Monday’s protests showed a striking escalation in direct attacks on the country’s theocratic foundation and not just on the June presidential election, which the opposition has attacked as fraudulent.
The new violence came as Iran’s chief prosecutor, Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehi, warned of even harsher measures if the protests did not cease.
“So far, we have shown restraint,” Mr. Mohseni-Ejehi said, according to IRNA. “Anyone who in any way endangers security must be dealt with.”
On Monday, protesters burned pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei, and even the father of the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They held up Iranian flags from which the “Allah” emblem, added after the revolution, had been removed.
Contemporary neuroscience is one of mankind’s greatest intellectual achievements. As a researcher for many years into new methods of rehabilitating people with neurological damage, in particular due to strokes, I have been thrilled by the promise of new technologies such as sophisticated brain scanning to help us to understand the processes of recovery and (more importantly) suggest treatments that would promote the kinds of reorganisation in the brain associated with return of function. In contrast, I am utterly dismayed by the claims made on behalf of neuroscience in areas outside those in which it has any kind of explanatory power; by the neuro-hype that is threatening to discredit its real achievements.
Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix “neuro-”. Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities.
Matt Grist of the Royal Society's social brain project responds:
The reason policy makers might be interested in brains and behaviour is that policy has to do (but not only to do) with aggregate level effects of individual actions. So if it can be shown that brains have certain shortcomings or potentialities not previously understood, then this is useful for informing policy direction. However, it is not clear that any policy yet has been informed by neuroscience. Even so-called “nudge” policies such as auto-enrollment in private pensions could have been devised from behavioural observations alone (observations attentive to the power of inertia in human decision-making). Part of the idea of our project is to have a conversation about what neuroscience does add to purely behavioural research.
Perhaps it adds nothing at all beyond what Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, speaking at the RSA, called, “the seductive allure of neuroscientific explanations”. Camilla Batmanghelidjh, after fourteen years experience of supporting neglected and abused children through her organisation the Kids Company, has come to believe vehemently that punishing and blaming such children is counterproductive. Such a punitive method is based on the mistake of thinking that the kids see before them an array of choices, one of them presenting itself as the morally correct one, yet which they choose to ignore. She argues that in fact what is needed is to get these kids into a position where they can see the full array of choices in the first place. This is done through structured activities that build-up the kids” capacity to see the world from the point of view of others, to gain control of their emotions, and to feel self-worth. The work Ms Batmanghelidjh has done has been highly successful. However, she has now embarked on research with neuroscientific partners so that she can present evidence of her success in terms of brain scans. We, as a society of empiricists, seem to need the neuroscientific level of explanation to convince us such a social policy is right. So the role of neuroscience in policy may simply sometimes be one of corroboration.
Obama’s long speech on Afghanistan did not refer even once to India or Kashmir. Yet India has a large and growing presence in Afghanistan, and impoverished young Pakistanis, such as those who led the terrorist attack on Mumbai last November, continue to be indoctrinated by watching videos of Indian atrocities on Muslims in Kashmir. (Not much exaggeration is needed here: an Indian human rights group last week offered evidence of mass graves of nearly 3000 Muslims allegedly executed over the last decade by Indian security forces near the border with Pakistan.) Another terrorist assault on India is very likely; it will further stoke tensions between India and Pakistan, enfeebling America’s already faltering campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda.
There are many reasons for this silence. Strident Indian protests destroyed the chances of Richard Holbrooke adding Kashmir to his responsibilities as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Assuming the presidency, Obama inherited the Bush administration’s policy of building up India as a strategic American ally and counterweight to China in Asia. Encouraged by an affluent and increasingly assertive Indian-American lobby, the Bush administration offered a civil nuclear agreement to India. India, unlike Iran, has long refused to sign the NPT; the nuclear deal was yet another one of the Bush administration’s defiant assertions of American exceptionalism, opening up India, after a long period of sanctions, to American defense companies (Lockheed Martin alone hopes to cut deals worth $15 billion over the next five years).
