thousand two…) it went about 60 feet–it flows fast because of the steep downhill grade in this mountainous area–so about 6 feet per second.
• I confirm my estimate of 60 feet in ten seconds in my head by noticing that the driftwood is floating just a tiny bit faster than a person walking fast in the same direction on the path next to the river. A fast walking person goes about 4 miles per hour, and 6 feet/second X 3600 seconds/hour = 21,600 feet/hour, and 21,600 feet/hour X 1 mile/5,280 feet = (approximately) 4 miles/hour. Checks out. Good.
• The cross-sectional area of the river is 50 feet X 2 feet = 100 square feet.
• The volume of water flowing by in a second is therefore 100 square feet X 6 feet = 600 cubic feet.
• Newer commodes often have written on them the amount of water they use per flush. Most often I have seen the figure 6 liters/flush. Now, the problem is converting cubic feet to liters.
• To do this, I think the following: I know that a cubic meter is 1000 liters. How many cubic feet are in a cubic meter? Well, I remember that there are about 3.3 feet in a meter, so 3.3 X 3.3 X 3.3 = (approximately) 36 cubic feet/cubic meter.
• So, we have 1000 liters/cubic meter X 1 cubic meter/36 cubic feet = (very approximately) 30 liters/cubic foot.
• Now 1 flush/6 liters X 30 liters/cubic foot = 5 flushes/cubic foot of water.
• 5 flushes/cubic foot X 600 cubic feet/second (from above) = 3000 flushes/second.
• 3000 flushes/second X 60 seconds/minute = 180000 flushes/minute of river flow.
• 180,000 flushes/20,000 persons = 9 flushes/person, from a minutes worth of water flow, which I rounded up to 10 just ’cause it sounds better when I tell my wife this astoundingly impressive fact. 🙂 (Yeah, yeah, I know she’s sick of crap like this…)

Incidentally, it just occured to me as I write this that the amount of water flowing by every second (600 cubic feet) in the river weighs as much as about 18 Toyota Corollas (and this is not a very big river). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to convince him/herself of the approximate truth of this.

*************************************

Here is one more example: recently (on a train) I wondered how much the air in the Empire State Building weighs. Here is how I went about estimating the answer:

• I read somewhere that a north-south NY city block is about a 20 of a mile. I confirm this rough figure in my mind by thinking that Manhattan is about 12 miles long and the northernmost streets are numbered around 215 or so. Since there is a bit of Manhattan below 1st street, I figure 200 blocks divided by roughly 10 miles gives a nice round number of 20 blocks per mile. Good.
• A mile has 5280 feet, so a 20th of that is half of 528 feet, about 250ish feet. (It’s a rough calculation!)
• It seems to me that the area of the footprint of the building (from having seen it many times) is probably close to the square of a city block (it actually is more rectangular, with the north-south dimension a bit less than a block and the east-west one a bit more), so let’s just say 250 X 250 feet, which is 62500 square feet, or roughly (remember, I have to keep this stuff in my head! And I’ll round up this time, since I rounded down last time) 70,000 square feet.
• It’s a little broader at the bottom floors and tapers sharply starting at the 86th through the 102nd floors, I think, so I’ll just say it is 90ish stories.
• Let’s say 10 feet (surprise, a nice round number!) of height for each floor, so multiplying by the area of the footprint, we get 10 X 90 X 70000 = 900 X 70000 = 63,000,000 cubic feet of internal space. You with me?
• I’ll say about a sixth, or roughly 13 million cubic feet of this is probably taken up by solid stuff including people, internal supports, furniture, etc., so we’re left with a nice round number: 50 million cubic feet of air.
• Now I just happen to know that the  density of air is about 0.08 pounds per cubic foot (at sea level and normallish temperatures), but even if I didn’t, I just remembered reading somewhere that air is about 800 times lighter than water, and knowing the density of water I could have figured it out easily enough.
• So, the weight of all the air in the Empire State Building is… 0.08 X 50,000,000 or 8 X 500,000 which equals… (drumroll, please) 4,000,000 pounds!

Which, as it happens, is 2,000 Toyota Corollas, or ten times the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 767 (by now you know not to ask why I know this!), like the one which crashed into the World Trade Center. Each tower of the WTC was bigger than the Empire State, so it is interesting to note that the weight of each of the planes that struck it (the other plane was slightly smaller), was less than a tenth of just the weight of the air inside the building.

What’s surprising about such estimates is how often they are very close to the reality. This is especially true in a multi-step approximation, where over- and underestimates at various steps tend to cancel each other out, usually resulting in something not too far off from the truth. To convince you of this, I emailed my friend, the mathematician John Allen Paulos, and asked him to estimate the weight of the air inside the Empire State Building. I told him he could look up the density of air, but nothing else, and to tell me his reasoning. This is what he wrote back:

Here’s my quick back of the envelope rough calculation of the weight of the air in the Empire State Building:

The building is about 1200 feet high and at ground level it a large square which then tapers as the building rises. I guess that on average it is about 200 feet by 200 feet. This gives us 48,000,000 cubic feet for its approximate volume. Since the density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/cubic meter or, translating into English units, roughly 2.5 pounds/35 cubic feet, the approximate weight of the air in the building is 48,000,000 x 2.5/35 or about 3.4 million pounds, somewhere around 3 or 4 million pounds.

The thing to notice here is that while John’s individual assumptions are significantly different from mine (for example, my estimate of the area of the footprint of the building, 70,000 square feet, was 75% greater than his estimate of 40,000 square feet), in the end things kinda’ even out and my answer of 4 million pounds is less than 20% greater than his answer of 3.4 million pounds.

But how can we know the actual figure? We cannot. We can only get closer and closer approximations by measuring things more and more accurately (the volume, not just of the building, but of everything in it, which must be subtracted). It’s not like there’s an easy way to pour the air out of the building and weigh it!

The fun in doing these estimates is in NOT looking anything up, and instead trying to answer questions by using, along the way, what we do know to estimate everything we need to know to answer our question.

*************************************

Suppose you have a baterium cell of a kind which divides into two every minute. (Normal bacteria like E. Coli divide about twenty times slower than that, but it’s just an example.) Now you put this cell into a large jar (with lots of bacterium food) at 11 AM. In one hour, at 12 noon, the jar has just completely filled with bacteria. Can you work out the time between 11 AM and 12 noon when the jar was half full? Can you estimate it? Go ahead and keep the figure in your head. I’ll give you the answer later.

Meanwhile, let me say a few words about doubling times. Let’s say you have an investment which is earning 10% interest per year. How long will it take for you to double your money?

There is a very simple little rule which works quite well in approximating doubling times for rates of growth between -25% (that’s “minus” 25%) and 35% or so (and very accurate for single digit percentage rates of growth), which goes like this: just divide 70 by the percentage rate of growth, and you have the time needed to double the quantity. (The reason this works is a little complicated and would require me to explain stuff I don’t want to get into at the moment.)

So, what is the answer to the question above: how long will it take to double your money if it is growing at 10% annually? The answer is simply 70 divided by 10, or 7 years. Say a country’s population is growing at the rate of 2% annually. How long before it doubles? 70 divided by 2, or 35 years! This rule is very useful in doing the rough mental estimates that I like to do.

I’ll give one last example: I read somewhere recently that the total energy consumption of the world is currently approximately 5 X 10²⁰ Joules per year, and worldwide energy consumption is increasing at a little over 2% annually. (This rate is expected to go up, not down, in the next couple of decades. China’s energy consumption has been growing at double-digit rates!) The following question occured to me: at this rate, how long will it take before we outrun the total amount of energy which is coming in from the sun? (Fossil fuels are just a stored form of this solar energy, and renewable forms of energy like wind power, are also just a small subset of the total radiant energy we receive from the sun daily.) Here’s how I went about estimating how long it would take:

• I know (I did some research on solar panels a few years ago) that the total radiant power coming in from the sun per square meter is about 1400 Watts (1 Watt of power is a Joule of energy per second).
• Half the world’s surface (the side facing the sun) receives energy at this rate. What is the area of this region? Well, it is just a circular cross section of the Earth, and the radius of the Earth is about 6,000 kilometers.
• The area of a circle is Pi X radius X radius, which is 3 X 6000 X 6000, or approimately 100 million square kilometers, in our case.
• One square kilometer is 1000 meters X 1000 meters = 1 million square meters, so we have a total area receiving solar energy of 100 million square kilometers  X 1 million square meters/square kilometer, or 100 trillion square meters.
• 100 trillion square meters X 1400 Watts/square meter = 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Watts of power, or 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Joules per second.
• So in a year we have 60 X 60 X 24 X 365 seconds or approximately 60 X 60 X 20 X 400 = 28,800,000, or about 30 million seconds = 3 X 10⁷ seconds.
• 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Joules/second X 3 X 10⁷ seconds/year = roughly 4 X 10²⁴ Joules of total radiant energy from the sun every year.
• Let’s just round it up to 5 X 10²⁴ Joules. Remember, our current world wide consumption is 5 X 10²⁰ Joules annually, or only 1/10,000th(!) of the total radiant energy of the sun that falls on the Earth every year. This seems a tiny fraction, but consider:
• At 2% annual growth in worldwide energy consumption, we double consumption every 35 years (by the approximate doubling time rule given above).
• How many times do we need to double consumption to reach 10,000 times our current level? This is just log₂ (10,000). I know that 2¹⁴ is 16,384 (I was a programmer!) and this is more than the factor of 10,000 that we need. So let’s just say we need 14 doublings.
• At 35 years/doubling X 14 doublings, we get 490 years.

