Dispatches: Nihari Redux

Last week, Abbas posted a little video I made of a journey to Karachi’s Burns Road to have one of my very favorite foods, nihari.  So I thought I would supply some more information about this gastronomic epiphany.

Nihari is a dish of spiced, braised meat that has achieved sentimental status for many Pakistanis and Indians.  Shanks, which can be beef, lamb, or goat, are simmered overnight in a broth flavored with red pepper, black pepper, garlic, mace, coriander, and other spices.  Often they are left to braise in a pot covered in embers to maintain an even and low temperature.  After six to eight hours of simmering, when the shanks have tenderized, the cooking liquid is thickened and flavored with fried onions, and the finished stew is served with chopped coriander, minced green chilies, slivered ginger, lime wedges.  It is eaten with plain fresh naan, usually for breakfast or brunch – especially after long nights for its restorative qualities.  I think its combination of deeply flavored, earthy meat, the fresh zest of the toppings, and the perfection of a proper tandoori naan is one of the greatest bites there is to eat.

The nihari shops of Karachi and Lahore do bustling business, but mention it to many expatriate Pakistanis and you will hear consecutive sighs.  (I hold that Pakistani nihari is better.  Why?  Because Pakistan is better.  Kidding.  It’s because it’s best made with beef, which is uncommon in India.)  Good nihari is not commonly available in this country.  The great wave of Indian restaurants that colonized the US and Britain, mostly run by Bangladeshi entrepreneurs starting in London’s Brick Lane and New York’s Sixth Street, denatured a group of regional dishes into a standardized scale of chili heat: vindaloo, jalfrezi, do piaz, madras, etc.  Nihari, a much more singular dish, didn’t make it into this list, and is thus only found in restaurants catering to South Asian immigrants, and even then usually only available as a weekend special.

The number of cultures that have restorative dishes made from long-simmered, gelatinous cuts of meat served with fresh seasonings makes one wonder about the possibility of a universal index of deliciousness.  In Mexico, so similar to the subcontinent in ingredients and general approach to cuisine, there is goat’s head stew as well as  the great hangover cure, posole (hominy corn in pork and chicken broth topped with fresh radishes, lime, and salsa).  In Italy, osso buco combines braised lamb shanks with gremolata, or lemon zest mixed with chopped parsley.  In Turkey, tripe soup is a weekend brunch special.

The shanks, or lower legs, of cows, lambs and goats have richly marrowed bones surrounded by a ring of stringy, tough meat.  Opposite in texture to more usual star cuts such as tenderloin, shanks require long cooking to become edible and also contain large amounts of gelatin.  That’s why they are usually used in luxury Western cooking for stock.  But shanks, like many humble cuts of meat, have enjoyed a popular renaissance with the vogue for peasant foods.  So maybe it’s time for nihari to take its place alongside osso buco and barbecued ribs in the list of foods considered by gastronomes as honest and authentic regional delicacies.  As Abbas mentioned, I bet Anthony Bourdain would love it.  For many Pakistanis and Indians, it occupies that place already: its rarity in restaurants only contributes to its aura.  You might say that in the social imaginary it represents the streets of home themselves, in all their remembered specificity.  Taste, memory.

With most such foods, the genius of the place supposedly cannot be transported – if you’re meant to taste authenticity, you can’t take it with you.  Here is the point in the story where I’m supposed to admit that my grandmother cooked the greatest nihari, or that I fondly remember youthful trips to the nihariwallahs of Burns Road.  That would go along with the mythologizing impulse that we often give in to when talking about such talismanic foods.  I’d rather use the example of nihari to rebut that idea.  Actually, I tasted it for the first time at the age of about twenty at my aunt’s house, in Baltimore.  I was immediately hooked, and started cooking it for both my family and anyone else who expressed an interest in trying it.  Surprisingly, it was quite easy, and the results were always good.  There were a few early periods where I ate it every day for a week.

It was only in 2004, when I visited Pakistan for the first time in ten years, that I had the chance to try the real deal.  And so I toured the famous specialist shops (in case you’re going, I especially love Zahid’s of Saddar, Karachi and the little shop outside the Lahore’s Lahori gate, where my mother and I had a memorable lunch).  So for me the dish doesn’t hold the kind of retrospective nostalgia it does for many people.  So just as I think it’s a bit silly to wait in line for two hours with a bunch of trainspotting foodies to have a slice of Di Fara’s admittedly delicious pizza, I think one shouldn’t overly romanticize a foodstuff’s most legendary purveyors when you can have it in your own home.  This is also because I know that nihari is not hard to make, and so you can have it anytime.  Here’s how:

NIHARI

4 tablespoons oil
4 lbs. beef shanks (I think beef provides the best flavor for this dish)
6 garlic cloves, minced
4 tablespoons nihari masala (you can use a packet of Shaan, or use the one below)
2 onions, halved and sliced
1/2 cup flour
naan, made yourself or from a good restaurant (no butter!)
for garnish: chopped coriander, limes wedges, minced bird’s eye chilies, slivered ginger

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat and brown the meat in two batches.  Then fry the garlic until just coloring, return the meat and add the masala to the pot and add ten cups of water.  Bring to a boil, then cover and turn down to the lowest simmer.  Go to sleep.  When you wake up, or about six to eight hours later, test the meat for doneness – it should be fork-tender and the marrow should have melted out of the bones, leaving them as clean white rings in the broth.  Remove a teacup of the broth and whisk the flour into it, removing lumps.  Reintroduce the floured broth to the pot.  Now fry the onion until browned with a little more of the masala, then pour this mixture into the broth.  Turn the heat up and boil rapidly with the cover off until you reach a slightly thickened texture, though still a bit watery.  Taste for salt.  Serve with fresh naan (if bought, ride your bike back from the restaurant quite fast to maintain their heat) and small bowls with the garnishes.  Make sure to squeeze plenty of lime juice into your serving.  You won’t be sorry.

NIHARI MASALA

2 tbl red pepper
5 tsp salt
2 tbl of paprika (for redness)
2 tbl ginger powder
1 tsp powdered nutmeg
2 tsp black peppercorns
2 tsp fennel seeds
1tsp black cumin seeds
1 tsp kalongi (um, either onion or nigella seeds, can’t remember)
4 bay leaves
1 tbl whole mace

Grind the last six ingredients into a powder, then mix with the above.  This will make more than you need for one dish.

All my dispatches.



Teaser Appetizer: Health Care Agenda For Barack Obama

Here we go again! The white house contenders are piping seductive music to our ears: the loud techno-heavy metal clatter about the Iraq war and the gospel-soul music for the healthcare. And we know it well — they will play only the doleful blues after the election.

Screenhunter_01_feb_04_2341Barack Obama has promised to provide health coverage for all Americans in next six years, which means 47 million uninsured would get some kind of coverage. Obama is certainly not the first candidate to garner electoral support by espousing liberal health care. In 1883, Otto Bismarck of Germany enticed labor support by passing the health insurance bill for the factory workers and he succeeded in severing the support of labor to the social democrats. On august 6, 1912 Theodore Roosevelt called for compulsory health insurance for the industrial workers, to outwit the liberal platform of Woodrow Wilson.

The health-care-for-all rhetoric tugs your heart — the uninsured suffer unduly from denied care. The truth always lies buried in the details.

The uninsured have extremely limited access to outpatient and preventive care. They rely on the hospital emergency rooms for their needs from where the seriously sick are admitted to the hospital and others go home after treatment. The hospitals shift the cost of their care to the other insured and paying customers. It is not that the uninsured don’t get health care but they are compelled to access it deviously and often in desperation. The ER visit is free but suffused with contempt.

The annual cost of providing the care to the uninsured is approximately 250 billion dollars. The current 1.7 trillion dollar system already carries this load. Obama should not tax and spend extra 250 billion dollars but squeeze it out from the current health care expenditure and make it visible and available. The current system is morbidly obese, with redundant flab. Even the cost of administering the current system sucks up at least 25% and some believe it to be even more. Canada administers its health system at less than half the US cost. And then there are layers of clever businesses cannibalizing the system without adding to consumer health.

Obama should fulfill his promise and also differentiate himself from other candidates. Here is a five-point plan for Obama:

1. Unified Payer System

No, this is not another single payer system attempt, which will again face fierce opposition from the entrenched. In 1993, Clinton health reform exercise collapsed because the American public did not trust a government controlled single payer or a nationalized health insurance, which denied local participation.

In the early 1970s Kennedy and Mills (Chairman of Ways and Means Committee) proposed a bill, which would have created a single national indemnity insurance plan based on fee for service with co-payments. The opposition from all quarters killed the bill in the congress. The medical establishment feared it as ‘socialized medicine”, labor complained of its inadequate benefits; republicans frowned on it as expensive and Wilbur Mills, the cosponsor of the bill found amorous relief in the arms of Fanny Foxe, a night club stripper.

Currently, every insurance payer insists on its own unique processes of fixing rates for medical services, prior authorization process, credentialing health providers, prescription plans and myriad other procedures. Health insurance industry is an inefficient behemoth probably beyond repair. The system is so dysfunctional that one wonders at the wisdom of financing the health care through indemnity coverage.

Obama should propose a unified standardized payment system with multiple payers. While the insurance companies can still sell the individual products, a unified standard payment system is likely to save enormous administrative costs.

This will differentiate him from Hillary Clinton who is likely to rehash the failed 1993 attempt.

2. Health Savings Account

Market system does not work in health care because of insurmountable asymmetry of information between the physician (seller) and the patient (buyer). The seller decides what the patient should buy. Add to this the vulnerability of the ailing consumer at the point of purchase and an assurance that some third party (insurance) will pick up the tab.

The indemnity model has built in flaws: moral hazard and inducement of demand: the consumer considers the insurance a free ride and demands more services, which the economists call, ‘moral hazard.’

In a landmark study by RAND, the investigators analyzed the magnitude of moral hazard over a period of three to five years by the health care utilization behavior of six thousand individuals in six locations. The participant consumers differed in the amount of co-payments they made and were grouped in five categories: one group got completely free care and the other four had varied co-payments from 25% to 95% of the charges. The results were revealing: while co-payments decreased the utilization, free care increased the utilization by 30%; and there was no difference in the outcome health status between groups. Co-payment decreased the threat of moral hazard.

The physician also plays the system. In order to preserve or enhance his income, the physician induces demand for more services. Victor Fuchs studied the correlation between the supply of surgeons and the demand of operations. (Journal of Human Resources, 1961) He found that 10% increase in the number of surgeons in a community would increase the demand of surgeries by 3%.

Hospitals also induce demand. Roemer, an economist, described a hospital in upstate New York, which had 139 beds and average occupancy of 108 beds in 1957.The hospital increased its size to 197 beds in a new building in 1958 and the occupancy increased to 137. Though there was no inappropriate care, yet there was no health enhancing benefit to the community either.

The traditional health insurance has responded to moral hazard and demand inducement by creating managed care, capitation, HMOs and other innovations. These organizations work on the principle of curtailing the seemingly unnecessary care and resource utilization. The proponents of these organizations claim that in 2005 the system spent 300 billion dollars less because of their intervention. But it is unlikely that the whole health system benefits much, because the cost saving shows up in the profit column of these organizations and insurance companies. The previous income of health provider now becomes the revenue of the middle meddlers.

That is why Obama must encourage the ‘Health Savings Account’ where the consumer saves money regularly in this account and pays for her care from the savings. The unspent money belongs to her. Coverage for major medical catastrophe supplements the savings account. The consumer has incentives to spend her money wisely, which may partially curtail moral hazard and the demand inducement.

3. Import Drugs

Every one knows by now, that the drugs are more expensive in the US compared to Canada, Europe and other countries. Obama should create mechanisms of approving, accrediting and inviting a selected few reputed foreign drug manufacturers to sell their products in the US at a negotiated cost similar to their home countries. The USA is in a strong negotiating position as it is the largest market for foreign drug manufacturers. An FDA approved accreditation and licensing process of the manufacturer will eliminate the fear about the quality and efficacy.

Under Mr. Clinton’s global initiative, some reputed foreign pharmaceutical companies are already selling drugs for AIDS in the rest of the world at a fraction of the US cost. There is no reason why it can’t be replicated here.

Obama will win the wrath of the US pharmaceutical industry and the votes of the senior citizens. Both are laudable goals.

4. Health IT

All health care facilities in the nation should be connected on an interoperable Internet platform. Each citizen should have a secure access to her life long health record and should be able to authorize its use to care providers of her choice. The technology is already here; what we need is a legislative push to expedite the process. This single important step will benefit the patients and decrease excessive testing, redundant procedures, length of hospital stay and medical errors. The electronic billing and payment will cut the fraud and abuse.

While considerable progress in this direction has occurred lately, Obama should encourage a time bound plan with an end point in next six years.

5. Liability Reform

It would be good for Obama to suggest caps on punitive damages to differentiate himself from John Edwards who made a fortune as an injury lawyer. He will endear himself to the medical establishment whose support he will need to push other reforms.

Barrack Obama needs neither a magnifying glass to search the glaring faults nor a hearing aid for the screaming inefficiencies of the current system. While some wisdom is desirable, mere common sense will suffice for the most part. His chances of achieving the reform in health are brighter than retreat from Iraq. There is enough money in the current system to cover the uninsured. Let the gospel-soul music play for long this time.

Sandlines: The UN millipede meanders towards reform

Remember the ‘Slinky’—the children’s toy born of an accident in World War II research? How did the myriad vibrations of that single coil get it moving? It was gravity, of course, but how gravity failed to enchant my childhood mind.

Slinky2

Another mysteriously undulating mechanism, the United Nations, doubtless qualifies as the public global entity with the most moving parts. Like the Slinky, the higher purpose of its incessant undulating is unconvincing to some. Ostensibly animated by a Charter of guiding principles it is, like the Slinky, bound by the gravity of its 191 member states and their infinitely competing interests.

Quite unlike the Slinky, however, the UN is not remote from the world’s current crises, nor is it beyond the realm of our individual lives. Unless you live in Antarctica, Palestine, Western Sahara, or Vatican City—which do not qualify for membership because of their ambiguous sovereign status—your taxes fund the meanderings of this megalithic millipede. Although the EU, the US and Japan contribute 82% of its budget, the more numerous poor member states can dominate voting referenda. Their obstruction of sweeping UN reform efforts, initiated in 2004 by former Secretary General Kofi Annan to improve UN efficiency and impact, is a case in point.

The buildup to Annan’s declaration of the proposed reform lasted years, even decades; the supporting evidence exhaustive. Support among member states, however, was far from unanimous. Apparently the common criticism of the UN as little more than a ‘hiring agency for the Third World’ is not shared by those member states who oppose its reform.

During the Cold War, the UN was blocked from acting on the interventionism enshrined in its Charter, and fell back on useful humanitarian and monitoring missions. It also took refuge in passing resolutions that had little bearing on actual world politics.

The Middle East is an example of this impotence. It failed to stop wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Its key Security Council resolution 242, outlining a solution for the Israelis and Palestinians along the lines of land for peace, has been only partially fulfilled. In the Middle East partially has meant hardly enough.

It did send troops to the Congo in the early 1960s when the country began to fall apart after the precipitatous departure of the Belgians. The breakaway province of Katanga was brought back under central control, but the experience was not a happy one for the UN, symbolized by the death in an air accident of its Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.

In more recent years it has been slightly more successful. Its sanctions helped persuade white South Africans to hand over power to majority rule. Its quiet diplomacy helped bring an end to the Iran-Iraq War, and it played useful roles in winding up conflicts and developing democracy in Namibia, Mozambique, Cambodia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, East Timor and, for a second time, DR Congo.

Yet it failed in Bosnia, where intervention was led by the US and its Nato allies, and Kosovo where Nato acted against Serbia (not the UN). Most spectacular, however, was its paralysis in Rwanda where it failed to prevent genocide. When Annan announced plans, subject to the approval of UN member states, for a “bold and far-reaching” reform agenda, the institution was deep in criticism over its management of the Iraq oil-for-food program and allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in the DR Congo.

Fundamental changes in three main areas of the UN mission and Charter– development, security and human rights–were proposed. “We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights,” Annan said at the time.

Laying_cornerstone_at_un_hq The general reform package promised to:

§         Enlarge Security Council from 15 to 24 members

§         Streamline General Assembly agenda

§         Introduce new guidelines for authorising military action

§         Replace Commission on Human Rights with Human Rights Council

§         Introduce zero tolerance policy on abuses by UN peacekeepers

§         Improve coordination of environment and development aid agendas

Since then, many have commented on UN reform efforts, particularly the vaunted makeover of the much-contested Human Rights Council, which replaced the old Commission on Human Rights. Last October the Washington Post argued of the newly minted Commission:

For all its faults, the previous U.N. commission occasionally discussed and condemned the regimes most responsible for human rights crimes, such as those in Belarus and Burma. China used to feel compelled to burnish its record before the annual meeting. The new council, in contrast, has so far taken action on only one country, which has dominated the debate at both of its regular meetings and been the sole subject of two extraordinary sessions: Israel.

Western human rights groups sought to focus the council’s attention on Darfur, where genocide is occurring, and on Uzbekistan, where a dictator refuses to allow the investigation of a massacre by his security forces. Their efforts have been in vain. Instead, the council has treated itself to report after report on the alleged crimes of the Jewish state; in all, there were six official “rapporteurs” on that subject in the latest session alone.

