Every schoolchild in America knows the story of the original Thanksgiving. In 1621 in Plymouth, émigré English Calvinists struggled to make their way in the harsh climate of this New World. Wampanoag Indians helped them, teaching them to grow corn. In gratitude the Pilgrims invited the Native Americans to join in their harvest feast. On this secular holiday, with our extended families around us at the Thanksgiving table, we may be moved to give thanks not only for the feast but also for our families, our country, and our many other gifts.

But this modern version of Thanksgiving would horrify the devout Pilgrims and Puritans who sailed to America in the 17th century. The holiday that gave rise to Thanksgiving – a “public day” that they observed regularly – was almost the precise opposite of today’s celebration. It was not secular, but deeply religious. At its center was not an extravagant meal, but a long fast. And its chief concern was not bounty but redemption: to examine the faults in oneself – and one’s community – with an eye toward spiritual improvement.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Washington Post:

After decades of blissful ignorance, Americans have begun pondering how the food we consume each day arrives on our plates. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) forced readers to face the fact that our demand for a range of reasonably priced meats and produce comes with serious environmental consequences. Now two new books, Ann Vileisis’s Kitchen Literacy and Sarah Murray’s Moveable Feasts, give us even more reason to reevaluate the meals we take for granted. But they come to very different conclusions about whether to embrace or decry our increasingly complicated food web.

Kitchen Literacy chronicles how the growth of the increasingly complex food distribution system — railroads transporting animals and factories producing canned goods — eventually led consumers into a “covenant of ignorance” with supermarket chains, food manufacturers and advertising firms. All of them insisted that sleek packaging and catchy slogans mattered more than the traditional, hard-earned expertise homemakers had relied on for years.

More here.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

I recall very clearly sitting with a cup of coffee in upstate New York one morning last autumn, reading the now infamous section of the Martin Amis interview and thinking, “Where’s the punch line which turns it all on its head?” I scanned quickly through the rest of the article, then returned to the quote about Muslims, reading very slowly now, sure I’d missed the moment when Amis pronounced those awful views only in order to excoriate those who held them. When it became clear that, far from distancing himself from the views, he was attempting to implicate the wider world with the rhetorical use of “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it?” my first thought was to contact a newspaper in the UK and offer to write a heated response. But then, as I read the Amis article out to my roommate, and she (American and Jewish) responded with as much horror and disbelief as I (Pakistani and Muslim) had felt, I thought, it shouldn’t have to be me.

By which I meant, I was convinced that disgust for Amis’s remarks would be widespread enough in the UK that other British, non-Muslims – those implicated in the “don’t you have it?” line – would step forward and say, “No, I don’t, and it’s reprehensible that you do.” It would be a far stronger attack on him, I thought, to have someone other than a Muslim foreigner hold him to account. After all, of course I would object to him suggesting that I should be strip-searched, prevented from travelling, made to suffer for my failure to prevent Muslim boys from becoming suicide bombers (ah, Mr Amis, if only I had that power…).

More here.

Lessig’s TED talk:

First, the Saletan piece from Slate:

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t “the same as ours.” “Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” said the Federation of American Scientists. “Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,” declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.”

I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

More here.  And here’s Cosma:

William Saletan’s recent venture into demanding that we squarely face the harsh light of his pseudo-scientific prejudices is, in itself, intensely boring — we’ve played this scene over and over again — but becomes more interesting when we try to trace it back to causes, and then forward again to effects.

His writing the story may be explained in one of two ways.

1. He may be ignorant and stupid enough to be gulled by charltans like Rushton or Richard Lynn;
2. More charitably, he may not believe the bullshit himself, but may repeat it to his readers because he hopes that doing so advances some agenda of his own.

