Bill Barol in The New Yorker:
I am awake and alone at 2 A.M.
There must be a God. There cannot be a God.
I will start a blog.
Sunday, 12 July, 1959: 9:55 A.M.
An angry crow mocked me this morning. I couldn’t finish my croissant, and fled the café in despair.
The crow descended on the croissant, squawking fiercely. Perhaps this was its plan.
Perhaps there is no plan.
More here.
Kenneth N. Waltz in Foreign Affairs:
It should not. Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff. In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.
More here.
“Much like animals in the real world,” read PETA’s statement, “Pokémon are treated as unfeeling objects and used for such things as human entertainment and as subjects in experiments. The way that Pokémon are stuffed into pokéballs is similar to how circuses chain elephants inside railroad cars and let them out only to perform confusing and often painful tricks that were taught using sharp steel-tipped bullhooks and electric shock prods … If PETA existed in [the game world of] Unova, our motto would be: Pokémon are not ours to use or abuse. They exist for their own reasons. We believe that this is the message that should be sent to children.” It is tempting, and not too difficult, to dismiss PETA’s effort as nothing more than a publicity stunt, and most of those who have covered the campaign have suggested, not altogether unwisely, that PETA focus on corporeal beasts rather than fantastic ones. But PETA has a point.
more from Liel Leibovitz at TNR here.
If you want to see how myths arise from misunderstandings, the Tower of Babel provides a textbook example. In ancient Assyrian babilu means ‘door of God’ and thus correctly describes the Babylonian ziggurat erected to the god Marduk by Nebuchadnezzar II and later seen in ruins by Herodotus. But in Hebrew the word bâlal means ‘to confuse’, hence the confusingly different account in Genesis. In this version, men come together in the cradle of civilisation to build ‘a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven’ as a monument for posterity, lest they be ‘scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ — and God, sensing that ‘this is only the beginning of what they will do’, sends down a software bug to corrupt their communal language and scatter them before they finish the job. It’s from this muddle that Babel emerges as the ultimate symbol of architectural hubris, a subject first represented in Flemish art in the 16th century.
more from Laura Gascoigne at The Spectator here.
Kerouac the writer is of course inseparable from the life of Kerouac the man. In brief form it goes like this: he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents in 1922, moved 11 times before he was 17, was addicted to books and imaginary play, stayed up all night in high school talking about poetry and ideas with one group of friends, stayed up drinking with a different group, learned to love night and rain, longed to marry a local girl whose father promised to get him a brakeman’s job on the Boston and Maine Railroad, parlayed a talent for football into a scholarship to Columbia, dropped out of college after ten minutes, made a couple of Atlantic crossings as a merchant seaman at the onset of the Second World War, returned to college for a further ten minutes, and thereafter divided his time for a number of years between a quietly disciplined writing life at home in Queens with his widowed mother and occasional forays into Manhattan for too much drink and talk with a circle of brilliant, reckless and variously talented friends who provide a couple of hundred pages of frantically complex narrative in any complete Life of Kerouac the writer and man.
more from Thomas Powers at the LRB here.
From Slate:
It seems likely that our brains have been equipped for abstraction for as long as we have been human. But how does prehistoric art help us understand this capacity—which today asserts itself everywhere from the walls of MoMA to the icons on our smartphones? The images in the Lascaux, Nerja, and Chauvet caverns look far from hyperrealistic. One simple explanation holds that our ancestors didn’t have the time or skill to render horses and cattle exactly as they appeared. Yet researchers in neuroaesthetics are beginning to wonder whether the abstraction in Paleolithic art actually mirrors the way our minds process the world.
More here.
From PhysOrg:
The light in the dust lies dead.
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
These words, which open Shelley's poem “When the Lamp is Shattered,” employ visions of nature to symbolize life in decay and rebirth. It's as if he had somehow foreseen the creation of this new Gemini Legacy image, and penned a caption for it. What Gemini has captured is nothing short of poetry in motion: the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting. All the action appears in a single frame, with the stunning polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 as the focus of attention. Polar-ring galaxies are peculiar objects. Astronomers have found only a handful of them, so not much is known about their origins. Most have an early-type spiral system, called a lenticular galaxy, as the central showpiece. But NGC 660, which lies about 40 million light-years distant toward the direction of Pisces the Fishes, is the only polar-ring galaxy known with what is called a late-type lenticular galaxy as its host. All, however, display a ring of stars, dust, and gas that extends tens of thousands of light-years across space along an orbit nearly perpendicular to the main disk.
