Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei at berfrois:

For seven years now I have lived in Albania. I have seen ambassadors and foreign representatives come and go. And they all, so they say, share this same ideal: to make Albania a better place. Or rather, to make Albania more like wherever they came from: the West. Their presence would change Albania, would stabilize Albania.

The government of Edi Rama has gladly and smartly catered to the feelings of self-importance of these foreign dignitaries, who, more often than not, were not exactly the brightest of their class. After all, whose career as foreign diplomat would be well served with a post in a relatively unimportant European country?

But Rama adopted their language and made them feel as if he were one of them. He would create a state, he would invite the IMF and World Bank back into the country, he would reform the police, the justice system, and so on and so forth. He clothed himself in the drapes of European enlightenment – cosmopolitan culture, contemporary art, good taste.

But looking back it seems that Albania has changed hardly at all. What has changed, however, is the West, and in particular the EU. In a relatively short period it has developed (once again) the nationalist and populist discourses that twenty years ago would have been unthinkable in the liberal, affluent, multicultural societies from which they sprang up. The EU has even experienced its first secession, a phenomenon that in the 1990s was strictly reserved to the Balkans.

more here.

Grey Anderson at n+1:

THE DECLINE OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY has been accompanied in tandem by the efflorescence of the far right. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s impressive showing in 2002 came as a brutal shock to mainstream opinion in France; his daughter’s first-round success 2017 is widely perceived to be inevitable. Beginning with the 2012 election, in which Marine Le Pen won the highest ever score for a FN candidate in a presidential race, the party has gone from success to success: in both the European elections of 2014 and departmental elections the year after the FN won the largest share of first-round votes, in each case about a quarter of the electorate. Although the Front’s isolation has largely prevented it from converting this support into political power, as alliances between the other parties traditionally result in FN candidates being defeated in runoffs, mounting signs indicate that this “glass ceiling” may be fragile.

Founded in 1972 out of a hodge-podge of far-right and neo-fascist groups seeking a parliamentary road to power, the FN first tasted electoral success in 1983, when the party won the mayoralty of Dreux, to the west of Paris, and saw ten municipal councilors elected. Its real breakthrough came three years later, in the wake of a law introducing a measure of proportionality in legislative elections; in 1986, thirty-five MPs and six regional presidents were elected on FN lists, with almost 10 percent of the vote in legislative and regional elections held on the same day.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

The best way to approach “Inventing Downtown” is to follow the curator’s lead and see it not as an exhibition of works or even of artists, but of places—or rather, of a unique kind of place: those exhibition venues that sometimes move from place to place but always reflect a confluence of artists who elected to exhibit their work together. Some of the best-known among them, including the Tanager Gallery, Brata Gallery, and Hansa Gallery, were structured as cooperatives; the artists shared the expenses of the gallery as well as the decision-making and some of the labor. Others were simply the studios or living spaces of artists who invited colleagues to show their work. For instance, the City Gallery was part of Red Grooms’s loft on Sixth Avenue, and 112 Chambers Street was Yoko Ono’s studio. Other groups used donated spaces, like the Judson Gallery, which Marcus Ratliff (later a prominent graphic designer) started with Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

The finale of “Inventing Downtown” is devoted to the Green Gallery, a commercial gallery on 57th Street whose founder, Richard Bellamy, had been the hired director of the cooperative Hansa (which itself had moved uptown during the course of its seven-year existence). Bellamy became a key figure in the New York art world and was known as “one of the remarkable, eccentric personalities of the city.” A recent biography, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, offers a sympathetic portrait of an unconventional figure more adept at understanding art and artists than at the business of running a gallery.

more here.

Steve Chawkins in LA Times:

In the nearly five years it took Robert Pirsig to sell “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” 121 publishers rejected the rambling novel. The 122^nd gently warned Pirsig, a former rhetoric professor who had a job writing technical manuals, not to expect more than his $3,000 advance. “The book is not, as I think you now realize from your correspondence with other publishers, a marketing man’s dream,” the editor at William Morrow wrote in a congratulatory note before its 1974 publication. He was wrong. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” sold 50,000 copies in three months and more than 5 million in the decades since. The dense tome has been translated into at least 27 languages. A reviewer for the New Yorker likened its author to Herman Melville. Its popularity made Pirsig “probably the most widely read philosopher alive,” a British journalist wrote in 2006.