Now, William Saletan is a journalist. He is paid to write stories, in the belief that they will attract readers, who can then be advertised at. But his job, the reason why this would not be a purely exploitative manipulation of those readers, is that his stories ought to tell his readers things which will make them better informed about the world, better able to make their way through it. He has just demonstrated that he is either unable or unwilling to do his job. His readers might attempt to extract information from his words by undoing the distortions imposed by his folly and manipulations, but life is too short. His words are worth attending to only as specimens, rather than communications.

William Saletan is the national correspondent of Slate, and published this multi-part heap of rubbish there.

Update: See next post before complaining.

More here.  [Thanks to Ian McMeans.]

Jennifer Homans in The New Republic:

When Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961, he became a legend overnight. He was a great dancer; but he was also a Russian, our Russian, and the instant he threw himself into the arms of the French authorities and declared, in English, “I would like to stay in your country,” the cultural cold war seemed for a brief moment to have been won. If Nureyev himself appeared stunned by the international media blitz that followed, gazing glassy-eyed into the flashing cameras, he adapted quickly to his new role. And this was not the last time he would touch a cultural nerve: he went on to become an avatar of 1960s style; and an exemplar of the celebrated vanity of the 1970s “Me Generation”; and an unabashed homosexual and, sadly, a victim of AIDS, which killed him in 1993 at the age of fifty-four. He did all of this while dancing–not sexy cutting-edge works, but nineteenth-century Russian classics such as Swan Lake and Giselle. Nureyev was the most unlikely of creatures: a serious classical ballet dancer who was also an international pop superstar.

More here.

From the New York Sun:

We speak for a growing number of faculty members at Columbia University who believe that President Bollinger has failed to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom. Academic freedom lies at the heart of what we do as faculty members: teach, generate new knowledge, and sustain the critical capacities of the society at large. It encompasses, among other values, the autonomy of the University in the face of outside threats and pressures, a determining role for faculty in the governance of the University and especially in the shaping of its research and teaching programs, the insulation of tenure and promotion decisions from outside interests, and the creation of an environment that enables the fullest and freest exchange of ideas. The events of the past few years have created a crisis of confidence in the central administration’s willingness to defend these principles.

We note, in particular, the following issues:

1) In the face of considerable efforts by outside groups over the past few years to vilify members of the faculty and determine how controversial issues are taught on campus, the administration has failed to make unequivocally clear that such interventions will not be tolerated. When outside groups attempted to sway tenure decisions, the President of Barnard issued a forthright statement rejecting such efforts; the President of Columbia has failed to do so.

More here.  [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]

Pervez Hoodbhoy in the LA Times:

Why has Musharraf failed so dramatically to stop the insurgency? One reason is that most of the public is hostile to government action against the extremists (and the rest offer tepid support at best). Most Pakistanis see the militants as America’s enemy, not their own. The Taliban is perceived as the only group standing up against the unwelcome American presence in the region. Some forgive the Taliban’s excesses because it is cloaked in the garb of religion. Pakistan, they reason, was created for Islam, and the Taliban is merely asking for Pakistan to be more Islamic.

Even normally vocal, urban, educated Pakistanis — those whose values and lifestyles would make them eligible for decapitation if the Taliban were to succeed in taking the cities — are strangely silent. Why? Because they see Musharraf and the Pakistan army as unworthy of support, both for blocking the path to democracy and for secretly supporting the Taliban as a means of countering Indian influence in Afghanistan.

There is merit to this view. Army rule for 30 of Pakistan’s 60 years as a country has left a terrible legacy. The army is huge, well-equipped, armed now with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and has perhaps the world’s richest generals. Sitting or retired army officers govern provinces, run government agencies, administer universities, manage banks and make breakfast cereals.

Over at Infinite Thought, warning explicit images (via Crooked Timber):

What would humanist pornography look like? Chances are that even the most adamant defender of the charms of adult material would struggle to find much evidence of compassion or affection in today’s relentlessly lurid output. Contemporary pornography informs us of one thing above all else: sex is a type of work, just like any other. What matters most is quantity – the bigger the better. It is not for nothing that one of the most successful sex videos of all time, starring Annabel Chong, features 251 sex acts performed with approximately 70 men during a ten hour period. Contemporary pornography is realistic only in the sense that it sells back to us the very worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality.