In other words, given our current worldwided energy consumption, and the fact that it is growing at more than 2% per year, if it were to continue to grow at that rate, we will have outstripped ALL the energy coming in from the sun in less than 500 years! Pretty shocking, no? And if we took into account the solar energy that is absorbed by the atmosphere before reaching the surface of Earth, and things like that, we have MUCH less time during which we can sustain 2% growth in energy consumption. I know very little about economics, but I wonder if economic growth rates are related to energy consumption rates in any straightforward way. (Robin?) If so, this points to a cap on economic growth as well. So that’s my nerdy column for today.

Oh, and yes, the answer to the bacteria question: the jar will be half full at 11:59 AM. Just think about it for one minute!

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

by S. Abbas Raza

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got a Bachelor’s degree there in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In 1983 he got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Akeel Bilgrami is my teacher and my friend. A couple of years ago I had him over for dinner at my apartment in New York one night. Leon Wieseltier had just published what I considered at best a confused hack job of a review of Daniel Dennett’s then new book Breaking the Spell in the New York Times. I was quite outraged by this odium-filled denunciation of one of the living philosophers that I most admire, and even orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to the publishers of the New York Times.

I asked Akeel that night what he thought of the review, and he said that while he agreed with me that Wieseltier’s attack was shameful, he didn’t see too much of interest in Dennett’s book either, because while attacking religious faith in predictable ways (certainly preaching to the choir in my and Akeel’s case), Dennett completely failed to even acknowledge, much less analyze in any meaningful way, the more important cultural, political, and philosophical underpinnings of the much-lamented religious fundamentalist resurgence here in America as well as in the Muslim world.

As I have written here at 3QD in the past, I am sympathetic to this criticism of not just Dennett’s book, but the whole slew of best-selling anti-religion books since then by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, John Allen Paulos, and others, even while I feel that these books have had the tremendously salutary effect of creating, or at least greatly expanding, the space available to atheists in the public sphere.

Akeel then told me that he was writing an essay for Critical Inquiry which addresses precisely the cultural and political contexts of religion that these books ignore, and that he would send it to me when it was done. He did, and I was immediately captivated by his subtle and deeply original analysis. After much late-night discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Akeel’s analysis between Robin Varghese and me, we decided to send the paper to some philosophers, political scientists, and other academics for critical comment. Six of those have now responded. In the next eight posts, you will find first the full text of Akeel’s paper, followed by the six critical responses, and then finally a last essay by Akeel answering his critics. 3QD will not be publishing further replies from the participants as full posts, but additional responses can always be left as comments on the appropriate post.

By the way, I recently spent some hours attempting to distill Akeel’s argument for this introduction, only to realize that it is already very dense (Akeel covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space) and far too intricate to be comprehensibly condensed. (To give you a sense of the rare and admirable concision with which Akeel writes, let me mention that in the essay, during the course of dismissing recent attempts at inverting the argument of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Akeel gives a brilliantly brief summary of the trajectory of the main arguments of that book in one page!) So I strongly urge you to take the time to read Akeel’s essay, which follows this post, in full.

In fact, I should perhaps also add that the material which makes up this seminar is somewhat more academic in tone (and length!) than readers of 3QD may be used to seeing here. I nevertheless encourage them to make the effort to read it as it is a thoughtful treatment of most-consequential topics (as Akeel himself puts it, “There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, eventually, nothing short of the democratic ideal is at stake…”) and the contributors make some fascinating arguments.

Robin Varghese and I would like to warmly thank all the contributors for their submissions, and of course, most of all we want to thank Akeel Bilgrami, not only for writing the original paper as well as a response to the critical comments, but much more for his long and affectionate mentorship.

Here, for your browsing convenience, is a table of contents:

1. Akeel Bilgrami: Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment
2. Colin Jager: Literary Thinking: A Comment on Bilgrami
3. Bruce Robbins: Response to Akeel Bilgrami
4. Justin E. H. Smith: A Comment on Akeel Bilgrami’s “Occidentalism, The Very Idea”
5. Steven Levine: A Comment on Bilgrami
6. Ram Manikkalingam: Culture follows politics: Avoiding the global divide between “Islam and the West”
7. Uday Mehta: Response to Akeel Bilgrami
8. Akeel Bilgrami: A Reply to Robbins, Jager, Smith, Levine, Manikkalingam, and Mehta

by Akeel Bilgrami

It wouldn’t be too lofty to describe the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades about the inherited ideas and ideologies of the ‘Enlightenment’ as our intellectual efforts at self-understanding — in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the sense in which we belong to a period, properly describable as our ‘modernity’.

These ongoing efforts on our part, however, gain a specific interest when they surface in the context of a new form of cold war that has religious rather than communist ideals as its target. Since religion, at least on the surface, in some fairly obvious sense runs afoul of the demands of the Enlightenment, our modernity may seem to be much more at stake now than it was in the contestations of the original cold war, where the issues seemed to be more about a conflict internal to the ideals of the Enlightenment.[i] But in the passage of analysis in this essay, I will have hoped to raise one serious angle of doubt about this seeming difference.

A recurring complaint among critics of the Enlightenment is about a complacence in the rough and cumulative consensus that has emerged in modern ‘Western’ thought of the last two centuries and a half. The complaint is misplaced. There has, in fact, always been a detectably edgy and brittle quality in the prideful use of omnibus terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ to self-describe the ‘West’s’ claim to being something more than a geographical location. One sign of this nervousness is a quickness to find a germ of irrationality in any source of radical criticism of the consensus. From quite early on, the strategy has been to tarnish the opposition as being poised in a perpetual ambiguity between radicalism and irrationalism (including sometimes an irrationalism that encourages a fascist, or incipiently fascist, authoritarianism.) Nietzsche was one of the first to sense the theoretical tyranny in this and often responded with an edginess of his own by flamboyantly refusing to be made self-conscious and defensive by the strategy, and by explicitly embracing the ambiguity. More recently Foucault, among others, responded by preempting the strategy and declaring that the irrational was, in any case, the only defence of those who suffered under the comprehensive cognitive grip of the discursive power unleashed by modernity, in the name of ‘rationality’.[ii]

I want to pursue some of the underlying issues of this confusing dialectic in such disputation regarding the modern. There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, eventually, nothing short of the democratic ideal is at stake, though that particular theme is too far afield to be pursued in any detail in this essay.[iii]

A familiar element in a cold war is that the warring sides are joined by academics and other writers, shaping attitudes and rationalizing or domesticating the actions of states and the interests that drive them, in conceptual terms for a broader intellectual public.[iv] Some of this conceptual work is brazen and crass and is often reckoned to be so by the more alert among the broad public. But other writing is more sophisticated and has a more superior tone, making passing acknowledgements of the faults on the side to whom it gives intellectual support, and such work is often lionized by the intellectual elites as ‘fair-minded’ and ‘objective’ and despite these marginal criticisms of the state in question, it is tolerated by the broad consensus of those in power. Ever since Samuel Huntington wrote his influential article “The Clash of Civilizations”,[v] there was a danger that a new cold war would emerge, one between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ to use the vast, generalizing terms of Huntington’s own portentous claims. Sure enough since that time, and especially with two or three hot wars thrown in to spur the pundits on, an increasing number of books with the more sophisticated aspiration have emerged to consolidate what Huntington had started.

To elaborate this essay’s concerns, I will proceed a little obliquely by initially focusing closely and at some length on one such book and briefly invoking another as its foil, and then situate the concerns in a larger historical and conceptual framework. The focus is worth its while since the conclusions of the book I have primarily chosen, as well as the attitudes it expresses, are representative of a great deal of both lay and academic thinking on these themes.

Read more »

Colin Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Early in April presidential candidate Barak Obama remarked that “some of these small towns in Pennsylvania…like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them….And it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The remarks were widely seen as a slip for the normally sure-footed Obama—certainly Hillary Clinton went to town with them, accusing Obama of condescending to working-class voters and being “out of touch.”

Obama’s remarks might be seen as an example of the kind of thinking that Akeel Bilgrami finds lacking. In the essay under discussion here, Bilgrami criticizes the ease with which left-liberal thinkers translate enchantment into its supposedly more worldly (read: economic) causes. Bilgrami argues that there is a wider and more philosophical issue at stake here, namely the disenchantment that attends modernity. That disenchantment has a certain “feel” to it. Consequently, those who see in re-enchantment simply a form of false consciousness miss the cultural dimensions of disenchantment: the transformation or outright destruction of indigenous and local forms of solidarity, the isolation and alienation that trail in its wake.

Bruce Robbins, in his response to Bilgrami, wonders whether this is the right approach. Do the kind of cultural-philosophical interpretations of what ails red-state America that Bilgrami recommends really hit their mark? The beliefs of values voters, says Robbins, may be “less representative of would-be theocrats struggling to free themselves from liberalism’s privatization of religion than of consumer-citizens, whipsawed between consumerism and asceticism, who live a relatively happy inconsistency between public and private” (639).

Now it may be that Robbins has misconstrued his target here. Bilgrami certainly thinks so. That’s something for them to work out. I’m more interested in the fact that Robbins’s remarks might serve as an admirable gloss on Obama’s remarks. Both Obama and Robbins might be understood as suggesting that the modern age has brought with it a distinctive set of tensions, even contradictions, perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom the promises of modernity have not materialized. This way of construing things puts most of its emphasis on getting the description right, and much less emphasis trying to imagine how it might feel to be a consumer-citizen so “whipsawed.” (Thus, right wing media outlets continually mentioned that Obama had made these remarks in San Francisco, implying that elites on the Left Coast just don’t “get” the heartland.)

Read more »

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

[Colin Jager’s response, which Bruce Robbins’s piece refers to, can be found here.]

