‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him,’ Voltaire stated. This premise, as expressed in what is possibly one of the most famous lines in the history of philosophy, perfectly summarizes the paradoxical relationship Western societies have had to the idea of faith or belief in the existence of a divine being since the days of the Enlightenment. While most of us seem to believe that there is no such thing as God, and have by and large accepted the rather bleak fact that there is ultimately no meaning to our existence, many of us are (secretly) still searching for a higher power to provide an explanation for the mystery, marvel and misery of the world around us. This desire to conceive of a force capable of providing some guidance and direction for the life we live remains firmly engrained no matter how little belief in God persists.

In the sphere of visual art, Belgian artist Kris Martin provides one of the most striking explorations of this dilemma of faith. Martin is a believer, it would seem, and his work clearly challenges the generally accepted assessment of our life as stripped of meaning, without any enduring substance. Most of his practice circles (in one way or another) around the subjects of life and death, and the ephemerality and fragility of our existence. While it seems that a large number of contemporary artists tackle issues of such significance, it is in fact rather unusual to come across one whose work and artistic motifs are so clearly related to considering these fundamental questions, and whose own position is firmly rooted in a belief in Christian values and the existence of God.

more from Frieze here.

Over at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson reviews Philip Glass’s Satyagraha:

Satyagraha tells, in non-linear and largely non-verbal fashion, the story of Gandhi’s struggles on behalf of South Africa’s Indian population. During the course of this twenty-year fight for civil rights, he developed the philosophy and political tactics he would eventually use to liberate India from British colonialism. These tactics went on to inspire Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other liberators around the world. But in this period, they were still a work in progress, paid for in risk and blood.

Satyagraha juxtaposes symbolic stagings of key episodes in Gandhi’s struggle with Sanskrit quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, among the most sacred texts of Hinduism. While to some this may seem an obvious choice, it is actually a curious one, as much of the Gita is about why its hero, Arjuna, must go to battle. It’s hardly a nonviolent text.

Yet it is a text, perhaps above all, about knowing and fulfilling one’s holy mission, of virtue in the face of adversity, of duty and moral responsibility. This is why Satyagraha appealed to me as “Jewish”: not because of its composer’s ethnicity, but because it captures the power of sacred text to inspire sacred action.

If you haven’t seen Der Untergang (The Downfall), rent it. It’s really good. Meanwhile here is a pretty funny parody (sorry Hillary supporters, but it IS funny, no?). Warning: Strong Language.

[Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross, author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher:

Q: A common account of Rorty’s career has him starting out as an analytic philosopher who then undertakes a kind of “turn to pragmatism” in the 1970s, thereby reviving interest in a whole current of American philosophy that had become a preserve of specialists. Your telling is different. What is the biggest misconception embedded in that more familiar thumbnail version?

A: Rorty didn’t start out as an analytic philosopher. His masters thesis at Chicago was on Whitehead’s metaphysics, and while his dissertation at Yale on potentiality was appreciative in part of analytic contributions, one of its major aims was to show how much value there might be in dialogue between analytic and non-analytic approaches. As Bruce Kuklick has shown, dialogue between various philosophical traditions, and pluralism, were watchwords of the Yale department, and Rorty was quite taken with these metaphilosophical ideals.

Rorty only became seriously committed to the analytic enterprise after graduate school while teaching at Wellesley, his first job. This conversion was directly related to his interest in moving up in the academic hierarchy to an assistant professorship in a top ranked graduate program. At nearly all such programs at the time, analytic philosophy had come to rule the roost. This was very much the case at Princeton, which hired him away from Wellesley, and his commitment to analytic philosophy solidified even more during the years when he sought tenure there.

But the conventional account is flawed in another way as well.