Regarding proposed expansion of the Security Council (consisting of five permanent seats–China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United Statesand ten temporary seats), there is widespread agreement that the five permanent members should no longer reflect the victorious powers of World War II.  Yet there is no agreement on who might join this privileged group, how big a new council should be, or how members should be selected.

In the development sector, much is at stake given the proliferation of specialized UN agencies, sometimes as many as twenty, working in a country at a time. Harnessing their collective powers while eliminating duplication and waste will prove an enormous challenge. ‘Herding cats’ comes to mind. It is essential, for attaining the Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation, health, education and the environment in the poorest corners of the world by 2015 is considered doubtful without significant institutional reform. A High-Level Panel on UN Reform, convened by the Annan in 2005, has gone further and proposed ‘streamlining UN agencies’ for improved efficiency and impact on the ground.

Recommendations specific to the development sector include:

  • putting operations in countries under a single umbrella with overall responsibility for delivery
  • better funding and co-ordination of humanitarian aid
  • full funding of the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF)
  • donors to commit more aid through UN programs and less to their own “pet projects”
  • ongoing reform of business practices under the Secretary-General’s direction
  • secure long-term funding for agencies that meet reform goals

The CERF fund, launched during last year’s World Summit, aims to create a pool of $500m in ready money allowing a quick response to natural disasters. Only half of the money has so far arrived, and NGOs in line to receive this money to respond to emerging crises have begun to issue their own reports detailing the shortcomings of the initiative. I was in DR Congo in late 2006 to evaluate a similar emergency fund, and found it useful. NGOs are highly mobile and able to operate in insecure areas generally off-limits to UN staff. The UN agencies, while administratively slow, possess massive procurement capacity for life-saving relief supplies. These are prepositioned in known volatile areas, and when crisis hits–massive civilian displacement, earthquakes or cholera outbreaks–participating NGOs are able to evaluate acute needs and distribute relief supplies in under 72 hours. No relief agency operating alone is capable of such rapid, massive response, and in places like Congo such reform initiatives are clearly bearing fruit.

The ‘single umbrella’ experiment is perhaps the most radical initiative outlined above. The ‘One UN’ initiative, currently piloted in Vietnam, was triggered in September 2005 by a Vietnam UN country team note submittted to the 2005 World Summit in New York. The objective is to ensure faster and more effective development operations by establishing a consolidated UN presence, while maintaining the distinct purposes and personalities of the six participating UN bodies—UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA, UNIFEM, UNV and UNAIDS. 

The initiative provides a tool through which the agencies and programs can work as one team, while cutting fragmentation and duplication of efforts. UN staff expect there to be difficulties along the way as entrenched interests fight to preserve their independence; ‘One UN’ will also be piloted in six other countries, not yet announced.

Annan’s successor, Ban-Ki Moon, will continue to pursue these long-overdue reforms. 

Selected Minor Works: When Screens Bleed

A Note on Sex and Violence

Justin E. H. Smith

Somewhere, and I don’t remember where, Arthur Danto describes the power ‘bad words’ have of ‘bleeding out’ of any quotation marks within which one might hope to contain them. Thus in the philosophy of language it has been known for some time that if John says, “Sally said ‘wow’,” John is not really using ‘wow’ in a sentence, he is only mentioning it in connection with Sally’s use. But try the same thing with ‘fuck’ -–supposing say that John and Sally are siblings and John is reporting to his parents–, and you will find that to mention is to use. The profanity bleeds out of the quotation marks meant to separate it from the sentence in which it is contained. FCC broadcasting rules confirm this: not only vulgar rants, but even the titles of vulgar songs, are forbidden.

Xin_48090121080255443943

When it comes to these charged words, the more common way of saying without saying is not through punctuation but through euphemism: freaking, darn, gosh, shoot, etc. But these terms pose no danger of bleeding out into the language surrounding them only because they are already bloodless. Or perhaps, better, they function in language like artificial sweetener in food –giving you something for nothing, but turning out in the end to be nothing themselves–, and should be used just as sparingly. They are a worse habit than cursing. Cicero understood this. “When you speak of the anus,” he wrote, “you call it by a name [‘anus’, i.e., ‘ring’] that is not its own; why not rather call it by its own [i.e., ‘culus’]? If it is indecent, do not use even the substituted name; if not, you had better call it by its own” (Epistolae ad familiares IX xxii). While also showing that one era’s euphemisms are another’s hyper-correct orthophemisms –today ‘anus’ is the preferred term of the straight-faced and literal-minded– when followed out to its logical conclusion the orator’s observation makes a rather strong demand of us: that we eschew all allusion, all talking-around, perhaps even all metaphor. Euphemisms frequently taste artificial, but to insist on pure, direct literalism in all speech at all registers would amount to a severe impoverishment of language.

The difference between the poetic allusion, the insipid euphemism, and the blunt literal description, it seems to me, is strikingly similar to that between erotic art, idiotic softcore simulations, and porn, a three-part distinction which in turn maps onto that between epic battle scenes, cartoonish blood-splattering violence, and snuff films. I would like to consider whether Danto’s insight about profane language might thus be useful for understanding images that fall into any of these genres. Here, I am interested primarily in ontology –in particular the relation of images to reality–, and not in ethics, except insofar as our ethical judgment of the content of an image is relevant to that image’s power to jump out from behind its screen and become part of reality. It seems to me, in short, that just as certain words cannot be contained semantically within quotation marks, certain images cannot be kept morally behind the screens on which we watch them. They bleed out of the pixels meant to contain them, like ‘fuck’ bleeds out of its punctuational container. (Need I plead that I did not just say ‘fuck’, but only mentioned it? Undoubtedly, the editor of a less enlightened review would judge that I did, and ask me to garble it with dollar signs and asterisks. Fine. I confess I did use it. That is precisely my point.)

The images that seem least capable of bleeding in this way are the ones that rely, curiously, on copious quantities of fake blood. The more the red dye spills, the less infectious the image seems. It is a weighty decision to watch an Iraqi beheading video. It is not a weighty decision to watch Helloween or Child’s Play. A psychologically mature adult should be able to watch anything acted without coming away tainted. Martin Amis recounts: “As the credits rolled on Child’s Play 3, I felt no urge or prompting to go out and kill somebody. And I also knew why. It’s nothing to boast about, but there is too much going on in my head for Chucky to gain sway in there.” Child’s Play, it seems, has roughly as much to do with violence as saying “gosh” has to do with blasphemy. It is the same unreasonable fundamentalist who would attempt to supress the one and the other.

I think most of us would have the same opinion of Emmanuelle or The Story of O. These are harmless entertainments: they do not bleed out of the screen with moral consequences for the real people watching it. But isn’t ‘real’ porn more like an Iraq beheading video than it is like ‘erotica’? With few exceptions (Bruno Dumont, Nagisa Oshima, Vincent Gallo: all predictably received as enfants terribles), it is still not possible to have sex qua actor. That is, if you are an actor having sexual intercourse in your role in front of a camera, then like it or not you are also having sex in your real life. It is an action that cannot be contained within the bounds of a fiction. There are at least some actions, then, that can’t be executed in the name of artistic integrity, actions that, even if attempted in the aims of art, inevitably prove to be uncontainable within the art for which they were performed and end up constituting some small corner of reality. What distinguishes these actions –let us call them ‘radioactive’— from the safe kind? What do they say about art and its relationship to reality?

It seems that the list of such actions has no existence independently of evolving community standards. Consider for example our culture’s rapidly changing attitude towards smoking, and how this has impacted art. A New York Times article of January 28 reports: “England’s [smoking] ban, which begins July 1, allows actors to smoke only ‘if the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for them to smoke.’” Other rules in other places are stricter. Smoking, like sex, seems increasingly to be one of those activities that cannot be contained within the simulated world that hosts the other actions of characters on a stage or in front of a camera. In contrast with the world of Tennessee Williams, these days a character smoking is a person smoking.

It is worth noting that sex involves bodily fluids which may seep through pores or sores, and smoking, as its enemies have driven home ad nauseam, involves the transmission of airborne particles into the lungs and bloodstreams of all who come near the smoker. Fluids and vapors are at stake in these radioactive actions, not just sights and sounds.

Why is this distinction important? Aren’t sound waves and light rays just as much a part of reality as fluids and particles? Against those who claimed that the introduction of sound marked the end of the ‘pure’ cinematic form of the silent film, André Bazin has argued that in 1929 a dream that had run through much of the history of 19th-century technology was finally realized: the mechanical recording of a larger sliver of reality than what is given to any one of the senses individually. The 19th-century had phonographic recording, and it had photographic recording, but only with Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer were we able to have both at once.

One might reasonably ask Bazin: if what you are interested in is registering reality mechanically, why stop at sight and sound? Why not give the people smells, tastes, and feels as well? One thing to note right away is that, physically, the senses are not all analogous. Sights and sounds can be recorded, but the only way to capture a smell and to deliver it at a later time is not to record it but to capture the smell itself. It doesn’t make any sense to speak of a ‘recording’ of a smell. If you are smelling something, this is because there are particles of that thing entering your nose. If you are seeing or hearing something, this is admittedly because there are light rays or sound waves entering your ears or eyes, but in the case of recording they need not be coming from the thing of which they give you an impression. That thing may be on the other side of the world, may have ceased to exist a century ago, and what you are sensing, even if dependent on that thing, is by no means a part of it in the way that aromatic particles are literally taken from some source material. These same points may be made a fortiori for tastes. ‘Feels’ deserve their own analysis, but suffice it to say here that they are more like tastes and smells than like sights and sounds.

As a result of this physical difference, I believe there are fundamental reasons why cinema could never expand beyond sight and sound, even if John Waters experimented with ‘odorama’ cards in the 1970s. To incorporate smells or tastes or feels would not be to enhance the art form, in the way that the addition of sounds to sights no doubt did. It would be to change activities altogether: from the creation of visual art, to what is today called ‘virtual reality’. That is to say, one can watch and hear a movie as an external spectator, whereas if one is smelling and tasting and feeling, one is necessarily a participant. Movies disclose worlds to us, to speak with Cavell, whereas virtual reality would enworld us.

Yet perhaps certain sights and sounds are capable of having a physiological and psychical effect comparable in force to the vapors and fluids that penetrate the body and that consequently inspire legislation and moral concern. Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” I take this to mean that certain images are such that the spectator/participant distinction collapses in looking at them: to watch is to be implicated, just as there is no way to experience the tastes of a meal but by joining the diners. In the case of snuff films and pornography, the power to bleed off the screen is so strong that even the time delay, even the assurance that everything you are seeing is already a fait accompli, does not seem to make a difference. The time delay does make some difference of course—to watch live webcam pornography is on many accounts morally indistinguishable from a visit to a prostitute; to watch a live snuffing online is to be an accomplice to murder, while once a snuff film is available, the deed has been done, and our decision to watch can have no retroactive influence.

But again, the time delay is somehow not enough to make all the moral difference. It’s impossible, of course, but I want to say that Iraq beheadings and gonzo porn bleed off the screen by travelling in time. Their presentness is not entirely diminished by the fact that we are watching them on playback. Consider in this connection the French verb for what audience members do at live spectacles: “assister.” To go to the theater is to “assist” in its performance, as obviously the performance would not be a performance if there were no audience. Students “assist” at lectures, and witnesses “assist” at executions. At the movies, one does not “assist,” one just “watches.” Families of the victims of Timothy McVeigh, interestingly, were satisfied to “assist” at his lethal injection by way of closed-circuit television: TV, in its original, live function is a way of circumventing boundaries imposed by space, but not by time. Film, though, is in general the medium that shows events at a remove in both time and space. Yet somehow this remove disappears in porn and snuff. To watch is for the event itself to be relived, and somehow almost to cause the real people on the screen to relive the event (even if they are now headless). To watch is to “assist”, with all the moral repercussions this verb implies in English. As Linda Lovelace testified, every time a man watches Deep Throat, she is being raped all over again. This is of course believable only if one believes Lovelace was raped in the first place, for the moral status of the time-delayed “assistance” derives from the moral status of the original event.

Salo2

The two most well-known films set in Italy under the Nazi occupation, Rossellini’s Open City of 1946 and Pasolini’s Saló from 1975, both share the view that fascists are the true anarchists, but differ as to how the anarchic freedom that fascism affords the victors ought to be used. The thirty years that separate the two seem only to have strengthened the Italian view (Visconti’s Götterdämmerung is another example) of the Nazis as sexual perverts.

In Saló, a clique of top Nazis and their clerical collaborators kidnap two dozen or so local Italian teens, and take them off to a secret castle to force them into sexual slavery. The men are bored with conventional sex, of course, and as the film wears on the fantasies they act out grow increasingly exremental and bloody. They are revaluing all values, creating from scratch a world à rebours, etc.

It strikes me that satanism, sadomasochism, any sort of celebration of the dark side in the form of communal rites can’t but remain stuck in the mode of parody. They are effective in providing a kinky rush, but as a way of life they must be difficult to sustain. This for me was the (likely unintended) lesson of Saló. It is an intriguing thought experiment to envision what a total subversion of all ‘bourgeois’ values would really look like: where society says kiss your lover, strike her instead; if society serves nourishing food, we’ll serve toxic excrement (a concoction of chocolate and orange marmelade in the film), etc. A certain pessimistic view of modern morality, moreover, and one that no doubt rubbed off on Pasolini (he cites Blanchot and Klossowski in his film’s ‘bibliography’), would have it that bourgeois codes of conduct only mask the violence we are all inflicting on the other all the time, that the order subverted in Saló is a lie, while what goes on in the castle in Saló is somehow an acknowledgment of the truth about human beings.

I for my part would really rather not eat shit, and I suspect that this aversion has more to do with my evolutionary history than with my boring conventional morality. Perhaps for this reason, my experience of Saló was rather like the one Martin Amis had watching Child’s Play. I was unmoved; my view of the world and of my place in it was left unshaken. I was mildly concerned when I learned that the actors involved were, rumor had it, underage, and that for that reason the legality of the film has been disputed throughout the years. But my sense has been that the nubile young things came out of the experience intact, far closer to Dakota Fanning after Hounddog than to Daniel Pearl after his most memorable screen appearance.

Realism as the end of cinema, Bazin thinks, extends back to the discovery in the mid-19th century of the possibility of mechanical recording of sights and sounds. Today, every yokel in the first world, and a growing number in the third, can record both just by slipping that little object we still insist on calling a ‘phone’ out of his pocket and holding it up to the world. Saddam Hussein’s hanging was a far more perfect achievement of realism than The Bicycle Thief. But surely realism as an aesthetic end was not meant to come to this. Di Sica and Rossellini wanted that newsreel feel, but not to the extent that their films would be mistaken for news. Curiously, to the extent that realism is an aesthetic end, it can only be accomplished through simulation. To the extent that cinema is to be an art, it must build up an alternate world out of mechanical projections of this one, rather than simply reproducing this one. And just as good speech will slide neither into insipid euphemism nor blunt literalism, good cinema will not make too much use of fake blood, and will not forget that real blood (as well for the most part as real bodily secretions of other sorts) cannot be deployed without bleeding right through the screen.

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

Monday, January 29, 2007

A Case of the Mondays: The Blank Slate and Other Phantom Theories

Reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate reminded me of most other polemical books I’d read that attempt to integrate some science into their works. In theory it’s a science book, a longwinded defense of both evolutionary psychology and its obvious social implications. But in practice, it’s mostly a political book; the science is provided only as a backdrop against which Pinker sets up his attacks on a host of social, political, and cultural notions that stand in opposition to crude evolutionary psychology (which I’ll abbreviate as EP in the rest of this post).

Pinker frames his view as this of modern science, represented by such tools as genetics, neurobiology, and post-Williams Revolution evolutionary biology, versus this of three closely interlinked demons. The first demon, which he focuses on the most, is the view that at birth the human mind is a blank slate to be shaped by environmental forces. The second is romantic affection for the noble savage, uncorrupted by pernicious civilization. And the third is the dualist notion that people are ghosts inhabiting the machines that are their own bodies.

The problems with the book’s thesis start right at the beginning, when Pinker claims that a) all three views are interlinked, and b) all three views were very respectable until the science of EP started to overthrow them. The best way of seeing why Pinker is wrong there is by looking at the three philosophical positions he associates with the three demons—empiricism for the blank slate, romanticism for the noble savage, and dualism for the ghost in the machine.

By and large, the philosophers who developed empiricism, romanticism, and dualism in modern times disagreed with one another. Descartes’ dualism isn’t a component of Locke’s empiricism; on the contrary, they disagree on the fundamental issue of whether all knowledge comes from experience. Romanticism developed mostly after the Enlightenment, and was only associated with empiricism or dualism when it mythologized European progress rather than the noble savage.

Zooming in on empiricism, it’s easy to see another error of Pinker’s: Lockean empiricism does not strictly speaking say the mind is a blank slate, at least not in the way that is relevant to EP. The main point of EP is that the human brain is hardwired to be prone to certain forms of learning and modes of behavior. The EP-derived view that men are on average better than women at math is not that men are born knowing more math than women but that men are born with a greater aptitude for math than women. In contrast, Locke’s main contention is that knowledge comes directly from experience. He never concerned himself with social learning, which only became a serious subject of study a century or two after his death.