I’m grateful to Colin Jager for attaching this renewal of the “Occidentialism” conversation immediately and firmly to the upcoming election. Akeel Bilgrami’s Critical Inquiry article (Spring 2006) suggested that the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was in large part the result of the “shallowness of the Left diagnosis,” which saw the red states’ bitterness and turn to religion as “consequences of the market.” The Republicans won, Bilgrami argues, because their analysis was “less shallow.” Looking deeper, they saw, correctly for Bilgrami, that the real problem was “something with a much wider and longer reach than market society, something that subsumes market society, that is, … the thick ideal of scientific rationality.” The so-called “values voters” who went Republican in the name of religion were very properly turning against the secular/ scientific rationality of the Left, which could not give them “values to live by.”

Where are these values voters today? According to the New York Times/CBS poll reported in the Times on May 5, 2008, voters who were asked “Does the candidate share the values of most Americans?” responded exactly the same for Hillary Clinton and for Barack Obama, 60%. John McCain trailed only slightly at 58%. A sizeable minority apparently feels that the candidates do not share its values (presumably anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-immigrant, and so on), but that minority is not positioned to decide anything. In other words, the strategy of seizing comparative advantage by claiming to speak for “values” has all but disappeared from this year’s political contest. In my earlier reply to Bilgrami, I had proposed that even in 2004 the “values” issue was not in fact decisive. To me at least, the new poll data confirm that this issue was never the deeper and truer reading of long-term American politics that Bilgrami, among others, saw in it. And as the failing US economy has re-asserted its prominence as voter issue #1, it has not become more plausible to think that voters are moved by their repulsion from scientific rationality and hunger for enchantment more than they are by market-generated unemployment, foreclosures, gas prices, food prices, and actual physical hunger. There may be strong arguments for the re-enchantment of the world, but in 2008 political urgencies are not among them.

I’m comfortable talking politics here, which is to say talking at the level of educated common sense, because I have no illusions about my ability to engage with Bilgrami at the level of technical philosophy. In the last sentence of his response-to-my-response (Critical Inquiry Spring 2007), Bilgrami offers a gloss on what enchantment means: “the oughts are there in nature and need no derivation.” I’m told that some philosophers (among them John Searle) have indeed argued that under certain conditions ought can be derived from is. I’m also told that this position has not won anything like general acceptance even among professional philosophers. I can imagine at least some reason for taking this idea on: knowing more about the distant impact of my actions on the natural environment (is) might well change my sense of my ethical obligations (ought). But I don’t think this is what Bilgrami means, or what his argument would mean if taken seriously by the non-philosophers like myself who seem to be the implicit addressees of his original essay. So if I offer this statement as a concise summary of the differences between Bilgrami and myself, I do so on the assumption that we arguing at a non-technical level.

Read more »

Justin E. H. Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University.

Akeel Bilgrami has so decisively exposed the weaknesses of the recent attempt to invert the argument of Said’s Orientalism that I do not see much point here in weighing the virtues of his essay against those of Buruma and Margalit’s book.  I would like to focus instead on his essay as a self-standing argument, and to pursue a few problems I see arising from it.  In broad outline, these problems stem from two very large aims of the essay: to describe the way things are today, and to account for how they got to be that way. 

Bilgrami’s broad historical thesis concerning a dissenting indigenous tradition in the West is intriguing but debatable.  He does not focus on Spinoza explicitly, but on the notion of a “Radical Enlightenment” that, since the publication of Jonathan Israel’s tome of that name, has been primarily associated with the impact of Spinoza on modern history.  Now, Spinoza has been recruited of late to do all sorts of things for all sorts of factions.  He has become the great hope of some segments of the post-Marxist Left, yet the uses to which he has been posthumously put are part of Spinoza’s reception history, not part of Spinoza.  The 17th-century philosopher was not a post-Marxist, and was no more sympathetic to Giorgio Agamben than to Paul Wolfowitz.

Spinoza is said to represent a possible alternative modernity because he conceived God as immanent rather than transcendent, and of nature as itself divine.  Yet Robert Boyle, too, had compelling reasons to believe that the vision of nature as clockwork, and of God as mechanic who set the world in motion and then absconded, was the only vision that adequately exalted God and thus that was acceptable for a pious natural philosopher such as himself.  For Boyle, to have God implicated in the “operose and distractious” workings of nature (Cudworth’s phrase), whether through direct implication or through the parting out of motive force to subordinate plastic natures or archaei, would be to render God a lowly custodian, when in fact, he wanted to argue, God is great enough to create a nature great enough to do everything it has to do in accord with a few basic laws.  There is no contempt for nature here, and no call to replace piety and awe with hard-headed rationality.  There is only a desire to avoid the ‘pagan’ mistake of conflating God and the world, and of explaining natural processes in terms of the inherence of quasidivinities in the natural landscape of clouds, streams, mountains, etc.  There may in fact be nothing wrong with such paganism, but Boyle’s desire to avoid it was not a symptom of some nascent disenchantment; it was rather a central feature of the great majority of theological reflection in all three of the great traditions of Abrahamic religion.

Another prominent theory of how nature works, and of God’s relationship to nature, was occasionalism, the doctrine defended by Nicolas Malebranche, Louis La Forge, Arnold Geulincx and others, according to which nature is intrinsically inert, and every change that comes about in the world is the result of God’s direct causal intervention (“perpetual miracle,” Leibniz called it).  Reading Bilgrami, the question naturally arises: were Malebranche and his kind early disciples of disenchantment, or were they part of the countercurrent?  It is worth noting that in the 17th century occasionalism was consciously and explicitly appropriated from medieval Islamic philosophy: Al-Ghazali, for example, had thought that it was an easy step from “There is no God but God” to “There is no Cause but God.” Occasionalism from 11th-century Persia through 17th-century France appears to have been motivated, again, by a form of piety, characteristic of monotheism and not of animism, that seeks to glorify God by attributing direct responsibility for every state of Creation to him.  Now, Bilgrami may simply think that belief in a unique transcendent God is unfortunate, and thus may find Spinozan immanentism and animism attractive.  But he has not convinced me that the representatives of the “Radical Enlightenment” were resisting what we would later come to recognize as the scourge of scientific rationalism, nor that the Occidentalists have anything in common with the members of this supposed indigenous Western countercurrent.  I thus remain skeptical concerning Bilgrami’s central thesis, that, in his words, “there really are conspicuous intellectual and critical affinities between the ‘Occidentalist Enemies of the West’ and Gandhi on the one hand and a longstanding and continuous dissenting tradition within the West itself on the other.”

Read more »

Steven Levine is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Prof. Bilgami’s make two central claims in his illuminating paper: 1) that certain malignant aspects of Western development and society are internally and not contingently related to the scientific rationality of the Enlightenment, and 2) that it is not science itself that leads to these malignant aspects but rather an interpretation—and the practices based upon this interpretation—of what science requires of us in our thinking about rationality and value. As Bilgrami himself points out there has been a long history of thinking—some of which was contemporaneous with the scientific revolution itself—which makes claims similar to these. Because the particular tradition that I stand in, Left Hegelianism, is part of this long history of counter-thinking, I find both claims very plausible. In our preferred jargon, the point that Bilgrami is driving at is encapsulated by the phrase ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. The dialectic of enlightenment claims that enlightenment reason is at odds with itself, that while it provides for the possibility of an autonomous form of life, one not determined solely by the contingences of nature and fate, it, in securing this possibility, often expresses itself instrumentally. When instrumental reason is take to be the whole of reason the malignant aspects of Western development and society mentioned above follow, i.e., nihilism and new forms of domination. The left Hegelian does not take it that this dialectic requires the abandonment of enlightenment reason for the irrational or the mute silence of the Other, rather it signals the necessity for undertaking an immanent critique of dogmatic conception’s of enlightenment reason and the practices based upon these conceptions. Dogmatic conception are ones that overlooks the dialectic of enlightenment, taking it—as Buruma and Margalit do—that the principles of the enlightenment are only contingently related to their malignant consequences.

The goal of the left Hegelian is to achieve a higher order type of reflection in which reason reflects on its blind spots and potential one-sidedness. This task is especially important now since a dogmatic conception of the enlightenment and enlightenment reason informs the position of most US policy makers and ideologues who still, post-Iraq, take it to be their duty as Enlightened to maintain US hegemony. The question is whether this charge applies to Buruma and Margalit. While Buruma and Margalit don’t endorse open hegemony (indeed both were against the Iraq adventure), they are still, so Bilgrami argues, ‘Cold War Intellectuals’ who contribute to the ideological underpinnings of Western dominance. How does he make out this claim? To first thing to recognize is that Buruma and Margalit ignore completely internal critiques of the enlightenment—those offered by the early modern radical enlightenment, left-Hegelianism, or more distantly, Ghandi—and instead focus all of their attention on Slavophile, Japanese, and German Romantic and nationalist writing, as well as Islamist Occidentalist writings. In my view, this selection of topics, one very reminiscent of Paul Berman’s influential yet incoherent Terror and Liberalism, is prepared for by a certain imaginary that shapes the views of many if not most current ‘Cold War Intellectuals’. This imaginary posits a simple opposition between the enlightenment universal and the non-enlightened particular, Gesellshaft and Gemeinshaft, the progressive and the reactionary, the Lexus and the olive-tree, etc. Once this imaginary is in place, the affinity between Western romantic and nationalist writings and Islamist Occidentalist writings seems commonsensical. And indeed, there are obvious affinities here. The problem is not in identifying affinities, but in the narrowing of vision in which the positions mentioned above—the early modern radical enlightenment, left-Hegelianism, and Ghandi—disappear from view altogether. In performing this disappearing act, liberal intellectuals like Buruma and Margalit, who otherwise might be one’s political ally, play a key ideological role in the ‘War on Terror’; for now political argument cannot call upon the resources of the excluded positions but can only express which side of the simple opposition one is on. This narrowing of argumentative space is distinctive of our age. One of the virtues of Prof. Bilgrami’s paper is his attempt to reopen this space and let a bit of light shine in.