More here.
Eric Hobsbawm outlived his short twentieth century (1917-1991) by more than twenty years. And right to the end he was still the object of scandal for having been far too long a communist. ‘You see’, he might have said, (‘you see’ was one of his habitual linguistic tics) ‘there have been many communists among major historians, but they left. Some stayed on the left (E.P. Thompson), some moved right (Annie Kriegel, François Furet). I stayed until the end, the bitter end.’
Since even the popular media agree that Hobsbawm was a remarkable historian, a great historian, and some even say that he was the greatest living historian (something which he found rather unconvincing and a little embarrassing), it begs the question: how can an impenitent communist be a great historian? Indeed, whenever Hobsbawm was interviewed, especially in Britain or the United States, sooner or later, the utterly predictable questions would pop up. And why did you support the USSR? And why did you stay so long in the communist party? (the sub-text here being ‘the producer insisted I should ask you this because it would look odd if I didn’t’). The interviewer would offer a challenge: Here is the opportunity to denounce your past, to repent, to say sorry. Take the chance. Admit it: you were wrong!
Although he has consistently refused to abjure, he freely admitted mistakes, erroneous interpretations, his belated realization of the gravity of Stalin’s crimes (Khrushchev’s speech was to him a revelation). However, on the substance: ‘are you sorry to have been a communist?’ he always remained unrepentant.
What kind of communist was he? He belonged, he explained in his autobiography, Interesting Times, to the generation for whom the hope of a world revolution was so strong that to abandon the communist party was like giving in to despair. But he must have been tempted. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary a letter was sent to the Daily Worker, then the party daily. It was signed by Hobsbawm as well as other party intellectuals such as Christopher Hill, E.P Thompson, Ronald Meek, Rodney Hilton, Doris Lessing, and the remarkable Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (who, in a somewhat eccentric way, is supposed to have rejoined the party over Hungary on the grounds that one does not desert friends in need). The letter declared that, ‘We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to the Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure of the British communists to think our political problems for themselves…The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on the false presentation of the facts….’.
Clare Carlisle in The Guardian:
“Evil” is a strong word, and a provocative one. Nowadays it tends to be reserved for acts of exceptional cruelty: the Moors murders, organised child abuse, genocide. It is not just the extreme nastiness of such acts – and their perpetrators – that makes people describe them as evil. There is something unfathomable about evil: it appears to be a deep, impenetrable darkness that resists the light of reason. To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like “unthinkable evil” or “unspeakable evil” highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable.
So how can we think about evil? Perhaps we can't, or shouldn't. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that we should remain silent about “that whereof we cannot speak” – a quotation beloved of lesser philosophers seeking a convenient way to end an academic paper. On a more practical level, most victims of evil will find that simply coping takes all their energy – and in the midst of their suffering, it may be difficult to disentangle the questions “why?” and “why me?” But the very familiarity of these questions suggests that there is something about evil that calls for thinking. And Wittgenstein's remark about remaining silent can be countered by Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the proper subject matter for philosophical thinking is precisely what is “unthought” and even unthinkable.
The Christian tradition offers huge resources for our thinking about the nature, origin and meaning of evil. This is partly because the history of western philosophy is intimately bound up with Christianity, so that supposedly secular debates on morality and human nature usually involve theological ideas even if these remain implicit. But more specifically, the Christian doctrine of creation makes the question of evil particularly pressing. If the world was designed and brought into being by a perfectly good, just and all-powerful creator, why does it contain evil at all? If God did not create evil, where did it come from? And why would God make human beings capable of extreme cruelty?
Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:
My grandmother was one of the first women to study mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. When she graduated, in 1905, the university nominated her for its highest distinction, an award marked by the presentation of a ring engraved with the initials of the emperor. But no woman had previously been nominated for such an honor, and Emperor Franz Joseph refused to bestow the award upon one.
More than a century later, one might have thought that by now we would have overcome the belief that women are not suited to the highest levels of education, in any area of study. So it is disturbing news that more than 30 Iranian universities have banned women from more than 70 courses, ranging from engineering, nuclear physics, and computer science to English literature, archaeology, and business. According to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the restrictions are part of a government policy to limit women’s opportunities outside the home.