More importantly, the people Pinker criticizes for distorting science by claiming that IQ is not meaningful or not hereditary, or even that the mind is indeed a blank slate, have nothing to do with the other two demons. Marxist theory, which the people Pinker labels radical scientists adhere to, is extremely anti-romantic and anti-dualist. Among all the radical ideologies in existence—libertarianism, fascism, religious fundamentalism, anarchism—it is certainly the most pro-modern. Lewontin’s politics is largely doctrinaire Marxist: in Biology as Ideology, he trumpets the triumph of progress, even as he indicates this progress should come from accepting socialism more than from ordinary capitalist improvements.

The relationship between Pinker and Lewontin is an interesting one. Pinker notes that although Lewontin claims that he thinks the dominant force in evolution is the interaction between gene, organism, and environment, in terms of social implications he ignores everything but environment. On that Pinker is certainly right: Biology as Ideology is an anti-science polemic that distorts facts to fit Lewontin’s agenda (my take on Lewontin was subsequently debated in length here). However, Pinker commits the same transgression: he says he believes in the sensible moderate view that human behavior is determined by both inborn and environmental factors, and goes on to not only ignore the implications of the environmental part but also defend racists and sexists who have used pseudoscience as cover.

For instance, he starts by ridiculing people who called Richard Herrnstein a racist for a 1970 paper about intelligence and heredity. Although the paper as Pinker describes it is not racist per se, Herrnstein was indeed a racist. The screed he published with Charles Murray in 1994, The Bell Curve, is not only wrong, but also obviously wrong. Even in 1994, there were metastudies about race and intelligence that showed that the IQ gap disappears once one properly controls for environmental factors, for example by considering the IQ scores of children born to single mothers in Germany by American fathers in World War Two.

The truth, or what a reasonable person would believe to be the truth, is never oppressive. If there is indeed an innate component to the racial IQ gap, or to the gender math score gap, then it’s not racist or sexist to write about it. It remains so even if the innate component does not exist, but the researcher has solid grounds to believe it does.

However, Murray and Herrnstein had no such solid grounds. They could quote a few studies proving their point, but when researchers publish many studies about the same phenomenon, some studies are bound to detect statistically significant effects that do not exist. By selectively choosing one’s references, one can show that liberals are morally superior or morally inferior to conservatives, or that socialism is more successful or less successful than capitalism. At times there are seminal studies, which do not require any further metastudy. There weren’t any in 1994, while existing metastudies suggested that the racial IQ gap was entirely environmental. As I will describe below, the one seminal study done in 2003 moots not only Murray and Herrnstein’s entire argument but also much of Pinker’s.

To rebut claims of racism and sexism, Pinker invokes the moral argument—in other words, that to be against racism and sexism one need only vigorously oppose discrimination, without believing that without any discrimination there would be no gaps in achievement. In theory, that is correct. But in practice, that narrow view makes it impossible to enforce any law against discrimination.

Worse, Pinker invokes anti-feminist stereotypes that are born not of serious scholarship, but of ideologically motivated conservative thinking. He supports Christina Hoff-Sommers’ spurious distinction between equity feminism and gender feminism. Although there are many distinctions among different kinds of feminists, some of which track the degree of radicalism, none of the serious ones has anything to do with Hoff-Sommers’. In theory, equity feminism means supporting equality between women and men, while gender feminism means supporting a view of the world in which the patriarchy is omnipresent. In practice, the people who make that distinction, including Pinker, assign everyone who supports only the forms of equality that are uncontroversial in the United States, like equal pay laws and suffrage, to equity feminism, and everyone who supports further changes or even existing controversial ones to gender feminism.

As a case study, take family law activist Trish Wilson. Wilson’s activism focuses on divorce law; she has written articles and testified in front of American state legislatures against laws mandating presumptive joint custody, mainly on the grounds that it hurts children. In addition, she has written exposés of ways abusive men exploit legal loopholes, including presumptive joint custody, to gain custody of children. In pushing for equality in the courtroom, she is a liberal feminist’s liberal feminist. And yet, her attacks on the men’s rights movement for protecting abusive men have caused every conservative who makes distinctions between equity and gender feminism to deride her as a gender feminist.

Any reasonable distinction between a more radical feminist stream and a more conventional one would put Betty Friedan and her organization NOW on the less radical side. Friedan was anti-radical enough to devote much of her tenth anniversary afterword to The Feminine Mystique to attacking radical feminists, by which she means not Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, but Kate Millett. NOW has focused on legal equality, primarily abortion rights and secondarily laws cracking down on employment discrimination and sexual harassment. But Pinker assigns Friedan as well as Bella Abzug to the gender feminism slot, using entirely trivial statements of theirs to paint them as radicals. Friedan he attacks for suggesting extending compulsory education to the age of 2; Abzug he attacks for saying equality means fifty-fifty representation everywhere.

To his credit, Pinker never quite claims that there is no gender discrimination. However, he makes an earnest effort to undermine every attempt to counteract it, however well founded. For instance, he claims that it’s absurd to say that women’s underrepresentation in science in the United States is due to discrimination, on the grounds that they’re even more underrepresented in math, and it’s not likely mathematicians are more sexist than scientists. Instead, he suggests, women are just not interested in math and science.

However, it is legitimate to ask why this interest gap exists. There is no EP-based argument why it should be innate. On the contrary, independent evidence from, for example, the proportion of female mathematicians who come from families of mathematicians versus the proportion of male mathematicians, suggests it is environmental. Indeed, the educational system of the United States has long encouraged women to ignore the hard sciences. Other educational systems produce near-parity: while 13% of American scientists and engineers are women, many other countries, such as Sweden and Thailand, have percentages higher than 30 or even 40.

Furthermore, one of the most important pieces of information about biases in education, the stereotype threat, receives no mention from Pinker. It’s an established fact that telling girls who are about to take a math test that boys do better will make them do worse. In fact, telling them that the test measures aptitude, or even asking them to fill out an oval for gender before the test, will hurt their performance. And yet somehow Pinker glosses over that fact in a book that purports to be about a combination of genetics and environment.

There is hardly a single thing Pinker gets right about rape in his book, except that Susan Brownmiller is wrong. His explanation of rape is that it is a male biological urge, as evidenced in the fact that in many species males rape females. However, that theory says nothing about why straight men rape other men in prison, or in general about the dynamics of male-on-male rape. He provides scant circumstantial evidence for his theory of rape; instead, he prefers to rant about how Brownmiller’s feminist theories are dominant, even though in fact the dominant view among criminologists is that rape is simply a violent crime, rather than a case of passionate sex gone awry or a mechanism of reinforcing the patriarchy.

Pinker commits not only a sin of omission in writing about rape or violence in general, but also a sin of commission, in writing that nobody really knows what causes violence. In fact, criminologists have fairly good ideas about how social ills like poverty and inequality cause crime, although they know it about murder more than about other violent crimes. Still, the rates of all violent crimes are closely correlated; the major exception is the United States’ murder rate, which is higher than its general violent crime rate predicts presumably because of its lax gun control laws.

Finally, Pinker quotes a 2001 study by Eric Turkheimer as showing that the Darwin wars ended and the gene-centric side, led by Richard Dawkins, prevailed over the more environment-based side, led by Stephen Jay Gould. Thence Pinker concludes that attempts to raise children in ways more conducive to growth are futile, since much of their future behavior is genetic, and almost all of what is not genetic is due to developmental noise rather than environmental influence.

However, in 2003 Turkheimer published another study, which sealed the questions of race and IQ and of environmental influences on children in general. Turkheimer’s starting point was that earlier studies about the heritability of IQ often focused on adopted children in middle- and upper-class families, where environmental influences might be different from in lower-class families. By examining a large array of data spanning multiple races and social classes, he saw that on the one hand, within the middle class IQ is highly genetic, with a heritability level of 0.72 and no significant environmental effects. But on the other, within the lower class, which includes most blacks and Hispanics in the US, the heritability of IQ drops to 0.1, and environmental factors such as the depth of poverty or the level of schooling predominate.

Obviously, it would be futile to blame Pinker for not mentioning Turkheimer’s 2003 study. The Blank Slate was published in 2002. However, all other facts I have cited against Pinker’s thesis and its purported social implications predate 2002. The Turkheimer study does not show by itself that Pinker’s book is shoddy; it merely shows that much of it is wrong. What establishes Pinker’s shoddiness is the treatment of social problems like sexism, racism, and crime, which is based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker’s say.

Even a cursory examination of the current mainstream social scene will show that the myths of the noble savage and the ghost in the machine are nonexistent. That fringe scholars sometimes believe in them is no indication of their level of acceptability; there are fringe scholars who believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, too. Even the theory of the blank slate, at least in its most extreme form, is a phantom ideology. Lewontin adheres to it, but Lewontin is a contrarian; non-contrarian scientists do not publish books comparing modern biology departments to Medieval Christianity. Pinker likes to poke fun at theories that suggest everyone or almost everyone can succeed in life, but he never gets around to actually refuting them. All he does is attack extreme caricatures such as the blank slate and other phantom theories.

Shia and Sunni, A Ludicrously Short Primer

Even now, many people who hear these terms daily on the news are confused about what the real differences are between Sunni and Shia Muslims, so I, having been brought up in a very devout Shia household in Pakistan, thought I would explain these things, at least in rough terms. Here goes:

It all started hours after Mohammad’s death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad’s burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet’s named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement. Below I will say a little more about the Shia.

So early on in Islam, there was a split between political power and religious leadership, and to make a long story admittedly far too short, this soon came to a head within a generation when the grandson of one of the greatest of Mohammad’s enemies (Abu Sufian) from his early days in Mecca, Yazid, took power in the still nascent Islamic government. Yazid was really something like a cross between Nero and Hitler and Stalin; just bad, bad in every way: a decadent, repressive dictator (and one who flouted all Islamic injunctions), for whom it became very important to obtain the public allegiance of Husain, the pious and respected son of Ali (and so, grandson of Mohammad). And this Husain refused, on principle.

Yazid said he would kill Husain. Husain said that was okay. Yazid said he would kill all of Husain’s family. Husain said he could not compromise his principles, no matter what the price. Yazid’s army of tens of thousands then surrounded Husain and a small band of his family, friends and followers at a place called Kerbala (in present day Iraq), and cut off their water on the 7th of the Islamic month of Moharram. For three days, Husain and his family had no water. At dawn on the third day, the 10th of Moharram, Husain told all in his party that they were sure to be killed and whoever wanted to leave was free to do so. No one left. In fact, several heroic souls left Yazid’s camp to come and join the group that was certain to be slaughtered.

On the 10th of Moharram, a day now known throughout the Islamic world as Ashura, the members of Husain’s parched party came out one by one to do battle, as was the custom at the time. They were valiant, but hopelessly outnumbered, and therefore each was killed in turn.  All of Husain’s family was massacred in front of his eyes, even his six-month old son, Ali Asghar, who was pierced through the throat by an arrow from the renowned archer of Yazid’s army, Hurmula. After Husain’s teenage son Ali Akbar was killed, he is said to have proclaimed, “Now my back is broken.” But the last to die before him, was his beloved brother, Abbas, while trying desperately to break through Yazid’s ranks and bring water back from the Euphrates for Husain’s young daughter, Sakeena. And then Husain himself was killed.

The followers of Ali (the Shia) said to themselves that they would never allow this horrific event to be forgotten, and that they would mourn Husain and his family’s murder forever, and for the last thirteen hundred years, they have lived up to this promise every year. This mourning has given rise to ritualistic displays of grief, which include flagellating oneself with one’s hands, with chains, with knives, etc. It can all seem quite strange, out of context, but remembrance of that terrible day at Kerbala has also given rise to some of the most sublime poetry ever written (a whole genre in Urdu, called Marsia, is devoted to evoking the events of Ashura), and some of us, religious or not, still draw inspiration from the principled bravery and sacrifice of Husain on that black day.

Earlier today, I took the following unlikely pictures on the ritziest road in New York City, Park Avenue:

Procession_1

This is the procession commemorating Ashura, or the 10th of Moharram. In front, you can see a painstakingly recreated model of the tomb of Husain. The mourners are dressed mostly in black. It is a testament to the tolerance of American society that despite the best attempts of some of its cleverest citizens to proclaim a “clash of civilizations,” it allows (and observes with curiosity) such displays of foreign sentiment.

Sea_of_heads_on_park_ave

The procession is made up of Shias of various nationalities, with the largest contingents being from Pakistan and Iran.

Punk_with_alam

A young Shia holds up a banner, perhaps forgetting for a second that he is supposed to be mourning.

Morgan_and_coffin 

You can see one of the coffins with roses on it, which are ritualistically carried in the procession.

Hands_up_1

The self-flagellation is in full swing at this point. (The arms are raised before coming down to beat the chest.)

Zuljana

This is “Zuljana” or Husain’s horse, caparisoned with silks and flowers.

Blurred_matam

The self-flagellation, or matam, reaches a climactic frenzy before ending for Asr prayers. Later in the evening, there are gatherings (or majaalis) to remember the women and children of Husain’s family who survived to be held as prisoners of Yazid.

Sojourns: Two Views of the Apocalypse

Death_earthSlavoj Zizek once said “it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end but somehow capitalism will go on.” One is tempted to respond, well yes of course. It is also easier to imagine blowing up a car than designing one. Destruction is a rather simple proposition. Feats of engineering are somewhat more complicated.

And yet there is something to the apocalyptic imagination. Thinking about the end of the world can perhaps tell us something about the world that is ostensibly ending. Or so it would seem from two of the more visually arresting films to appear in the last decade, both ruminating over our final days, both set, as it happens, in England. I refer here to everyone’s favorite intellectual zombie flick 28 Days Later and the more recent dystopian thriller Children of Men.

The first thing I would point to is that it is not the “world” that is ending in these movies so much as the human race that has lorded over it for the past eon or so. It is part of our species arrogance to identify the world with humanity and then to wonder if our destruction would be anything other than a good thing for the rest of “life on earth.” So then let us be clear. What we are talking about here is not exactly the globe or the planet but simply the noisome breed of animals bent on mucking it up for everyone else.

28dayslater001Humans. We are tiresome, aren’t we? Few could deny the beauty of the depopulated London with which 28 Days Later begins: the seraphic Cillian Murphy ambling about Oxford Circle, picking detritus off the ground, alone save for the pigeons and the gulls. Humanity has perished because the “rage virus” has been loosed from a lab and made us tear each other limb from limb. We don’t die from the virus itself. It’s the rage that kills us. And so we ought to wonder how much the virus adds to our native cruelty and rancor. Perhaps Cornelius had it right after all: “Beware the beast Man, for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates he kills for lust or sport or greed … Let him not breed in great in numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.”

Actually, the conclusion (or at least the original one) of 28 Days Later is nowhere near as radical. It turns out the virus never got out of the country. Humanity is spared. The hero, his girlfriend, and an orphaned kid make an ersatz domestic hearth in the English countryside, all warm in their sweaters and waiting to be rescued. Rage may be conquered after all. Perhaps we can all just get along.

Humanity (nearly) perishes by anger in 28 Days Later. Sadness dooms us in Children of Men. Seventeen years after a global infertility crisis has brought a stop to human reproduction across the planet, “life” has pretty much ground to a halt. There’s no future generation in sight, so nations plunge into despair. War, chaos, and social entropy ensue. The sound of children’s voices is dearly missed.Childrenofmen

Children of Men is a movie at odds with itself. At its core, the story is a saccharine humanist fable of a culture of life fighting to persist among one of death. A baby springs miraculously into the fallen world and suddenly there is a future to save, as if one could only live for the sake of progeny, as if a world without humans would not be left well enough alone. Amid the rubble and squalor of the end of world, life or death struggle turns to getting the baby offshore to a group of save-the-planet scientists aptly dubbed (giving the game away) … the human project.

Deer_munchsYet, for us much as the movie is committed at the level of story to a bland humanism, it is equally committed at the level of form to something quite different, to making us wonder, within the terms of the narrative, whether the human species ought not to become extinct after all. A great deal of attention has been paid to the six-minute long shot in a battle strewn internment camp. As with 28 Days Later, humanity’s end makes quite a spectacle. I would point also to an earlier scene at an abandoned and dilapidated schoolyard. Here we are supposed to be thinking about the despair left in the absence of children. But the camera does something else. We freeze on a deer that strides into the frame and occupies the place of the missing kids. It’s an arresting moment precisely in the species difference. A non-human animal walks on the ruins of a civilization made for human children. And perhaps that is just fine.

As with 28 Days Later, humanity ends and begins again in England and is best imagined wrapped up in a cable knit sweater while drinking Earl Gray tea (a role brilliantly played here by Michael Cain). Yet, Children of Men makes the saving of humanity look and feel like it is beside the point and a waste of time. And that is why it is most interesting in spite of its own worst ideas.