Over at Princeton University Press, Chapter 1 of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human:

The online fieldsite of Coming of Age in Second Life might seem utterly different than Indonesia, but like my earlier work this book touches on broad issues concerning selfhood and society, and like my earlier work this book is a methodological experiment. Building upon a significant body of prior research on virtual worlds, I argue that ethnography holds great promise for illuminating culture online, but not because it is traditional or old-fashioned. Ethnography has a special role to play in studying virtual worlds because it has anticipated them. Virtual before the Internet existed, ethnography has always produced a kind of virtual knowledge. Borrowing a phrase from Malinowski, Clifford Geertz argued that the goal of ethnographic understanding is to achieve the “native’s point of view” (Geertz 1983). The quotation from Malinowski that started this book asked you to “imagine yourself ” in a new place (Malinowski 1922:4), to be virtually there. Representations of persons in virtual worlds are known as “avatars”; Malinowski’s injunction to “imagine yourself ” in an unfamiliar place underscores how anthropology has always been about avatarizing the self, standing virtually in the shoes (or on the shores) of another culture.

Pauline Melville in the FT:

The Wapisiana are savannah Indians. Their territory stretches from the south of Guyana over and into the north of Brazil. Wapisiana is one of two Arawak languages in Guyana. Like many of South America’s indigenous languages, it is under threat from the languages of the old imperial powers – in this case English and Portuguese – and from an invading way of life that has been imposed uneasily on the culture. School lessons are taught in English and, until recently, pupils speaking Wapisiana were punished.

Colette Melville is a sturdily built, lively Wapisiana woman, as hard-working as you have to be when there is no running water or electricity in the house. Wapisiana is her first language. When I suggested that we put some sort of dictionary together, she was enthusiastic. But neither of us had the skills of a lexicographer, or knew anything about phonetics or how to agree on orthography with a language that was barely written down. Even the name Wapisiana is not standardised: Wapishana, Wapityan, Wapitschana, Matisana, Vapidiana, Uapixana have all appeared in literature. In the end we just started writing down words in notebooks. “The correct pronunciation is ‘Wapichan’,” said Colette. “And we are the Wapichannao – the people who come from the west. We’ll call it the Wapichan dictionary.”

Samuel Johnson has another definition of the dictionary-maker: “A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” We set about the drudgery.

From The Washington Post:

As we consider who will be our next first lady (or first laddie), Cokie Roberts introduces us to the women who pioneered this most ill-defined of jobs. Ladies of Liberty also portrays a bevy of bluestockings, educators, explorers and even a few intrepid nuns, but it is the first ladies — especially the affable and politically astute Dolley Madison — who steal the show. This might be a good Mother’s Day gift for Michelle Obama, Cindy McCain or even Bill Clinton because the role has evolved surprisingly little.

Although one can imagine Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison having her own political career at a later time in our nation’s history, the first ladies chronicled here overwhelmingly saw their jobs solely in terms of what they could do for their husbands.

More here.

Myles Burnyeat: On 24 April 1993 I took part in a popular weekly BBC radio programme, entitled Ad Lib., chaired by Robert Robinson, in which people in odd professions talked about what they did. Once upon a time, when I was a young fellow at University College London, the BBC would regularly broadcast interesting philosophical talks by the likes of Gilbert Ryle, David Pears, and Bernard Williams, and publish them subsequently in a wonderful weekly journal (sadly, now defunct) called The Listener, which would appear on the newsstands alongside the Economist, Spectator, and New Statesman. Then we were mainstream, not an odd profession. But now the BBC had reclassified us as an oddity, worthy of Robert Robinson’s splendidly acerbic attention alongside two varieties of psychotherapist (broadcast in alternate weeks, lest they fall into a quarrel), lighthouse keepers, and other queer folk. We did not complain. For a moment, queer as we might be, we had the attention of the whole country.

more from Eurozine here.

In the Spring 2008  Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute (pdf, p. 18).

