by Hasan Altaf

There is, I imagine, no one on earth whose understanding of the past is completely without bias, but this problem must be particularly acute when it comes to those who, once upon a time, were responsible for creating that past: those who could change, in ways however small, the course of events, who could, or imagined they could, control whatever forces were in play, who could and did shape history. Maybe it would be best to take their versions of events with not just a grain of salt but also a pinch of pity, because for them, the stakes of this game must be higher than they are for the rest of us. They made the world we have today; all we have to do is live in it.

Evidence of this phenomenon has been ample of late (everyone writes a memoir, everyone gets the chance to plead their case before the cameras), but it became especially clear to me when former President Pervez Musharraf – the “enlightened moderate” of Pakistan’s early aughts, the dictator who dressed as a democrat only to find that he had no clothes at all – came to Washington. (World tours are a favorite pastime of both Pakistani politicians and ex-leaders, and Washington is one of the top destinations.)

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Rock ‘n’ roll books have their own special set of challenges, the most important being: try not to reduce the wily, ridiculous, vibrant music of rejects and losers into a dry, studied word paste. But on the other hand, don’t try to mimic its high-energy squall with language either. Best not to engage with the music on that level at all; instead, point the tape recorder or pen in the direction of its makers and artists (but not its drummers … just kidding!), and let them tell stories about “what it was like.” Granted, Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California is a sociology book, published by a university press, and the subjects that lend themselves best to study within this framework are the followers, the scenesters, the kids at the shows, the fanzine scribes, and the promoters, who sometimes made stupid rules and liked to squabble about what punk was and wasn’t. When the attention turns, however briefly and sporadically, toward the musicians themselves, a different punk history emerges — one that’s more eccentric and contradictory and endlessly weird, and one that starts to answer the question of why people started these bands anyway. What “made” the Screamers happen? In the face of universal apathy or scorn, when there was no place to play and when no one cared, what made them make the unusual sounds that so enthralled some people and so baffled others?

more from Grace Krilanovich at the LA Review of Books here.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne introduces Bayes’s theorem in her new book with a remark by John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Bayes’s theorem, named after the 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, addresses this selfsame essential task: How should we modify our beliefs in the light of additional information? Do we cling to old assumptions long after they’ve become untenable, or abandon them too readily at the first whisper of doubt? Bayesian reasoning promises to bring our views gradually into line with reality and so has become an invaluable tool for scientists of all sorts and, indeed, for anyone who wants, putting it grandiloquently, to sync up with the universe. If you are not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be. At its core, Bayes’s theorem depends upon an ingenious turnabout: If you want to assess the strength of your hypothesis given the evidence, you must also assess the strength of the evidence given your hypothesis.

more from John Allen Paulos at the NYT here.

So is this, as it has been described, the most significant contribution to moral philosophy for well over a century? Or is it a monument to a misdirected programme? Like most work on moral philosophy, On What Matters is divided between two distinct areas. There are theories within ethics, telling us what our values should be or what the contours of our rights and duties are. These are theories in what is known as first-order moral philosophy. Its aim has often been to reduce the teeming plurality of rights and duties, obligations and benefits to some kind of order. At the limit there might be either a small number of principles or even one unique principle, from which everything else could be derived. Hence we find suggestions such as the Golden Rule, John Stuart Mill’s principle of maximising utility, or Kant’s categorical imperative. But we also find writers such as Isaiah Berlin or Bernard Williams, who mistrust all this tidiness and insist, instead, on the irreducible plurality of virtues or the inevitability of insoluble dilemmas as different obligations conflict and jar against each other. Classical tragedy is especially concerned with such conflicts and their insoluble nature. The other branch of the subject consists of second-order theories, telling us something about the status of first-order pronouncements. In this area, often called meta-ethics, notions such as objectivity, knowledge, truth, proof, and reason are used to debate the nature of first-order claims. If I pronounce, for example, that vanity is a sin, could my remark count as objective and perhaps true, or even known to be true, by the light of reason? This is Parfit’s view, rationalism. Or am I more in the business of expressing an attitude or encouraging a sentiment of disapprobation of vanity, voicing a stance rather than describing a fact?

more from Simon Blackburn at the FT here. here

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Ziauddin Sardar in The Independent:

We need all of our brain to understand and appreciate the world around us. The left-brain, associated largely with scientific activity, and the right hemisphere concerned with religious matters, must work in unison. But they also have to be kept apart. The logic of one does not apply to the other. The challenge of our time is to keep the two separate but integrated and in balance. This, in essence, is the main message of The Great Partnership.