Pirsig, a perfectionist who published only one major work after “Zen” but inspired college classes, academic conferences and a legion of “Pirsig pilgrims” who retrace the anguished, cross-country motorcycle trip at the heart of his novel, died Monday at his home in South Berwick, Maine, the Associated Press confirmed. He was 88 and had been in failing health. “Zen” and Pirsig’s less successful 1991 novel, “Lila,” are not easy reads. In both, he develops what he calls the “Metaphysics of Quality,” a philosophy that attempts to unite and transcend the mysticism of the East and the reason of the West. “Zen” is the account of a 1968 motorcycle trip that Pirsig, his 11-year-old son Chris and two friends made from Minneapolis through the West. A fifth traveler was sensed but unseen: Phaedrus, Pirsig’s alter ego, brilliant, uncompromising and obsessed with the search for truth. Like the real-life Pirsig, the ghost-like Phaedrus had an IQ of 170, entered a university at 15 and, as a young man, was committed to mental hospitals where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy.

“He was dead,” Pirsig’s narrator writes in “Zen.” “Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain.”

More here.

Nick Wingfield in The New York Times:

Zoran Popović knows a thing or two about video games. A computer science professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Popović has worked on software algorithms that make computer-controlled characters move realistically in games like the science-fiction shooter “Destiny.” But while those games are entertainment designed to grab players by their adrenal glands, Dr. Popović’s latest creation asks players to trace lines over fuzzy images with a computer mouse. It has a slow pace with dreamy music that sounds like the ambient soundtrack inside a New Age bookstore.

The point? To advance neuroscience.

Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons. The Center for Game Science, a group at the University of Washington that Dr. Popović oversees, developed the game in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a nonprofit research organization founded by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, that is seeking a better understanding of the brain. Dr. Popović had previously received wide attention in the scientific community for a puzzle game called “Foldit,” released nearly a decade ago, that harnesses the skills of players to solve riddles about the structure of proteins. The Allen Institute’s goal of cataloging the structure of neurons, the cells that transmit information throughout the nervous system, could one day help researchers understand the roots of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and their treatment. Neurons come in devilishly complex shapes and staggering quantities — about 100 million and 87 billion in mouse and human brains, both of which players can work on in Mozak.

More here.

Prayaag Akbar in Aeon:

In October 2016, a young man walked into a flour mill in Uttarakhand, a state of northern India where the mist-wrapped mountains of the outer Himalayas begin. He was Dalit (Sanskrit for broken, scattered, downtrodden), a relatively recent collective identity claimed by communities across the nation that are considered untouchable in the caste system. Present in the mill was a Brahmin schoolteacher – Brahmins are the caste elite – who accused the Dalit man of having defiled all the flour produced there that day, merely by his entry: notions of purity and pollution are integral to caste. After the Dalit man objected to the insult, the schoolteacher took out a blade and slit the Dalit’s throat, killing him instantly.

The incident caused uproar in the national press. Dalit groups in Uttarakhand staged a series of protests. The Brahmin schoolteacher was arrested, along with his brother and father, who had threatened the murdered man’s family if they went to the police; booked for murder and criminal intimidation, the men were also charged under the ‘Prevention of Atrocities’ act – a vital part of the Indian Penal Code that prohibits a range of violent and non-violent action against members of the lowest castes and tribes.

After the initial flurry of limited upper-class angst – followed by self-congratulation (at the foresight of the lawmakers for how the state machinery kicked into gear to protect the lower-castes) – the violence was then safely imagined as belonging to a distant, retrograde realm, where things would soon change. Silence followed, then forgetting. There was no discussion of the deep-seated convictions and codes that enabled this gruesome act, or how each Indian life was linked to it: the key to living in a caste society is to distance yourself from its most horrifying manifestations.