So, perhaps the lesson is that thinking about the end of the world is in fact thinking about making it a better place.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Lunar Refractions: Just Make It Up—Invention, Creation, and Deception

Pinocchioanonillust_1According to cliché most artists, aside from having the key characteristics of egocentricity and vanity, are also, to a certain degree, liars. I wholeheartedly agree with this, if you can read it in a positive way. Looking at it linguistically, the difference between creative, inventive, innovative, and visionary characters is mere nuance—it’s all just a question of people who, to varying degrees, like to make stuff up. Whether their audiences then believe them or not is an entirely different matter, and no responsibility of theirs.

It’s often said that pathological liars fool no one but themselves, and herein lies the difference. To counter what many historians and critics like to think, artists working with visual and verbal material (or any other medium, for that matter) usually know what they’re up to. I was in a bookstore the other day decorated with various quotes along a series of columns. Waiting at the checkout I came across a phrase from Einstein, something along the lines of “true creativity lies in knowing how to conceal your sources.” Both the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review have, over the past few months, run articles and letters discussing the growing length of author’s acknowledgements, source credits, and writer’s general fear of becoming the next J.T. Leroy or James Frey. In other countries it’s perfectly acceptable to publish a book filled with extended quotes of other works as long as the author is mentioned—the title and other information about the quote’s source are seen as superfluous, and the reader just needs to know or be willing to hunt it down. In the United States a similar approach would have one publisher’s legal department phoning the other non-stop. This obsession with full disclosure is beginning to suffocate; readers and viewers are free to trust or distrust creative types, and I’d like to think they’re bright enough to distinguish things without relying on someone else to tell them what to think. That someone else might be untrustworthy anyway.

I went to see a Piranesi exhibition at Rome’s Museo del Corso, which among copper plates, sketches, and countless prints included the over 135 etchings in his Views of Rome series. I’ve never much loved his lines, and am fairly convinced he was a sell-out, but I nevertheless can’t deny his importance. The show’s curators chose to title it Piranesi’s Rome: the Eighteenth-Century City in the Grandi Vedute. A newspaper review of the show is more accurate with its title, Piranesi, or Rome as it Wasn’t. Curiously, the museum space itself was most appropriate; there wasn’t a window in the entire place, and it was depressingly dark, completely cut off from the outside world—the world that would’ve exposed some of his embellishments.

Piranesiautoritratto In many etchings Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) liked to bestow the title of Architect on himself, even if—or maybe because—of his many architectural projects, only one was ever realized. That design, his renovation of the church Santa Maria del Priorato and adjacent garden on the Aventine Hill in Rome, brought him much less recognition than his obsessive, incessant print production. In a pre-photographic period he was the major promoter of ancient Rome’s grandeur, and foreshadowed the Romantics’ fancy for ruins by several decades. In 1746, six years after he’d moved to Rome from Venice, the twenty-six-year-old etcher undertook the immense task of documenting views of his adopted city. At the same time the city was being invaded by ever more foreigners on the Grand Tour; French, English, German, and people of countless other nations, primarily from northern Europe, couldn’t get enough of the decadence depicted in his work. How much the fact that he himself was a northerner at heart influenced his perspectives I can’t really say, but they can certainly be seen as propaganda. A few (and some of the most interesting) works in the show were done independently of any commission; a multi-plate plan of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli is a visual fugue stretching over nine feet. Pope Clement XIII, a member of the powerful Venetian Rezzonico family and one of his main patrons, commissioned a church renovation that was never realized for lack of funds. So these few architectural projects are utterly peripheral in comparison to the prints that sold like hotcakes both to visitors and a vast audience abroad—people who’d never have the chance to actually see the sites he portrayed. Perhaps he would’ve embellished certain scenes and buildings regardless of his audience, but I think he gained great liberty in recognizing that there wouldn’t be any fact checkers poring over his work. Hence SPQR, the acronym of Senatus Populus Que Romanus (the Senate and People of Rome), becomes something like Sabinae Populus Que Resistet (the Sabines, People that Remain/Resist/Persist) in one of his inscriptions. Over drinks the other day I was discussing this with an archaeologist who held mixed gratitude and disapproval for the Vedute—some of them are the sole depiction of important structures since destroyed, and therefore important documentation, while some are simply made up. Most fall somewhere in between. Photoshop didn’t yet exist, not to mention photography, but Piranesi managed to fool people with many of the very same techniques of today’s advertising—bits of his richly evocative scenes are the equivalent of the perfectly blue skies, radiantly blemish-free teen models, and high-gloss world in commercials for travel and just about everything else.

He’s a little more honest in his 1760–61 series Carceri d’Invenzione, where he admits his inventiveness in the title. He’d begun exploring this theme fifteen years earlier in a series initially titled Invenzioni Capric[ciose] di Carceri, with a nod to the fundamental caprice underlying it all. Piranesi was convinced that Rome’s grandeur came not from the Greek legacy, but from the Egyptians, via the Etruscans. This explains a lot of the simply wacky interventions he adds to buildings that would otherwise be plainly classical. My question remains: does it really matter how faithful he was to the world around him? Does it really matter if he’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes, or really was convinced of his own visions?

In 1930 Henri Focillon published Esthètique des visionnaires, an essay discussing the visionary esthetics of Daumier, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Turner, Tintoretto, and El Greco. His clearest claim in what could otherwise be dismissed as a relic of Romanticism is that visionaries don’t view their subjects, they rather envision them. He goes on to say that these visionaries possess (I’d say are possessed by) a particular virtue that doesn’t alter nature, but rather imbues it with a striking vivacity, intensity, and profundity. These are mere words—he contradicts this later on by writing that visionaries can’t be contented with the real world, and so they use it as a point of departure; “They interpret more than imitate, and transfigure more than interpret.” Fine.

Returning to the so-called Architect’s one completed building project, the  church atop the Aventine is almost impossible to visit, as it’s closed to the public, but the garden next door can be viewed through the keyhole of its door, where six or seven people were lined up as I got there late this past Saturday evening. Stooping to peer through the keyhole, your eye meets an orderCartolinavillamaltaly perspective, lined with well-kempt cypresses, receding to the illuminated dome of Saint Peter’s at the very center of the composition. Not only is Piranesi controlling what you see (a dome framed by dark vegetation, Vistadallaventinomuch more orderly than the surrounding city and most of his chaotic print compositions), but he’s also dictating how you see it; you’re limited by the keyhole’s outline, then by the trees. These limits closely relate it to Borromini’s famous colonnade perspective at Palazzo Spada, the views of ideal cities produced in Renaissance Florence, and the Olympic Theater of Palladio and Scamozzi in Vicenza. This last connection, to theater, is fascinating, and reveals a lot about our contemporary culture. Going to the theater—or cinema, for that matter—people expect to be removed from their own world; it’s entertainment, imagination, fantasy, and can appear more real than the people, places, and things we see around us each day. It’s the circus, it’s make-believe, it’s the Surrealists’ theater of cruelty, it’s a theater of the absurd, it’s a theater of war. It’s Dionysus’s thyrsus-led procession, the drunken debacle that became the origin of all theater. So why do people bring such different expectations to visual art? A few contemporary artists are venturing into theater: Kara Walker’s silhouettes, although immobile, narrate past and present characters and their often frightful histories; William Kentridge’s Black Box / Chambre Noire, a tripartite riff on the themes inherent in the black box as theater (realm of performance), airplane device (to record disaster), and camera (interior between lens and eyepiece), was shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim but not in New York; and Pierre Huyghe’s puppet shows all merge static visual arts with theatrical realms.

Infinite possible worlds exist, and comingVicenzateatroolimpico into the theater—or peering through the  keyhole (be it Piranesi’s or EtantdonnsDuchamp’s)—a single filtered, channeled world is presented. Such miniature theater can be sculptural object, projection, installation, print, and vice versa. The grand narrative and scale of present and past history are here reduced to small theater. Piranesi’s prints, distant relatives of later architectural follies, were both products cranked out for commercial profit and visions loftier than any debate of real vs. unreal.

At times Piranesi’s hand grew heavy, and the acid bath a bit strong, but this darkness could be read as the reverse side of the Enlightenment looking glass. The nature of shadows is key; in talking about his exploration of the black box, Kentridge describes how, while observing a solar eclipse, he became aware of the process of looking, “of being made conscious of the nature of light,” and how light diffuses mystery, making “everything immediately comprehensible.” This light can be useful, but also has the power to overexpose an image, leaving a bleached-out scene, robbed of its essence—be it actual or invented.

The Future of Science is Open, Part 3: An Open Science World

In Parts one and two, I talked about the scholarly practice of Open Access publishing, and about how the central concept of “openness”, or knowledge as a public good, is being incorporated into other aspects of science.  I suggested that the overall practice (or philosophy, or movement) might be called Open Science, by which I mean the process of discovery at the intersection of Open Access (publishing), Open Data, Open Source (software), Open Standards (semantic markup) and Open Licensing.

Here I want to move from ideas to applications, and take a look at what kinds of Open Science are already happening and where such efforts might lead.  Open Science is very much in its infancy at the moment; we don’t know precisely what its maturity will look like, but we have good reason to think we’ll like it.

By way of analogy, think about what the Web has made possible, and ask yourself: how much of that could you have predicted in, say, 1991, when Sir Tim wrote the first browser?  Actually, “infancy” being a generous term for the developmental state of Open Science, a better analogy probably reaches further back: how much of what the internet has made possible could anyone have predicted when ARPANET first met NSFnet?  Given that last link, for instance, would you have seen Wikipedia coming?  How about eBay, Amazon.com, RSS, blogs, YouTube, Google Maps, or insert-your-own-favorite amazing web site/service/application?

The potential is immense, and from our current perspective we cannot predict more than a fraction of the ways in which openness will transform the culture and practice of science.   Nonetheless, there are signs pointing in possible directions.


early examples: sequence data

Sequence data (such as mRNA, genomic DNA and protein sequences) have long been the leading edge of large-scale collaborative science, largely because early competition among public and private organizations resulted in a series of groundbreaking agreements on public data sharing.  (For a quick tour of the relevant history, see this article.)  Among the online tools that have been developed around openly-accessible sequence databases such as GenBank or SwissProt, the flagship effort is probably the NCBI‘s online gateway Entrez.  From Entrez I can search for information on a sequence of interest on almost thirty different interlinked databases.  I can:

  • find related nucleotide and protein sequences, and make detailed comparisons between them
  • map a sequence of interest onto whole chromosomes or genomes, and compare those maps across ten or twenty different species
  • access expert-curated information on any connection between a query molecule and human genetic disease or heritable disorders in other species
  • look for known motifs or functional sequence modules in a query molecule, or use similar sequences to build 3D models of its likely shape and structure
  • compare a sequence of interest across wide taxonomies, and formulate useful questions about its evolutionary history
  • look for array data regarding expression of a query sequence in different developmental, disease-related and other contexts
  • access genetic mapping data with which to map a query sequence in organisms for which little or no sequence data is yet available

There’s much more — that was a very brief and incomplete overview of what Entrez can do — but you get the point.  All of this analysis is only possible because the underlying sequence data is available on Open terms (and largely machine-readable due to semantic markup), and it forms a ready-made infrastructure in which further Open information can readily find a place — as soon as it becomes available.


data and text mining

In part 2 I talked about a range of efforts to make databases of other information, including text, similarly interoperable and available for mining.  Paul Ginsparg, in a recent essay, used the interface between PubMed Central and various sequence databases as an early example of what becomes possible when databases can be read by computers as well as by humans (emphasis mine):

GenBank accession numbers are recognized in articles referring to sequence data and linked directly to the relevant records in the genomic databases. Protein names are recognized, and their appearances in articles are linked automatically to the protein and protein interaction databases. Names of organisms are recognized and linked directly to the taxonomic databases, which are then used to compute a minimal spanning tree of all of the organisms contained in a given document. In yet another view, technical terms are recognized and linked directly to the glossary items in the relevant standard biology or biochemistry textbook in the books database. The enormously powerful sorts of data mining and number crunching that are already taken for granted as applied to the open-access genomics databases can be applied to the full text of the entirety of the biology and life sciences literature and will have just as great a transformative effect on the research done with it.

Donat Agosti recently pointed to three related projects: Biotext, which builds text mining tools; EBIMed, which analyses Medline search results and presents associations between gene names and several other databases; and the Arrowsmith Project, which allows semantic comparison between two search-defined sets of PubMed articles.  The latter also maintains a list of free online text mining tools, which currently includes several dozen sites offering tools for a variety of purposes, although the majority are still focused on Medline and/or sequence databases.

These sorts of tools are not only useful, they are likely to become essential.  Even now, I can hardly imagine trying to navigate the existing sequence data without Entrez, or the research literature without PubMed.  GenBank contains more than 40 billion bases and is growing exponentially, doubling every 12-15 months.  PubMed contains nearly 17 million records as I write this, and is adding well over half a million every year.  The 2007 Nucleic Acids Research database issue lists nearly 1000 separate biological databases, up more than 10% from last year.  As Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central has pointed out, simple text searching is not enough to keep a researcher afloat in this onrushing sea of information.


bibliometrics

Data and text mining methods stand to come into their own as discovery tools once they have a fully Open and machine-readable body of published research on which to work.  Similarly, the utility of bibliometrics, the quantitative analysis of text based information, can be dramatically enhanced by Open Access.  In particular, measures of research impact can be made much more powerful, direct and reliable.

Research impact is the degree to which a piece or body of work has been taken up and built upon by other researchers and put to practical use in education, technology, medicine and so on.  Governments and other funding bodies want to be able to measure research impact in order to provide accountability and ensure maximal return on investment, and researchers and research administrators want the same measurements in order to assess the quality of their research and to plan future directions (“how are we doing? how can we do better?”).

The most important measure of research impact currently available is citation analysis, a proxy measurement based on acknowledged use by later published work; the predominant citation-based metric in modern research assessment is the Impact Factor (IF).  If a journal has a 2004 IF of 5, then papers published in that journal in 2001-2002 were cited, on average, 5 times each in 2003.  This number is probably the most widely misunderstood and misused metric in all of science, and comes with a number of serious built-in flaws, not the least of which is that the underlying database is the property of for-profit publishing company Thomson Scientific.

Despite these flaws and considerable high-profile criticism, it is difficult to overstate the influence that the Impact Factor has had, and continues to have, on all efforts to evaluate scientists and their work.  Researchers obsess over journal choice: you don’t want a rejection, which forces you to re-submit elsewhere and wastes time, but you need to get that paper into the “best” (that is, highest IF) journal you can so as to appeal to hiring, funding and tenure committees.   And that’s not unrealistic, since quite frankly the bottom line for most such committees is “who has published the most papers in high-IF journals”.  Other factors are usually considered, but the IF dominates.  It’s a clumsy, inaccurate and unscientific way to go about evaluating research impact and researcher talent.

Happily, there is a better way just over the Open Access horizon.  Once a majority of published research is available in machine-readable OA databases, the community can get out from under Thomson’s thumb and improve scientific bibliometrics in a host of different ways.   Shadbolt et al. list more than two dozen improvements that OA will make possible, including:

  • A CiteRank analog of Google’s PageRank algorithm will allow hits to be rank-ordered by weighted citation counts instead of just ordinary links (not all citations are equal)
  • In addition to ranking hits by author/article/topic citation counts, it will also be possible to rank them by author/article/topic download counts
  • Correlations between earlier download counts and later citation counts will be available online, and usable for extrapolation, prediction and eventually even evaluation
  • Searching, analysis, prediction and evaluation will also be augmented by cocitation analysis (who/what co-cited or was co-cited by whom/what?), coauthorship analysis, and eventually also co-download analysis
  • Time-based (chronometric) analyses will be used to extrapolate early download, citation, co-download and co-citation trends, as well as correlations between downloads and citations, to predict research impact, research direction and research influences.
  • Authors, articles, journals, institutions and topics will also have “endogamy/exogamy” scores: how much do they cite themselves? in-cite within the same “family” cluster? out-cite across an entire field? across multiple fields? across disciplines?
  • “Hub/authority” analysis will make it easier to do literature reviews, identifying review articles citing many articles (hubs) or key articles/authors (authorities) cited by many articles.

Existing metrics (which basically means Thomson’s proprietary data) are simply not rich enough to support such analyses.  There are already efforts underway to mine the available body of text for better ways to evaluate research.  Hirsch’s h-index, an alternative way of using citation counts to rank authors according to their influence, can be calculated online using Google ScholarBollen et al. have proposed a method for using Google’s PageRank as an alternative to the Impact Factor, as well as their own Y-factor which is a composite of the two measures.  The Open Citation Project built Citebase, an online citation tracker which has been used to show that downloads (which are measured in real-time from the moment of upload) can predict citations (for which data one must wait years).  Authoratory is a text-mining tool based on PubMed, and is capable of co-author analysis, authority ranking and more.

As the body of OA literature expands, these and similar tools will provide a far more reliable and equitable means of comparing researchers and research groups with their peers than is currently available, and will also facilitate the identification of trends and gaps in research focus.  The downstream effects of increased efficiency in managing and carrying out research will be profound.


commentary and community

Andrew Dayton recently described another feature of the coming Open Science world, which he calls Open Discourse:

The internet is expanding the realm of scientific publishing to include free and open public debate of published papers. […] How often have you asked yourself how a certain study was published unchallenged, without the results of a key control? How often have you wondered whether a paper’s authors performed a specific procedure correctly? How often have you had the opportunity to question authors about previously published or opposing results they failed to cite, or discuss the difficulties of reproducing certain results? How often have you had the opportunity to command a discussion of an internal contradiction the referees seemed to have missed?