Aaron Clause has spent nearly three years modelling the statistics of terrorism, but holds  little hope that a mathematical model can predict whether a given man will walk a bomb into a given cafe on a given afternoon. He does believe that in large enough social systems, the capricious behaviors of individuals seem to fade in the face of collective patterns. “A classic question that many historians have asked over the years is, ‘Where does individual control end and statistical behavior take over?’” Clauset says. A physicist and computer scientist by training, he is pursuing that question.

His work to date has led him to conclude that terrorist attacks conform to patterns, at least on a global scale. In February 2007, Clauset, a Santa fe Institute postdoc, and his partners maxwell young (now a graduate student at the university of Waterloo) and Skrede Gleditsch (a reader at the university of essex) published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that made a novel claim: the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, when taken worldwide, seems to follow a remarkably simple equation. the statistical distribution fits severe events like 9/11 to the same curve as more common but less severe ones that kill a dozen or so people. the pattern suggests that such rare and large events are not outliers, as was previously thought, but are somehow interconnected with the smaller attacks. the authors claim that if an underlying connection exists, then taking  measures to discourage small-scale attacks might also prevent severe ones.

THE GREAT Sicilian mystery writer Leonardo Sciascia once quipped, “A man who dies tragically is, at any moment of his life, a man who will die tragically.” For the historical novelist, this is a potent proposal — essentially, the dramatic key to a story in which the ending is predetermined and plot twists are not an option. In Ron Hansen’s novel “Exiles,” the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked.

Returning to the religious territory of his acclaimed 1991 book, “Mariette in Ecstasy,” Hansen tells the story of the poet-turned-Jesuit seminarian so moved by news of the 1875 shipwreck that he breaks a seven-year abstinence from writing to compose a tribute. Hansen’s novel, like the poem it’s based on, takes up the dramatic scene aboard the Deutschland, a grisly, slow-motion sequence in which 157 people die from exposure, drowning or battering waves after the German steamship ran aground on a sandbar in the North Sea. “They fought with God’s cold — / And they could not and fell to the deck / (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled / With the sea-romp over the wreck.”

more from the LA Times here.

It’s essential to Styron that these larger-than-life figures be shown, even at the pinnacle of their public glory, as creatures of uncertainty and appetite, just as it’s essential that we see Styron himself not merely on the podia of lecture halls or in his book-lined Martha’s Vineyard study but suffering the depredations of chronic prostatitis. (By the way, Styron’s essay on the prostate, originally published in France, is one of the funniest and wisest in the book; I doubt any male reader will walk away from it unaffected.) Urogenital horrors also inform “A Case of the Great Pox,” an eloquent account of Styron’s skirmish with a diagnosis of syphilis during World War II that incorporates a lucid meditation on the disease’s rich and terrible history. Here, as in his novels, Styron demonstrates his genius for revealing the inextricability of the personal from the global.

“Havanas in Camelot” includes three essays in which Styron recounts his friendships with other writers: Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Terry Southern. Of the three, Southern comes across with particular vigor, a Texas libertine whose passionate admiration for, of all people, Henry Green leads him to write a novel called “Flash and Filigree.” “I trust then, Bill,” he remarks, after giving Styron the manuscript, “that you think this will put me in the quality lit game?”

more from the NY Times here.

Patrick Barry in Science News:

It doesn’t take brains to have some smarts. New research shows that even bacteria can evolve to predict upcoming events based on clues, like a dog salivating at the sound of the dinner bell.

“It’s really the first evidence that single-celled organisms — bacteria — also have this ability for associative learning,” says Saeed Tavazoie, a molecular biologist at Princeton University who led the research on E. coli bacteria.

The discovery reveals a kind of predictive intelligence in how microbes interpret sensory cues from their environments. Understanding how this predictive ability affects bacteria’s behavior could help scientists control microbes better, benefitting industry and the treatment of infectious diseases.

When E. coli enters a person’s body, its environment immediately becomes warmer. Later, as the microbe moves into the person’s gut, oxygen becomes scarce. Tavazoie and his colleagues found that warm temperatures alone triggered the microbes to switch to a less efficient, low-oxygen mode. The bacteria anticipated the coming lack of oxygen and were preparing for it, the researchers reported online May 8 in Science.