The pornography industry itself is a veritable juggernaut, generating an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide. It makes more money than Hollywood and all major league sports put together. 300,000 internet sites are currently devoted to its propagation, and 200 new films are estimated to be made every week. Almost any genre and type of sexual taste is catered for, just so long as you aren’t looking for anything as recherché as sweetness or wit.

On one level, we might say, so what? Pornography serves a certain practical purpose, why expect anything more from it? If you want romance, go and read Mills and Boon! Alternatively, we might side with anti-pornography feminists and argue that the genre is so irredeemably associated with violence and misogyny that we should steer well clear of it, and perhaps even campaign for its abolition.

But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummelling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn’t always function and purr like a well-oiled machine?

Daniel Cressey in over at Nature’s blog The Great Beyond:

Japan said today that it plans to go ahead with its annual whale hunt of about 1,000 whales (AFP). For the first time this will include humpbacks, currently listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List.

A group of legal experts gathered by the International Fund for Animal Welfare think the humpback take could well be illegal. Japan insists that its whaling is for research purposes, although meat from the animals caught does end up being eaten. The IFAW group says this selling of meat could mean Japan is in breach of its obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (press release, coverage in The Age).

“Japan’s repeated assertion that its whaling activities are legal is incorrect and misleading. ‘Scientific whaling’ as conducted by Japan violates international law and should not be allowed to continue,” said Alberto Szekely, professor of international law and coordinator of the panel (press release).

Ben Goldacre in The Guardian:

There are some aspects of quackery that are harmless – childish even – and there are some that are very serious indeed. On Tuesday, to my great delight, the author Jeanette Winterson launched a scientific defence of homeopathy in these pages. She used words such as “nano” meaninglessly, she suggested that there is a role for homeopathy in the treatment of HIV in Africa, and she said that an article in the Lancet today will call on doctors to tell their patients that homeopathic “medicines” offer no benefit.

The article does not say that, and I should know, because I wrote it. It is not an act of fusty authority, and I claim none: I look about 12, and I’m only a few years out of medical school. This is all good fun, but my adamant stance, that I absolutely lack any authority, is key: because this is not about one man’s opinion, and there is nothing even slightly technical or complicated about the evidence on homeopathy, or indeed anything, when it is clearly explained.

And there is the rub. Because Winterson tries to tell us – like every other homeopathy fan – that for some mystical reason, which is never made entirely clear, the healing powers of homeopathic pills are special, and so their benefits cannot be tested like every other pill.

From MSNBC:

The secret to why male organisms evolve faster than their female counterparts comes down to this: Males are simple creatures. In nearly all species, males seem to ramp up glitzier garbs, more graceful dance moves and more melodic warbles in a never-ending vie to woo the best mates. Called sexual selection, the result is typically a showy male and a plain-Jane female. Evolution speeds along in the males compared to females.

The idea that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin observed the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with those of the drab peahen.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In the modern vernacular, to say someone is “in denial” is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it’s not a problem. Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people.

More here.

Akbar Ganji in the Boston Review:

Iran’s political-legal system is founded on apartheid, on unjust and untenable discrimination among members of society. Social opportunities and privileges are not distributed on the basis of merit, but according to such indefensible criteria as race, religion, and allegiance to the political regime. While some are deprived of certain basic human rights and the chance to benefit from their talents and efforts, others are afforded “special rights.” They benefit handsomely from coveted social opportunities and privileges. One of the most glaring fault lines of this apartheid system is gender. In Iran, women suffer every injustice and deprivation endured by Iranian men, and gender injustice as well.

