John Cookson at Big Think:

Is a person's propensity toward evil a matter of malfunctioning synapses and neurons?

Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” says it is. Ever-more-detailed brain scans are revealing the biological origins of psychological issues in “evil” people, from those who are mildly antisocial to serial murderers.

Under each brain’s wrinkly cortex lies the limbic system, an evolutionary heirloom controlling emotion and motivation, among other functions. Within this limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of nuclei that processes our feelings of fear and pleasure.

Murderers and other violent criminals have been shown to have amygdalae that are smaller or that don’t function properly, explains Stone. One recent study concluded that individuals who exhibit a marker of “limbic neural maldevelopment” have “significantly higher levels of antisocial personality, psychopathy, arrests and convictions compared with controls.”

The amygdala is important because, among its other functions, it allows an individual to respond to the facial expressions of others. When a person has an abnormal amygdala—one that doesn't process the facial expressions of emotion—they can have an inability to register the fear and suffering of a victim, says Stone. This lack of response to the emotions of others predisposes an individual to antisocial, even criminal, behavior.

More here.

From Radio Free Europe:

Salman Ahmad was a 19-year-old medical student in 1982 when he performed music on stage for the first time in his native Pakistan. Having just returned from six years in the United States, where he'd earned enough money clearing restaurant tables and delivering newspapers to buy an electric guitar, the future Pakistani rock star began to play a song by the rock group Van Halen at a talent show in Lahore. Suddenly, Ahmad heard cries of rage in Urdu from a gang of bearded young men who stormed toward the stage. They were an early manifestation of the Taliban: Islamic student extremists affiliated with a local religious party, acting as self-appointed music police.

While some of the extremists threw burqas and chadors over the women in the audience, Ahmad says one bearded student jumped on stage and grabbed his electric guitar — “his eyes filled with a madness that has nothing to do with God” as he smashed the precious instrument beyond repair. Ahmad tells RFE/RL it was a transformational moment in his life — the moment when he declared “rock and roll jihad” against the “ideology of hate.” “The Taliban and their brand of Islam is not Islam at all. Islam doesn't teach you to kill innocent women, children, and men. Islam doesn't teach you to commit suicide,” Ahmad says. “That's haram,” or forbidden. Ahmad says that “as long as the Taliban pursue a strategy of violence, subjugation of women, destroying girls schools, killing musicians,” he doesn't see how anyone can “reconcile with that sort of mentality and ideology. The ideology of hate, the ideology of terrorism, has no place in Islam, or anywhere else in the world, and I will continue saying that.”

More here. (Note: Salman is a dear friend, and above everything else, one of the most decent human beings I have ever met. Salman Zindabad!)

Who could have predicted that a … campaign (of) anti-Muslim hate speech (by) … the country's most prominent politicians … could have led to (Koran burning) in Florida? —Josh Marshall, TPM

The Balloon of the Mind

Hands, do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed

by William Butler Yeats

From Nature:

Practice makes perfect when it comes to remembering things, but exactly how that works has long been a mystery. A study published in Science this week¹ indicates that reactivating neural patterns over and over again may etch items into the memory.

People find it easier to recall things if material is presented repeatedly at well-spaced intervals rather than all at once. For example, you're more likely to remember a face that you've seen on multiple occasions over a few days than one that you've seen once in one long period. One reason that a face linked to many different contexts — such as school, work and home — is easier to recognize than one that is associated with just one setting, such as a party, could be that there are multiple ways to access the memory. This idea, called the encoding variability hypothesis, was proposed by psychologists about 40 years ago².

More here.

Rowan Jacobsen in Eating Well:

I am a granola-eating, free-range-chicken-chasing, broccoli-hugging foodie. I recoil from junk food like vampires shun sunlight. You’d think me the ideal audience for Food Rules, Michael Pollan’s latest megaseller, which consists of 64 “straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely.” But Food Rules awakened strange feelings in me. As I paged through the book, being advised “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (#2), I felt a big finger wagging at me. This was not having the intended effect. Instead, I’m sorry to say, it was awakening my inner Bart Simpson. Somewhere between “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead” (#37) and “Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored” (#47), I became consumed by the notion of breaking all 64 food rules in one day of gloriously irresponsible eating.