Ram Manikkalingam is visiting professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.

Bilgrami’s paper is centrally located within the contemporary debate about the global divide between “Islam and the West” that is popularly called “the clash of civilisations”. This debate is motivated by the question – “why do they hate us?” – posed by some (or is it many) westerners looking askance at intensifying negative, if not hostile, feelings in the Muslim world towards the west, in general, and the United States (US), in particular. This question has led to two answers: they hate us/you because of who we/you are? (Buruma and Margalit), and 2) They hate us/you because of what we/you do? (Mahmud Mamdani). Bilgrami’s paper links “the who you are” to “what you do.” My comments will try to first unpack this linkage and then re-pack it in a way that I hope will contribute a little more to the effort made by all three works (Buruma and Margalit, Mamdani and Bilgrami) towards linking values, culture, politics and violence in order to better understand the impact of Western policies and (Islamic) terrorism on our lives.

Let me begin with a summary of my take. Bilgrami is sympathetic to the intellectual objective of Buruma and Margalit to link culture with politics. But he is dismissive of their intellectual effort at doing so, as well as hostile to the political motivation behind it. His main objection is that Buruma and Margalit slip too quickly from a cultural critique of the west to the resort to violence on the part of Islamist terrorists. He believes that the step – from culture to violence – is contingent on other political factors. The first step – sharing a set of (cultural) values need not lead to agreement on whether or not (and how) to resort to violence. However, while sympathetic to Mamdani’s effort to view violence as a response to the politics of the West, he disagrees with Mamdani’s dismissal of the cultural elements in such a linkage. But if violence is only contingently linked to politics, then why can’t politics be only contingently linked to the cultural critique.

To put it in Bilgrami’s language, Gandhi and Bin Laden can share a cultural critique of the west (and a set of values – liberal individualism and scientific rationality are bad), but differ in politics (the West may or may not be inherently bad); they can share politics (the West is imperialist), but differ in whether to resort to violence (together with Western progressives and moral suasion the West can be changed according to Gandhi, or it will only change under the threat of force according to Bin Laden); and finally it is possible to agree about resorting to violence (threat of force is necessary to change Western policies – Bin Laden and Fidel Castro), but disagree about how to resort to it (terrorism is acceptable given asymmetries of military power according to Bin Laden or terrorism is morally unacceptable according to Castro). This weakens Bilgrami’s endorsement of the effort to integrate the cultural critique with politics and violence, and appears to place him uneasily between Mamdani and Buruma and Margalit.

Read more »

Uday Mehta is Clarence Francis Professor in Social Sciences at Amherst College.

In the opening lines of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber declared that the ultimate stakes of the book were not the causal and historical roots of capitalist enterprise but rather the question of what aspects of “Western civilization”  “lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.” His answer, which followed in the very next sentence, was: “Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid.” What made this science valid and uniquely Western was its rationality. “Knowledge and observation of great refinement existed elsewhere, above all in India, China, Babylonia, Egypt,” but what they lacked were the rational principles for the very activities that they practiced with great and often surpassing acumen.  Indians had geometry, mathematics and the natural sciences but “no rational proof” or “method of experiment.” Chinese “historical scholarship,” though “highly developed,” did “not have the method of Thucydides.” Indian political thought, despite being a predecessor to Machiavelli, lacked “systematic method” and “rational concepts.” And, crucially, given the focus of Weber’s work, India, Babylon and China had merchants, domestic and foreign trade, banks, credit markets and entrepreneurs but “their activities were predominantly of an irrational and speculative character.” Rational capitalism was uniquely a feature of the modern West.

Weber is of course not alone in associating the defining kernel of the West with principles. Samuel Huntington famously identified America with the Anglo-Protestant creedal “principles of liberty, equality, human rights, representative government, and private property” and with the specifically liberal and democratic culture, values and institutions that these principles, on his account, produced. Buruma and Margalit associate the West with the principles of scientific rationality and the formal aspects of democracy. But Weber is ultimately very different from these others with whom he appears to shares an initial impulse. For him, the specific kind of rationality that triumphed in the modern West did in fact produce a form of life. It was a form of life and a culture about which he had a deep ambivalence because it was characterized by the immanence, and not merely the epiphenomenal accident, of an “iron cage.” It was one whose epitaph would be, “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that is has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” and in which, moreover, regeneration might very well turn on the rise of “new prophets” or the “great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.”

Read more »

I am grateful to the contributors to this web symposium on “Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, (first published in Critical Inquiry, 2006) for having bothered to read my work and comment on it. I would like to apologize to them (and to Abbas Raza and Robin Varghese, the editors of the excellent website “3 Quarks Daily” who proposed this symposium to me well over a year ago) for being so delayed in my responses.

I have replied to the comments in the order in which they were sent to me. If I spend proportionately more space on the comment by Bruce Robbins, it is only because I feel he continues to drastically misconstrue my views in a way that that I would not like to stand uncorrected.

Reply To Robbins II

There is a cast of mind I find a strain, even a repugnance, which constantly seeks to reduce issues of historical and philosophical depth to a galumphing topicality.

In my reply to Robbins’s first comment on my initial essay, I had pointed to how utterly misplaced his suggestion was that I had some concern in that essay to instruct ‘the Left’ about how to win an election (‘seize power ‘, I believe, was his expression) in America. My refusal to be drawn into this effort to steer the discussion of my work to his own up-to-the-minute political preoccupations has left him frustrated.

In the first sentence of his latest comment, he pounces hungrily on an opening remark in the comment by Colin Jager in this web symposium, saying: “I’m grateful to Colin Jager for attaching this renewal of the “Occidentialism” conversation immediately and firmly to the upcoming election.” But Jager does nothing of the sort. He merely cites Obama’s controversial claim about how some of the political attitudes and the religiosity in working class America might owe partly to certain broadly characterized social and economic deprivations they have suffered in the last few decades with a view to raising the hard questions about false consciousness that I had briefly discussed in my essay, and then proceeds to ideas about disenchantment, community and solidarity that I had presented there in the long genealogical diagnosis I had offered of some of the conditions of advanced, industrial society in the West, especially in America, from its early conceptual and material origins in the late seventeenth century. Jager’s interest is in assessing my account of these things, not at all in the ‘upcoming elections’.

In the next sentence, Robbins writes: “Akeel Bilgrami’s Critical Inquiry (2006) article suggested that the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was in large part the result of the ‘shallowness of the Left diagnosis,’ which saw the red states’ bitterness and turn to religion as ‘consequences of the market.’ ” This, too, is false. I mentioned the 2004 election once only to cite an undemocratic Liberal Left response to the ordinary people who were responsible for its outcome. In the brief last section of my essay where the election gets this mention, my canvas is the much bigger one of modern American culture and politics, whose span was delineated by me explicitly with phrases such as “ever since the Goldwater defeat” and ‘for some forty years’. I do believe that the Liberal Left has been shallow in America and I do believe that the Republican Party has been cynically tapping things in the American heartland that metropolitan Liberals have not grasped with any searching historical analysis or psychological sensitivity. But these beliefs were not presented as opinions geared to any recent or future election.

It is a depthless journalist’s tendency to think, as Robbins does, that the latest shifts in poll-monitored percentage points in a given week or month reflect any appreciable difference in the facts, accumulated over the last few decades, about the religious commitments of extraordinarily large numbers of people that have made and continue to make an overwhelming difference to American politics. If this or that politician today (McCain, for instance) does not speak in a campaign with the same religious fervour as his predecessor nor get quite the same response that his predecessor got, that is not a sign that matters of religion and ‘values’ –as Robbins puts it—are not relevant to this country’s politics. Their accumulated relevance is too obvious to deny, and this difference in the behaviour of a particular politician at this particular instant may just be because, over these many years, the Republican alliance with the Religious Right has made more or less certain that the very considerable conservative religious vote is quite secure for the Republicans, and McCain can now focus on the swing voter instead.

I feel embarrassed indulging Robbins’s obsession with yesterday’s headlines and today’s polls and the coming November, in a symposium such as this, given its larger theme –much the same embarrassment someone would feel in having to engage an infatuated man who parades his mistress in a thoroughly inappropriate place.

Read more »

///
Don Q. in Mahattan
–Biting the dust of ’01 
Jim Culleny

Dining in Soho alone, a man
served by a girl with lip studs, nose ring,
and serpent tattoo uncoiling
from deep cleavage,
sees the new man of La Mancha,
in dim light across the room,
seated with his back to the street:

He topples a pepper mill with his fork
gesturing to his wife, Sancha,
vowing he’ll redeem New York.

Sancha smiles and re-sets the mill in place
among constellations of pepper stars
strewn across formica space.

Between them supper’s done:
spent dinnerware, filaments of flaked filo
circling half a buttered bun,
remnants of dense moussaka,
and that pepper mill now standing like a dustbowl silo
near languid cubes in tepid water.

Don (el Hombre), enemy of disorder,
sweeps a hand through this small universe
like a superanal patriot
and plows a thousand miniscule black galaxies
into his cupped palm
and dumps ’em on a plate.

He takes his tined baton
between forefinger and thumb
and sets a cadence in the atmosphere
thumping his undiffident drum.

Then Don, el futile hombre,
maestro of mishap,
conducts the ice and water glass
into long-suffering Sancha’s lap.