In Granta an interview with the author of Germany’s most provocative of recent debut novels:

Thirty-year-old Charlotte Roche, born in High Wycombe but raised in Germany, has been a recognizable face in her adopted home country since she started working as a presenter on Viva, the German equivalent of MTV, in the mid-1990s. She went on to write and present programmes and late-night talk shows for Arte and ZDF, and won the highly respected Grimme Prize for television in 2004. But only now that she has written her first book are people ready to take her seriously.

Feuchtgebiete, which translates roughly as ‘wetlands’ or ‘moist patches’, was published by Cologne’s Dumont Verlag earlier this year. It is narrated by eighteen-year-old Helen Memel, an outspoken teenager whose childlike stubbornness is paired with a premature sense of sexual confidence. After a failed attempt to shave her intimate parts, Helen ends up in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Maria Hilf Hospital. She doesn’t leave the ward for the rest of the novel. Surrounded by surgical instruments and humming X-ray machines, she reflects in ever more uncomfortable detail on the eccentric wonders of the female body. It’s an explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the perversion of J.G. Ballard’s Crash and the feminist agenda of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Feuchtgebiete hasn’t been out of Germany’s newspapers since publication, selling half a million copies.

 In The New Statesman:

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a “crisis of democracy” from too much participation of the masses. In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard. When they did, it was called an “excess of democracy” and people feared it put too much pressure on the system. The only group that never expressed its opinions too much was the corporate group, because that was the group whose involvement in politics was acceptable.

The commission called for more moderation in democracy and a return to passivity. It said the “institutions of indoctrination” – schools, churches – were not doing their job, and these had to be harsher.

The more reactionary standard was much harsher in its reaction to the events of 1968, in that it tried to repress democracy, which has succeeded to an extent – but not really, because these social and activist movements have now grown. For example, it was unimaginable in 1968 that there would be an international Solidarity group in 1980.

But democracy is even stronger now than it was in 1968.

In Le Monde Diplomatique, Slavoj Zizek makes a 9 point case against solidarity with Tibet, sort of:

8. A main reason why so many in the West have taken part in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by the Dalai Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist spirituality which is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. Our fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don’t care about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf of us so we can continue with our crazy consumerism.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote: “If you are snagged in another’s dream, you are lost.” The protesters against China are right to counter the Beijing Olympics motto of “one world, one dream” with “one world, many dreams”. But they should be aware that they are imprisoning Tibetans in their own dream. It is not the only dream.

9. If there is an ominous dimension to what is going on now in China, it is elsewhere. Faced with today’s explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask when political democracy, as the “natural” political accompaniment of capitalism, will come.

///
Audition
Jilia Alvarez

Porfirio drove Mami and me
to Cook’s mountain village
to find a new pantry maid.
Cook had given Mami a tip
that her home town was girl-heavy,
the men lured away to the cities.
We drove to the interior,
climbing a steep, serpentine,
say-your-last-prayers road.
I leaned toward my mother
as if my weight could throw
the car’s balance away
from the sheer drop below.
Late morning we entered
a dusty village of huts.
Mami rolled down her window
and queried an old woman,
Did she know of any girls
looking for work as maids?
Soon we were surrounded
by a dozen senoritas.
Under the thatched cantina
Mami conducted interviews–
a mix of personal questions
and Sphinx-like intelligence tests.
Do you have children, a novio?
Would you hit a child who hit you?
If I give you a quarter to buy
guineos at two for a nickel,
how many will you bring back?
As she interviewed I sat by,
looking the girls over;
one of them would soon
be telling me what to do,
reporting my misbehaviors.
Most seemed nice enough,
befriending me with smiles,
exclamations on my good hair,
my being such a darling.
Those were the ones I favored.
I’d fool them with sweet looks,
improve my bad reputation.
As we interviewed we heard
by the creek that flowed nearby
a high, clear voice singing
a plaintive lullaby…
as if the sunlight filling
the cups of the allamandas,
the turquoise sky dappled
with angel-feather clouds,
the creek trickling down
the emerald green of the mountain
had found a voice in her voice.
We listened. Mami’s hard-line,
employer-to-be face
softened with quiet sweetness.
The voice came closer, louder–
a slender girl with a basket
of wrung rags on her head
passed by the cantina,
oblivious of our presence.
Who is she? my mother asked.
Gladys, the girls replied.
Gladys! my mother called
as she would for months to come.
Gladys, come clear the plates!
Gladys, answer the door!
Gladys! the young girl turned–
Abruptly, her singing stopped.