It wouldn’t be easy. It would take significant planning and discipline, as well as digestive fortitude, but I might just be able to do it. I would eat whatever I saw advertised on television (#11). I would eat it alone and bored (#59, #47). I would eat breakfast cereal that changed the color of my milk (#36), I would eat way beyond full (#46) and I would scramble to go back for seconds (#53) of a food that was incapable of rotting (#13).

More here. [Thanks to Elatia Harris.]

Mohsin Hamid in Dawn:

Religion, like love, is at its core about sincerity. Saying you love your spouse or your child in public as loudly as possible does not make it true. But imagine a state where everyone was encouraged, indeed coerced, to do this. By law, no one would go to work on their child’s birthday. Wedding anniversaries would be marked with televised speeches. In order to be issued with passports, childless couples and the unmarried would be forced to fill out special declarations to the effect that their status was not of their choosing.

What would happen? People would lie. In order to be accepted and get ahead, they would say one thing and believe something else. And by so doing, they would devalue truth (and indeed love) in their society. They would create an environment of hypocrisy in which those who love and those who don’t love both claim to love, where those who don’t love would be denied the chance for honest self-assessment, and where those who do love would find the words they use to express their feelings drained of meaning through rampant misappropriation. The result would be a society utterly toxic to love and to its own people.

The same is true of religion. A state that mandates religious practices, as Pakistan does, is a state that mandates hypocrisy, because the law can only govern outward behaviour. It can say that such-and-such behaviour is prohibited, but it cannot say that such-and-such belief is prohibited. And as the gap between belief and behaviour widens, hypocrisy sets in. People with beards still kill. People who cover their heads still steal. People who thank God for their victories still cheat. And because so many people do these things, the split between religion and morality becomes profound and widely accepted.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down and wildcards added. Thanks to all the participants. (Details about the prize here.)

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll and tell your friends about us.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Akeel Bilgrami, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (given here in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog: Katsafanas on “Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology”
2. Justin Erik Halldor Smith: More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)
3. Minds and Brains: The Myth of Sensory Immediacy – Why Berkeley Was Wrong
4. PEA Soup: Am I a Consequentialist?
5. Philotropes: Do folks think that consciousness matters for moral responsibility?
6. The Immanent Frame: Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
7. Tomkow: The Retributive Theory of Property
8. TTahko: Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology
9. Yeah, OK, But Still: Marriage

We'll announce the three winners on September 22, 2010.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added up to three others that we also liked.

Soviet historic sites, meanwhile, are being remade into tourist attractions. Some, like the Karosta military prison in Liepaja, Latvia, offer visitors “live action” tours — recreations of what it was like to be incarcerated in the institution’s dank cells. Visitors are yelled at, ordered around, interrogated, and made to suffer physical punishments for their misbehaviours. For participants, it’s a lot of fun, and perhaps a masochistic form of catharsis. In this way, the physical and psychological remnants of the Soviet system have been transformed into a resource. At Pravda, Mr. Lenin served as the North American spin on this process — an ironic, distant nod at a once-evil empire, relegated to encouraging the consumption of premium vodka and Russian fusion food. Mounted in his place of honour, he looked good, I thought — right at home in red and gold and glitz, more comfortable than he will ever be in his crystal sarcophagus in Red Square. As for us patrons, well, if any Cold War fears still lurked in our cultural subconscious, they could be washed away with a shot of vodka and a side of black bread and pickles. I tossed back my glass and offered a silent na zdorovye to Lenin, revolutionary hero, patron saint of vodka bars.

more from Medeine Tribinevicius at The Walrus here.

Sentence has been passed on Thilo Sarrazin, now only enforcement awaits: his expulsion from the SPD and his dismissal from the board of Germany’s central Bundesbank. After nearly two weeks of media outrage Chancellor Angela Merkel seems satisfied and the newly elected President Christian Wulff will be hoping that punishing the offender will ensure that “the discussion does no damage to Germany – particularly on an international level.” What a free-thinking president! The only hiccup in the trial of the newly-hatched bestselling author and former finance senator to Berlin, is that Thilo Sarrazin has offered neither confession nor apology, and he denies preaching either racism or eugenics. And despite the media tribunal, much of Germany regards him as the man who is simply telling the truth, and this is why he has become a persona non grata.

more from Joachim Güntner at Sign and Sight here.

