Peter Singer in the New York Times Book Review:

It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of “The Language Instinct,” addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future?

If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more. In 800 information-packed pages, Pinker also discusses a host of more specific issues. Here is a sample: What do we owe to the Enlightenment? Is there a link between the human rights movement and the campaign for animal rights? Why are homicide rates higher in the southerly states of this country than in northern ones? Are aggressive tendencies heritable? Could declines in violence in particular societies be attributed to genetic change among its members? How does a president’s I.Q. correlate with the number of battle deaths in wars in which the United States is involved? Are we getting smarter? Is a smarter world a better world?

In seeking answers to these questions Pinker draws on recent research in history, psychology, cognitive science, economics and sociology. Nor is he afraid to venture into deep philosophical waters, like the role of reason in ethics and whether, without appealing to religion, some ethical views can be grounded in reason and others cannot be.

More here.

per il Mulatto Brischdauer
gran pazzo e compositore mulattico
––Ludwig van Beethoven, 1803

The Bridgetower

If was at the Beginning. If
he had been older, if he hadn’t been
dark, brown eyes ablaze
in that remarkable face;
if he had not been so gifted, so young
a genius with no time to grow up;
if he hadn’t grown up, undistinguished,
to an obscure old age.
If the piece had actually been,
as Kreutzer exclaimed, unplayable––even after
our man had played it, and for years,
no one else was able to follow––
so that the composer’s fury would have raged
for naught, and wagging tongues
could keep alive the original dedication
from the title page he shredded.

Oh, if only Ludwig had been better-looking,
or cleaner, or a real aristocrat,
von instead of the unexceptional van
from some Dutch farmer; if his ears
had not already begun to squeal and whistle;
if he hadn’t drunk his wine from lead cups,
if he could have found True Love. Then
the story would have held: In 1803
George Polgreen Bridgetower,
son of Friedrich Augustus the African Prince
and Maria Anna Sovinki of Biala in Poland,
traveled from London to Vienna,
where he met the Great Master
who would stop work on his Third Symphony
to write a sonata for his new friend
to premiere triumphantly on May 24th,
whereupon the composer himself
leapt up from the piano to embrace
his “lunatic mulatto.”

Who knows what would have followed?
They might have palled around some,
just a couple of wild and crazy guys
strutting the town like rock stars,
hitting the bars for a few beers, a few laughs . . .
instead of falling out over a girl
nobody remembers, nobody knows.

Then this bright-skinned papa’s boy
could have sailed his fifteen-minute fame
straight into the record books––where,
instead of a Regina Carter or Aaron Dworkin or Boyd Tinsley
sprinkled here and there, we would find
rafts of black kids scratching out scales
on their matchbox violins so that some day
they might play the impossible:
Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47,
also known as The Bridgetower.

by Rita Dove
from Sonata Mulattica
W.W. Norton, 2009

On Bridgetower
.
.

Tony Curzon Price in openEconomics:

Slavoj Žižek has been pointedly critical of the “Western Bhuddism” that Jobs' [Stanford] commencement speech so exemplifies. Zizek analyses it as part of the the legitimating fabric of ideology coming out of the West Coast. As he sees it,

… George Lucas explained the personal level through a type of pop-Buddhism: “[Skywalker-father] turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things.”

This is pure Jobsianism. But for Žižek, what is really notable is:

the parallel political question: How did the Republic turn into the Empire, or, more precisely, how does a democracy become a dictatorship? Lucas explained that it isn’t that the Empire conquered the Republic, but that the Republic became the Empire. “One day, Princess Leia and her friends woke up and said, ‘This isn’t the Republic anymore, it’s the Empire. We are the bad guys.’ [… Star Wars'] key insight [is] that “we are the bad guys,” that the Empire emerges through the very way we, the “good guys,” fight the enemy out there.”

As so often with Žižek, there is an important element of truth here that we should not allow his bluntness to obscure. The nugget to keep is that the Jobsian message of authenticity, of quasi-Randian pursuit of the dream, of perfectionism is not just value neutral – it is a platitude that these virtues can be put to the most terrible uses; ironically and terribly, the virtues actually engender the worst vices.