It is true that India does not seem to have the same exalted place in the Obama administration’s worldview. As the US and China become even more economically interdependent, notions of “containing” the Middle Kingdom through pro-America allies now look less like realpolitik than a symptom of anachronistic cold-war thinking in Condoleezza Rice’s State Department.
In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry. What Zomia presents, Scott argues in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed,” is nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress, in which human life has improved as societies have grown larger and more complex. Instead, for many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace.
It is not surprising that anti-Muslim populism has found some of its most ferocious supporters among former leftists, for they, too, have lost their faith – in world revolution, or whatnot. Many of these leftists, before their turn to revolution, came from religious backgrounds. So they suffered a double loss. In their hostility to Islam, they like to talk about defending “Enlightenment values,” whereas in fact they lament the collapse of faith, whether religious or secular. There is, alas, no immediate cure for the kind of social ills exposed by the Swiss referendum. The Pope has an answer, of course. He would like people to return to the bosom of Rome. Evangelical preachers, too, have a recipe for salvation. Neo-conservatives, for their part, see the European malaise as a form of typical Old World decadence, a collective state of nihilism bred by welfare states and soft dependence on hard American power. Their answer is a revived western world, led by the United States, engaged in an armed crusade for democracy. But, unless one is a Catholic, a born-again Christian, or a neo-con, none of these visions is promising. The best we can hope for is that liberal democracies will muddle through this period of unease – that demagogic temptations will be resisted, and violent impulses contained. After all, democracies have weathered worse crises in the past.
I tried to get to see your grandchildren. I phoned the only shop at Sepanaphudi. A manual operator put me through. I asked him if he knew the Theleles. Yes, he said, they’re all here, who do you want to speak to?
I phoned the next day, spoke to one of them. Didn’t get his name but he knew mine. Mr Robert? – Come and see us quickly. Bring clothes, girls’ clothes, and food. We are all without job. Can you come tomorrow? Put off by his desperation, I didn’t go.
I’ll still come one of these days and visit your grave. Long ago you carried me from the noise into the sunlight. How much I’ve tried to pay my debt to you. Only to find that debts of guilt are endless. And debts of love? There are no debts of love.
by Robert Berold
from All the Days publisher: Deep South, Grahamstown, 2008
CIRCLING my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.” Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.
I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.
If you watch enough television, you'll witness what psychologists describe as birth order stereotypes. Take Alex P. Keaton of the 1980s U.S. sitcom Family Ties. Firstborn Alex was far more brash and competitive than his younger sisters, reading The Wall Street Journal while in high school, for example. Now scientists report that the stereotype is valid: eldest children are less cooperative, trusting, and reciprocating than their siblings.
Psychologists have been debating the importance of birth order since the days of Sigmund Freud. Those that argue that it plays a strong role in personality say, for instance, that middleborn children are more social than their youngest or oldest siblings because they get the least amount of attention from their parents and thus must make friends outside of their family. Psychologists base their findings on self-questionnaires and interviews with friends and family.
Evolutionary biologist Alexandre Courtiol of the University of Montpellier 2 in France and colleagues wanted a more objective test. So they asked 510 unrelated college students to play a two-person investment game. The game worked like this: Both players started with €3. Player A, the investor, could send any amount of her money to player B, the banker, who would triple that money. Then player B could return any amount of his now larger pool of cash to player A. Because player B didn't have to send any money back, the amount player A sends to him is a measure of trust. And the sum player B returns to player A is therefore a measure of reciprocity.
“Two thousand seventy-four pages and trillions of dollars later,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said recently, “this bill doesn’t even meet the basic goal that the American people had in mind and what they thought this debate was all about: to lower costs.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill makes no significant long-term cost reductions. Even Democrats have become nervous. For many, the hope of reform was to re-form the health-care system. If nothing is done, the United States is on track to spend an unimaginable ten trillion dollars more on health care in the next decade than it currently spends, hobbling government, growth, and employment. Where we crave sweeping transformation, however, all the current bill offers is those pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet—here’s the interesting thing—history suggests otherwise.