More here.

Akeel Bilgrami in the NOMIS Workshop Series: Nature and Value Discussion Papers (page 107 and on):

There are several other features of the political philosophy we have inherited that one could summon to present the tension between liberty and equality, and I have mentioned only these two just to give a completely familiar sense of how far such thinking has gone into our sensibility, how entrenched it is in the very way we deploy these terms, and how, therefore, it would seem almost to change the semantics of the terms if we were to think that the tension could be removed or resolved. That is to say, if we managed to see them as not being in tension, it would only be because, as Thomas Kuhn might have put it, we have changed the meanings of the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, not because we have produced an improved theory or politics within the framework of the Enlightenment. Within that framework things are, on this score, unimprovable. In other words, what I mean by framework here is perhaps one of the (diverse) things that Kuhn meant by his term ‘paradigm’ and, if so, clearly we need to shift to another framework if we are ever going to remove the tension between these two notions. In such a new framework, neither ‘liberty’ nor ‘equality’ would mean what they mean in the framework of Enlightenment thought, no more than ‘mass’ in Einstein’s physics meant what it meant in Newtonian mechanics, if Kuhn is right.

How might such a shift in framework be sought? Here is a proposal. Let’s, as a start, usher the very ideals of liberty and equality off centre-stage. If this is to disinherit an entire tradition of liberal thought of the Enlightenment, so be it. Once these are exeunt, we need to replace them on centre-stage with a third, more primitive, concept; that is to say, a concept more fundamental to our social and political life than even liberty and equality. And this is to be done with the idea that ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ may subsequently be introduced once again – by the back door, as it were– but now merely as necessary conditions for the achievement of this more basic ideal that occupies the central position. So re-introduced, there is reason to think that these terms may have undergone substantial revision in their meaning, and thus may not any longer express concepts that are at odds with one another.

More here. Sanjay Reddy responds following Bilgrami's essay.

William E. Scheuerman in Boston Review:

Germany’s defeat helped free Habermas from the provincial social climate. He listened to live radio broadcasts of the Nuremberg Trials and, shocked by the horrors recounted, seems to have quickly grasped the criminal nature of the regime under which he had grown up. Revealingly perhaps, his academic interests shifted away from medicine, a more professionally secure field, to philosophy. His 1954 University of Bonn doctoral dissertation on the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling offers little evidence of Habermas’s growing radicalism, but his early journalistic pieces, published during the early and mid ‘50s in major German newspapers and intellectual journals, anticipate his life-long political concerns. Directed against right-wing intellectuals (for example, Heidegger), they criticize an older generation for failing to take democracy seriously—that “magic word,” according to Habermas, that brought together otherwise disparate voices within his own postwar generation who sought a clean break from Nazism.

Because Habermas took the magic word of democracy so seriously, he found himself disenchanted not only with established conservative intellectuals but also political elites who preferred to keep their mouths shut about their Nazi entanglements, and for whom Germany’s new liberal order was primarily about stability and security, not democratic self-government. Dictatorship and the racism that motored it still haunted his country. Democracy was not a fortunate historical inheritance one could simply take up, but instead an unfinished project. As he has more recently claimed, democracy represents the surviving “remnant of utopia”: only democracy is “capable of hacking through the Gordian knots of otherwise insoluble problems.” Thus his life-long intellectual project of trying to understand democracy’s promise and possibilities.

More here.

Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books:

One of the bombs dropped during the current presidential campaign in France is Histoire mondiale de la France, an eight-hundred-page tome surveying 40,000 years of French history. A collaborative work written by 122 academics and directed by Patrick Boucheron, a distinguished medievalist at the Collège de France, it hardly seemed destined for the best-seller lists when it was published in January. But the French have snapped it up: 70,000 copies have been sold as of mid-March and sales are still going strong. After several decades of somnolence, academic history is a hit.