//

From Orion Magazine:

RECORD HEAT and wind and fire displace nearly one million Southern Californians. Record drought in Atlanta leaves the city with just a few more months of drinking water. Arctic ice shrinks by an area twice the size of Texas in one summer. And all over the world—including where you live—the local weather borders on unrecognizable. It’s way too hot, too dry, too wet, too weird wherever you go.

All of which means it’s time to face a fundamental truth: the majority of the world’s climate scientists have been totally wrong. They’ve failed us completely. Not concerning the basics of global warming. Of course the climate is changing. Of course humans are driving the process through fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. No, what the scientists have been wrong about—and I mean really, really wrong—is the speed at which it’s all occurring. Our climate system isn’t just “changing.” It’s not just “warming.” It’s snapping, violently, into a whole new regime right before our eyes. A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now.

The only question left for America is this: can we snap along with the climate? Can we, as the world’s biggest polluter, create a grassroots political uprising that emerges as abruptly as a snap of the fingers?

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Post-American World By Fareed Zakaria.

Every 20 years or so, the end of America is nigh — ever since the 18th century when, in France, Comte de Buffon fingered the country as a den of degeneracy while Abbé Raynal slammed its cultural poverty: America had not yet produced “one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius.” In 1987, in his book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” the Yale historian Paul Kennedy saw the United States on the road to perdition — this, four years before the suicide of the Soviet Union, which left America all alone in the penthouse of global power. Now, two decades on, it is the much-hyped “great power shift” toward Asia that will turn the United States into a has-been.

At first blush, “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, seems to fall into the same genre. But make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse. There is certainly plenty to bemoan — from the disappearing dollar to the subprime disaster, from rampant anti-Americanism to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will take years to win.

Yet Zakaria’s is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the “rise of the rest.”

More here.

Mara Hvistendahl in Scientific American:

For over three decades the Chinese government dismissed warnings from scientists and environmentalists that its Three Gorges Dam—the world’s largest—had the potential of becoming one of China’s biggest environmental nightmares. But last fall, denial suddenly gave way to reluctant acceptance that the naysayers were right. Chinese officials staged a sudden about-face, acknowledging for the first time that the massive hydroelectric dam, sandwiched between breathtaking cliffs on the Yangtze River in central China, may be triggering landslides, altering entire ecosystems and causing other serious environmental problems—and, by extension, endangering the millions who live in its shadow.

Government officials have long defended the $24-billion project as a major source of renewable power for an energy-hungry nation and as a way to prevent floods downstream. When complete, the dam will generate 18,000 megawatts of power—eight times that of the U.S.’s Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. But in September, the government official in charge of the project admitted that Three Gorges held “hidden dangers” that could breed disaster. “We can’t lower our guard,” Wang Xiaofeng, who oversees the project for China’s State Council, said during a meeting of Chinese scientists and government reps in Chongqing, an independent municipality of around 31 million abutting the dam. “We simply cannot sacrifice the environment in exchange for temporary economic gain.”

The comments appeared to confirm what geologists, biologists and environmentalists had been warning about for years: building a massive hydropower dam in an area that is heavily populated, home to threatened animal and plant species, and crossed by geologic fault lines is a recipe for disaster.