Yesterday was Richard Dawkins's birthday and I wrote to him to wish him a good one. To amuse him, I also sent along a letter I had written some time ago to a correspondent from Karachi. Richard wrote back saying, “Dear Abbas, thank you for this. It is excellent. Is there some way we can post this on RichardDawkins.net?” Who am I to say no to Richard? So here it is at his site:

Quite recently I received a letter from a very religious and clearly very intelligent and well-educated young person from Pakistan asking about my personal religious views. This was my reply:

Dear X,

I am not going to speak here about my own religious views but about yours. It seems from what you have written that you are somewhat troubled that I might not share your own beliefs. What I want to do is recommend to you a reasonable, scientific, logical, and quite surefire method by which you may strengthen your own faith.

It doesn't really matter which sect of which religion you belong to, this is what you need to do: pick two or three well-known religions with large numbers of adherents which are as different as possible from your own. From your perspective, the people who believe in these religions are quite wrong about a great number of things, even though you may agree with them about some aspects of their faith. Forget about the things you agree on. Focus instead on their wrong beliefs. The more ridiculous they seem to you, the better. And now ask yourself why such a large number of people find these beliefs to be not only reasonable but often quite self-evident. You must make finding the answer to this question your project for some time. You will essentially be compiling a list of bad reasons for holding a religious belief.

If you think about it (and look into the matter) you will find that there is generally no great difference in the average intelligence of those people who believe in religions very different from yours and the people of your own religion. After all, one can find accomplished and very smart artists, scientists, musicians, mathematicians, writers, philosophers, and so on, from all major religions. (One can, of course, also find imbeciles in every religion, but that is neither here nor there.) Similarly, one can find morally decent people as well as cheats and liars and evil psychopaths from all sorts of religious backgrounds.

More here. My interview with Richard is here.

Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times:

Architecture generally involves creating monuments to permanence from substantial materials like steel and concrete. Yet this year, the discipline’s top award is going to a man who is best known for making temporary housing out of transient materials like paper tubes and plastic beer crates.

On Monday, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban was named the winner of this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, largely because of his work designing shelters after natural disasters in places like Rwanda, Turkey, India, China, Haiti and Japan.

“His buildings provide shelter, community centers and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss and destruction,” the jury said in its citation. “When tragedy strikes, he is often there from the beginning.”

In a telephone interview from Paris, Mr. Ban, 56, said he was honored to have won, not because the Pritzker would raise his profile but because it affirms the humanitarian emphasis of his work. “I’m trying to understand the meaning of this encouragement,” he said of the prize. “It’s not the award for achievement. I have not made a great achievement.”

More here.

From The Physics arXiv:

Last week, the world of science was ablaze with the news that astrophysicists had found the first evidence of ripples in spacetime from the instants after the Big Bang. The discovery of these gravitational waves would be big news by itself but there was another aspect to this work that was even more significant.

The work also found crucial evidence for a process known as inflation: that in the instants after the Big Bang the universe expanded explosively—by some 20 orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second—making it the size we see today.

But even before the sound of champagne corks popping has died down, theorists are beginning to question the new result. Everyone agrees that the data shows important evidence of gravitational waves. The question is whether these waves could have been created after inflation, rather than before it. If so, then they do not provide any evidence that the early universe expanded so quickly and the celebrations have been premature.

More here.

William Kremer in BBC World News:

Around the year 1500, an assistant to the Venetian ambassador to England was struck by the strange attitude to parenting that he had encountered on his travels. He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home “till the age of seven or nine at the utmost” but then “put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years”. The unfortunate children were sent away regardless of their class, “for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own”. It was for the children's own good, he was told – but he suspected the English preferred having other people's children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder.

…So why did this seemingly cruel system evolve? For the poor, there was an obvious financial incentive to rid the household of a mouth to feed. But parents did believe they were helping their children by sending them away, and the better off would save up to buy an apprenticeship. These typically lasted seven years, but they could go on for a decade. The longer the term, the cheaper it was – a sign that the Venetian visitor was correct to conclude that adolescents were a useful source of cheap labour for their masters. In 1350, the Black Death had reduced Europe's population by roughly half, so hired labour was expensive. The drop in the population, on the other hand, meant that food was cheap – so live-in labour made sense. “There was a sense that your parents can teach you certain things, but you can learn other things and different things and more things if you get experience of being trained by someone else,” says Jeremy Goldberg from the University of York.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

MIT engineers have coaxed bacterial cells to produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots. These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells — which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales — with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.