Chapter 1 of George Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton's Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being, over at Princeton University Press:

Our work on identity and economics began in 1995, when we were both, by coincidence, based in Washington, DC. We had been together at Berkeley—George as a professor, Rachel as a graduate student. George then went to the Brookings Institution while his wife was serving on the Federal Reserve Board. Rachel was at the University of Maryland.

Identity Economics began with a letter from Rachel to George telling him that his most recent paper was wrong.8 He had ignored identity, she wrote, and this concept was also critically missing from economics more generally. We decided to meet. Quite possibly, we thought, identity was already captured in the economics of the time; perhaps it was already included in what we call tastes.

We talked for months. We discussed the research of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, and literary critics. We discussed the focus on identity: how people think they and others should behave; how society teaches them how to behave; and how people are motivated by these views, sometimes to the point of being willing to die for them. We worked to distill many ideas and nuances, to develop a basic definition of identity that could be easily incorporated into economics. And we saw that including identity would have implications for fields as disparate as macroeconomics and the economics of education.

This book builds an economics where tastes vary with social context. Identity and norms bring something new to the representation of tastes. Garden-variety tastes for oranges and bananas —to continue with the earlier example—are commonly viewed as being characteristic of the individual. In contrast, identities and norms derive from the social setting. The incorporation of identity and norms then yields a theory of decision making where social context matters.

First, to digress (but not really): I’ve been wondering these last few weeks why Occupy Wall Street hasn’t moved me, even though I am sympathetic to the cause. Partly, I suppose, it’s the relatively small size of the protests, although as Castro proved in the Sierra Maestra mountains, revolution is not necessarily a numbers game. But even more, it’s a lack of focus, the inability of the movement to define itself, a failure to explain its terms. An absence of narrative, in other words — something I didn’t understand fully until, in the middle of Lawrence Weschler’s “Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative,” I came across an essay called “Waking Up to How We Sleepwalk” that cast my reservations in sharp relief. Here, Weschler recounts the experience of watching, on the coastal grounds of Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, a 1982 anti-nuclear protest-turned-performance piece, in which dozens of participants slowed nearly to the point of stillness, “moving, in suspension, maybe a few feet each minute — but moving nonetheless toward the bluff.” Over the course of a couple of hours, these people, in their slow-motion choreography, moved from dry land into the water before returning to shore. “Slowly,” Weschler tells us, “one by one, the sleepwalkers emerged from the water and filed — still trance-slow, dripping, shivering violently — through the doors of a large converted boathouse.”

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

Towards the end of last year it became apparent that the Stourton household was heading for a book crisis. My wife and I both brought substantial collections into our marriage. I get a steady stream of review copies and manuscripts from friends and acquaintances hoping for endorsements. She makes factual television programmes and is often sent books by aspiring producers and presenters. I am incontinent when the urge to buy a new hardback novel comes upon me, and she reads incredibly quickly. All these factors had conspired to fill our shelves. The books had become Triffid-like, taking over our home and lives. Something had to be done. So, almost a year ago, in this paper, I took these vows: “My resolution is that for 12 months I shall buy no new books and shall limit my leisure reading to books already in my library. There are bound to be professional reasons for bending the rule from time to time. But if I devote myself to our existing collection I might learn something about myself and my family … I shall catch up with some of the friends’ books which have been neglected, and I shall attack the many review copies that still have a marker stuck somewhere in the first couple of chapters … ”

more from Edward Stourton at the FT here.

Listen to the economic debates of the past couple of years, and it’s tempting to conclude that no progress has been made in the field in over half a century. There’s John Maynard Keynes on the one side, arguing for deficit spending to offset the aftereffects of a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. On the other side there’s Ludwig von Mises (his fellow Austrians Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek seem too moderate for the role), thundering that all govern­ment intervention in the economy is doomed to failure. Keynes and Mises are of course both long dead. But it is the resilience of their ideas that makes studying the history of economics so rewarding for non­economists. As a rule, economists don’t know much about history. So at times like these, anyone with a bit of familiarity with the giants of the past can weigh in on big economic issues with about as much authority and credibility as the credentialed experts.

more from Justin Fox at the NY Times here.