The learned and humane Jonathan Sacks normally speaks from within the Jewish tradition. But here he is much more inclusive, drawing from Judaism, Christianity and, he claims, Islam. He emphasises that the foundations of all three faiths rests on a personal God who created the universe in love and endowed all of us with the dignity of His image. His erudition is extensive. We are leisurely taken on a tour of sacred and poetic texts of Judaism and Christianity, as well as the thoughts of noted atheists and old-fashioned and postmodern philosophers. Sacks is not interested in proving the existence of God. He engages in a conversation, “a sustained argument for the sake of heaven”, to demonstrate that it is quite possible for a rational person to hold religious beliefs. Writing in the tradition of 18th-century religious philosophers, such as William Paley, Sacks hopes to promote tolerance and civility. The real urgent conflict, he suggests, is not between different kinds of belief and non-belief, but between militant dogmas, and their champions, of all varieties.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Heaven preserve us from all the sleek and dowdy virtues, such as punctuality, conscientiousness, fidelity and smugness!” So wrote Violet Keppel in her unruly call to arms to the great ruling passion of her life, Vita Sackville-West. “What great man was ever constant? What great queen was ever faithful? Novelty is the very essence of genius and always will be. If I were to die tomorrow, think how I should have lived!” And indeed, how this woman, this “unexploded bomb,” as Vita called her, “lived!”

Sir Michael De Courcy Fraser Holroyd, biographer supreme of Lytton Strachey, George Bernard Shaw and the painter Augustus John, among others, tells the much-told tale of Violet and Vita yet again, in “A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers,” but with more depth and context than anyone has before. And he tells us oh so much more besides the fascinating story of “the three V’s” of Bloomsbury — for wherever go the glamorous and flamboyant Violet and Vita, Virginia, in her blue stockings, ambles nearby, pen at hand.

More here.

A Green Crab's Shell

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like –

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
–size of a demitasse-
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue,
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this–
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

by Mark Doty
from Atlantis
Harper Perennial, 1995

A short tally might be taken of English poets who witnessed with their own eyes a hanging, drawing and quartering. Among them would certainly be John Donne, a Roman Catholic by upbringing, closely related to some of the leading Catholic families in England. In his Pseudo-Martyr of 1610, Donne remarks that he has observed devout bystanders at the execution of a certain foreign Jesuit priest: “pray to him whose body lay there dead; as if hee had more respect, and better accession to heaven because he was a stranger, than those which were familiar had”. Five years after the book’s publication, Donne was ordained priest of the Church of England and almost immediately made a Royal Chaplain, rising in 1621 to the Deanship of St Paul’s Cathedral, in which capacities he delivered some of the most eloquent sermons ever to grace an Anglican pulpit. The most quoted is the Lenten address of 1630/31 known as “Deaths Duell”, preached before Charles I at Whitehall. In it he waxes amorous about the worm, through whose ecumenical digestion one is incestuously joined with one’s mother, sister or brother. London vermin had already feasted on Donne’s brother Henry, who in 1593 had expired in Newgate gaol after harbouring a Jesuit priest; they had just got to work on his mother – an industrious go-between for the Jesuits in her time – who had recently died in the deanery, a recusant to the very end. Her brothers Ellis and Jasper, Jesuits and exiles, fattened Continental worms.

more from Robert Fraser at the TLS here.

The Door on Princeton Avenue

In through that door walked Uncle Teddy.
In through that door danced Aunt Edna.
My mother left through that door
and my father, drunk, tottered through it.
Mornings that door was the first I touched
and the last I touched in the evening.
All my relatives entered that door.
Every friend too, can you believe it?
We lived on the second of three floors.
We had no chimney, the windows were high.
If Santa came, then he came through that door.
Easter Bunny too. When Jesus returned
to whisk us to heaven, he’d hover
with miracle sandals through that door.
News back then didn’t come over the phone,
or the internet, when someone died
kin crashed through that door to tell us.
One day when I was five I walked in that door
and one day I was fourteen and walked out.
We moved. We moved and left that door behind.
Yet I remember running through the apartment
to answer a knock, my hand on the cool knob,
feeling like I need only twist open that door
and the whole mystery of the world
would reveal itself and be mine forever.
That was a long time ago. Ages and ages.
Uncle Teddy dead. Aunt Edna dead. Dad too.
Mom barely holds on in a small trailer in Florida.
I haven’t seen that door now in almost thirty years.
Now some stranger is closing that door.
Now someone I never met is locking it.

by James Valvis
from Anderbo

From The Boston Globe:

EARLIER THIS MONTH, a troop of volunteers in Newton piled into canoes and went to war in the name of the Charles River. They wore gloves to protect themselves from their enemy: a thorny aquatic plant called the European water chestnut, believed to have invaded the Charles a century ago after escaping from the Harvard botanical garden. The plant spread swiftly, growing so thick in some areas that it overwhelmed the waterway entirely. For the past four years, the Charles River Watershed Association has led the effort to get rid of the pest, recruiting concerned citizens to pull the unwanted plants out by their roots and collect them in plastic laundry baskets.