Stevan Harnad has referred to a similar idea as peer commentary, calling it a “powerful and important supplement to peer review“.  It’s important to note that a number of journals, such as Current Anthropology or Psycoloquy, offer “open peer commentary” which is not actually open to public contribution.  Similarly, the phrase “open peer review” is typically used to indicate that reviewers are not anonymous, rather than that review is open to the public.  Neither of these pseudo-open concepts rely on “openness” in the Open Access/Open Science sense, whereas Open Discourse as Dayton means it is, of course, utterly dependent on such openness for its subject matter.

There are a number of venues which enable fully Open Discourse as Dayton means it.  OA publisher BioMed Central offers a public comment button on every article, and Cell allows public comments on selected articles.  BMC also publishes Biology Direct, which offers both an alternative model of peer review and public commentary, and PLoS has just launched PLoS One, offering standard peer review followed by public commentary, annotation and rating.  Philica will publish anything, and provides public commentary which can also serve as a form of peer review through an authentication process for professional researchers.  JournalReview.org is set up as an online public journal club, and Naboj is a forum for public review of articles posted to arxiv.org.   BioWizard is somewhat similar, but is limited to articles accessible via PubMed and offers a number of other tools, such as a blogging platform and a rating mechanism designed to identify popular papers.  Both JournalReview and BioWizard notify corresponding authors so that they can participate in the discussion.  The British Medical Journal offers a rapid response mechanism which, having posted over 50,000 public responses to published work, sounds a cautionary note for more recent arrivals on the public commentary scene: in 2005, the journal was forced to impose a length limit and active moderation in order to avoid losing the desired signal in a flood of uninformed, obsessive noise.

Speaking of floods of uninformed, obsessive noise — what about blogs?

Of course, I’m kidding.  I actually have high hopes for the future of blogs in science, centered on three themes: commentary, community and data.  Blogs are an excellent medium for commenting on anything, and with web feeds and a good aggregator it’s pretty easy to keep track of a selected group of blogs.  If Technorati worked, it might allow interesting views of the science blogosphere; fortunately, we have Postgenomic, which indexes nearly 700 science blogs and then “does useful and interesting things” with the data.  For instance, you can see which papers and/or books are getting attention from science bloggers; there’s even a Greasemonkey script that will flag Postgenomic-indexed papers in Connotea, Nature.com’s social bookmark manager for scientists, another for PubMed and yet another for journal websites.  A new Digg-like “community commentary” site, The Scientific Debate, allows trackbacks and so can interact with regular blogs.  The discussion above about text mining applies, of course, to blogs, since they are typically openly accessible and friendly to text mining software.  For instance, Biology Direct or PLoS One could interact with the blogosphere using linkbacks, or by pulling relevant posts from Postgenomic.

Blogs also tend to create virtual communities, such as the one that centers on Seed’s ScienceBlogs collection of, well, science blogs.  This group of about 50 blogs is rapidly becoming a hub of the science blogosphere, and even gave rise to a recent meatspace conference that bids fair to become an annual event.  Such self-selected communities foster a sense of cameraderie and strongly encourage co-operation over competition, which can only favor the advance of Open Science.  (It’s not just blogs, of course, that can take advantage of community building.  The Synaptic Leap, the Tropical Disease Initiative, OpenWetWare and BioForge all provide infrastructures that enable collaborative communities to do Open Science.)

Finally, blogs (and wikis) have immense potential as a scientific publishing medium.  They are, to begin with, the perfect place for things like negative results, odd observations and small side-projects — research results for which the risk of having an idea stolen is greatly outweighed by both the possibility of picking up a collaboration and the importance of having made available to the research community information which would never surface in a traditional journal.  Most research communities are relatively small; it would not be difficult for most researchers to keep up with the lab weblogs (lablogs?) of the groups doing work most closely related to their own.  I know of a few blog posts in this category.  This and this from Bora Zivkovic are, I think, the first instances of original data on a blog. This series from Sandra Porter is earlier but involves bioinformatic analysis (that is, original experimentation, but no original data), as do this and this from Pedro Beltrao.  Egon Willighagen blogs working software/scripts for cheminformatics, and Rosie Redfield and her students blog hypotheses, thinking-out-loud and even data.  Blogs are also good for sharing protocols, like the syntheses posted by the anonymous proprietor of Org Prep Daily.

Beyond that, it’s possible to do fully Open Science, publishing day-to-day results (including all raw data) in an online lab notebook.  I know it’s possible because Jean-Claude Bradley is doing it; he calls it Open Notebook Science.  His lab’s shared notebook is the UsefulChem wiki, which is supplemented by the UsefulChem blog for project discussion and the UsefulChem Molecules blog, a database of molecules related to their work.  There is nothing to prevent Jean-Claude from publishing traditional articles whenever he has the kind of “story” that is required for that format, but in the meantime all of his research output is captured and made available to the world.  Importantly, this includes information which would never otherwise have been published — negative results, inconclusive results, things which simply don’t fit into the narrative of any manuscript he prepares, and so on.  Being on a third-party hosted wiki, the notebook entries have time and date stamps which can establish priority if that should be necessary; version tracking provides another layer of authentication.

At the moment the Bradley lab is the only group I know of that is doing Open Notebook Science, but of all the glimpses of an Open Science world I have tried to provide in this entry, Jean-Claude’s model is, I think, the clearest and most hopeful.  Only when that level of transparency and immediacy is the norm in scientific communication will the research community be able to realize its full potential.


that’s all, folks

I promise, no more obsessive posting about Open Science here on 3QD.  If I’ve managed to pique anyone’s interest, I recommend reading Peter Suber’s Open Access News and anything else that takes your fancy from the “open access/open science” section of my blogroll.  And as always, if I’ve missed anything or got anything wrong, let me know in comments.

….

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Ocracoke Post: On the Case of the Da Vinci Code Appeal

Thank god, the lawyers of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are appealing the decision of a London court that Dan Brown did not plagiarize their book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, for his blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code. 2007 begins to look so much less drab when I consider the spectacle of this ongoing legal battle. Consider, Reader:

Clouseau

1. The pure cheek of the whole thing. Whether they win their appeal or not, surely the best thing that ever happened to Baigent and Leigh was Dan Brown, since their book tended to be displayed alongside The Da Vinci Code, unquestionably boosting its sales. (One of the authors was prominently featured in a History Channel “documentary” on the truth beyond the Da Vinci Code – There isn’t any, by the way. Or is there? No, there isn’t. Or is there?) And of course each new phase of the case is essentially a free advertising spot. There is no scenario in which any of the parties can lose, really, if one keeps in mind the fact that legal counsel is a tax-deductible business expense. I say fight it all the way to the supreme court of the European Union if necessary.

2. The world-historical implications for global capitalism at stake here, since it involves Random House kind of appearing to sue itself (because it published both books), or something, while simultaneously reaping the publicity benefits of any possible outcome – the late, great William Gaddis would have loved this case, and I wish he were alive to see it and write about it.

3. The exquisite legal paradox facing Baigent and Leigh. The fact is that their book, purporting to have found an ancient conspiracy leading back to a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, is a work of fiction. The irony of fate here is pretty sublime. Their plagiarism case would be much stronger if they had told the truth and said that they had made it all up. As it stands, however, the pretense of the conspiracy-theory genre forces the authors to pretend that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is based on actual research etc. rather than being a fabrication of two very inventive minds.

4. What does all this imply about Dan Brown? It’s possible that he is only a figurehead or sort of corporate entity (“Dan Brown”) that involves the research genius of his wife, Blythe, and some sort of marketing genius (the real Dan Brown or his agent, etc.) who has mastered the art of narrative cliffhangers to such a degree that even a complete inability to write English prose doesn’t get in the way of the story. (Please read Anthony Lane’s priceless review of the film here; Mr. Lane made it all worthwhile.)

A Final Note: The ultimate Da Vinci Code experience, for my money, is neither the book nor the film, but the audiobook. The actor they hired to narrate, Paul Michael, is a very competent person, and I mean no real disrespect to him. But he is male, and this hopeless job forces him to do the female dialog in an sort of falsetto Inspector Clouseau French accent that makes hottie archaeologist Sophie Neveu, supposedly a descendant of Jesus Christ, sound like a breathless tranny. “My grandfather, my grandfather…” Oh my, Sophie, tell me more!

Read an excerpt from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Negotiations 10: Les Demoiselles

From January 25 until March 3 of this year, Cindy Workman is exhibiting twelve new works—inkjet prints all—at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York City. I have been a fan of hers for several years, and the current series is in my opinion some of her finest work to date. She is an artist at play in the world, and the stuff is arresting, provocative, curious, charged, and suffused with what I can only describe as a kind of tempered joy. The opening is on this Thursday, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Do not miss this show.

She has entitled it “les demoiselles,” and I got the sense from looking at each print that Ms. Workman had chosen to break Picasso’s large canvass into its constitutive elements, so that what we get is a series of neo-cubist portraits, in which many surfaces are present at once, and the cumulative effect of which is a larger portrayal—and hence, interrogation—of contemporary female identity, what it is and how it is constructed and experienced. Layering drawings of idealized girls taken from the envelopes of sewing patterns on top of or behind soft-core porn shots from the 1950’s, and then blending them into a single composition, Workman creates images that are simultaneously familiar and jarring. These women are sexualized in ways familiar to us all, but inappropriately so. One is attracted and repulsed at the same time. Imagine looking at what appears to be a little girl, only to realize that she is a woman who, in her attempt to look like a sexy little girl, has had too much plastic surgery—and you begin to get the idea. (Conversely, imagine that you are looking at what appears to be a voluptuous sex object, only to discover that you are seeing a little girl in a sailor’s outfit…)

Breasts are prominent in these works, in part because for Workman they are a source of identity for women and in part because their exposure renders that very identity exposed. Workman isn’t just asking you what it means to have breasts; she is asking you what it means to be a breast-having-object, what it means to be an object whose existence depends on having breasts and what it means to want to be such an object: what it means to be a commodity whose consumer appeal is proportional to the heft and shape of one’s breasts. Workman, however, is not making anti-porn, anti-consumer agitprop. There is nothing hectoring or scolding in or about these pieces. The subjects know that you are looking at their breasts, and you are invited, even expected to do so. The result is art as a kind of reportage, an art that talks about things we can’t otherwise talk about.

In “les demoiselles,” Workman continues her practice of collage, but this time the background is stripped out. This, to me, is where things get very interesting indeed. The subjects appear in color fields (the artist described one to me as “Indescribable pink. Pinky-mauve. Dirty-bright pink.”)—hues in which they are suspended and from which they are irretrievably separated. They will never again dress in the colors that surround them. This composition of containment lends to the subjects an auratic, glowing, elevated status—they have become archetypes of sexualized femininity—but that very elevation cuts them off from the world in which they appear and exist. That woman surrounded by pink, hovering in pink, one feels, will never again experience pink. She has exchanged for her elevated status the very quality that made that status possible; it is lost to her, and she to it. She is eternally lonely, and these works are a profound meditation on the contemporary condition of loneliness.

After looking at each print, I had to admit to Ms. Workman that she had put my back-brain and my super-ego in conflict. I found the work sexy; I knew I shouldn’t, for many reasons; but I couldn’t help myself. I practically apologized for that. She just laughed. That’s part of the point, I realized. And then she said it for me: “That’s because men are more visual, and women are more cerebral.” Indeed. This show makes that clear, and brilliantly so. Touché, Ms. Workman.

The Bollywood Babe and Big(ot) Brother

Big Brother. Not the leader of Orwell’s claustrophobic dystopia, but a brightly coloured reality TV show format, that has waded into controversy in the UK this week. Screenhunter_06_jan_21_2109British viewers watched the programme with increasing discomfort, as loutish English celebrities bullied (and most say, racially abused) well known Bollywood actress, Shilpa Shetty, live on air.

The Big Brother concept has made a pretty packet for its creator, Endemol, the brainchild of Dutchman, John de Mol, with the format being successfully sold to broadcasters in no less than 70 countries – most of which have been prime time hits. The format of the programme is simple. Contestants enter the “Big Brother” house to win cash prizes, or in celebrities’ cases “money for a favourite charity” although they are normally paid a hefty fee to turn up in the first place (in Shilpa Shetty’s case, a reputed £350,000). To win, contestants must avoid nominations for eviction from their housemates, with the public deciding whom amongst those nominated will ultimately get the boot. It could be a social experiment in hippy, free-loving communal living, except that the point of Big Brother is to foster division, arguments, and sexual tension, all of which makes for great ratings.

To a great deal of surprise, Shilpa “the Body” Shetty, a Bollywood siren, with at least 50 movies under her belt, and a command of 8 languages, shimmied off Bollywood screens and into the UK’s “celebrity” version of Big Brother at the beginning of this month. Given her 15 million pound fortune, and true A-list credentials, nobody understood why she would want to enter the Big Brother house with a bunch of International and British low life celebrities, the best of the bunch being, Dirk Benedict, yes “the Face” from the now defunct A Team, and Jermaine Jackson, brother of the now defunct Michael Jackson.

In doing so, the clearly successful Shilpa, has attracted a great deal of envy from the worst of the bunch: three non-entity, female English celebrities, who are famous for very little apart from once being in manufactured pop bands, or, indeed once having been in other reality TV shows. Jealousy, envy, and misunderstanding soon descended into intermittent slanging matches, and a clear policy of segregation. The bullies have mocked the laxative-like properties of her Indian cooking, made frequent silly jokes about Indians and India, said Miss Shetty should “fuck off back home”, repetitively mimicked and mocked her accent, excluded her from their conversations, refused to sit next to her in communal areas, and one woman – insisting that “Shilpa” was unpronounceable – opted to call her “the Indian” instead. Ms Shetty, while bearing the treatment with a great deal of dignity, has broken down on a number of occasions.

The issue has become emotive, and has been blown sky high. On Monday last week, Ofcom, the UK TV regulator, had received 2,000 complaints from the viewing public asking that the programme be pulled off the air – more complaints than had ever been received in relation to a single programme. By Tuesday, Asian MP, Keith Vaz, had tabled a motion in Parliament and by Wednesday Tony Blair expressed criticism of the show in the Commons. In the meantime, the hapless Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer (and Prime Minister in waiting) found himself in India struggling to reassure Indians that Britain prided itself on “fairness and tolerance”, as Shilpa Shetty’s treatment was brought up in press conferences, meetings with junior ministers, and finally with Manmohan Singh himself. By Thursday, the Carphone Warehouse, Big Brother’s main sponsor had withdrawn its £3 million sponsorship deal citing racism, and the perfume line brought out by one of the celebrity bullies was taken off the shelves. By Friday, David Cameron, leader of the opposition, urged viewers to “switch off”, and complaints at Ofcom had reached the heady heights of 30,000. Most worryingly of all, Gordon Brown, still stuck in India, and faced with public demonstrations and the smell of burning effigies, declared “a vote for Shilpa is a vote for Britain”. We knew then, that the shit had really hit the fan.

Finally, on Friday evening, the main instigator of the bullying, Jade Goody, was voted out of the Big Brother House, after a week of national soul searching, and a five day stretch of the programme continuously hitting the headlines in both the broadsheets and the tabloids. Every single person I have met over the past week has raised the issue, from my doorman, to the guys at work, to my most self interested friends, usually oblivious to the world around them. This is publicity no money could buy.

While people have been piling over each other to comment on the matter, it is Meera Syal, the comedian, who has hit the nail on the head. She says “What this treatment of Shilpa has done is remind a lot of Asian people in Britain of the type of uncomfortable treatment they’ve received themselves over the years.” Asians switched on in droves and worked themselves up into a kind of collective rage. They then switch on the PC in droves and sent hundreds of emails of complaint in a kind of collective avengement. It seems there is nothing that brings the Indian diaspora together like a Bollywood star being bullied – I should know, after just two days of watching the programme to see what all the fuss was about, I found myself angrily logging on to the Ofcom website along with everyone else.

Has the whole incident been blown out of all sensible proportion? On one level the answer is a clear yes. Why should playground taunts on a reality TV programme engage the public so much, when there are far more serious issues out there? At the end of the day, all the celebrities in the house will be evicted, collect their fat pay checks, and return to their lives of varying privilege. The Big Brother house, despite its tag of Reality TV, certainly isn’t any of the contestants’ true reality.

And yet, the BBC Asian Network has described the issue as their biggest story ever – bigger than Saddam’s botched execution, bigger than Inzamman Ul Haq’s cricket ban, bigger than the rise of the British National Party in last local elections. My view is, why should we all act so surprised? Every Asian in this country has experienced some degree of petty racism in some form or the other, and suffered some kind of silent grievance. This issue has shown that the Asian community in the UK, when united, is a force to be reckoned with. While no one would deny that a number of English viewers complained about the programme, it was the Asian community that forced the issue with regulators, the TV producers, and an Asian MP who forced the issue onto the floor of parliament.