In recent months, the likes of Palestinian filmmakers Najwa Najjar and Annemarie Jacir, Jordan's Amin Matalqa, the U.A.E.'s Ali F. Mostafa, Arab-American Cherien Dabis, Lebanon's Chadi Zeneddine, Morocco's Hicham Ayouch and Saudi Arabia's Haifaa Mansour have all completed, or are in the process of completing, their debut efforts.
These young directors, many of whom grew up in the shadow of civil war and political strife in their native countries, are proving to be comfortable straddling East and West. That fusion is imbuing their filmmaking aesthetic with an often intriguing mix of Arabic subject matter and cultural influences from both Hollywood and Europe.
What's more, these up-and-coming talents are gaining the attention of some of the film world's biggest companies.
Zeneddine, for example, whose first film, “Falling From Earth,” is a poetically elliptical take on life in modern-day Beirut, has been signed up by Disney to develop “The Last of the Storytellers,” drawing on the Arab world's rich folkloric traditions.
Similarly, Ayouch has been enlisted by 20th Century Fox to make the studio's first Arabic-language feature film with “Samba,” about a Moroccan man who is obsessed with a Brazilian telenovela star and who teaches a samba class to a host of doting young women all eager to win his heart.
In June of this year, I posted a video here from the New York Times about the “Improbable American,” Todd Shea. Some people responded with suspicion and hostility to Todd's work in the comments to that post, but Todd reacted there with patience and good humor, taking pains to explain his admirable and important work in greater detail. Later in the summer, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Todd one day, and I was so impressed with his positive attitude and his courage that I promised to try to raise funds for his organization at 3QD this year.
Well the time to do that is now. We are trying to raise at least $2,500 before Christmas. Please take a few minutes to watch the video below again, read Todd's profile from the New York Times, and then please consider giving as generously as possible to Todd's cause, which is doing so much, not just for the poor of Pakistan, but also in terms of America's image in the hearts of people there.
Please use the ChipIn widget near the top of the right hand column here at 3QD to make contributions. Think what an excellent Christmas gift to the people of Pakistan this will be!
On Christmas day, I will publish a list of contributors (without the dollar amounts) who have given their permission for their name to be published. (I will write to you and ask, but you can make it easier for me by including a note when you pay.)
Let's try to exceed our target by as much as possible!
Adam B. Ellick in the New York Times:
The lone hospital in this Kashmiri mountain town was on the eve of hosting one of the year’s biggest social gatherings, a health fair for several hundred villagers, and Todd Shea was not happy.
The hospital’s founder, Mr. Shea, an American who resembles a football coach more than a health worker, was outraged because one of the employees had failed to purchase enough hygiene kits — freebies the villagers had come to expect at the fair.
“This is a problem, and there is a solution,” Mr. Shea, strident but good-natured, yelled to a staffer on the phone from the field. “Let’s see how good you are. I know there are kits lurking in the walls. I guarantee you that if I come there, I will find them. You know me!”
Seven hours later, at midnight, the employee returned from a nearby city with a sheepish smile and 100 kits he had managed to round up. Mr. Shea hugged him, “I believe in you,” he said.
If Mr. Shea, 42, had a résumé, it would by his own admission reveal far more experience as a cocaine addict than as a medical professional. But with his take-charge demeanor, he has transformed primary health care here in this mountain town in Kashmir, where government services are mostly invisible.
Sustainable Healthcare Initiatives Now Empowering Pakistan (SHINE PAKISTAN) and its Pakistan-registered entity, Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS), have been operating for nearly 4 years to provide preventive, primary and emergency healthcare services and health education to citizens living in remote and mountainous area that were devastated by the October 8 2005 earthquake in Pakistan Administered Kashmir. SHINE PAKISTAN/CDRS currently provide docotors, medical staff, volunteers, medicines, supplies and operational funds to 12 health facilities in cooperation with The Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) and the the Health Department of Pakistan Aministered Kashmir.