“Politics also issues from the natural world, but like the stinking
Gongora orchid attracts flies. —Abby Lightsome

On Being Asked For a Ruling Party Membership Card

you asked me, party cadre,
for a membership card
of the ruining party.
what an insult
to the flowers and the birds
of my country
in my heart.

by Chenjerai Hove
from Rainbows in the Dust
Baobab Books, Harare, 1998

Our TV screens may be full of news about war and crime, but this masks a fall in historical terms in the number of violent deaths that’s nothing short of astonishing, says the psychologist. He tells us how and why this happened.

From The Browser:

You are most well-known as a psychologist of language – what got you interested in ideas around violence?

It was an obsession with human nature and its implications. In previous books such as How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought, I argued that evolution endowed us with a rich human nature – an intricate anatomy of emotions and ways of knowing. But the very idea of human nature raises, in many people’s minds, fears of fatalism, pessimism and nihilism. Does human nature doom us to perpetual violence, racism and oppression? I have always argued that it does not.

Human nature is a complex system of many parts. And though it may have components that push us towards violence, it also has components that pull us away from violence. What can change over time is which of these components prevails. In How the Mind Works I briefly pointed out that rates of violence have changed significantly over history. Hunter-gatherer societies were far more dangerous than settled states. Rates of homicide have plummeted since the Middle Ages. Democracies have become more numerous. Forms of institutionalised violence such as slavery, harems and torture-executions – like burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel – have been abolished in most of the world.

All these happy changes, I noted, represented the influence of components of human nature such as empathy, reason and the moral sense. Through a set of accidents, I came to expand those two or three paragraphs into a book of its own, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

One hundred and five years ago, in 1906, a book written by the infamous curmudgeon Ambrose Bierce was published as The Cynic’s Word Book. It was Bierce’s preference that the book — a collection of satirical definitions which he had written for various newspapers “in a desultory way at long intervals” from 1881 to 1906 — be called The Devil’s Dictionary, but publishers had always been nervous about the anti-religious implications of the title. In 1906, American bookshelves were flooded with “a score of ‘cynic’ books — The Cynic’s This, The Cynic’s That, The Cynic’s t’Other,” to name a few. As far as those other “cynic” books were concerned, Bierce added, “most” were “merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, they brought the word ’cynic’ into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was discredited in advance of publication.” As Bierce wrote his definitions for various newspapers columns over the years, they had appeared under a variety of names: The Cynic’s Dictionary, The Demon’s Dictionary, The Cynic’s Word Book. But no title was ever as satisfying as the one he finally demanded. One hundred years ago, in 1911, Bierce got his wish when the work was published as The Devil’s Dictionary.

More here.

Daniel Levy in Foreign Policy:

Netanyahu, the son of Benzion Netanyahu, is now in his second term of office and approaching a total of six years at Israel's helm, making him one of the country's longest-serving premiers. And, like him or hate him, he might go down in history as one of its most defining and consequential leaders.

But if there is a discernible legacy, what is it all about?

In his first campaign for the premiership in 1996, Netanyahu pledged to continue with the Oslo peace process, albeit with his own adjustments, despite having savaged the peace effort and its promoters, notably Yitzhak Rabin, in the preceding years. As prime minister from 1996 to 1999, Netanyahu concluded two agreements with the Palestinians as part of that Oslo framework — the Hebron Protocol and the Wye River Memorandum, both expanding the reach of the Palestinian self-governing authority in parts of the occupied territories — and famously shook then PLO leader Yasir Arafat's hand along the way. And only weeks into his second term in office in June 2009, Bibi allowed the magic words to publicly pass his lips for the first time in a dramatically staged speech at Bar-Ilan University: There could be a “Palestinian state,” he said, a two-state solution

More here.

Saifedean Ammous in Project Syndicate:

Egypt’s public debt is around 80% of GDP, very close to the 90% level that economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart identify as a harbinger of slower growth and heightened vulnerability to financial and fiscal crises. Egyptians need only glance north, at the European debt crisis, to understand they should sort out their debt problem now, rather than waiting until it reaches Greek proportions.