///

by Atiya Batool Khan

I had the honor of meeting Ahmad Faraz 26 years ago in Washington. A local Urdu literary society, the Aligarh Alumni Association, had invited him to recite at a gathering they had organized in his honor—a Mushaira, or poetry reading. This was after he had left Pakistan under pressure from military strongman Zia-ul-Haq's government. My husband and I were asked by the Aligarh Alumni Association to host him for a week, but in that short time we became fast friends, so his stay turned first into a month and then it ended up being almost a year. This was the beginning of a lifelong relationship and he gradually became like a member of our family. We would visit with him at least once a year in Pakistan, and he visited us just as often. Though he became one of our closest friends, we always addressed him by the honorific name “Faraz Sahib” (Mr. Faraz) out of respect, and that is how I shall refer to him here.

As far as Urdu poetry goes, none of his contemporaries could touch Faraz Sahib, or even come close. The superiority of his poetry owes much to his personal qualities: the boldness of his thought, his willingness to fight oppression and his very costly (to himself) political activism, his rebellious nature, and of course his romantic worldview.

It was actually love poetry that first made him very popular at the tender age of 19 years. Here is one famous romantic poem of that early time which already announces the bold and beautiful lyrical rhythm in Urdu that would become characteristic of him later:

Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhaanay kay liyay aa
Aa phir say mujhay chhorr kay jaanay kay liyay aa

Pehlay say maraasim na sahi phir bhi kabhi to
Rasm-o-rahay duniya hi nibhaanay kay liyay aa

Kis kis ko bataayengay judaai kaa sabab ham
Tu mujh se khafaa hai to zamaanay kay liyay aa

Kuchh to meri pindaar-e-mohabbat ka bharam rakh
Tu bhi to kabhi mujh ko manaanay kay liyay aa

Ek umr say hun lazzat-e-giryaa se bhi mehruum
Aye raahat-e-jaan mujh ko rulaanay kay liyay aa

Ab tak dil-e-khush_feham ko tujh say hain ummeedain
Ye aakhari shammain bhi bujhaanay kay liyay aa

*

Come, even if only to break my heart
Come, even if only to leave me again

Yes, it is no longer like before, but still
Come, if only for the sake of convention

I cannot tell people the reasons for our separation
Come, even if unhappy, for public show

Respect just a little my love for you
Come, for once, just to appease me

For long I haven’t had even the pleasure of lament
Come, joy of my life, if only to make me weep again

My heart, the optimist, still retains some hope
Come, to extinguish even these last little embers

*

As a poet, he was as sensitive as an artist should be: he frequently observed and then took the time to reflect upon things that others did not notice. During one of his visits with us, my husband took him to see the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. The next day he wrote his famous poem “Kaali Deewaar” (The Black Wall), a meditation not only on the utter futility of that war and the destruction wreaked upon the Vietnamese, but also an outpouring of sympathy for the loved ones of the American veterans he saw placing flowers near their names on the wall.

On another occasion I took him to work, to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, with me, and he soon wrote a poem about the Eye Bank there. In this especially notable poem, he movingly describes the deprivation of blind people, offering his own eyes to them. But then he wonders if others would ever want eyes that have witnessed so much pain; whether such eyes, that have seen so many of their dreams shattered, would even be bearable to others.

His frustration and anger against inhuman practices and political oppression is obvious in a poem that he wrote in praise of the prophet Mohammad in which he also writes:

Mere zameer ne qabeel ko nahin bakhsha
Main kaise sulha karoon qatal karne walon se.

*

My conscience has yet to forgive Cain
How can I make peace with these killers?

*

And when he teaches us to be an activist he says:

Shikwae zulmate shab se to kahin behtar tha
Apne hisse ki koi shama jalate jaate

*

Rather than lamenting the darkness of that night,
We should have done our share and lit a candle or two

*

In a philosophical mood he would recite:

Ek diwana ye kehta hua hansta jata
Kaash manzil se bhi age koi rasta jata.

*

A lunatic, laughing, would go along, saying
I wish this path went further than my destination

*

For friendship he wrote:

Zindigi is se ziada to nahin umr teri
Bas kisi dost ke milne se juda honay tak

*

Life, your duration is easily measured:
From the moment of meeting a friend, to the moment of parting

*

He not only wrote well but also recited his poetry with a uniquely charming cadence. The audience was invariably mesmerized. He would always get standing ovations and uproarious applause. In person he was a very cheerful, friendly person, greeting all he met with a warm smile. We shared a love of puns and plays on words, and he loved to recite jokes and make people laugh. Using his love of language and his creative gift, he made any gathering he attended extremely enjoyable. He was a very progressive thinker, always eager to hear about new ideas or try out new inventions. He never hesitated to voice his opinions or inner feelings, even if they were different than the norms of his native culture or the time.

Faraz Sahib was a person of stature with charisma, glamour, wit, humor, kindness, caring and sensitivity who was also bold, vivacious, a true friend, poet, philosopher, human rights activist, agnostic, non conformist, an avid reader, humble, extremely patriotic and notably passionate. He had a palpable urge to create and write. He was a world-renowned Urdu poet and national icon in Pakistan. He died on August 25th of complications from a severe stroke and Renal Failure. He was 77 years old. He is survived by his wife, Rehana, and his sons, Saadi, Shibley and Sarmad.

He was a great person and an exemplary friend. He lived a full and happy life, and whoever met him once would not be able to forget his charming personality and will miss him. He called me his friend and that is my pride.

In short I would say that he cared for people more than others thought was wise, he took risks more than others thought was safe, and he dreamt more than others thought was practical.

Atiya B. Khan is a pediatrician practicing in Maryland and a social activist who has raised millions for the education of the poor. The Urdu poetry here has been loosely translated by her brother, S. Abbas Raza.

Michael Blim

I am printing here an advance copy of one half of Barak Obama’s upcoming convention acceptance speech.

For the record, I obtained it through a family friend who labors in the bowels of Chicago’s Daley Democratic Machine. I am calling him Billy here so that his gift to me doesn’t bring down the wrath of Richie Daley on his head. Billy has a no-show job at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I don’t ask him what he does there, because I am pretty sure he doesn’t do anything.

The only time you can be sure of finding Billy is at his apartment in the 42nd ward two weeks before every Election Day. He’s a precinct captain. And now I guess you understand why he has a no-show job. I heard via a mutual friend that he spends most of his time in Las Vegas running a strip club.

Billy sent me the speech in a PDF. He had gotten it from his sister-in-law who does clerical work inside the Obama inner sanctum in Chicago. She had given Billy the PDF because she figured that he wouldn’t be watching the convention, with the Sox and Cubs in tight pennant races and all. Billy wrote me that she sent it on to the whole clan in Bridgeport. He thought a scoop like this might generate interest in my column, given that he thinks nobody reads it, and he is a loyal friend and wants to see me make out as a writer.

Given that the whole Bridgeport clan has this part of the speech, and most of them are connected, I decided to put this out, and see if I can pick up a reader or two.

The following is the part of Obama’s acceptance speech that concerns foreign policy:

“The Republicans say that I talk a lot about change, but I don’t say what I want to do.

Not true, but just so there is no mistaking what I intend to do as president, let me lay out my new direction for American foreign policy.

I am going to make big changes.

First, the Iraq war was the biggest mistake America has made since the Vietnam War, and it has cost over 4000 men and women their lives. Tens of thousands will carry grievous wounds around for the rest of our lives. Countless tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives, suffered terrible injuries, or are worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein.

I intend to pull out our troops by the end of the first year of my term. There is already a consensus in the country that this is the best thing to do. There is no guarantee that a McCain administration, once they get in, will do it.

I will. And I will not leave garrisons of American troops on Iraqi soil after the combat pullout. They would be a provocation for Iraqis and their neighbors who wish to govern themselves without American interference. Their resentment would put our troops constantly in harm’s way.

Everybody is coming home. You can count on it.

Second, I favor engagement – not war or isolation — with Iran. Only war could possibly stop them from building nuclear weapons if they choose to. This would be a disastrous course of action. Even a cold war with Iran would fail. We couldn’t stop friends like Pakistan and India, so what gives us the confidence that our hostility will change their minds?

My administration is not going to war with Iran. It is better to establish a relationship with them. It would be even more important if they develop nuclear weapons.

Some argue that we must use force and eliminate Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities to support and protect Israel. I ask you: Since when has Israel ever needed defending? The certain knowledge that Israel would use its A bomb against Iran is deterrent enough. Deterrence worked between the former Soviet Union and us during the Cold War, and it seems to be working between Pakistan and India. Let’s leave Iran to decide its own fate.

Third, we should leave the Israelis and Palestinians to sort out their destinies. Our involvement doesn’t help. Instead, it hurts the chances for peace. Because the United States has given Israel our unconditional support, Palestinians believe they cannot trust us to be even-handed, and they are right. Our constant pressure drives them further away from making peace. Israel too, given our total support, has no real incentive to make peace. We provide each of an excuse. In the long run, they are locked in a deadly and ruinous embrace.

The Palestinians and the Israelis must make their own peace, and their chances of success increase if we get out of the way.

Fourth, we had better acknowledge that we face a new cold war if we do not find better ways of coexisting with Russia. We can blame former President Putin and his governments for making it more likely. But it takes two to make a cold war.

We never stop to consider Russia’s position. We told them to make an American economy out of the shambles of the failed Soviet system. After years of trying and failing, they went back to their old ways of doing things. At least for the time being, their new arrangement works.

When they were down, we lorded it over them. Our plan didn’t work, and the Russian people suffered terribly.

So the state once more controls Russia’s massive corporations, and Russian citizens enjoy what we consider a limited set of civil liberties.