What most members of minority communities know is that petty racism is much easier to identify with, than out and out racial abuse. Most of us would agree that we live in a broadly tolerant society, and certainly a society that has shown itself time and time again, to have at least, the right ideals, even if it sometimes falls short of them. But watching the treatment meted out to Shilpa Shetty, has served to highlight how difficult it is to identify racism. It would have been easier if one of the other contestants broke, and simply called her a paki. But instead we saw the singling out, the bitching, the bullying, and the creeping isolation that the Indian celebrity was subjected to. We were only able to put two and two together, because the programme enabled us to listen in to the conversations between the perpetrators who disclosed a number of ignorant and racist views. The frustrating thing was that Shilpa Shetty suspected she was the target of racial discrimination on some level, but had no way to prove it.

It was this, I suspect, that rankled most with Asian viewers – that we could see it happening, but she could not. Many of us could identify with the slow and painful realisation that we are encountering prejudice, but are defenceless against it, because it is simply a gut feeling that cannot be proved. Despite the pro equality policies, and the anti discrimination legislation in this country, calling treatment racist, is often still seen as playing the race card, and secretly people wonder whether the complainant is being overly sensitive, and to be quite frank, really rather weak. While racism is not a word that should be used lightly, many of us are frustrated, that we cannot call it like we see it.

The attitude of the broadcasters fuelled this frustration. Channel 4 knew that the row over racism was TV gold, but that continuing to air the programme (or at least refusing to discipline the offending housemates) could put both the producers and the channel at risk of race relations offences, and their public funding, and broadcasting license, at serious risk. The channel’s statements to the press, and official stance on the matter, were a case book study in legal obfuscation. Rather than mention the dirty “r” word, the producers first put Ms Shetty’s treatment down to “girly rivalry”. They then upgraded their assessment to “bullying”, and finally, when the issue exploded into international politics, put the whole thing down to a “clash of class and culture”, rather than racism. It was clear that the programme’s lawyers were busily working away in the background. Channel 4’s latest stance, has been that the programme has served the public interest in that it had helped to promote a discussion of racial tolerance – the language could have been lifted from the duties incumbent on the broadcaster under recent race relations legislation.

The dust has now settled, but this has been a fairly incredible week for race relations in this country. All of us watched while Shilpa Shetty, after a ninety minute conversation with the programme’s producers in the Big Brother House (reportedly persuading her that she had not suffered racism, and that an allegation of racism, would only harm her interests) made a statement that she did not think her treatment was a racist. In a twist, Jade Goody, has acknowledged that her behaviour in the house was racist, and has asked for forgiveness in true Mel Gibson style, clearly alive to the fact that her career is going down the toilet.

A number of other race related stories, have also floated into the news in the wake of Big Brother publicity. Most notably, the case of a criminal who had refused treatment from a Pakistani police surgeon, calling him a “fucking paki” and asking for an English doctor instead. Charged with racial harassment, a judge told the defendant that he should have called the doctor “a fat bastard” instead. Rather than taking anti discrimination seriously, it is clear that some, even those in power, are simply fostering, or permitting discriminatory treatment while ensuring the language used cannot be caught by the law. The important thing for people of this ilk, are the legal loopholes, and not the spirit of the law itself.

I must say that, despite my knee-jerk complaints to Ofcom, in retrospect, I am incredibly grateful this programme was not pulled off the air. It has exposed the sometimes two-faced response of the authorities to allegations of racism. It has also exposed the British viewing public to be unconditionally fair, and egalitarian – a public that I am glad to be part of. But most importantly, this year’s Big Brother has allowed the Asian viewing public to state categorically what is, and is not, accepted to be racist behaviour with a sense that they have every right to be here, and a confidence that they are welcome.

Monday, January 15, 2007

A Case of the Mondays: Religion is Like Race

A lot of secularists mistakenly believe that religious discrimination is somehow different from racial discrimination. The tipping point that drove me to write this article was reading about Sam Harris’s beliefs about the acceptability of denying Muslims basic civil rights. Since being religious is a choice, the argument goes, there’s no real analogy between religion and race.

But in fact, religion is very much like skin color, in that it’s an ethnic marker. Endogamous cultural groups can be distinguished on the basis of language, color, national origin, or creed. In the US, the difference between blacks and whites is about color while this between Hispanics and Anglos is a combination of color and language. In Bosnia, the difference between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats was entirely religious, as is the difference between Sunnis and Shi’as in Iraq. The exact nature of the difference rarely matters; there’s no material difference between distinctions based on religion and distinctions based on skin color.

Like the other ethnic markers, religion is intimately connected to group identities. Even apostates often have some cultural connection to religious customs: secular Jews hold Passover Seders ex-Christian atheists usually celebrate Christmas, and secular Muslims in Turkey tend not to eat pork. Ontologically, Stephen Roberts made sense when he said, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Sociologically, he didn’t, because a person’s religious identity tends to be independent of what religion he adheres to. This religious identity is weaker among secular people, but it doesn’t disappear entirely, as Bosnians discovered in the early 1990s; analogously, linguistic identity is weaker among polyglots than among monoglots, and racial identity is weaker among people whose social circle is racially mixed than among people whose social circle is racially uniform.

And politically, it’s easier to understand conflicts when one regards religion as just another ethnic variable. The Bosnian genocide involved peoples who differed only in religious markers, but proceeded like any non-religious ethnic conflict. Al Qaida provided aid to the Muslims, while Russia sided with the Eastern Orthodox Serbs; however, that religious sense of kinship was hardly different from the pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements that fueled World War One. Of Iraq’s three constituent groups, two are distinguished based solely on ethnicity and language, while two are distinguished based solely on religion.

Further, group distinctions can morph over time. European anti-Semitism began as exclusively religious in the Middle Ages. As Jews accumulated money in the late Middle Ages, it became increasingly a class issue, and then, during the Enlightenment, focused more on culture and less on religion. By the late 19th century, it became racial, reflecting an overall increase in the prevalence of racial pseudoscience in Europe; it has had a strong racial component ever since. But that story will reveal very little about the exact ways anti-Semites hurt Jews. A more instructive way of characterizing it is that anti-Semitism has been populist for most of its history, but was systemic between roughly 1890 and 1945.

The artificial division of religious and nonreligious distinctions seems by and large restricted to the secular West. It’s a mistake endemic to atheist activists, like Harris or Richard Dawkins, that religious conflicts will disappear if atheism only gains more credence. In fact, although religious fundamentalism has been a motivating force behind Western supremacist views, the Western elites justify supremacist views based entirely on secular arguments. Samuel Huntington doesn’t say that the West is special because the Reformation’s theology is the best of all the theologies of major religions and denominations; he says the West is special because of its mix of human rights, democracy, and separation of church and state.

Ultimately, this is a conflation of two different dimensions of religious distinctions. The first, the one between secularism and fundamentalism, is what is most familiar to people who are only familiar with one religion, such as most Westerners. That distinction is similar to distinctions between liberals and conservatives, and has very little to do with ethnic markers. But there’s another distinction, that between different religions. Plural religious societies, such as those of India or Iraq or even those Islamic societies that are in regular contact with the West, tend to emphasize that distinction instead.

This conflation allows a lot of people to hold beliefs about religious groups whose racial equivalents are too racists for any member of the Western elite to fathom. For example, take the idea that Islam is inherently degrading to women. In a way it is, but so is Christianity; the implicit idea is that Christianity is superior to Islam, because Christianity has been less successful at defending its misogynist traditions than Islam. Arguments rarely get more self-contradictory than that, but the conflation of cross-religious differences with the difference between secularity and religion effectively masks that contradiction.

But in fact, there’s little difference between distinctions of religion and distinctions of language or race. Different religions have different practices, but that hardly merits a special mention, in light of the different customs of different nationalities or cultural groups. In particular, discrimination and conflict have very little to do with whether the bone of contention is religious or national. Very rarely, religious groups will wage an ideological religious battle, as in the Crusades. More frequently, religion will be a proxy for something else—nationalism in the cases of Al Qaida, Israel, and Palestine; racism in the case of Western anti-Muslim attitudes; and a combination of racism and class consciousness in India.

The common secularist belief that every religious conflict can be analyzed in the same way as American-style culture wars is just not true. Most people never choose their own religion in the same way secularists chose to be nonreligious. In practice, religion works more like skin color than like the secular/religious spectrum; holding supremacist views about one religion is racism; and massacring people of a different religion is genocide.

Random Walks: Shuffling the Cards

FoolPast, present and future are literally in the cards for the characters that populate Charles Williams‘ 1932 novel The Greater Trumps. Curmudgeonly, perpetually dissatisfied Lothair Coningsby, a Warden of Lunacy having a bit of a mid-life crisis, has inherited a collection of rare decks of cards from a late close friend. Among them is a hand-painted deck of Italian tarot cards, dated circa mid-15th century, that turns out to be very special indeed.

It is the original tarot deck, and corresponds to miniature golden figures that move as if by magic across a golden plate, in an intricate interlocking pattern that seems to defy human understanding. Each figure corresponds to a card in the deck: four suits, each with 10 numbered cards, and four “court cards” (Page, Knight, Queen and King), plus the so-called “Greater Trumps,” or Major Arcana. In the midst of all those figures is The Fool, or Nought, which anchors the entire deck and yet doesn’t seem to move at all (or does it, if one only has eyes to see)?

But this particular tarot deck isn’t just about the symbolism; it possesses real power over the traditional four elements (earth, air, fire and water). As Henry Lee, the gypsy-blooded fiance of Nancy Coningsby explains, “It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire.” (Indeed, when he and Nancy put the cards to the test, her shuffling does indeed produce actual dirt.) “That’s of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it’s said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the ever-lasting dance.” The Fool is the key to understanding that great cosmic dance, enabling the one with that comprehension to predict the future based on the present. Henry Lee and his grandfather desperately want to have that power, and their desire fuels the events that ultimately unfold — first with catastrophic, then with sublime, results.

Williams is hardly a household name in today’s literary circles. He is one of the lesser known members of the so-called Oxford Inklings. (C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are the most famous members.) He was forced to leave University College London before completing his degree for financial reasons, but that didn’t keep him from pursuing a life of letters, and eventually acquiring an honorary master’s degree for his trouble.

He worked (initially as a proofreading assistant) at Oxford University Press from 1908 until his death in 1945, work which apparently left him plenty of time to write. In addition to his novels, he wrote Arthurian poetry, numerous works of literary criticism, and The Figure of Beatrice, an analysis of the Divine Comedy that is still cited by today’s Dante scholars. When the Press moved from London to Oxford after the outbreak of World War II, Williams began attending the Inkling meetings on a regular basis, getting their input on his final novel, All Hallow’s Eve, and having the privilege of hearing some of the earlier drafts of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy-in-progress.

Like Lewis, Williams was a devout Christian, but his belief system had a few odd quirks, with more than a hint of mysticism and a fascination with classical philosophy and pagan myths. That pagan/mystic bent infuses all his novels, in which supernatural forces routinely impinge on ordinary daily lives, transforming his characters in the process. Doppelgangers, succubi, ghosts, palmistry, the Holy Grail, African tribal lore, and the Platonic archetypes all make appearances in Williams’ fiction. He briefly belonged to the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — which is probably where he acquired his familiarity with the tarot cards that play such a central role in The Greater Trumps. (The Golden Dawn established most of the various “meanings” associated with modern tarot cards.)Charleswilliams_1

Tarot decks have a murky, frequently disputed history; the Wikipedia entry is littered with missing citations and cautionary notes. But the bits of history Williams relates in The Greater Trumps is fairly accurate, considering their mysterious provenance. While there are many legends that purport to tie tarot decks with ancient Egypt, there is no reliable evidence for this. Historians generally agree that generic playing cards first appeared in Europe in the late 14th century, probably migrating over from Islamic Spain, and there is certainly a tradition of using more traditional decks for divination purposes. Tarot as a game seems to have emerged in the early to mid-15th century in Northern Italy: a normal deck of 52 cards, to which the  21 carte da trionfi (“triumph cards”) were added, along with the Fool.

Tarot decks were used for gaming at first; written records of their use in divination don’t appear until the 18th century, when they became quite popular with leading occultists of that period, and became associated with magic and mysticism. The alleged Egyptian connection is attributed to a Swiss clergyman named Antoine Court de Gebelin, who believed the popular Tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and the Egyptian Book of Thoth. (It wasn’t true, but nonetheless the legend spread.) A prominent French occultist named Alliette used the tarot to tell fortunes just before the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, was fascinated by tarot readings, which helped popularize them further. Today, the most widely used deck in the US is the Rider-Waite Tarot, featuring images drawn by artist Pamela Colman-Smith in accordance with the instruction of Christian mystic/occultist Arthur Edward Waite, first published in 1910. (Both Waite and Smith were members of the Golden Dawn.)

No doubt because of the rich complexity of their symbolism, tarot cards figure in almost every artistic medium imaginable. For instance, Bizet’s Carmen has a pivotal scene in which Carmen and her two gypsy pals read their fortunes in the cards. Her friends see love and wealth, but the doomed Carmen can only see her own death. Sci-fi author Roger Zelazny has his characters in the Amber fantasy series use magical decks of tarot cards to communicate with each other (each of the Major Arcana represents a character). Television is rife with tarot references: the decks are a major feature in the HBO series Carnivale, and have been featured in episodes of the 1994 teen drama My So-Called life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and (more recently) Monk. Woody Allen’s latest film, Scoop, features a serial killer in London whose signature is a tarot card left at the crime scenes. And the cards have become an art form in and of themselves: all manner of uniquely designed decks have cropped up, from mystical New Age decks like the Tarot of the Cat People, to decks based on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, and even a deck devoted to computer geeks, where the major arcana cards include The Hacker, Flame War, and The Garage. (The suits are Networks, Cubicles, Disks and Hosts, while the court cards are the CIO, the Salesman, the Marketer and the New Hire.)

Clearly, tarot cards hold a fascination for us that has little to do with divination, igniting our imaginations in some very intriguing ways. I learned how to read tarot spreads myself in the 1990s — not because I attribute any special powers to either myself or the cards, but because I was fascinated by their symbolism and how they could be arranged in so many different combinations to essentially tell a story. There are certain universal elements that seem to resonate with the human psyche, and these are built into the tarot design, and the associated meanings of each card. Noted psychologist Carl Jung was fascinated by tarot symbolism — like me, not because he ascribed to them any mystical powers, but for what those symbols revealed about human nature in general, and the specific fixations and subconscious yearnings of his patients.

Jung might have been onto something. People do seem to crave reassurance about their decisions and direction in life, even if their “fortunes” merely serve to reinforce what their gut instincts have already determined. They look to things like crystals, tarot cards, and astrology, in addition to psychotherapy, as one means of getting that reassurance — and perhaps as an avenue to acquiring deeper self-knowledge. A recent article in the Washington Post by the self-described “spiritually sensitive” Rachel Machacek relates her experiences visiting five different psychics in a single day as an exercise in determining whether there is anything to be gained by such ventures. She concludes:

“My day of fortunetelling included some nerve-jangling moments. And it got me thinking about where I’d been, my current situation and what the future holds for me. And I suppose that’s the point of any therapy: awareness and acknowledgment of your issues, and moving forward guided by positive forces.”

That’s the sort of mushy, unfocused, vaguely New Age sentiment that sets a skeptic’s teeth on edge, especially if said skeptic has any background in science. After all, science is predicated on our ability to make accurate predictions about the world based on precise, universal physical laws, using the language of mathematics. Well, sort of: things can get a bit weird at the subatomic level, where we can only assign probabilites, because the very act of observing something causes it to change, such that any information we glean about, say, an electron is no longer valid a moment later.  We can use science to make useful predictions about some things, but not others: the weather, for instance, remains unpredictable beyond a few days, and while statistical analysis can help traders on Wall Street better navigate the rising and falling of the stock market, it can’t determine those fluctuations with 100% accuracy. There are just too many variables.

So, while the old Pythagorean notion of the music of the celestial spheres might have fallen by the wayside, that doesn’t mean Nature isn’t engaged in an elaborately intricate dance all her own. Williams’ novel even cites the movement of electrons (discovered just a few decades earlier) as being among those steps. Nature’s dance includes “everything that changes, and there is nothing nowhere that does not change,” and it is that change that makes the future so hard to predict. Even if the characters in The Greater Trumps can pin down one exact moment, in a flash, that moment is over and their observation is no longer accurate.

And it can change in a myriad of different directions, each change begetting more change, branches upon branches in the evolutionary timeline.  Replay the same scene and alter just one tiny element, and you may find — as meteorologist Edward Lorenz did in the 1960s when he sought to create a predictive model for the weather — that things play out in entirely different ways, with dramatically different outcomes. Our fortunes, the twists and turns in the road of human life, just have too many variables. In their own way, the fictional Henry Lee and his gypsy grandfather are pursuing a sort of science, seeking absolute truth in a constantly changing world. But as physicist Richard Feynman once shrewdly observed, Nature doesn’t always willingly reveal her secrets. Certain elements of the great cosmic dance seem to be always hovering just beyond our ken — which is what makes life so interesting. We continually seek new knowledge and greater understanding, and this in turn raises new questions and mysteries to be solved. It is, indeed, a never-ending cosmic dance.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette writes about science and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics. Her latest book, The Physics of the Buffyverse, has just been published by Penguin.