For the most part Franzen writes as if literary modernism and experimental postmodernism had never occurred. All four of his novels, including the new one, are somewhat loose and baggy, and they contain an easygoing and warm attention to the complexities of human character. Reality-as-given is for these books an endlessly renewable resource. There is no “relentless investigation into the possibilities of form,” to use a phrase from Gilbert Sorrentino to describe the avant-garde.3 However, Franzen’s books do address sizable cultural events. Strong Motion is in the honorable category of eco-catastrophe fiction. The Corrections has several subplots having to do with clinical depression, biotechnology, and the recapitalization of Eastern Europe. The subplots of Freedom include species extinction, mountaintop removal used in West Virginia coal mining, overpopulation, and private-sector subcontracts for the Iraq war. The personal is invariably sutured to the social, but the personal—the portrait of Enid Lambert, the mother in The Corrections, for example—is what generally remains most memorable in these books. Franzen is a writer of great patience. This is his glory and his curse. Like Arnold Bennett and any number of other nineteenth-century English and Russian novelists, he has the voluptuary’s interest in physical details, and he takes his time in describing them.

more from Charles Baxter at the NYRB here.

Alex Shephard in Planet:

Ever since he stole his first film camera, Werner Herzog has been making strange, brilliant films that blur the line between fact and fiction. His features and documentaries explore grand, elemental, even primeval themes — the nature of madness, the chasm between nature and civilization, and man’s mad ambition to conquer a hostile, implacable natural world. Over the past forty years Herzog has created a body of work that is arguably as powerful and durable as any contemporary filmmaker.

His 2009 film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? — a film loosely based on the story of Mark Yavorsky, a grad student who, inspired by Aeschyles’ Oresteia, murdered his mother with a saber — comes out on DVD next month. PLANET spoke with Herzog about the madness he attracts, his cinematic vision, and his relationship with Roger Ebert.

Did you ever meet Mark Yavorsky?

Mark Yavorsky was found incompetent to stand trial and he was put away in a maximum-security mental institution, but he was released after eight years. And I met him at a trailer park. He lived in a trailer park, near Riverside, CA. …. His trailer was filled with strange memorabilia. In one corner he had a poster of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and there was a shrine built and a candle burning in front of it. When I walked in, I shrank back and I thought, “Oh, get yourself out of here. Stay out. Stay away from the man.”

More here.

Andrew Gamble in The Independent:

Andrew Mellon, the US Treasury Secretary during the Great Crash of 1929 and one of America's richest men, observed that in a crisis assets return to their rightful owners. Nothing much has changed. As the present crisis has mutated from a banking crisis to a fiscal crisis and a sovereign debt crisis, bonuses continue to be paid, while the people of Greece and Iceland suffer huge cuts in jobs and services.

As the head of Citibank helpfully pointed out, “Countries cannot disappear. You always know where to find them.” Once the bubbles are burst, expectations about asset values are dashed, optimism gives way to despair, and wealth is ruthlessly redistributed. Capitalism survives by purging itself of debt and loading the costs of adjustment on the weak and the poor.

For David Harvey, this is the latest of the great structural crises which have punctuated the development of capitalism and which signify that major limits have been reached to further growth. Crises on this view are inherent in capitalism itself, and the means by which it renews itself. Only a periodic clear-out of debt and unproductive activities creates the basis for a further leap forward.

Harvey is less interested in the detail of how the 2007-8 crisis unfolded than in understanding it as a manifestation of how capitalism works. Over the last two decades, he has become a leading exponent of classical Marxist political economy, his work known for its exceptional clarity and for integrating spatial categories into the theory of capital accumulation.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Human Chain is stranger – and much greater – than a cursory glance would suggest. Though here, as expected, are exquisitely turned poems about rural events and childhood incidents, the collection also revisits (and sometimes redirects) earlier work, and there is a chilly, other-worldly aura hanging over the whole enterprise. “Chanson d’Aventure” describes the mild stroke Heaney suffered in 2006, and how he and his wife were “careered at speed” in an ambulance through “Dungloe, / Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected / By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.” The book, as Eliot said of Webster, is much possessed by death.