This approach could one day be used to design more complex devices such as solar cells, self-healing materials, or diagnostic sensors, says Timothy Lu, an MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering. Lu is the senior author of a paper describing this innovation in the March 23 issue of Nature Materials. The researchers also demonstrated that the cells can even coordinate with each other to control the composition of the biofilm. These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells, Lu says. The researchers are also interested in coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels. Other potential applications include diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

On Monday my essay ‘In Defence of Diversity’ – which exposes the hollowness of contemporary anti-immigration rhetoric, and places it in historical context – won the 3 Quarks Daily 2014 essay prize. And on Monday, the Times’ new columnist Melanie Phillips – my old colleague from the days when I was a panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze – published a polemic trying to claim the progressive groundfor critics of mass immigration. Her arguments are familiar – they are the very arguments I unpicked in my essay. So here are Phillips’ main points – and my response. If only she had read my essay first (not that I think it would have made much difference…)

‘Even now, it is still the issue that dare not speak its name… Mass immigration is still something on which only one view is considered socially acceptable: that there is nothing wrong with it.’

This, of course, has become the standard meme among anti-immigration campaigners, endlessly pushed by authors such as David Goodhart and Paul Collier. I find it extraordinary that anyone still has the gall to make such a claim. To suggest that there is no debate about immigration, or that the only position that one can hold is in defence of mass immigration, is about as credible as suggesting that Nigel Farage is a shy, retiring type who hates stirring up controversy.

Far from immigration being a taboo subject, there are few issues about which politicians and journalists are more obsessed, and few ideas that have more acquired the status of uncontestable wisdom than the need to impose tighter immigration controls.

More here.

Sabahat Zakariya in The Friday Times:

As the conversation turns to ‘Two Lives’, his book about his Indian uncle and German aunt that is a particular favourite of mine, I ask him which prose genre is his favourite: “I like narrative non-fiction as a reader, though I do like a lot of fiction too. People tend to think that narrative non-fiction is simpler. You start at one point and you end at another but for something like ‘Two Lives’, for instance, there is a lot of complexity. It is actually two and a half lives since I am also a character in the book. A great deal of thought went behind deciding its structure, how to fit all the lives, where to place the letters and the pictures and so on.”

“I love the way it begins, with you standing outside that house in London”, I gush. He smiles graciously, “Chekov had this wonderful saying: Start in medias res. So just that, ‘When I was sixteen I was sent to…’ Just that.”

“No Thomas Hardying around?” I add helpfully.

“Haha. Yes. No Thomas Hardying around. Bus seedhi baat.”

More here.

Three Trees

…………—for J, J & I

Over at Brain Pickings:

2. Now and in the time to be, try to be kind to your parents. If this sounds too close to “Honor thy mother and father” for your comfort, so be it. All I am trying to say is try not to rebel against them, for, in all likelihood, they will die before you do, so you can spare yourselves at least this source of guilt if not of grief. If you must rebel, rebel against those who are not so easily hurt. Parents are too close a target (so, by the way, are sisters, brothers, wives or husbands); the range is such that you can’t miss. Rebellion against one’s parents, for all its I-won’t-take-a-single-penny-from-you, is essentially an extremely bourgeois sort of thing, because it provides the rebel with the ultimate in comfort, in this case, mental comfort: the comfort of one’s convictions. The later you hit this pattern, the later you become a mental bourgeois, i.e., the longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

On the other hand, of course, this not-a-single-penny business makes practical sense, because your parents, in all likelihood, will bequeath all they’ve got to you, and the successful rebel will end up with the entire fortune intact — in other words, rebellion is a very efficient form of savings. The interest, though, is crippling; I’d say, bankrupting.

3. Try not to set too much store by politicians — not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement. The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be. The only thing that’s going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius. Yet in doing this, you must also prepare yourselves for the heart-rending realization that even that pie of yours won’t suffice; you must prepare yourselves that you’re likely to dine as much in disappointment as in gratitude. The most difficult lesson to learn here is to be steady in the kitchen, since by serving this pie just once you create quite a lot of expectations. Ask yourself whether you can afford a steady supply of those pies, or would you rather bargain on a politician?

More here.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the NYT Magazine:

Spend any time hanging around bisexual activists, and you’ll hear a great deal about biphobia. You’ll also hear about bi erasure, the idea that bisexuality is systematically minimized and dismissed. This is especially vexing to bisexual activists, who point to a 2011 report by the Williams Institute — a policy center specializing in L.G.B.T. demographics — that reviewed 11 surveys and found that “among adults who identify as L.G.B., bisexuals comprise a slight majority.” In one of the larger surveys reviewed by the institute (a 2009 study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine), 3.1 percent of American adults identified as bisexual, while 2.5 percent identified as gay or lesbian. (In most surveys, the institute found that women were “substantially more likely than men to identify as bisexual.”)

Then there’s the tricky matter of identity versus behavior. Joe Kort, a Michigan-based sex therapist whose next book is about straight-identified men who are married but who also have sex with men, says that “many never tell anyone about their bisexual experiences, for fear of losing relationships or having their reputation hurt. Consequently, they’re an invisible group of men. We know very little about them.”