Below the Fold: Getting Concrete about Equality by Educating Girls and Women

A month ago in 3QD, I argued that microfinance wouldn’t eliminate poverty or do much in advancing global economic equality. Two weeks ago, I proposed that it’s no use thinking you can eliminate global poverty without achieving economic equality, something now supported by even the World Bank. Equality eliminates poverty, but poverty elimination doesn’t achieve equality. It produces people who are less poor at best, and who are not able to protect any economic gains they might make via poverty reduction programs. Several months ago, I argued that poor countries could not close the inequality gap between them and us without rich countries sharing some of their wealth.

One 3QD respondent asked, given my dim view of microfinance, what I would propose instead. I want to take up one proposal and show how it would be superior to more investments in microfinance.

Suppose you want to invest a dollar with the goal of increasing world economic equality, and so you are considering how to make that dollar work to the best advantage of poor people in poor countries. Consider subsidizing poor family incomes by rewarding people for keeping their girls in school. That is, give a family that keeps its daughters in school a monthly income supplement for every girl in school.

The Benefits of Educating Girls and Subsidizing Families to Do It

StreetpicWhy? Because economists and poor people’s advocates alike will tell you that spending money to put poor girls through school is the best way to build sustainable and poverty-free economies. Further, girls’ education is key to achieving gender equality, and as an added benefit, a family subsidy helps reduce poverty at home. Not incidentally, if people are induced to put girls through school, the evidence suggests that they will endeavor to keep their boys in school too.

The economic benefits are significant. Economies grow faster the more education women have. Not only do societies produce more because they have more workers, productivity improves because you are enabling the least qualified persons to be more qualified for more difficult and rewarding work. At the same time, one need not settle for improvement solely in the relatively small industrial economies of poor countries. Educated rural women improve agricultural productivity as well – a significant step forward for poor societies considering that women perform the lion’s share of agricultural labor.

Women with more education in poor countries have children who live longer, are better fed, and experience better cognitive development. The children are more likely to be immunized against basic infectious diseases. Increased women’s earnings are also more likely to be used to support children than if men remained the sole money source of the family.

As economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers argues, educating young girls is the best single investment a poor society can make.

How Does It Work in Mexico?

Tassawur Increasing girls’ school attendance by providing their families with income supplements is not cheap. Mexico has an exemplary program of providing monthly stipends for keeping poor children in school. Though the state pays a subsidy for every poor boy and girl, more is paid for the education of a girl. The further the girl goes in her schooling, the monthly stipend increases so that, for example, when a girl reaches her third year in secondary school, her family receives a monthly grant equivalent to 46% of an agricultural worker’s monthly income.

The results have been terrific. School enrollments have grown by as much as 17% in the crucial higher grades, a time when children are often taken out of school to work in the fields. Now girls attend middle school in roughly equal proportion to boys, and both sexes have now passed the 75% rate of school attendance.

As I said, the program is not cheap. In 2004, the program did reach 5 million poor Mexican households, twenty percent of all Mexican households. The cost, 2.3 billion dollars a year, is certainly a lot of money, but proportionately is only 1.5% of the Mexican federal government’s budget, and a fraction of 1% of the Mexican national output.

Suppose you took the same dollar and put it as capital into non-profit microfinance. You might be surprised to find out that providing poor people with small loans to start and improve small businesses costs much more on a mass basis than educating their children and subsidizing their monthly incomes. The United Nations Capital Development Fund, the sponsor of an initiative to spread microfinance operations worldwide, but especially among poor people in poor countries, estimated in 2005 that it takes 22 billion dollars to adequately serve the microfinance needs of 100 million poor people.

Let’s do the math for Mexico. Half of Mexico’s 100 million people, or 50 million people, are poor. So, if we were to provide Mexico’s poor with adequate microfinance funds, it would cost us 11 billion dollars a year, or half of what the United Nations estimates is needed to cover 100 million poor people.

In contrast, suppose we provide education subsidies to all poor families sending their children to school, and for as long as they attend school. Right now, as noted above, the supplement program covers 20% of all households. Given that I do not have average Mexican household size by income handy, I ask your indulgence here. I am assuming for the purposes of the argument that the average size of a Mexican household is the same from top to bottom of the income distribution. In other words I am supposing that the 50 million Mexicans (half the population) whom we know live in poverty compose half, or 12.5 million of Mexico’s 25 million households. That means that the education subsidy program would have to be increased two and a half times its present rate of 2.3 billion dollars a year to cover all poor families. This would cost approximately 5.75 billion dollars year.

There is a certain dumb luck, perhaps, in how symmetrical the numbers here turn out to be.

An anti-poverty program that by supporting girls’ education increases the prospects for ultimately greater economic and gender equality while providing cash income support to all Mexico’s poor households costs a little more than half as much as availing them of microfinance. Even assuming poor households are significantly larger than rich and middle class households, the difference between the cost of microfinance and the cost of education subsidies is large enough to cover any mistakes made in estimating the number of poor children with change to spare.

The difference between Mexico and very poor countries is that Mexico, at least, has the state funds to provide education subsidies on a large-scale basis. If the lesson that education support is better and cheaper than microfinance holds, rich countries in assisting very poor countries will need to provide proportionately more money support. Being a very poor country means lower incomes and few state resources. Again, though, it seems to make more sense than pumping up the poor with microfinance.

The worldwide campaign to make microfinance the key to eliminating poverty and improving economic opportunities for the poor looks both expensive and likely to be ineffective, I hope my previous column Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime? gave you reasons why in principle you should not support microfinance. Recall too that microfinance has not been shown to measurably reduce poverty in poor countries, and almost by definition cannot be expected to help eliminate economic inequality. Quite the contrary: if it works well, microfinance should create a probably a minority stratum of small business people who by their success would be a cut above the poor. Microfinance, if it succeeds, then, could actually increase economic inequality in poor countries.

Well, reader, place your bets. Where would you, and where should we, put that dollar to work? Education for poor girls that puts money in their parents’ pockets or small, high-interest loans for a minority of their mothers in high-risk enterprises? Me, I’m sticking with Larry Summers, perhaps for the first time in my life.

Next time, I will write about global, universal health care.

‘Asking Auden’

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

To commemorate the centenary of the birth of the poet W. H. Auden which falls on 21 February, 2007 I am posting my poem ‘Asking Auden’ written in 1984 and first published in A Temporary Grace in 1991.

                   Asking Auden

‘Who,’ the inquisitive will ask
‘Was he?’ A writer who spoke honestly
Of his time and character
On this abrasive satellite,
Acknowledging the muck
Words can make whole.

Don’t get uptight
Or too plastered
As you prime your pals—
Chester, Igor, Rhoda;
Think of this poor planet,
Rotten with bad sorts
And horrors greater than any
Ever imagined before.

I can hear you bitching on,
Calling out the old complaints:
Frog effusions are offensive.
Why are people always late!,
Looking like a scruff and dropping
Ash upon the Muses.

Wystan, tend attentive ears,
Bless us on the earth below,
Sens a rhyming, mystic message,
Drop it in the Grand Canal
Where The Rake was first presented
And your hotel rooms were bad.
Let the gondala ferry forward
Through the reeking air and slush,
Bringing with it new precision,
Agape and eros, beauty,
Mastery of form and space.
Wystan! Please stop gossiping,
Listen to my plea,
Send unconscious powers aplenty,
Send the critics out to sea.

Suddenly a voice is heard,
Genial features looming:
These interruptions just won’t do.
Be yourself without my help.
Be true to truth and ready for the worst.
Work hard and don’t expect
That God is easily pleased!

With that he sighed, sat back, relaxed,
Ethereally smoked, and drank a glass of schnapps.

A promise then, remembering
The folds of that transatlantic face—
To summon up fresh energy
For the new century of the race
Called sapiens, whose language grabs
From past and future tense
Continuing words of grace.

Chester, Igor, Rhoda: Chester Kallman, Igor Stravinsky, Rhoda Jaffe

The Rake: The Rake’s Progress, opera premiered in Venice September 11, 1951, libretto Auden/Kallman

Sandlines: Can Africa’s Pygmies be ‘made equal’?

Jared Diamond’s overarching thesis in Guns Germs and Steel—that the fate of human societies is largely determined by their capacity for food production—is beguiling for its simplicity, and for the tapestry of learning he brings to its defense. To some, it is the versatile pragmatism of the thesis that seduces. For others, any attempt at a unified field theory of human progress bears the mark of the devil and cannot, de facto, hold water.

The source of my affinity for the theory lies, I confess, rather with the man’s Norwegian homesteader beard: such a countenance cannot not be trusted. See the DVD version of GGS, with Diamond traversing the globe and expounding his theory alongside hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea and weeping in African HIV hostels, to appreciate his truly endearing qualities. Your next move might be, as mine was, to scour the consumer parking lot of Ebay for a lifesize, cardboard cut-out likeness of Professor Diamond to stand guard over your living room.

Jared_diamond

‘By accident of their geographic location’, Diamond likes to say, societies either inherit or develop food production capacities that in turn facilitate population density, germs, political organization, technology, and other ‘ingredients of power’. Diamond applies this reading to a number of human societies, including those on the losing end of history. And they lose, it turns out, by the sheer accident of their less endowed natural environment. For the world’s remaining indigenous peoples, particularly those whose mode of production is dominated by hunting game and gathering wild foods, their geographic locations may be diverse or dull, fertile or barren. Common to their respective natural environments is an absence of plant and animal species suitable for domestication and cultivation, an obvious pre-requisite for the creation of surplus.

Africa’s most renowned hunter-gatherer groups, the Pygmies[1] of Central Africa and the Khoisan or ‘San’ of the Kalahari Desert, are surrounded by a cornucopia of edible plants and wild game. Diamond examines the dominant flora and fauna in these two regions to show that that neither Pygmies nor San—or their farming neighbors—have succeeded in domesticating a single native plant or animal species for cultivation. Sub-Saharan Africa’s crops and livestock, like the practice of cultivating them, are all non-indigenous. Both the practices and the raw materials were gradually imported over centuries by invading Bantu farmers from West Africa[2] and, to a lesser degree, by colonizing whites. Both San and Pygmy hunter-gatherers were engulfed by a Bantu majority, to which they reacted by further compressing into their respective natural habitats.[3]

As minority hunter-gatherers surrounded by a farming majority, Central Africa’s Pygmies have fared far worse than the San of the Kalahari. Unlike the Pygmies, San hunter-gatherers retained their original language and lifestyle—against forced modernization efforts by the Botswana government—by remaining geographically concentrated in a harsh desert world whose sole monetary resource is subterranean (diamonds). Not so for Pygmy groups. Seeing their forest world first conquered by outsiders, then divided into protected reserves and game parks, and now increasingly deforested and mined by extractive industries, Pygmies have scattered into a thin diaspora across nine different countries. Displacement and ensuing marginalization has not meant banishment from their forest home, but Pygmies did lose their original language in the process, attesting to the extent of their self-estrangement.

_41690914_pygmy_203_bbcOver the last five years, I have had two occasions to work with different Pygmy groups in the Congo, and hope to again this year. In both instances I was struck by the automatic and fierce prejudice with which they were treated by the surrounding Bantu Congolese, subsistence farmers living at the same level of extreme indigence and dispossession as the Pygmies themselves. The other primary characteristic of their misery was the degree to which they had internalized the Bantu discourse of their inferiority and ignorance.

They were at such a nadir that they actually believed the racist slander to which they were constantly subjected; their inferiority complex was total and all-consuming. Every aspect of their lives was to them proof not of the injustice of the discriminatory discourse around them but of their own failure, their incompetence, their baseness. Their identity as they expressed it in focus group discussions consisted precisely of the very insults they heard throughout their lives from their Bantu neighbors. It was stunning and tragic—they were totally brainwashed.

Of course there is much to romanticize in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, partcularly that of Pygmies, whose place in the Western fantasy of primordial proximity to enchanted nature is deeply entrenched. In this spirit, National Geographic has an excellent website devoted to the Bambuti Pygmies of northwestern Congo. It captures the beauty of certain unbroken traditions, the spiritualization of their forest world and the ceremony of certain maturation rituals.

Visual documentation of their exile and destitution among the Bantu are few, to my knowledge, but a series of gripping images by Dutch photographer Chris Keulen provide such testimony. To see them, go to Keulen’s site and look under ‘Stories’, then click on ‘Congo DRC 2001’. The Pygmy photos are not marked because they are part of a larger series on living conditions for civilians at the epicenter of Congo’s war in 2001. In the series, images of people standing or sitting outside or beside makeshift shelters are generally of Pygmies (I only know this because I was indirectly involved in the shoot). Those seated indoors, in health centers or schools, are generally Bantu. The trauma is evident and Pygmy living conditions defy description: the one of a girl lying face down on volcanic rock (# 007) is to me the most poignant in the series.

For 2007, UN agencies are considering intensive programming aimed at establishing the equal rights, access to health care and education for Congolese Pygmy groups. I am curious to see how the UN approaches the issue: clearly the dominant Congolese (Bantu) society is at fault, rife as it is with profound racism and prejudice towards its original inhabitants. Project proposals I have seen base themselves on UN legal precedents recognizing and protecting the rights of indigenous groups, based on the principle of ‘autochthony’.

But are victimhood and a history of oppression the most constructive rhetorical arguments to restore equality between peoples? Victimhood as a tool of empowerment does not seem to result in sustainable integration or equality between peoples, although it is very effective in generating and perpetuating a discourse of difference and resentment, particularly the entitlement mentality.

What would Prof. Diamond say about all this? Hunter-gatherers availing themselves of legal instruments to survive is positive, as the San are doing to reclaim their ancestral homelands in Botswana (having been forcibly evicted four years ago). The Pygmies lack sufficient representation and mobilization capacity, dispersed as they are across nine countries in small groups (their total population is estimated between 300,000 and 500,000). Diamond’s contingency thesis would appear to hold, as the legal and political leverage hunter-gatherers deploy will only be as effective as the national legal codes and judiciary system of the day. In the Congo, after all, justice is sold to the highest bidder. Their Bantu compatriots, like the flora and fauna of their forest home, may not prove receptive to legal settlements over land rights for Pygmies. Sadly, the fate of Pygmies will likely remain beholden to limitations imposed by their environment.


[1] The term ‘Pygmy’ is used here as adopted by indigenous activists and support organizations to encompass the different groups of central African forest hunter-gatherers and former hunter-gatherers. Sometimes used pejoratively, here the term is used to distinguish them from other ethnic groups who may also live in forests, but who are more reliant on farming, and who are economically and politically dominant.

[2] A term conventionally used for settled farming peoples, although these groups include Oubangian and Sudanic language speakers as well as Bantu language speakers.

[3] If geographic location determines a society’s mode of production, for better or worse, one wonders if Diamond would concede the inverse of his theory: that hunting/gathering as a mode of production is itself an accident, not a choice—a default livelihood whose inefficiencies are endured, not overcome through experimentation with other modes of production. Still, this would not explain why hunter-gatherers like the Pygmy and San never venture beyond the limitations of their environments and modes of production to experiment with different ones elsewhere.


Monday, January 8, 2007

Dispatches: Sunday Bazaar

Here in Karachi the solidity of the world around you dispels much of that sense of precariousness one gets by reading about Pakistan from afar. My dashing, mustachioed cousin Munib still rides his father’s forty-year old blue Vespa around the chaotic streets, just as he did in his late teens. One change in his riding habits, however, is that he now often has his two children, aged seven and three, hanging on to him, and their mother riding side-saddle behind. When you see them pull up, you might fear for their lives, if you didn’t know they’d been doing this for the intervening three years since you last saw them. Similarly, coming to Pakistan is a good corrective to much of the doomsaying rhetoric about it emitted by public intellectuals, who hold that Pakistan continually teeters on the edge of viability. I suppose this is related to the commonplace that other countries exist in an earlier historical time, that the desired trajectory of all countries is to imitate and approach the United States. On the subject of Pakistan, most commentary is concerned with its precarious deviations from the prescribed path to modernity.

“Failed state,” “stalled democracy,” “sectarian violence,” “torn social fabric,” “endemic corruption.” These descriptions, which I’ve been hearing for decades, are belied by the simple fact that, well, Pakistan rolls on: the kites and kites (hawk-like birds of prey and child’s contraptions, respectively) still circle lazily overhead. Plus, these days, the damage America’s reputation as the anti-banana republic has sustained lessens the accusatory power of such characterizations: if the narrative of U.S. strategic benevolence, political integrity and institutional expertise was once somewhat believable, surely that bubble has burst. (I shudder to imagine what depths of irrationality the U.S. government would sink to if, like Pakistan, the U.S. had been the subject of 600 acts of terrorism, killing over 900, in 2006.) Also, for the entire class of professionals who left for the U.S. and Britain over the generation between 1970 and 1990, repeating Pakistan’s “failed-state” status has become a kind of reassuring mantra, perhaps because it makes it easier to justify having left.