The bans are especially ironic, given that, according to UNESCO, Iran has the highest rate of female to male undergraduates in the world. Last year, women made up 60% of all students passing university exams, and women have done well in traditionally male-dominated disciplines like engineering.
It may well be female students’ very success – and the role of educated women in opposing Iran’s theocracy – that led the government to seek to reverse the trend. Now, women like Noushin, a student from Esfahan who told the BBC that she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, are unable to achieve their ambitions, despite getting high scores on their entrance exams.
Some claim that the ideal of sexual equality represents a particular cultural viewpoint, and that we Westerners should not seek to impose our values on other cultures. It is true that Islamic texts assert in various ways the superiority of men to women. But the same can be said of Jewish and Christian texts; and the right to education, without discrimination, is guaranteed in several international declarations and covenants, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which almost all countries, including Iran, have agreed.
“Post-secular” is a rather nebulous term, as Mohamed admits. It is supposed to cover recent theoretical turns towards taking faith seriously, whether through theological movements such as Radical Orthodoxy or Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism”. Alain Badiou in particular, an avowed atheist, allows us to “glimpse” what Mohamed (himself a Muslim atheist) calls, in his convoluted way, “the possibility of an unreligious turn away from a secular view of belief”. This appears to mean that we must now consider faith in romantic love, or Cubism, say, as equivalents for what used to be associated with the divinity (so perhaps “I saw her face; now I’m a believer”?). Milton gets into the act in strained ways because he provides a “pre-secular” parallel to the post-secular present, and each illuminates the other. An ambitious intellectual leap brings the plain style of God or Abdiel in Paradise Lost – where grace, for example, “Comes unprevented, unimplor’d, unsought” – into a supposedly productive dialogue with modern Messianism, the appeal to a faithful few, and then, oddly enough, with the plainer still style of the internet – the medium through which both jihadists and supporters of Barack Obama communicate.
more from Neil Forsyth at the TLS here.
Now that this tremendous whatzit has had a few weeks to pound and roar through the theaters, and maybe wash away some of the prerelease publicity, I hope that people have become more interested in what The Master puts on the screen, and less in the question of whether it’s a history of Scientology with the names disguised. The so-called Master of the title, a character known to the legal authorities as Lancaster Dodd, is a peddler of psychotherapeutic claptrap and pseudoscientific mythology in post–World War II America—so, yes, he has a lot in common with L. Ron Hubbard. Dodd, too, has a fat book to sell (it’s called The Cause, rather than Dianetics) and travels with a wife named Peggy (Hubbard’s first wife was named Polly), with whose aid and incitement he teaches that we must awaken to our true nature as billion-year-old spirits.
more from Stuart Klawans at The Nation here.
The Hegel that Zizek loves is not the not the good patriot, not the philosopher brought to Berlin by Frederick William III to reconcile democrats to absolute rule, not the consoling thinker who showed how the apparent contingency of events concealed the inner logic of history. The Good Hegel is, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, a kind of hedgehog—a stubborn dialectician for whom every event, no matter how momentous or accidental, can be reduced to the cosmic three-step dance of thesis, antithesis, synthesis: “The Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form.” The Hegel that Zizek loves is much like Zizek himself: a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths. Zizek’s Hegel is a kind of cosmic prankster.
more from Adam Jasper at Bookforum here.
From Herald:
The SC’s directive was issued after a 2009 petition filed by advocate Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki and this after an incident in Taxila where policemen maltreated and sexually abused transgender persons returning from a wedding. “The Taxila incident motivated me to speak for transgender people. They are as human as us and, according to the Constitution, the state has a duty to protect its citizens regardless of their gender,” says Khaki. The SC agrees. A judgement issued on March 22, 2011 states, “Their rights, obligations including right to life and dignity are equally protected … The government functionaries both at federal and provincial levels are bound to provide them protection of life and property and secure their dignity as well, as is done in case of other citizens.” In addition to ordering the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) to register transgenders as the third sex, the court has asked provincial social welfare departments to work for the community’s support and development.
More here.
From Scientific American:
President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney ought to be talking about how to use programs like this to bring about the kind of success that Germany has achieved. The German government encourages a close partnership between technical universities and industrial manufacturers; it supports centers where scientists and engineers pursue fundamental research in close proximity to industrial colleagues investigating more applied technologies. German battery makers, for instance, work with technical universities on nanotechnology, while textile makers contribute to research in carbon fibers for composite fabrics. Could there be a grander vision for harnessing U.S. research talent in this way? On this, both candidates have been silent.