The European water chestnut is considered an invasive species, one of the 1,500 or so plants and animals across the United States that have ended up settling in places where they don’t belong because of human activity. It’s a dubious distinction – one that most of us associate with evil carp overpowering local fish populations in the Mississippi River Basin, stubborn zebra mussels clogging pipes and killing birds in the Great Lakes, and the Asian longhorned beetle wiping out trees here in Massachusetts. Controlling the spread of such creatures has been a priority among ecologists and conservationists since roughly the 1980s. In that time, projects like the one on the Charles have proliferated around the world, forming a movement to patrol the natural environment and protect its fragile native ecosystems from intruders. The reasons to fight invasive species may be economic, or conservationist, or just practical, but underneath all these efforts is a potent and galvanizing idea: that if we work hard enough to keep foreign species from infiltrating habitats where they might do harm, we can help nature heal from the damage we humans have done to it as a civilization.

From Science:

In 2007, a Swiss woman in her late 20s had an unusually hard time crossing the U.S. border. Customs agents could not confirm her identity. The woman's passport picture matched her face just fine, but when the agents scanned her hands, they discovered something shocking: she had no fingerprints. The woman, it turns out, had an extremely rare condition known as adermatoglyphia. Eli Sprecher, a dermatologist at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, has dubbed it the “immigration delay disease” because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Yet scientists know very little about what causes the condition. Since nine members of the woman's extended family also lacked fingerprints, Sprecher and his colleagues suspected that the cause might be genetic. So they collected DNA from the family—one of only four ever documented with ADG—and compared the genomes of family members with ADG with those of members who had normal fingerprints. The researchers found differences in 17 regions that were close to genes. Then they sequenced these genes, expecting to identify the culprit.

But the researchers didn't find anything. At first, Sprecher suspected that either they had performed the genetic analysis incorrectly or the missing mutation was hiding in a noncoding or “junk” region of the genome. “Then came the trick,” he says. When graduate student Janna Nousbeck sifted through online databases of rare DNA transcripts that came from the suspect regions, she noticed one very short sequence that overlapped with part of a gene called SMARCAD1. This gene seemed like a likely candidate for the mutation since it was only expressed in the skin. When the researchers sequenced SMARCAD1, their suspicions were confirmed: The gene was mutated in the fingerprintless family members, but not in the other family members.

More here. (Note: For Abbas who will sympathize with those who have “Immigration Delay Disease”)

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In a recent essay about moral relativism in The Times’s philosophy series The Stone, Paul Boghossian cites a 2001 op-ed of mine as an example of the contradictions relativists fall into. At one moment, he says, I declare the unavailability of “independent standards” for deciding between rival accounts of a matter, and in the next moment I am offering counsel that is “perfectly consistent with the endorsement of moral absolutes.” I don’t regard that as a contradiction, and I would say that to think of it as one is to fail to distinguish between relativism as a philosophical position — respectable, if controversial — and relativism as a way of life, something no one recommends and no one practices.

Boghossian defines relativism (and I’ll go along with his definition for the purposes of this column) as the denial of moral absolutes. But the definition is insufficiently nuanced because there are (at least) two ways of denying moral absolutes. You can say “I don’t believe there are any” or you can say “I believe there are moral absolutes, but (a) there are too many candidates for membership in that category and (b) there is no device, mechanical test, algorithm or knock-down argument for determining which candidates are the true ones.”

More here.

Jerry A. Coyne in USA Today:

One cold Chicago day last February, I watched a Federal Express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck. In the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic. Without thinking, I ran into the street, stopped cars, hoisted the man up and helped him recover his load. Pondering this afterward, I realized that my tiny act of altruism had been completely instinctive; there was no time for calculation.