Although the book owes much of its success to the talent of its authors, its publication was timed perfectly to make a splash during the election campaign. History has always been a battleground in France. As Éric Zemmour, a right-wing journalist and historian, remarked in an angry review in Le Figaro, “History is war. Not just the history of war but the war of history.” He went on to condemn Histoire mondiale de la France as an attack on the identity of France and an attempt to destroy the “national narrative” (“roman national”) at the heart of what it means to be French.

Alain Finkielkraut, a conservative philosopher and member of the Académie française, damned the book in an equally savage review: “The authors of Histoire mondiale de la France are the gravediggers of the great French heritage.” Other commentators on the right have echoed the same theme. Michael Jeaubelaux, a blogger who supports the conservative presidential candidate François Fillon, wrote: “When the Collège de France buries France and the French, it is urgent for the people to seize power against those who are paid to destroy our country, its history, its heritage, its culture!”

More here.

Michael J. Coren in Quartz:

Silicon Valley is obsessed with happiness. The pursuit of a mythical good life, achievement blending perfectly with fulfillment, has given rise to the quantified self movement, polyphasic sleeping, and stashes of off-label pharmaceuticals in developers’ desks.

Yet Andrew Taggart thinks most of this is nonsense. A PhD in philosophy, Taggart practices the art of gadfly-for-hire. He disabuses founders, executives, and others in Silicon Valley of the notion that life is a problem to be solved, and happiness awaits those who do it. Indeed, Taggart argues that optimizing one’s life and business is actually a formula for misery.

“I call it “the problematization of the world,” he said. “Once you start looking for this relatively new way of thinking—problem, challenge, solution, repeat—you see it nearly everywhere.” Instead of asking, How can I be more successful, he says, “It’s far more important to ask, ‘Why be successful?’”

Taggart is among a small band of “practical philosophers” entering the world of business. Serving as a kind of Chief Philosophy Officer, they summon ancient thinkers to probe eternal questions like, “How does one live a good life?” but also more practical ones like “What should my startup build?” This strand of philosophical inquiry, aided by books, blogs, and advisors, is gaining a small but intensely loyal following.

More here.

Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic:

January 29, 1912, was a beautiful day in Antarctica. A group of British explorers, led by a 37-year-old Victor Campbell, were on a cheerful journey across what we now call the Nansen Ice Shelf and Priestley Glacier. It was a kind of summer sojourn around the continent: They would make the first maps of the area, then rendezvous with their ship, Terra Nova, six weeks later.

Campbell’s notes are brief on January 29. The terrain on which he and his team tottered around that day was at the foot of some glaciers and mountains, which loomed above the icy plain. The area even sounded different: “The noise of running water from a lot of streams sounded very odd after the usual Antarctic silence,” he wrote. “Occasionally an enormous boulder would come crashing down from the heights above, making jumps of 50 or 100 feet at a time.” His party set up camp that night on a bed of gentle gravel, then moved on.

But the Terra Nova did not reach them in February, or March, or ever. Early sea ice set in and blocked off the ship’s route. With winter bearing down, Campbell and his team took steps that later made them famous. They dug an ice cave on Inexpressible Island and made camp for the the winter. They remained in the cave for months— eating seal and penguin meat, burning blubber for warmth—all through the black night of Antarctic winter. Not until September 30 did they finally set off for the 200-mile march back to their basecamp.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

This week marked the anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto had been established by the Germans in 1940 in the Muranów district of the Polish capital, imprisoning some 400,000 Jews, virtually all of whom were eventually killed, either in concentration camps, through hunger and deprivation, through executions, or in the final destruction of the Ghetto.

The uprising began on April 19, 1943, after German troops entered the Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Some 750 fighters fought the heavily-armed soldiers, holding out for nearly a month. Around 13,000 Jews were killed in the Ghetto during the uprising. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured after the uprising was crushed, 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to concentration camps, mostly to Treblinka.

More here.

Harry Lewis in the Washington Post:

When should traditional liberal values be sacrificed to important but narrower ends? That is the question behind Harvard University’s effort to subordinate freedom of association and freedom of speech to a locally fashionable form of “nondiscrimination.”