More here.
Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen
C. M. Naim in The South Asian Idea:
The Triangle Waist Factory (TWF) was situated on the top three floors of a ten-story building in the Washington Square area in Manhattan. The neighborhood was far from being a slum; though it had a several buildings with similar factories, it also had a few mansions of the rich, and some buildings of the New York University. TWF was owned by two Jewish men, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who were related to each other through marriage. They had immigrated to the United States only a couple of decades earlier, and through hard work as well as exploitation of immigrant labor in the garment industry—most of them were women, and a large number also Jewish—the two, by 1911, had become millionaires. Their success had come in particular from the popularity of a new female garment called “shirtwaist,” i.e. a shirt or bodice that reached only to the waist and was could be worn with any tailored skirt. It allowed more choice and freedom to its wearer, while adding a modish flair to otherwise more sober costumes. Shirtwaists were mostly made of sheer cotton fabrics. Unfortunately, the latter were also highly combustible.
More here.
Morgan Meis on Eric Hobsbawm, in The Smart Set:
I studied briefly with Eric Hobsbawm, the English Marxist historian who died October 1st at the age of 94. I studied with him in the early 1990s at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Hobsbawm was just completing his book The Age of Extremes, the third in a trilogy that included The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire. Hobsbawm was not an inspiring teacher. He would shuffle into the classroom in his baggy suit and sit down at a table at the head of the class. Then he would open up a folder and begin to read us chapters from the book he was trying to finish. That was it. Hobsbawm didn't read very well. A strange-looking man, his mouth was always screwed up to the right. He mumbled out of the side of his face. The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas would sometimes show up for a lecture or a conference at The New School during those days as well. Due to Habermas' severe lisp, you could barely understand him either. I suspect a generation of grad students formed the opinion that academic greatness and the inability to speak were somehow related. I recently read a passage from one of Hobsbawm's books where he reflects on his love of jazz. The book is called Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life. In it, Hobsbawm wrote:
Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most, I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, 16 or 17. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolised by words and the exercises of the intellect.
Thinking back to the man in his early 70s reading to his students from his then soon-to-be-published book, it occurs to me that Hobsbawm was still that 16- or 17-year-old kid. I ran into him once at the A&P supermarket on Union Square. He had a few items in his shopping cart and was wandering around in the aisles. When I spoke to him he looked at me shyly from under his brow. I asked him a few questions about the Third International. He looked relieved. Yes, let us speak of the Third International. Why is it that I will forever associate Eric Hobsbawm with the feeling of embarrassment?
Jennifer Saul in The Philosophers' Magazine:
In the UK, women are 46% of undergraduate students in philosophy, but only 24% of permanent staff. Women are approximately 21% of professional philosophers in the US, but only 17% of those employed full-time. These figures are very unlike those for most fields of the humanities, in which women tend to be near or above parity with men. Indeed, they more closely resemble mathematics and physical sciences (biological sciences are much closer to parity). One recent study by Kieran Healy showed philosophy to bemore male than mathematics, with only computer science, physics and engineering showing lower percentages of women.
What’s the explanation for this? It used to be thought that women were simply unsuited to philosophy. As Hegel puts it: “Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts …. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant.”
This view is, for obvious reasons, less popular now. However, quite a few people, both feminist philosophers and philosophers of psychology, have drawn on the importantly distinct idea that women approach things differently, and that philosophy is the poorer for not fitting well with women’s ways of thinking. One version of this idea can be found in Carol Gilligan and another in very recent work by Wesley Buckwalter and Steve Stich. These claims of women’s difference, however, have never held up well empirically, as Louise Antony argues eloquently in her “Different Voices or Perfect Storm”.
Another commonly floated explanation is that women’s family commitments make it more difficult for them to progress professionally. This may well be true (studies do show that women continue to do the majority of housework and childcare). But it fails to explain why philosophy should show such a different profile than other fields of the arts and humanities, which have achieved (or surpassed) parity. If anything, one would expect it to be easier to thrive as a mother and philosopher than as a mother and scholar of French literature, who is far more likely to need to travel to archives and the like.