Bisexuals are so unlikely to be out about their orientation — in a 2013 Pew Research Survey, only 28 percent of people who identified as bisexual said they were open about it — that the San Francisco Human Rights Commission recently called them “an invisible majority” in need of resources and support.

But in the eyes of many Americans, bisexuality — despite occasional and exaggerated media reports of its chicness — remains a bewildering and potentially invented orientation favored by men in denial about their homosexuality and by women who will inevitably settle down with men.

More here.

James K. Galbraith reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century in Dissent:

Early in the last century, neoclassical economics dumped this social and political analysis for a mechanical one. Capital was reframed as a physical item, which paired with labor to produce output. This notion of capital permitted mathematical expression of the “production function,” so that wages and profits could be linked to the respective “marginal products” of each factor. The new vision thus raised the uses of machinery over the social role of its owners and legitimated profit as the just return to an indispensable contribution.

Symbolic mathematics begets quantification. For instance, if one is going to claim that one economy uses more capital (in relation to labor) than another, there must be some common unit for each factor. For labor it could be an hour of work time. But for capital? Once one leaves behind the “corn model” in which capital (seed) and output (flour) are the same thing, one must somehow make commensurate all the diverse bits of equipment and inventory that make up the actual “capital stock.” But how?

Although Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, has written a massive book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view. He is in some respects a skeptic of modern mainstream economics, but he sees capital (in principle) as an agglomeration of physical objects, in line with the neoclassical theory. And so he must face the question of how to count up capital-as-a-quantity.

His approach is in two parts. First, he conflates physical capital equipment with all forms of money-valued wealth, including land and housing, whether that wealth is in productive use or not. He excludes only what neoclassical economists call “human capital,” presumably because it can’t be bought and sold. Then he estimates the market value of that wealth. His measure of capital is not physical but financial.

This, I fear, is a source of terrible confusion.

More here.

T.J. Clark at The London Review of Books:

Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their attention to the four canvases by Veronese in the National Gallery called The Allegories of Love, they have spent their time trying to unpack the pictures’ iconography and said almost nothing about their visual character. This seems nearly as odd to me as it would have done to Ruskin, since the four pictures’ iconography is banal and their visual character unique and demanding. Iconographically speaking, the paintings tell a familiar late Petrarchan story of the pains and ecstasies of desire. Matrimony is eventually called on, in the stateliest of the four, to quieten things down, but most of the pictorial action in the three leading up to it has to do with Love’s double-dealing. The mysterious letter that goes from hand to hand in the painting called Infidelity is usually taken to be written by the woman in the middle to the man towards the left – the ‘soft musing poet’, as Edgar Wind imagined him, sweating in a pink silk number, ‘with some of the obesity of a coloratura tenor’. The little winged Eros stands at the clavichord nearby, ready to play continuo to his young master’s next outpourings. The poet looks to the sky for inspiration.

more here.

Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker:

Not long after the Waco siege began, James Tabor, the Biblical scholar, heard David Koresh on CNN talking about the Seven Seals. Tabor is an expert on Biblical apocalypticism and recognized the Branch Davidians for what they were—a community immersed in the world of the Old Testament prophets. He contacted a fellow religious scholar, Phillip Arnold, and together they went to the F.B.I. “It became clear to me that neither the officials in charge nor the media who were sensationally reporting the sexual escapades of David Koresh had a clue about the biblical world which this group inhabited,” Tabor writes, in an essay about his role in the Mount Carmel conflict. “I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts.”

Arnold and Tabor began long discussions with Livingstone Fagan, a Branch Davidian who had been sent out of Mount Carmel early in the siege to act as a spokesman. Fagan was a Jamaican-born Brit, and one of the community’s scholars—a man known for greeting others with the very English “Hello, Livingstone Fagan here. Shall we study?”

more here.

Ellen Douglas from a 1975 peice for The New Republic:

Flannery O'Connor, a Southerner and a Catholic, removed herself from the secular, convictionless global village and built her life in a specific place and on a specific faith. She wrote: “As a novelist, the major part of my task is to make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible. The novelist begins his work where human knowledge begins—with the senses; he works through the limita- tions of matter and unless he is writing fantasy, he has to stay within the concrete possibilities of his culture. He is bound by his particular past and by those institutions and traditions that this past has left to his society. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has formed us in the West; we are bound to it by ties which may often be invisible, but which are there, nevertheless. It has formed the shape of our secularism; it has formed even the shape of modern atheism. . . .

“The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.”