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But defenders of religion like [Kathryn] Lofton and Karen Armstrong and the not-quite-pro-religion-but-getting-there types like Terry Eagleton invariably attack atheists for their lack of charm, style, empathy and another nebulous quality (I think of it as *mysterianism*) which keeps them from fully appreciating the true nature of religion. In the first part of her article Lofton sticks to that formula. Toward the end however, she introduces a new accusation that I have not until now seen hurled at the new (or old) atheists.
What is religion? The New Atheists reply, with clarion diagnostic consistency: Religion is something that sells you something invisible so you may feel that which you cannot find elsewhere. It is something for which there is insufficient evidence. It is something people do because they have always done it, not because they know how to think about it. Religion is irrational, it is emotional, and it is instinctual. Religion enslaves you with its wiles, then forgets to remove the handcuffs. It is the fortune teller reading entrails, not the captain consulting his compass. It massages and preys and toys and plays and screws you over, time and again, with a promise it won’t keep because of its irrationality and its whimsy. Religion is a know-at-all with no knowledge. It makes “a virtue out of not thinking.” Religion is cutting the hedge repeatedly around an erection. Religion is, it turns out, a lot like a girl.
Religion as effeminacy is nothing new. Nor indeed is the accusation that religion is socially sanctioned lunacy. Treating it as a neurological disorder, however, sets the New Atheists within a long tradition of critical misogyny. Under the guise of protecting your children, in the effort to best serve your sweet flock of idiots, if you want to be a New Atheist you have reclaimed a New Virility to counter your post-industrial emasculation. This virility plays out in demonstrations of protective strength, plowing away at the big two nemeses (Christianity and Islam) in the interest of protecting the little guy. It is also exhibited in grand tours of scientific proof, or plodding expulsions of religious duplicity.
Wait a minute! Have atheists and skeptics ever said that religion is like a girl? (Not that there is anything wrong with being a girl) Or that believing in unverifiable myths for comfort is exclusively a womanly quality? Have atheists refused to admit women into their fold? Do they claim that women are genetically incapable of possessing rational minds? On the other hand, organized religion has diligently kept women out of leadership roles through much of history. So, the charge of misogyny from a defender of “faith” sounds strange.
THIS volume repays attention for two reasons. The first is that it leaves the reader in no doubt about the ideology or intent of its subject; and, as Bruce Lawrence argues, bin Laden must be understood if he is to be defeated. The second is that it gives some insight into the Left’s understanding of ‘political Islam’. Lawrence believes that bin Laden’s terrorism is essentially a response to the West’s “much greater” terrorism. He quotes approvingly from Michael Mann: “Despite the religious rhetoric and the bloody means, bin Laden is a rational man. There is a simple reason why he attacked the US: American imperialism”. For Lawrence et al., the equation is simple: remove this reason and bin Laden’s war will cease.
It is true that bin Laden’s statements define his jihad as reactive: that is, as a legitimate response to Western aggression against Muslims, and one that will cease once its causes have been removed. But let us be clear about what he perceives those causes to be. They include the “Crusader-Jewish” presence in all the lands of Islam. By this he is not referring solely to the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan, or to Israel’s incursions beyond its 1967 borders. He is referring to the entirety of Israel-Palestine, and (a tricky one for the EU) to Moorish Spain. Bin Laden goes further: “In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stay in our country” (emphasis added). Lawrence et al. might view giving bin Laden what he wants as a “rational” response to the threat of terrorism, but moral honesty requires that we call this solution what it is: ethnic cleansing as a mode of appeasement.
Monday’s protests showed a striking escalation in direct attacks on the country’s theocratic foundation and not just on the June presidential election, which the opposition has attacked as fraudulent.