We see the instinctive nature of moral acts and judgments in many ways: in the automatic repugnance we feel when someone such as Bernie Madoff bilks the gullible and trusting, in our disapproval of the person who steals food from the office refrigerator, in our admiration for someone who risks his life to save a drowning child. And although some morality comes from reason and persuasion — we must learn, for example, to share our toys — much of it seems intuitive and inborn.

Many Americans, including Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian, see instinctive morality as both a gift from God and strong evidence for His existence.

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. “Evolution,” many argue, “could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul.”

So while morality supposedly comes from God, immorality is laid at the door of Charles Darwin, who has been blamed for everything from Nazism to the shootings in Columbine.

More here.

Josh Wood in the Boston Review:

One night last January, Rami Nakhle bounced toward the Lebanese border on the back of a motorcycle. A gang of smugglers—the kind who usually transport guns, drugs, fuel, and more mundane commodities—had agreed to take him from Homs, Syria, to Beirut, less than one hundred miles away.

To get out of Syria, Rami had promised to pay $1,500—six months’ salary for the average Syrian—cash to be paid on arrival, by a friend. The smugglers ordered him to ditch his small bag by the side of the road and proceed with only the clothes on his back, though this may have been a trick to cheat him out of his belongings. Smugglers can be dangerous people to deal with, but it was a risk worth taking. Rami had just been discovered by the Syrian security services. He had few options but to leave.

On a dirt track leading to the border, Rami waited with one of the smugglers until after dark. When the lights of the nearby Syrian military outpost finally flickered off, the pair inched toward the border. Everything was going according to plan.

More here.

Gratitude to Old Teachers

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then-holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

by Robert Bly
from Eating the Honey of Words, 1999
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY

Scott Russell Sanders in Orion Magazine:

Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. I would like to focus on a different one—our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth. To grasp the impact of that confusion, think of someone you love. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements—oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on—you would end up with a few dollars’ worth of raw materials. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight.

Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone’s arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. We’d be likely to say that it’s not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound. And yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world—as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

According to a group of geneticists in Switzerland from iGENEA, the DNA genealogy center, as many as half of all European men and 70 percent of British men share the same DNA as the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, or King Tut. For a film created for the Discovery Channel, scientists worked to reconstruct the DNA of the young male King, his father Akhenaten and his grandfather Amenhotep III. They discovered that King Tut had a DNA profile that belongs to a group called haplogroup R1b1a2. This group can be found in over 50 percent of European men and shows the researchers that there is a common ancestor. This genetic profile group is also found in 70 percent of Spanish males and 60 percent of French males however, it is only present in less than one percent of men in modern-day Egyptian men.

The R1b1a2 DNA haplogroup is believed to have originated in the Black Sea region some 9500 years ago and spread to Europe with the spread of agriculture in 7000BC. Researchers are unsure as to how and when the group first came to Egypt. They believe the reasoning the R1b1a2 haplogroup is rarely found in modern-day Egypt is due partially to European immigration throughout the last 2000 years.

More here.

Rita Chin in Eurozine:

Since the 1950s, a massive influx of labour migrants has dramatically transformed the demographic makeup of Europe. Whether they came as guest workers or former colonial subjects, migrants from North Africa, South Asia and Turkey produced the first significant Muslim communities within Europe. During the half century that these groups have resided in Europe, the national debates about their presence have changed radically. Broadly speaking, public discussions initially focused on the economic manpower and the impact of employing migrants on the native working class. As Europeans began to acknowledge that temporary labourers had become permanent residents, political discourse shifted to migrants' cultural differences based on their nationality. Since the 1990s, the emphasis has been on religion (especially Islam) as the primary characteristic that separates these migrants from the societies in which they reside. “Islamophobia”, in short, has emerged as “the defining condition of the new Europe”.[1]

A striking aspect of contemporary European debates about immigrants is the focus on the Muslim woman as a key figure through which objections to Islamic difference have been articulated. This gendered framing of difference is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the distinctive gender norms of postwar migrants became a major theme once significant numbers of family reunions had taken place in the early 1970s. But recent pronouncements by figures such as the Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Turkish-German sociologist Necla Kelek about the place of women in Islam have inflamed the debate.[2] Their highly sensational testimonials of female oppression under Islam have fuelled the tendency to characterize tensions between Muslim immigrants and Europeans as irresolvable. Muslim gender relations now serve as the most telling symptom of the supposedly intractable clash between European civilization and Islam.

Precisely because sexual politics plays such a critical role in defining the terms of the current pessimism about Muslims in Europe, it is important to trace when and how this process began, especially in relation to the shifting national public discourses on labour migrants over the past fifty years.