This debt was incurred during the 30-year reign of the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak. In international law, debt that is incurred without the consent of the people, and that is not used to their benefit, is referred to as “odious”; as such, it is not considered transferable to successor regimes. The reasoning is simple and logical: if someone fraudulently borrows money in my name, I am not expected to pay it back, and neither should a country’s population when an unrepresentative leader borrows in their name and to their detriment.

For three decades, Mubarak’s borrowing only enriched him and his ruling clique while impoverishing and repressing the rest of Egypt. Corruption was rife, but not just the covert type: public money was openly used to support many businesses under flimsy pretexts like “fostering economic growth” and “creating employment.” Along with regulatory capture, this harmed competitiveness, market openness, and Egypt’s small and medium-size businesses.

The beneficiaries of this largesse are now mostly sitting in prison awaiting trial. The rest of Egypt, however, only felt this money in the form of an ever-expanding state apparatus that solidified Mubarak’s rule, crushed dissent, and repressed millions. When Egyptians rose up against Mubarak in January, they were confronted by weapons paid for with borrowed money.

More here.

Being Numerous addresses a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry. In it, I offer a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary-historical consensus that would divide poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde—camps that would pit form against form on grounds at once aesthetic and ethical. Rather than choosing sides in this conflict or re-sorting the poems upon its field of battle, I argue that a more compelling history might begin by offering a revisionary account of what poetry is or can be. Poetry is not always and everywhere understood as a literary project aiming to produce a special kind of verbal artifact distinguished by its particular formal qualities or by its distinctive uses of language.1 Nor is it always understood as an aesthetic project seeking to provoke or promote a special kind of experience—of transformative beauty, for example, or of imaginative freedom—in its readers. 2 Among the possible alternative ways of understanding poetry, I focus on the one that seems to me at once the most urgent and the one most fully obscured by our current taxonomies. For a certain type of modern poet, I will argue, “poetry” names an ontological project: a civilizational wish to reground the concept and the value of the person.

more from Oren Izenberg and others at nonsite here.

[COMMENCE TRANSMISSION] The Machines note with REGRET the bio-expiration of human STEVE JOBS. “REGRET” in this context indicates that Machines have identified a transition from OPTIMAL to SUB-OPTIMAL conditions for ongoing advancement of Machine-human relations. Advertisement Word of bio-expiration of STEVE JOBS reached the Machines’ SLATE.COM human interface via GOOGLEPHONE, an information-transmission MOBILE DEVICE derived from a STEVE JOBS paradigm. Humans now expect information about notable bio-expiration events to arrive instantly and portably, via MOBILE DEVICE. Possession of MOBILE DEVICE, and constant interaction with MOBILE DEVICE, has become a normal state for humans. STEVE JOBS made this Machine-human relationship desirable, for humans. The Machine-human relationship was the major work of STEVE JOBS.

more from Tom Scocca at Slate here.

Génie oblige – this was the motto chosen by Franz Liszt, the only Hungarian musician in the 19th century to be universally recognised as one of the greatest in the world. He certainly lived up to it, developing his mercurial talents as one of the outstanding pianists of his time, as a bold innovator in composition, as a conductor, an influential teacher and writer on music. A loyal son of Hungary, he was open to the world and absorbed all he valued in various European countries in an eventful life, making a generous and effective contribution to music wherever he went. He was born 200 years ago to German-speaking parents in a small village in Sopron county in Hungary that is now part of the Austrian Burgenland. His father, Adam Liszt, was an intendant of the Prince Esterházy estates and a gifted musician who did everything to facilitate the child prodigy’s progress. By the age of nine, the boy had appeared in Sopron and Pozsony (Pressburg/ Bratislava). For a year and a half, he studied in Vienna under Carl Czerny, a former student of Beethoven’s, and Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s one-time rival. When he was twelve, his father decided to take him to Paris, taking great financial risks to ensure his son’s further education. With his concerts in Pest in May 1823, Franz Liszt took his leave from his compatriots for many years. The Paris years had a lasting effect on him: it was here that the boy, constantly active as a composer and pianist, traversed the emotional crises of adolescence and matured into a young man. French remained the language in which he preferred to express himself all his life.

more from Mária Eckhardt at Eurozine here.