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith at his own blog:

We were of indeterminate class. We inhabited a defunct chicken farm, inherited from the Scandinavian grandparents of my mother's side. My father, born in Southern California to a renegade Utah Mormon and an Arkansas dustbowl migrant, was exposed to big ideas and the hope of some upward mobility thanks to a naturally curious mind and also in part to a stint in naval intelligence (involving the transcription of Chinese and Russian radio signals) followed by the GI Bill and graduate study. My mother, born in Sacramento to Minnesota Lutherans (softened by the pseudomystical fun of Shrinerdom), went to law school by night, with the dream of eventually helping the poor white women of the trailer parks of Rio Linda escape their abusive relationships. When the JD in family law was finally earned, and nailed to the wall of the strip-mall office, she would discover that the local economy still functioned mostly by barter, and she would receive, in remuneration for her services, a 1978 AMC Pacer, home grown tomatoes, a vicious goat named Snowy (of whom we have not heard the last), and many a hand-scrawled misspelled Post-It note of gratitude.

There were some lean times in the Valley, and though San Francisco was only a two-hour drive away, though Michel Foucault was just down the road at Berkeley, where my own mother had been an undergraduate at the end of the 1960s, speaking of technologies of the self and the liberatory potential of pleasure, I recall a Central Californian childhood in which the cycles of drought and flood still played a role, in which the desperation of James Agee's interbellum South had been translated Westward with little change. While my parents were not themselves peasants or 'harvest gypsies', to speak with John Steinbeck, the simple fact of their choice to settle in Rio Linda, California, was sufficient to pull us downward, classwise, and to ensure that in all of my subsequent motion through elite East Coast institutions and centers of metropolitan sophistication, I would never, for a second, be free of the singular thought: you are from Rio Linda. You are white trash.

More here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books:

Two pilots who are flying an airplane together start punching each other in the cockpit. One ejects those members of the crew whom he believes to be close to his rival; the other screams that his copilot isn’t a pilot at all, but a thief. At that moment, the plane spins out of control and swiftly loses height, while the passengers look on in panic.

These are lines from a recent newspaper column by Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist, and I can think of no clearer aid to understanding the perverse, avoidable, almost cartoonish confrontation that has engulfed Turkey since last December, and that threatens to undo the political and economic gains of the past decade.

The parties to the confrontation are the prime minister, sixty-year-old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a Turkish divine, Fethullah Gülen, thirteen years his senior. Erdoğan leads the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and works in the political hurly-burly of Ankara, the country’s capital. Gülen is Turkey’s best-known preacher and moral didact. He lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania, reportedly in poor health (he has heart trouble). Gülen presides loosely but unmistakably over an empire of schools, businesses, and networks of sympathizers.

It is this empire that Erdoğan now depicts as a “parallel state” to the one he was elected to run, and he has undertaken to eliminate it. The feud began in earnest last December and has had a remarkably destructive effect. Many of Gülen’s followers work within the government and have had much power. Now large parts of the civil service have been eviscerated, much of the media has been reduced to unthinking carriers of politically motivated revelation and innuendo, and the economy has slowed down after a decade of strong growth. The Turkish miracle is over.

More here.

The Time of Our Lives

I am having the time of my life
digging up an old pine stump
with my daughter
in the bright fall sunshine.
Everything I need to know about life
And death is in this moment.

The spade is singing
Among the white-collared mushrooms:
Praise to the Fungi Imperfecti,
The Fusaria and the Cladospores.
The hatchet chops a tune
Into the wood's soft heart:
Praise to the wood lice, the earthworms,
millipedes, hister beetles, common black
ground beetles, the slugs like ushers
waving their antennae at the calamitous lightspill.
Please close the door. The show's in progress.
Praise to the unseen saints of Gaia,
the Bacilli, the Clostridia,
and the pearly Micrococci.

Praise to the myriad of unseen
crawlies, the forgotten ones,
the bond breakers, hewers of cellulose
who make possible this uprooting.

Read more »

Jason Burke in The Guardian:

In the final pages of this intense, lyrical, erudite and powerful book, Rana Dasgupta makes the most important of many perceptive points: there is no certainty, indeed little probability, that the city will eventually find the relative calm, order and hygiene of its counterparts in the developed world. There is no obvious reason why the evolution of this crowded, traumatised, violent metropolis in India in the early decades of the 21st century should follow that of New York, London or Paris in another place and another time. Delhi will remain as it is. Judging by the content of the previous pages, this is a frightening prospect. Dasgupta has provided a welcome corrective to the reams of superficial travel writing describing the whimsical, the exotic, the booming or simply the poverty-stricken in India. His is a much more complex, darker story and it is no surprise that his book is peopled by the corrupt, the tragic and the terrified.

Dasgupta was born and raised in the UK and his work thus fits in a long tradition of nonfiction writing on India by outsiders who are also insiders. The idea to take Delhi, and more particularly its new “bourgeoisie”, as a subject is a very good one. Through an unflinching portrayal of the arrogant, aggressive, ultra-materialistic new wealthy in the Indian capital he makes broad points about India a generation after the major wave of economic reform which unleashed a savage capitalism in the country.

More here.