This is their affair. Just as we would resent former President Putin lecturing us about how we eliminated many of our civil liberties after September 11, they find it irritating too to be told how they should run their society.

We also don’t seem to get it about why they are becoming more aggressive. How would we feel if Canada became a close ally with Russia – a second Cuba in other words? We are expanding NATO, the historic bulwark against Soviet ambitions, to their very borders. We would never stand for it, and they won’t either.

How would we feel if Russia put missiles of any sort in Canada or in Cuba again? John Kennedy wouldn’t stand for it, and once more today, neither would we.

We would risk war, and that is the point. If we want to work with Russia, we need to understand its motives – not prattle on about how the Old Russian bear is returning. We need to help find a new détente that will strengthen the treaty obligations that we, the Europeans, and the Russians agreed to when we ended the Cold War. We need to find ways among all of us to make peace and cooperation more desirable.

The bottom line: Nobody needs a new cold war, least of all our friends in central and Eastern Europe. For their sake, we need to support mutual respect and understanding on the part of all the nations of Europe, including the Soviet Union, and avoid unwittingly encouraging Russian aggression.

Fifth, we need to become again, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, a good neighbor to countries near us and to nations around the globe. We consider America great humanitarian, and we are. But we are also quick to tell others what to do, and to back it up with force.

We have military bases in 153 countries. We have half a million soldiers and their dependents stationed permanently abroad. We have an array of weapons and the ability to project deadly force on the ground within 48 hours anywhere in the world.

We need to turn this around. We need to pull back, and give up the bases. They are only an incentive to our meddling in the affairs of others. If nations need our help, we can provide it quickly and efficiently. And we have much to do at home. Our neighbors need the freedom to pursue their own paths to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sixth, the threat of terrorism. I believe we have accomplished more to defeat terrorism with intelligence, with vigilance, and with stealth than with our military operations. Terrorists do not form armies. They are not even revolutionary guerillas wanting to take over nations. They are persons who want to make the world suffer for what they believe are its sins. They seek vengeance and believe wrongly that violence converts people to their cause.

Let us continue to treat them for what they are: international criminals whom we must pursue relentlessly until they are ours. No war can successfully destroy a small group or a network of the angry and unappeased. Smart police work and counter-terrorist initiatives can — and will under my administration.

Finally, we should support the United Nations, and help it have greater impact on the world’s many crises. Let us recall that the United Nations was America’s idea. Franklin Roosevelt made its creation part of the post-World War II settlement. We need to reaffirm his noble vision by helping to make a stronger United Nations.

Mankind’s success as a species depends upon the existence of a grand arbiter such as the United Nations that protects the concerns of all in the management of our world.

To get America moving in a new direction, it must start with us. Let us help the United Nations grow. Let it discover a new role as the arena where peace is made, and agreements undertaken observed.

Let us grow too. Let us find a new way of being a great power. Let us use our power for good rather than our power for war. Let us work together with all peoples and nations of good will, and make the world a better place.

This, my fellow Americans, is change you can believe in. Americans young and old have heard the call. They hunger for changes that will be more than promises. They want changes that revolutionize our ways of life and that of citizens of the world wherever they find themselves.

More of the same will not do. Look at our performance over the past eight years. Does anyone want four more years like the last eight?

John Kennedy once quoted an ancient Chinese proverb that said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

If I become your president, I will help us take this new step together. Let us work to build a world of peace and prosperity for us – and for our global neighbors. “

Wow, helluva speech! Change I believe in.

Glad too that I could reproduce it here, as I know that outside the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, many of you have teams in pennant races and such.

So I say thanks to Billy’s sister in law for the sneak peak and the scoop. I have pennants on the mind too, so go Cubs – and Barak too!

///
From the Indictment and Abjuration of 1633:
“Whereas you, Galileo, son of Vincenzio Galilei … were denounced in 1615, to this Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine … namely, that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and the earth moves … We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you … have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy… “
…………………………..
Dermatology & Galileo
………………….
A creationist student of mine with a wart the size of a gumball on the end of his nose recently told me science is overrated and is anathema to God.  In the same breath he said he was seeing a dermatologist about the wart.

I asked, “Have you prayed about this?”

He said, “All the time.”

I asked, “Has it helped with the wart?”

He said, “I don’t pray about the wart.  I pray for forgiveness for consulting a dermatologist.”

As his guru, I told him it would be smart to meditate not only on the wart, but upon his inclination to view God as an idiot.  He looked at me as if I’d told him the earth revolves around the sun and excused himself to call his dermatologist on his iphone.
–Roshi Bob

Perennial Argument
Jim Culleny

“The earth revolves around the sun,”
Galileo said.

“No,” said the Pope,
“and if you say it again
you’ll be cut off from the benefit
of my infallibility and exiled
to the wilderness of reason
and lose all hope of hope.”

“Ok, maybe for the moment
it does not,” the miffed voyeur said,
and sheathed his telescope.
“But trust me, it will when
you’ve turned your head.”

//

The Vendyak

Justin E. H. Smith

In his 1957 structuralist masterpiece, Le croustillant et le gluant, the French anthropologist Jean-Robert Klein argued that the fundamental binary distinction through which the savage mind filters the world is that between the crispy and the chewy. The first and primary domain of application of these concepts is of course the alimentary one, but in primitive cultures, he argued, the crispy and the chewy are often projected from there into the cosmos as a whole. In his own fieldwork among the Yanomamo of Brazil, he showed in more than a few elaborate diagrams that, for them, men, rubber trees, the color green, the East, vipers, and butterflies are held to be ‘crispy’, while women, black, jaguars, the North, the stars, and ground foliage are in turn ‘chewy’.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Klein’s former student, Françoise Pombo, argued in a series of influential publications that her mentor had failed to notice something of great importance. What he was actually in the process of discovering, she claimed, was a tripartite schema, in which the crunchy [le croquant] was to be sharply distinguished from both the crispy and the chewy. The crunchy stands as the ‘in-between’ class, what cannot be subsumed, what remains forever outside of Aristotelian dualistic logic. It is neither crispy (which is to say, brittle throughout) nor chewy (soft throughout), but manifests something of both of these opposites. (To the criticism that, in everyday speech, what is crunchy is not at all chewy, Pombo responded that these are technical terms we are dealing with, and we should not try too hard to make them match up with our quotidian usages.) The crunchy, she maintained in a Hegelian vein, is nothing less than the Aufhebung or sublation of the crispy and the chewy: a category that simultaneously overcomes and preserves these lower-order concepts.

From Pombo’s extensive field interviews with both male and female members of the Vendyak tribe of the Kamchatka peninsula –the only indigenous people of the former Soviet Union, incidentally, to have been considered by the authorities too distant and too intractable to be worth the effort of forced sedentarization and modernization–, we find the following sort of exchange: “How would you describe this?” (she hands the informant a table-water cracker).
“It’s sort of crispy [li’xak],” answers the Vendyak.
“What about crunchy [at’xak],” Pombo presses. “Do you think it’s at all crunchy?”
“Yeah. I guess. That too.”

Pombo’s 1983 book, Au-delà du croustillant et du gluant, was a solid work of structuralist anthropology, even if somewhat critical –in view of the new wave of feminist theory of which she was a leading exponent– of the theoretical limitations of structuralism’s founding fathers. But in no time Pombo’s findings were taken up by the various poststructuralist schools. Lanier Pippidi, a follower of Alain Badiou and a self-described practitioner of ‘Maoist topology’, thought that the croustillant and the croquant were not sufficiently differentiated categories, and, in his 1994 book, Les surfaces kleiniennes, took to writing instead of the ‘crouquant’. In the recent English translation of his work (Touching Klein, University of Nebraska Press, 2004), this term of art has been rendered as ‘cruspy’: a forced amalgamation of ‘crispy’ and ‘crunchy’.  “Strictly speaking,” Pippidi tells us, “the cruspy is always-already densely imbricated in both the crispy and the crunchy. The double movement of the cruspy inscribes itself in both: it plays on surfaces, it crystallizes meniscuses.” 

Followers in this vein of interpretation grew more radical still; some claimed that the cruspy could not be written about at all, and took to denoting it as the ‘cruspy’. In her monumental 1997 book, Le double mouvement du crouquant, the Romanian feminist philosopher Raluca Mitici argued that “as long as the surface is intact, the ‘thing’ presents itself as impenetrable; once it is bitten into, it is no longer there in its thingliness at all, and the question of its penetrability does not arise. This is why the cruspy cannot be written” (translation ours).  Since then other variants have appeared in print, including ‘cro(u)quant’, ‘cro/uquant’, ‘crouquant’, ‘crXquant’, and, in an uninspired jeu de mots first seen in the memoir of a University of Chicago French professor turned South Side step dancer, ‘Crew Kant’. A forthcoming special edition of Semiotext(e), appearing in 2009 and summarizing the past 15 years of debate on this fraught subject, will be entitled “What Remains of the Cr—-?”*

“I don’t know if it can be written or not,” said Hünn-Tuk, at the time a 25-year-old Vendyak informant for Pombo’s book who, unique in his community, had received a university degree at Ryazan State University, in engineering, before returning to the place of his birth. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m the only one who knows how to write here anyway.”   

Some years later, Hünn-Tuk took part, along with four other members of the Vendyak community, in the aboriginal-peoples contingent of a conference on the anthropology of food at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Their hosts had taken them to a diner a bit out of town called ‘LeAnn’s’. A professor from the Slavic department was along to translate for Hünn-Tuk into Russian, who in turn translated for the others into their native tongue. I was at the conference, and heard about the incident first-hand from the professor (we had been roommates during my years at Michigan). 