Last spring, the university decided to attack the off-campus, all-male Final Clubs by disqualifying their members from Rhodes Scholarships and other distinctions — unless the clubs admitted women. A few of these clubs are infamous for loud parties and drunken misbehavior. The new strategy against them had the merit of novelty, even in the absence of evidence that coed clubs would behave any better.

Faculty members reacted with alarm, recalling Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of Harvard professors in the 1950s simply for belonging to a hated organization. Students deserve a better lesson from Harvard than an attempt to solve social problems by blackballing members of unpopular groups.

The policy covers all “single-gender social organizations” consisting of Harvard students, so the same sanctions would be visited on women’s clubs, including sororities. More women than men are affected, even though most of the women’s clubs don’t have real estate, much less raucous parties. Hundreds of women staged a surprise protest in response.

More here.

HM Naqvi in Dawn:

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger, the late, great, British art critic, posits that, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell, the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today… History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.”

…In his opus, Image and Identity, the late, great, Pakistani art critic, Dr Akbar Naqvi, announces, “Pakistan’s history is older than its age… The thesis of this book is that Pakistan is inseparable from [the] heritage of Al-Hind, and without that it has no identity.” Although this might not be news to serious historians, in the ever-evolving exclusionary socio-political ecosystems of the subcontinent, the assertion was like a brick lobbed in the oft stagnant pond of popular discourse. This theme pervades Dr Naqvi’s oeuvre, from Shahid Sajjad’s Sculpture to Sadequain and the Culture of Enlightenment.

“The subcontinent was partitioned,” he writes elsewhere, “but its people continued to share myths, histories, cultures and a multifaceted civilisation.” Consequently, we in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are “joint custodians” of the discourse of the subcontinent. Dr Naqvi observes this shared ethos in the work of Abanindranath Tagore, who responded to late Mughal miniatures, Abdur Rehman Chughtai, who routinely rendered icons from Hindu mythopoetics, Syed Sadequain Naqvi, who distilled everything from tantric symbolism to Arabic calligraphy, and Ustad Allah Buksh. “Buksh’s art was the Indian face of European painting and accepted national art … [i]n this style, local romantic lore and mythological subjects were painted according to Euro-Indian conventions of Raj art schools.” Manifestly, we, demonyms of the subcontinent, “have several histories converging upon us.”

For Dr Naqvi, history is not good, bad, some sort of binary, or for that matter, linear: Picasso’s Cubism, derived from African masks, in turn influenced the likes of Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes or Zubeida Agha and Shakir Ali.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Professor Sadia Abbas)

Yuval Harari in the New York Times:

In “The Knowledge Illusion,” the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual. From the 17th century to the 20th century, Western thought depicted individual human beings as independent rational agents, and consequently made these mythical creatures the basis of modern society. Democracy is founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free market capitalism believes the customer is always right, and modern education tries to teach students to think for themselves.

Over the last few decades, the ideal of the rational individual has been attacked from all sides. Postcolonial and feminist thinkers challenged it as a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of white men. Behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with the African savanna in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate for dealing with the urban jungle of the silicon age.

Sloman and Fernbach take this argument further, positing that not just rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.

More here.

From Columbia University Press:

This selection of poetry and prose by Ghalib provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the preeminent Urdu poet of the nineteenth century. Ghalib's poems, especially his ghazals, remain beloved throughout South Asia for their arresting intelligence and lively wit. His letters—informal, humorous, and deeply personal—reveal the vigor of his prose style and the warmth of his friendships. These careful translations allow readers with little or no knowledge of Urdu to appreciate the wide range of Ghalib's poetry, from his gift for extreme simplicity to his taste for unresolvable complexities of structure.

Beginning with a critical introduction for nonspecialists and specialists alike, Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall present a selection of Ghalib's works, carefully annotating details of poetic form. Their translation maintains line-for-line accuracy and thereby preserves complex poetic devices that play upon the tension between the two lines of each verse. The book includes whole ghazals, selected individual verses from other ghazals, poems in other genres, and letters. The book also includes a glossary, the Urdu text of the original poetry, and an appendix containing Ghalib's comments on his own verses.

Go here to read the introduction to the book.