Unfortunately, gender apartheid has not drawn as much outrage around the world as racial apartheid has. The international community was rightly united in its opposition to the regime in South Africa that denied blacks equal rights with whites, and it rose up to topple that system. But it has voiced little opposition to many societies in which the rights of women are systematically trampled upon. Under the guise of cultural pluralism, or respect for religious freedom, some clerical leaders have even rationalized gender apartheid.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Iraq and 9/11, sex trafficking, flu vaccines, widespread autism. Cognitive biases color our view of these and other issues and can affect our policy choices.

Because they are well-, but not widely understood, I’d like to briefly mention three of the most common ones and some related new and troubling research about denials.

First the biases.

Three Common Psychological Biases

1. The “availability heuristic” is the pronounced tendency of people to view any story through the lens of a superficially similar story that comes easily to mind or is psychologically available. For this reason, much of politics revolves around strengthening this tendency by keeping a preferred narrative uppermost in people’s minds. It doesn’t take too keen a political instinct, for example, to realize that some politicians’ incessant invoking of 9/11 is an effort to keep it psychologically available, to help it color every aspect of the political agenda.

More here.

In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms.

Paul Davies in Scientific American:

Thirty years ago the prevailing view among biologists was that life resulted from a chemical fluke so improbable it would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe. That conservative position was exemplified by Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, who wrote in 1970: “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” In recent years, however, the mood has shifted dramatically. In 1995 renowned Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve called life “a cosmic imperative” and declared “it is almost bound to arise” on any Earth-like planet. De Duve’s statement reinforced the belief among astrobiologists that the universe is teeming with life. Dubbed biological determinism by Robert Shapiro of New York University, this theory is sometimes expressed by saying that “life is written into the laws of nature.”

How can scientists determine which view is correct? The most direct way is to seek evidence for life on another planet, such as Mars. If life originated from scratch on two planets in a single solar system, it would decisively confirm the hypothesis of biological determinism. Unfortunately, it may be a long time before missions to the Red Planet are sophisticated enough to hunt for Martian life-forms and, if they indeed exist, to study such extraterrestrial biota in detail.

An easier test of biological determinism may be possible, however. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet.

More here.

Seth Freedman in The Guardian:

When I first moved to this country, I was prepared to play my part by enlisting in the IDF and serving in the West Bank. While there, I saw for myself the effect my mere uniformed presence had on the Palestinians I encountered on a daily basis. Every interaction took place with me holding all the cards – it was me with the loaded gun in my hands; it was me barking instructions to “stop or I’ll shoot”, “lift up your shirt”, “don’t come another step closer”; it was me playing with my quarry as though they were puppets on the end of short, taut strings.

However, I still believed that we “did what we had to do”, since it was a case of us or them, and we could never ease up in our actions for fear that the next Palestinian we encountered was the one with a bomb strapped to his chest. And so it continued, bursting into buildings to round up the residents and lock them in their own basement, so that we could take over the house and grab a few hours’ sleep in the middle of a mission – and all perfectly acceptable in the context of war.

But that was when I saw the wide, silent eyes of the families’ children as we screamed at their father – their hero, their protector – and wrested from him the reins of power inside his own house. And that’s when it started to dawn on me just what kind of effect our actions were having on the next generation, who were guaranteed to end up hating us when all they saw was us herding them like cattle and imposing our will on them through the sights of our guns.

More here.

Rodolfo Hernández

In 2000 the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano stated that the world was “upside down”. If you don’t believe it, just take a look to what recently happened during the XVII Ibero American Summit in Chile (Nov. 13, 2007): “Why don’t you shut up?” ordered the king of Spain Juan Carlos I to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, after the Latin American leader called José María Aznar, former Spain’s president, a “fascist”. The abrupt intervention of the King occurred while the current head of Spaniard government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero defended Aznar from Chavez’ accusation. The episode ended minutes later when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega referred in his intervention to the collaboration between the Spaniard and the U.S. government to defeat the Sandinistas in the presidential election. The king left the room visibly upset.