The Vendyak were very curious about everything on the menu, as the diner had been played up to them by their hosts for days as featuring ‘authentic’ local cuisine. Just as the Russian professor was struggling to come up with an adequate rendering of the concepts of ‘cheese grits’ and ‘chicken-fried steak’, one of the Vendyak pointed to the cover of the menu and asked to know the meaning of the phrase underneath the name of the restaurant: “LeAnn’s: Home-cookin’ just like granny use [sic] to make.” The professor translated the phrase into Russian, and at once Hünn-Tuk’s face contracted into a worried cringe. He tried to hide it, but the other Vendyak had already become excited, and Hünn-Tuk found himself unable to invent a lie under pressure. They demanded to know what the phrase meant at once, and he gave in: “This food is prepared as if by an elder woman,” he told them sombrely in Vendyak. 

Two of the men ran out of the restaurant at once, right out across the state route, and disappeared into the forest on the other side. The youngest of them dropped to the floor and began convulsing, as if in the early throes of an epileptic seizure. The fourth, a man of nearly 60 with grey whiskers and a few teeth, marched over to the anthropologist who had arranged the outing, an innocent young Melanesianist who had simply taken it for granted that love of granny’s cooking was a cultural universal. The Vendyak grabbed the Melanesianist by his throat and bellowed: “Do you want to poison our people!? Do you want to shrivel our testicles and make our arms too weak to hunt!?”

No, the Vendyak are no fans of granny’s home cookin’. Remarkably, however, there is not a single mention of this central prohibition in Pombo’s supposedly exhaustive study of Vendyak food-preparation practices. Why is this?

My assistant Tanya thinks she knows. She had been the on-the-ground facilitator for Pombo’s fieldwork in the late ‘70s, long before glasnost had got underway and before it was at all common for French anthropologists to learn about indigenous Soviet peoples from any other source than the occasional anthology of translated articles from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In an era when most visitors were shuffled through minutely planned, 7-day tours of the great achievements of the people’s economy, courtesy of Inturist, Pombo wanted to disappear into the field for several months, alone. Tanya had been assigned to take care of Pombo on her way through Moscow before and after her stay in the field (for in those days one could not travel to the Russian Far East via Tokyo), and, of course, to report everything that she had learned of Pombo’s research to the relevant officials. How could you have made such a compromise? I asked her when she revealed this to me. “We all made compromises,” she said.

Pombo had taken a deep liking to Tanya already on her first passage through Moscow, and on her way back had decided to entrust to Tanya a notebook, in a sealed envelope, that, as she explained, she would not be needing during the final preparation of her study for publication.  She did not say why it would not be included, but only that it “didn’t have its place” in the picture of the Vendyak she thought it imperative to convey. When Pombo died in Paris in 2002, Tanya deliberated for some months, unable to decide what to do with this problematic material. She left it in a drawer for six more years, and only now, as I am in Moscow on my way back from my own field work among the Lomi-Ek (likely my last visit, as I have reached forced-retirement age and the granting agency on which I’ve depended for the past thirty years no longer considers me an active researcher), has she decided to turn it over to me. “Do what you want with it. She’s been dead long enough. There must be some kind of statute of limitations. And anyway no one cares about structuralism anymore.” 

If what Pombo wrote in her unpublished notebook is true, the sociocosmic role of the crunchy may be quite different from the picture she gave of it in her published works. From these works, we know that the crunchy is associated with bones and decay, and foods held to be crunchy should only be consumed on one of the two annual feasts of the dead. Outside of these feasts, crunchy foods put the person who eats them at risk of sickness, impotence, and hunting failure.

But what we learn in the notebooks is that nothing has the power to make food crunchy more quickly and intensely than the implication of an old (post-menopausal) woman in its preparation. At the feasts of the dead, the elder women do all of the cooking, and it is for this reason, the Vendyak say, that the dishes that are served all come with such a thick crust: there is a desert resembling crème brulée, for example, made from churned deer milk, that must be hammered with a ritual mallet in order to break through the burnt, glass-like surface. The Vendyak sit and gnaw and suck this delicacy late into the evening. It is held to be very delicious, but also, outside of the context of the feasts, extremely dangerous. They are “eating their own death,” the Vendyak report, “which is something you cannot do every day.”

I suspect that Pombo’s suppression of this notebook had to do with her own personal experience of the Vendyak contempt for older women (she was 61 when she arrived there in 1979), and with a stubborn desire, one that she could never quite get over, to project onto the people she studied only laudable features, features that would present a promising alternative to the ‘dualism’, the ‘linearity’, etc., that she was striving to theorize her way out of. The truth is, the Vendyak treated her execrably, and she could not but have been angered by this.

Almost immediately upon arrival, the elders had placed her tent furthest from the cooking fire at the center of the encampment, and from the second or third day Pombo reported hearing whispers about the deteriorating quality of the food. By the third week of her fieldwork, the elder Vendyak sent Hünn-Tuk to her with a request: during the preparation of meals, might the anthropologist be willing to stand waist-deep in the lake, 50 meters or so from their encampment?
“Why do I have to wait in the lake?” Pombo asked. “There are many other post-menopausal women in the encampment who only have to stay in their tents.”
“The elders say they aren’t as za’laq as you are,” Hünn-Tuk explained to her in Russian, leaving the key concept untranslated from the original Vendyak. “They say that in all the history of the Vendyak, no woman has ever possessed za’laqtak to such a dangerous degree as you.”

Za’laqtak may be roughly translated as “the drying or desiccating principle.”  Many other things in nature possess it, including the sun. But the sun also includes its opposite, linaagtak, the principle of life and growth. Older women possess primarily za’laqtak, but in view of their enduring nurturing and care-giving skills they are thought to keep a portion of linaagtak throughout their lives, even if the overwhelming presence of za’laqtak in them makes it impossible for them to participate in food preparation. But Pombo was held by many to contain nothing but za’laqtak. Some said she was the very embodiment of za’laqtak, and a few elders with shamanic gifts began to mutter after a few weeks that Pombo was Za’laïq herself: the hideous underworld creature from whom all za’laqtak in the universe was thought to flow.

One early morning in the middle of the sixth week Pombo was woken up by Hünn-Tuk with an important message: “They want you to stand in the lake up to your neck today.”
“What?!”
“They say you need to go deeper. The food’s still coming out too crunchy.”
She struggled to recompose herself. “When you say ‘crunchy’,” she asked, ever the thorough researcher, “do you mean ‘crunchy’, or do you mean something closer to ‘crispy’?”
“I don’t know,” said Hünn-Tuk. “It’s just, you know. Hard. Dry… Can’t hunt.” 

Later that morning, as the women began to grind the roots and to tenderize the deer meat for cooking, Pombo dutifully waded out into the lake up to her neck. The water was cold, but in the mid-August heat she found it refreshing. She listened to the girls singing songs of fertility and promise as they pounded the meat on wooden boards strewn across their laps. The problem seemed to have been resolved in a manner acceptable to everyone, but the whispering continued, and Pombo was sure that, sooner or later, her freedom would be further restricted.

“You’re going to have to go in all the way,” Hünn-Tuk announced, shaking Pombo’s shoulder early one morning towards the beginning of the eighth week.
“All the way?”
“Just for the most dangerous period, when the girls are tenderizing.”
“You mean with my head underwater?”
“I brought you a breathing reed.” 

Hünn-Tuk explained that lake water is the most potent source of linaagtak in nature, and that the only way to keep her za’laqtak from reaching the encampment was by submerging her entirely in water. He apologized, evidently sincerely, and Pombo was touched enough by this to abandon the offence she had taken at first and to return her thoughts to the long-term scientific benefits of putting up with all this.  She grabbed the reed and stoically walked toward the lake.

Breathing through a thin straw underwater was not as difficult as she had first imagined, and it even brought back pleasant memories of childhood, snorkelling on the Lusitanian coast, silvery fish darting about her. Mostly she was proud of what she was willing to do for her work. She knew that Klein himself had repaired back to Sao Paolo after just a few weeks among the Yanomamo and a few mosquito bites too many, and after his favorite pipe tobacco had fallen overboard during a crossing of the Amazon in an overcrowded boat. He checked into the Excelsior, the story goes, and harassed the room-service staff until one of them agreed to journey across town by streetcar to Sao Paolo’s only purveyor of imported tobacco.

Pombo was reminiscing about this story when, happening to look up, she saw four or five human figures hovering above her, standing on a sharp rock jutting out over the lake. From his rough dimensions, she recognized one of them to be Hünn-Tuk. He was signalling for her to come up. 

“Your breath is drying out the meat,” he yelled to her in Russian. The other Vendyak did not understand, but they nodded their heads in affirmation.
“My breath?”
“It’s coming up through the reed and blowing towards the encampment.”
“Well I can’t very well stop breathing, can I?”
“That’s what the shamans are calling for. The other elders just want to banish you. They came with me to chase you into the forest.”

Hünn-Tuk was a good-hearted go-between, fully belonging to neither world, believing in none of it. After the banishment (during which the four Vendyak elders walked a few paces behind her, ritualistically shrieking “Get out!” and gathering up pine needles and nuts to throw at her, while studiously avoiding the rocks that were all around them and that could have caused real pain), Pombo waited in the forest. At an agreed-upon hour, Hünn-Tuk came to meet her, bringing her belongings from the encampment, apologizing profusely. He walked with her to a road, and waved down a car headed to Magadan. From there she could fly to Vladivostok, and from there back to Moscow. Pombo proposed jokingly that she just might be so dry as to ruin the Vendyak’s food all the way from the comfort of her Paris apartment. “It’s a good thing you didn’t say that during the banishment,” Hünn-Tuk replied.   