If anything, Pakistan and America are becoming more, rather than less, similar over time. In Pakistan, invented in 1947, political insecurity correlates to defensive national fervor: one of the saddest things is how often people conceive of Pakistan and India’s relationship as a zero-sum game; praise of one automatically implies derogation of the other. It’s utterly silly. (These days, Pakistan is faced with more instability in the form of seditious disquiet in the province of Balochistan.) In the U.S., of course, a similar experience of retrenchment has been underway for five years now, a festering provincialism that was always the least attractive part of America’s cultural self-understanding anyway. In my last dispatch, I tried to suggest, maybe not clearly enough, that it’s wrong to identify a country with the people who proclaim themselves as its most representative representatives. Just as, purely by definition, the residents of Dearborn, Michigan are as representative an American as those of Alexandria, Virginia, regardless of how important Americanness is to either group as an elective affiliation. Every nation, including these two, suffers from boorish patriots who claim to speak for it – that doesn’t mean we should believe they do.

In both countries, a bunker mentality has led to increasing self-isolation, and in both an increasing disparity between haves and don’t-haves has led not to social change, but to greater emotional insecurity and the segregation of “gated communities.” In both places upper-middle class parents wistfully recall the days when children, in their little mobs, could be given the run of the neighborhood without any particular need for an adult overseer. As a replacement for the loss of a more tangible community, the U.S. and Pakistan have turned, inside the home, to the inner space of pixellated screens. Today only the impoverished and privileged children of both countries have access to old-fashioned styles of recreation, like playing outside or swimming, while the average kid makes do with myspace.

The U.S. consumes more provincially. In Pakistan, as flyovers, underpasses, fast food chains, and supermarkets proliferate, its elite more and more resides in a globalized cultural zone, though one that’s not just American – cable TV is an awesome hodgepodge of BBC, Al-Jazeera, Fox, StarTV (India), Geo (Pakistan), Sky (Australia), etc. Britain’s cultural currency is the most widely traded. There are lots of generalizations to be made here about the British colonial experience creating a greater sense of comfort traversing national boundaries, etc., etc., but the basic evidence is that English Premier League matches and English comedians (Ricky Gervais, Sasha Baron-Cohen) have much wider purchase in Pakistani bourgeois pop culture than, say, baseball. (And on the other side of the coin, most Americans are probably unaware of the degree to which their own television is a series of British shows remade.) Pop music is harder to divine, but much of the American pop that makes it here makes it by virtue of British distribution, just as you are much more likely to hear, say, Cheb Mami in Karachi or in London than in Chicago.

However, this global stuff is only one soapy, superficial layer. Beyond, much remains underdeveloped – and I say that with relief, “development” in the real-estate sense being a depressing if hard-to-avoid urban fate. As in most major metropolises, the best escape from mallified sameness is market culture. Here in Karachi, Sunday brings the Sunday bazaar, where people of every variety and class come to shop for kurtas, custard apples, shawls, scissors, canes, shoes, tiny lemons, fabric, tea, greens, spices, toothpaste, sundry. The one by the beach in Clifton is a beautiful place, if wheezing with dust. It’s an enormous tented enclosure that gets seasonal produce (you eat your guavas for the year right now, and there won’t be a mango in sight until March), used clothing, and many other unique items to people much more efficiently and cheaply than any other system I know. I bought a single-buttoned suit jacket, two round-ended fruit knives, and some dried cherry peppers to garnish lentils. The Sunday Bazaar is sanguine proof of the hoary leftist idea that “development” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – a supermarket/big box retailer would so clearly not be an improvement on it.

Even more importantly still in place than weekly markets, however, is the Pakistani tradition of hospitality. If these mannered rituals belong to the historical past, then I hope the slouching future never fully arrives. Paying visits and drinking tea, the scourge of childhood, becomes a little more pleasant as an adult when you realize that second cousins you’ve met once, fifteen years ago, remember you and know your current doings. And it’s not as if people don’t have many to keep track of: I have eighteen first cousins, which I thought was a lot – my niece Tania has forty-five. Much of my trip has been spent visiting an aunt and uncle who are both ailing. My aunt Farhat suffers from cerebellar ataxia, which affects coordination and makes it very difficult for her to walk, talk, write, chew, swallow. She is largely bedridden, as is her brother in the bedroom next door, and has very little outside contact. Her major concern when we visit is making sure, by whatever means necessary, that we are comfortable. She has made it clear that she expects us to lunch with her, so that she may serve as our host. And she most certainly does not live in a timeless past. As I left after our first meeting on this trip, she struggled to pronounce something. “Aaaee ooo eee.” “AAAAee OOO eee.” I couldn’t understand. Frustrating. Before trying again, she stopped and laughed, eyes sparkling. “Happy New Year!!!”

The rest of my Dispatches.

The Emerald City and the Red Fort

by Ram Manikkalingam

I read two books recently. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekeran recounts experiences of the administration of Paul Bremer and the occupying forces of the US in the Green Zone. The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, by William Dalrymple, on the extra-ordinary story of the last Mughal emperor of India – Bahadur Shah Zafar – in the Red Fort. The disgusting and disturbing spectacle of Saddam Hussein’s hanging and my chief editor Abbas Raza’s constant pressure to name my favourite books of 2006 got me thinking about the curious coincidence that two among my favourite books last year link imperialism and evangelism, and recount the remaking of other societies.

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Comparisons are odious, particularly between the tolerant, gentle and cultivated head of a great dying dynasty and the unsophisticated evangelical representatives of a declining superpower, although both were cocooned in their respective courts. The last Mughal built his own world of poetry, music, hunting, dancing and partying in the Red Fort. The Americans built their’s of BBQs, movie theatres, trailers, press conferences, bars and discos in the Emerald City.

Shah Zafar, a poet who understood his condition as a virtual prisoner of the British living out the end of a dynasty, wrote:

Who ever enters this gloomy palace,
Remains a prisoner for life in European captivity.

Although an expert marksman, Zafar was no warrior. He patronized the poets, musicians and intellectuals of Delhi. And focused his energy and effort on the intellectual and cultural life of the city. He was tolerant towards all faiths: refusing to bow to the conservative imam’s demand to change his doctor who converted to Christianity and wary of Muslims who insisted on converting Hindus or slaughtering cows to fulfill Islamic obligations. On non-religious occasions, Shah Zafar is known to have refrained from entering mosques, since he also could not enter temples. He was not very adroit at managing his complex and cumbersome harem of many wives and concubines. His “harem was notoriously lax as far as discipline and security were concerned.” And the punishments he meted to his concubines who crossed the line were lenient, if administered at all.

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The mutiny of 1857 took not just the British, but also Shah Zafar by surprise. The Indian troops – Muslim and Hindu – rallied around him as the rightful ruler of India with the political objective of restoring the Mughal Empire. The pious old (he was 82 years at the time) Sufi poet Shah Zafar, suddenly became the reluctant head of a rebel army that rallied to Delhi as the last seat of Mughal sovereignty. He vacillated, not because he was timorous or weak, but because he was torn among knowledge of imminent failure and duty towards the troops rebelling in his name, and a desire to protect his subjects, the Delhi dwellers caught in between two contending armies.

The rebellion had powerful religious overtones to it. The divide was as much between British rulers and Indians ruled, as Christian versus Hindu and Muslim. The rebellion struck a chord, because it was responding to an imperial shift away from a religiously tolerant, even assimilationist form of British rule, to one that combined Christian evangelism with British power. British agents, who had once taken on Indian wives and ways, and even Muslim religion and Hindu rituals, refraining from eating pork and beef, now felt that they were there to remake native societies in their own image. The rebels spared Muslim Englishmen (yes there were some in Delhi) but not Christian Indians. There were atrocities committed against English men and women trapped in Delhi. But all of this paled in comparison with British reprisals after the rebellion collapsed. The British soldiers committed mass murder, rape and the wholesale destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Palaces, mosques and madrasas were destroyed in a misguided effort to punish a city for the rebellion.

Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, shortly afterwards, and died there in 1862, at the age of 87. He led a sad and humiliating exile. And his chief wife and surviving sons were not allowed to return to India under British rule. Today Shah Zafar’s burial place is, fittingly for a man who loved poetry and was both religious and tolerant, a Sufi shrine where Muslims in Burma come to worship.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City describes a very different form of isolation- rulers choosing to set themselves apart from the ruled by building a bubble around themselves. The members of the occupying authority ate pork (served by Muslim workers), drank alcohol, and touched not a morsel of food grown in Iraq within the green zone. The only contact with Iraqi’s were those who worked under them, and were therefore hesitant to criticize them, and Iraqi politicians dependent on the occupying authority for their power.

The rulers in the green zone demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity and interest in Iraqi history and politics. They believed that they had correctly conceived the new Iraq. And all that was required to execute this conception was the right combination of men, guns, dollars, and cement. In their evangelizing zeal, they believed that Iraqi politicians and American soldiers who raised questions about how exactly to execute this conception of Iraq, or needing more men and dollars, were inadequate to the task at hand. As the going got tougher, the plans got fancier.

Efforts were made to privatize state industries running at a loss, lay off workers and secure foreign investors, at precisely the time when unemployment was the biggest challenge facing Iraqis, and no foreigners could travel to Baghdad to view their potential investments, let alone try to turn them around. Other plans that would have had a far-reaching impact on ordinary Iraqis included taking away rations of food in exchange for cash, at a time when transporting goods to the market, not the money to pay for them was the key issue. More fanciful plans included giving debit cards to families to pay for food in a country where phone lines did not work because of regular losses of electrical power.

My favourite is the plan to have a state-of-the-art stock market, with the fanciest computers and the most squeaky clean transparency regulations to ensure that Iraq’s stock market would be up and running, when all the Iraqis wanted was a large room with dry-erase boards. The young American advisor spent months and hundreds of thousands trying to get the stock market off the ground with his grandiose plans. Two days after he left Baghdad, the new Iraqi stock market opened successfully with white boards to write bids and chits of paper to note transactions. The American advisor expressed frustration at the lack of Iraqi cooperation. Still, he felt that if he had not done his job, maybe nothing would have happened at all. When asked what would have happened in the absence of the young American advisor, the Iraqi Chairman of the Stock Exchange responded that they would have opened months earlier. At precisely the moment when no American civilian members of the occupying authority could travel outside the green zone, the planning for the wholesale economic reconstruction of Iraq got more and more ambitious.

Like Shah Zafar who wrote his beautiful poetry and encouraged his court musicians to sing and intellectuals to write, because he knew he had no power outside the Red Fort, the rulers in the Emerald City were encouraged to formulate plans and promulgate laws they need not ever worry about implementing. But unlike Zafar in the Red Fort, these officials of the occupying authority were out of touch with reality. Zafar was a sad old man, who wrote poetry because he knew he had no power to do anything else. By contrast, the new rulers in Iraq were strutting around the Emerald City, spending more and more time drawing up grander and grander plans, without realizing that they were doing so at precisely the moment when they no longer had the ability or power to implement them.

Web of Lies

by Beth Ann Bovino

[For information about 3QD and what we are all about, click here, or here for our main page. Also, after appearing on 3QD, this story was picked up by several news organzations, and even the FBI commented on it. For example, see this from the front page of the NY Daily News.]

Bab0A man called the other night and asked to speak with Beth Ann Bovino. Not interested in a conversation about the midterm elections or whether I need a new phone service, I considered “She’s not home”. Instead, I asked “whom may I say is calling?” He said his name (correctly, I had caller ID). He then ran into a series of statements about me: that I live at 304 West XXth Street (I do) and that I have a one bedroom with a fireplace (yes again). He asked if I am renting my place (I’m not). That’s when he told me that someone had placed an ad on Craig’s List in my name.

According to the ad, I live on the 5th floor of an elevator building (an upgrade from my 5th floor walkup). It comes at the low monthly rent of $1500 including utilities. (Later I found out they also had it listed at times for $1190 and $1100.) It has a deli, a grocery store, and a laundry room. I have a washer/dryer in my apartment, so maybe they could have charged more.

I had it delisted from Craig’s list, but decided to apply. I know from experience it’s a pretty nice place, and even at $1500 it’s a steal. I applied to the ad’s email Annbovino@aol.com. Ann Bovino (she said “Beth Ann Bovino is my full name.”) got back to me. She wrote “I have available the apartment but now I’m in Fremont – CA. This is the reason that I want to rent it. To start this deal you have to send me 1 month in advance and I will ship you the keys overnight. You can move in the apt in the same day when you receive the keys.”

Bab1_4She included pictures of “my” home: http://pictures.aol.com/galleries/annbovino. [All photos here are taken from this site.] Aside from the picture of my building, the rest are fiction. The bathroom fixtures received a lot of attention. The tub made it in over half the photos, while the modern faucet got a close up. However, I already have furniture and since there wouldn’t be any moving costs, I asked for a discount if the place comes unfurnished. I also asked if there was anyone else at the building who could show me the apartment? A super or someone else?

Ann Bovino wrote: “I understand your position but the keys are with me and the only option is to ship you the keys. I have an idea for this deal. First you have to send me money on your friend or relative name via MoneyGram because I want to be sure that you are a serious person and you really want to rent my apt. In the same day I will ship you the keys via UPS and after you will see the apt and you make a decision you have to resend the funds on my name for pick up the money.” She generously offered to support all MoneyGram fees. She also cut the rental price to $1400, unfurnished.

I responded that I was concerned about sending money without talking to someone over the phone. The same “I understand your position” piece was sent in reply, but it added “PS. I would love to speak with you by phone but I can’t because I’m a deaf-mute person and I am teaching in CA for a deaf-mute school.”

Bab2So there it is. I’m a deaf-mute person who moved to Fremont, California to teach deaf-mute children. I understand other people’s positions and will even bend on the price. I may even be able to pro-rate the agreement (though that was unclear). While this was entertaining, my real self got concerned. Ann Bovino reposted the apartment rental. A number of people came by to check out this dream apartment. I let them know just that. It was a dream. And a fraud. I called 311 to find out how to stop this. 311 didn’t have the facts to help much. Though they were supportive, they sent me to the N.Y. State Attorney Local Office, who sent me to Consumer Affairs, who told me, for some unexplained reason, to contact my local post office. However, an intensive internet search gave me some information to act, or at least know what I was up against.

I found out that this kind of fraud is a variation of the “Four-One-Nine” (419) or “Advanced Fee Fraud,” which has been around since the early 1980’s and that we have all seen. Emails sent with the SUBJECT: URGENT!!! in the header undoubtedly lead into this kind of fraud. It was dubbed “419 Fraud” after the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria. Usually it operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter, usually from Nigeria or another African nation (though not always), and contains either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. Or you may receive a Legal and Legitimate business proposal. Variations of Advance Fee Fraud seem endless. At some point, the victim is always asked to pay an Advance Fee upfront.

There are a number of web sites that look into this. One particularly interesting and very funny site is http://www.scamorama.com. Together with the book, scam-o-rama, it is designed specifically for scam busters (or those that support their cause). On their site they ask the question: “Can a scammer pretending to be an orphan from a Sierra Leone mining town find happiness scamming people? Well yeah, if he gets away with it.”

Their research, on an admittedly small data set, suggests disturbing trends: Travel and banking in West Africa are fatal to imaginary people. Airplane crashes have the most fatalities overall, while the Sagbama Express is most dangerous road. They write “the ‘bank customers’- all foreigners (European, Asian, Arab, American) – have died, usually in ghastly (air, motor) accidents. The banks may exist. The victims’ names may belong to real people who probably want them back. (I do.) Some names belonged to real people whose tragic deaths were lifted from obituaries. Some victims have died multiple times, not learning from previous experience. Some died from combinations of natural disaster.”

The book and the web site detail the ‘419’ advance fee fraud scam and the damage it does (hundreds of millions of dollars yearly). They also document the people who try to get back at them. On one side are the scammers, those who commit the fraud. Then there are the ‘scambaiters’- those who write back to lead the scammers on with stories and waste their time. There is one scambaiter who actually got money FROM the scammer (about $3). It inspired my game.

It has now been over three weeks since I first heard that my name has been used. Given the stats, my name has now likely been involved in a few more devastating accidents/illnesses/natural disasters. I could suffer still more virtual tragic ends if I do nothing. I contacted the local police department with no luck. However, one web site finally offered a chance to redeem my name. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) http://www.ic3.gov/faq/ is co-sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C).

The IC3’s mission is to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime. The IC3 aims to give the victims of cyber crime an easy-to-use reporting mechanism. The web site receives thousands of complaints each month. The complaints filed are all processed and may be referred to the appropriate law enforcement or regulatory agencies for possible investigation. Ultimately, however, investigation and prosecution are at the discretion of the receiving agencies.

If you’re a victim, keep any evidence you may have relating to your complaint, such as payment receipts, mail receipts, a printed copy of a website, or copies of emails. Keep phone numbers or addresses of anyone connected, either the culprit or other targets. You may be requested to provide them for investigative purposes. While it seems farfetched, there have been arrests. Most recently, the FBI and Spanish police have arrested 310 people in Malaga, Spain in connection with a €100m bogus (email) lottery scam run by Nigerian gangs. The gang also offered rewards for those willing to stash money taken out of Iraq by the family of Saddam Hussein or money found after the 9/11 attacks. It was the biggest 419 bust in history, and may result in drastic reductions of scam mails.

The scammer posted my apartment again. I remain a Californian deaf-mute. As of this date, my horrible airplane or automobile death has not been announced.

Beth Ann Bovino is a new columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. She will be added to our About Us page presently.