Is the world upside down? We have the socialist Rodriguez Zapatero demanding respect to right-wing ex president Aznar (arguing that he has been “democratically” elected), while the king of Spain (who represents the monarchy, a quintessentially anti-democratic institution) was sitting next to him! So in the world upside down the left defends the right even though the right led Spain to participate in the war in Iraq.

Furthermore, under this new rationality, shall we assume that the atrocities committed by a government must not be objected to or morally condemned only because they were actions of a “democratically” elected government? Needless to say it was the intervention of Spain in Iraq, ending with the terrible terrorist attacks in Madrid in March 11 of 2004 killing 192 innocent people that lead to the defeat of Aznar’s party (the Partido Popular) in the presidential elections of 2004.

And what about president Bush and his neo-colonial war in Iraq? Would Zapatero also urge us to respect him and his war just because he was “democratically elected” (which it is still questionable)? So, is the world upside down? Yes, the world is absolutely upside down, and maybe that is the reason why the king believes that he still is living in the XVI century and he can order to shut up to one of his subjects.

What could be the motivations that led the king to try to silence president Chávez? Is it because Chávez is really a “threat to the market economy, to freedom, co-existence and citizen’s welfare,” as it was referred in “Latin America: an Agenda for Freedom”, a document published in 2007, by the “Fundación Para El Análisis y Los Estudios Sociales”, a think-tank founded by Aznar?

This is not the first time that Latin Americans have been ordered to remain in silence. They have been requested to do so, sometimes politely, sometimes not. Genocide, for example, was one of the methods to force the population to shut up and to fulfill the goals of the Spanish conquers. As Bartolomé de las Casas pointed out, in the XVI century, the motivations for “killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.”

The king of Spain’s “why don’t you shut up?” embodies the connection with former notions of “natural” subjection of Latin Americans to new class interests to control and exploit the continent as in the old days of the monarchy. Maybe that “insatiable greed and ambition” keeps trying to run in the once upon a time called “New World”. Possibly, behind the unexpected intervention of the King and Zapatero’s defense of former president Aznar, are the old imperial ambitions, this time represented by the Spaniard corporations, such as Repsol, the oil company that has been severely affected by ongoing nationalization programs in Latin American countries, such as Bolivia.

In the XIX century, the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva in La Paz in July 16 of 1809, responded to the Spaniard monarchy: “We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity,” Galeano notes in 1973. After nearly two hundred years, it seems that Latin Americans have no other option but to be the subjects in silence of the “greed and ambition”. Yes, definitely the world is totally upside down, and the imperial ambition to dominate Latin America, in a new way and even more brutally as before, is still there. That is why Latin America cannot be shut up — even by a king.

Rene Burri. Nixon’s Official Visit to Egypt. June 12-13, 1974.

Photograph.

More on Burri here and here.

Via The Immanent Frame, over at the SSRC’s Varieties of Secularism program:

This past May the SSRC partnered with the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University to play host to an event on the “Varieties of Secularism.” Bringing together an impressive array of scholars, this one-day colloquium involved wide-ranging discussions of the relationships between secularism, politics, and religion. Discussion was stimulated by the remarks of six colloquium participants, each of whom was responding to recent and influential articles by Gil Anidjar (“Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33:52, 2006), Jürgen Habermas (“Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14:1, 2006), Saba Mahmood (“Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18:323, 2006) and Charles Taylor (“Introduction” to A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, Forthcoming 2007). Edited transcripts of each of the six presentations [by Talal Asad, Akeel Bilgrami, Simon During, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Colin Jager, and Jonathan Sheehan] can be downloaded…

At the Immanent Frame, comments by Simon During and Talal Asad are also available.  Asad:

Let me begin with Saba Mahmood’s paper, which I think is important, and talk about the idea of the “normative impetus internal to secularism,” as she puts it. Instead of seeing secularism as the solution to entrenched religious conflicts, instead of focusing on the notion of religious neutrality, say, she wants, in this paper and elsewhere in her work, to look at the way in which secularism informs foreign policy.