“Well, do you feel it?” Tanya asked me after I had finished the notebook and placed it back in its envelope.
“Feel what?”
“The desiccating principle. Do you feel it emanating throughout the apartment?” Tanya was my age, and was evidently trying to milk the notebook for some self-deprecating, old-lady humor.

She brought a bowl of those puffed shrimp chips from Southeast Asia that, for some inexplicable reason, had become so popular during the Putin years in Russia. We sat on her couch and snacked on the chips for a while in silence. Our teeth sank right through them, as though we were eating nothing at all. 

—

*Certainly, any complete account of the history of the crispy/crunchy debate would not fail to mention that it had its share of skeptics, as evidenced by the so called ‘FAZ hoax’ perpetrated against the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the height of the debate’s intensity. In a book review in the feuilleton of Germany’s paper of record published on August 18, 1997, the critic Benno Bleibtreu heaped unqualified praise on what was supposedly an advance manuscript of a book entitled Jenseits von Knackig und Knüsprig by a certain Rolf Magendarm. It turns out that Magendarm did not exist (indeed, to the less gullible speaker of German, even his last name should have been a clear give-away, suggesting as it does the crude physiology of the lower intestinal tract), and that his book, praised by Bleibtreu as “the most important contribution yet to the debate unleashed by J.-R. Klein some decades ago and sharpened for the new generation by Françoise Pombo,” was in fact only a pastiche of texts from the grand tradition of German moral philosophy with the term ‘crispy’ replacing every occurrence of ‘good’, and ‘crunchy’ standing in for every instance of ‘evil’. Having learned of the mistake from an anonymous telephone call, on the front page of the feuilleton of August 25 the FAZ’s editor-in-chief denounced in the harshest of terms what he saw as a “reckless disruption of the free exchange of ideas that forms the bedrock of a civil society.” He wrote that we may agree to disagree about the importance of this or that scholarly debate, but that nothing could be solved by an “intellectual fire-bomb” of the sort thrown at his newspaper. To date, the true identity of Rolf Magendarm has not been uncovered.

—

To see Imaginary Tribes #’s 1-4, please go here, here, here, and here.

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Edward B. Rackley

Now back in Goma to continue work on these peace talks after a refreshing week in Dakar, on the other side of the continent. Marathon return journey via Bamako, Nairobi, Kigali, then Goma. I’m still in a zombie state—just like the Congolese who are forced to put up with this ni paix ni guerre situation as it drags on and on.

During the three years before national elections in 2006, we used to call Congo’s transitional government an Etat fantome because there was no administrative presence anywhere in the country outside the capital. Things haven’t changed much. Governance is deliberately centralized, with no devolution of power to the provinces—the Mobutu bras de fer model all over again. Yesterday in a closed door session with our group of international representatives to the peace talks, the Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping mission referred to us collectively as ‘a bunch of zombies’.

We march obediently to negotiation sessions, listen to infinite grievances and push for reasoned compromise, visit sulking rebel leaders when they storm out after some minor slight or infantile malentendu. All this zombie-like to and fro in the service of a consensus that no one—particularly the government—has the remotest intention of seriously entertaining or accepting. I had to laugh at the Force Commander’s exasperation: here we are, zombies controlled by phantoms. Hard to get less visceral than that.

But it’s true, we wander from one event to the next, trying to move molehills that the belligerents perceive as mountains. There’s little political will on any side of the conflict, meanwhile money is flowing hand over fist to keep the twenty-two armed groups at the negotiating table. Last night, a visiting ICC representative here to pressure rebel leaders under investigation (or already indicted but not yet arrested) mocked me, saying: “The peace talks are already over, didn’t they tell you?”

An email from home this morning put the dilemma simply: what if western powers just got out and let the cards fall where they may? Well, western powers did not start the war, nor does their departure figure among belligerent demands (contrary to, say, Iraq). But the spirit of the question merits response: why do international efforts to broker peace seem to fail in so many situations? ‘Seem to fail’ is the operative phrase here: the track record for African conflict over the last twenty years shows that perseverance pays a tidy dividend. Sudan, Angola, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, even the Congo itself have experienced peace after years of fitful negotiations supported and prodded by the international community. Congo’s eastern provinces will get there one day, I’m certain. The timeline is just longer, a lot longer, than western taxpayers or casual Africa observers are used to.

Stand proud

A colleague who’s been in the region since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide (he is now responsible for rounding up militant Hutu extremists and shipping them back to Rwanda) described the current situation with an historical anecdote from Herodotus. The story goes something like this: Representatives from an occupying power (Athens?) visit a newly conquered but recalcitrant state that refuses to pay tribute. The messengers say, “We are here with the most awesome of gods, ‘power’ and ‘force’, so you must obey and pay us tribute.” Receiving officials in the occupied land respond, “Oh, that’s nice, lucky you. We here are under two other gods, ‘poverty’ and ‘incapacity’.”

The vignette captures how rule of law and military might can be impotent before the inertia of destitution, dysfunction and incapacity. It also captures the inability of the international community to get anything done in Congo, particularly on this peace process. A toxic cynicism is always in the back of my mind; resistance strategies are required. I console myself with minor victories of a different sort.

Most progress here is so slow and glacially incremental, it is wholly impalpable to the short-term visitor. Having been involved with the place for twenty years, I’ve learned where to find signs of hope, of change. It is definitely not in the political realm, in deliberate freefall since I first arrived in 1988. But there is powerful transformation on the personal scale, in the rebuilding of individual broken lives, one by one, one day at a time.

I recently visited a rehabilitation center for child polio victims founded by another American, a long-time ‘Congomani’ a few years older than me, whom I’ve known for some time. Called ‘Debout et Fier’ (‘Stand Proud’), there are about ten such centers around the country. Polio continues to afflict children here because vaccination coverage is so poor. Handicapped children are usually kicked out of the house and become street urchins, and must beg to survive. The Debout et Fier center here in Goma houses about 45 kids from around the region who are either waiting for an operation or recovering from one, and learning to walk with braces and crutches instead of dragging themselves around on the ground ‘like a snake’, as they always describe it. Snakes are particularly despised, because feared, in Congolese culture.

Because they’re Congolese kids, they are amazingly resilient, physically and psychologically. With proper meals, decent sleeping conditions and medical care, their recovery is quick. Also, because they are among equals, there is no shame or stigma, and learning erect mobility becomes child’s play, literally. Even before their surgical wounds heal, kids are struggling to stand in their new braces (made on site), hopping when stepping or walking doesn’t work. There are always makeshift footballs lying around the dusty compound, and whenever I visit the entire group is hopping around madly, chasing the football at which they swing their metal crutch poles. Laughing and sweating, entirely unconscious of their handicap, they’re regaining the mobility they’ve lacked all their lives.

Watching such a match at dusk the other day, the sun’s fading red light caught the dust thrown up by the footballers in front of me. I thought: if the price for this moment is all my personal frustration and anger at Congo’s political mess and its enormous cost to human development here, I am happy to pay.

What’s broken can’t be bought

Even out here in forsaken Goma, images from the Olympics can be had. Coverage is spotty and one cannot actually sit down and watch the Olympics, but visual impressions and reports are getting through in drips and drabs. Watching synchronized diving, or gymnastics, it’s obvious that the Olympic ideal is perfection of form as the pinnacle of beauty. Very few can achieve this ideal, hence the rarefied competition among elite athletes. Echoes of classical Greece are obvious, a vertical society despite its democratic pretensions. Cosmology can do that to a people.

The Olympics are tailored to this particular ideal of beauty as the rarefied perfection of form. No room for fractured beauty, obviously, as that would disqualify. Although pristine beauty is by definition more rare than fractured beauty, I tend to champion the latter because it’s more pedestrian, more democratic because accessible to all of us, if we open our eyes wide enough. I love cosmologies, but only for their literary value. It’s too late to actually believe in one. Fractured, democratic, horizontal: that’s where I’m most comfortable. Zeitgeist I guess.

Of course, fractured beauty abounds here in Goma. As my boss and I bounced along these terrible roads the other day, inhaling pounds of volcanic dust (always in the air) and diesel fumes blasting into the car from all the trucks lumbering by in the other direction, the boss mused that he felt like he was on a merry-go-round. Everybody’s on the narrow road at once, navigating enormous potholes as dozens of moto taxis blur past, honking constantly (think rickshaw madness in Delhi). The 360 degree view is just heads bobbing up and down, some buzzing past, others slow or stationary–pedestrians lost in the melee.

So instead of being overwhelmed by the oozing human morass of it all and thinking cynical thoughts about Congo’s prospects for progress, my boss slips into childhood reverie and comes up with the merry-go-round comment. A kindred soul, I thought: he appreciates fractured beauty too. Goma’s inexhaustible abundance: broken beauty, and the possibilities of redemption. While I appreciate the objective criteria that allow for judgments of Olympian beauty and that raise it above mere opinion or taste, I’ll defend ‘spurious’ or broken beauty any day. First, it’s often accidental, and thus available to everyone. It generally has little or no economic value, and so resists commoditization and the clutches of elitists (notice how contemporary art is the new ‘hedge’?). The human pathos contained in a football match between recuperating polio victims is the perfect antithesis of a Jeff Koons poodle, brilliant critic of the art world though he is.

So the first thing I’ll do when I get off this merry-go-round and make it home: ride my beloved bikes, then open a book of Borges stories and sit by the sea. Nothing could be more pristine … or fleetingly beautiful.

///
Humor and Light
Jim Culleny

Even in gloomy
shuttered rooms one beam
managing an invasion
through impossible slits
reaches to where
shadows rule

one joke, a laugh
one light remembrance
and dis-ease for an instant
disappears

Punch lines and photons
comedians and brilliant suns
take us as close to god
as anyone need be

//