The opening poem, “Had I not been awake”, replays the stroke in allegory, setting a new unfamiliar tenor of uncertainty and precariousness. A sudden wind whips sycamore leaves up onto the roof in a moment that “came and went so unexpectedly / And almost it seemed dangerously, / Returning like an animal to the house” resulting in “the whole of me a-patter”. Dominant motifs of Heaney’s work such as balance, steadiness and endurance are infused with a new awareness of instability, even in retrospect. And there is gratitude for this newly earned knowledge. In “A Herbal”, after Guillevic, about the plants that thrive in graveyards, Heaney writes: “The wind // Has me well rehearsed / In the ways of the world. // Unstable is good.” A new lexicon of tremor has entered the poems; as a boy he is “a-fluster” when an eel takes his fishing bait; his grandfather’s voice is “a-waver”; when the funeral bell tolls, the grass is “all a-tremble”; a riverbank field is “twilit and a-hover / With midge-drifts”; the words “giddiness”, “giddy” and “lightheadedness” occur and sometimes reoccur.

The poems are preoccupied with connection and separation.

Morehere.

One Season

That was the summer my best friend
called me a faggot on the telephone,
hung up, and vanished from the earth,

a normal occurance in this country
where we change our lives
with the swiftness of hysterical finality

of dividing cells. That month
the rain refused to fall,
and fire engines streaked back and forth crosstown

towards smoke-filled residential zones
where people stood around outside, drank beer
and watched their neighbors houses burn.

Read more »

Theodore Dalrymple in The City Journal:

It is an unenviable fate for an author to be remembered, if at all, for a devastating review of his principal work by a much greater writer; but such was the fate that befell Soame Jenyns at the pen of Doctor Johnson. The book that occasioned Johnson’s scorn was A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, which Jenyns first published anonymously in 1756. Johnson’s review brings to mind Truman Capote’s famous remark about Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, On the Road: that it was not writing, it was typing. For Johnson said of Jenyns: “When this [author] finds himself prompted to another performance, let him consider, whether he is about to disburden his mind, or employ his fingers; and, if I might venture to offer him a subject, I should wish, that he would solve this question: Why he, that has nothing to write, should desire to be a writer?”

In this case, however, the criticism was rather unfair; and Jenyns, by all accounts an amiable man, was mortified and harbored a deep but concealed resentment against Johnson for the rest of his life. After Johnson died, Jenyns published some vengefully scurrilous verses about the great man:

Here lies poor Johnson. Reader, have a care,
Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear;
Religious, moral, generous, and humane
He was—but self-sufficient, rude, and vain;
Ill-bred and over-bearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian—yet a brute.

Morehere.

Hello,

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. A total of 497 votes were cast for the 36 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own sites. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Playtonic Dialogues: Musicians Debate Methods Of Political Dissent
2. Guardian Science Blog: Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?
3. Experimental Philosophy: Further Experimental Work on the Bank Cases
4. P.A.P.-Blog: Why and How Do We Separate State and Church? And What Are the Consequences for Religious Liberty?
5. Minds and Brains: The Myth of Sensory Immediacy – Why Berkeley Was Wrong
6. Philotropes: Do folks think that consciousness matters for moral responsibility?
7. Underverse: We Just Live In It
8. Experimental Philosophy: Is the Armchair Sexist?
9. Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog: Katsafanas on “Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology”
10. PEA Soup: Am I a Consequentialist?
11. Specter of Reason: Ryle On Rules And Creativity
12. Justin Eric Halldor Smith: More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)
13. The View from Hell: The Patriarchy, the Gynocracy, and Other Comforting Myths of Struggle
14. 3 Quarks Daily: Raising Neanderthals: Metaphysics at the Limits of Science
15. TTahko: Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology
16. Vis Viva: On Handwaving
17. Flickers of Freedom: Can There be Partial (as opposed to impartial) Desert?
18. Tomkow: The Retributive Theory of Property
19. Flickers of Freedom: Does Consciousness Matter?
20. The Philosophy of Poetry: The Leap

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Akeel Bilgrami on September 11. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

The past decade has been a vivid tutorial in the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message”. The rise of 24/7 TV and the concomitant decline of traditional network news has fragmented the old collective audience. Today disparate groups receive the same facts, filtered through a different angle of the political prism. Web commentary has split these primary colours into a thousand graded hues. The residual virtue of mainstream critics is that they still discriminate on behalf of whole communities; they bind readers together, not slice them into ever smaller coteries. Also, in a world characterised by a hyper-abundance of media, where bandwidths are filled with a ceaseless flow of chatter and governments drown real information in large-scale data dumps, it is the sceptical, nimble-minded, old-fashioned literary critic, trained to thresh narrative grain from word chaff, who is best situated to gather something like truth from the digital realm.

more from Georgie Williamson at the ALR here.