Phillip H. Wiebe reviews John Bishop’s Believing by Faith:

Bishop revives the idea advanced by William James more than a century ago of following one’s passions in religion when intellectual issues cannot be decided. Bishop offers a sophisticated statement of the conditions necessary for a responsible act of “taking as true” some claim for which evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, and in the course of so doing not only engages some recent interpretations of faith in James’s famous “The Will to Believe,” but also clarifies recent advocacy of the view that belief in the existence of God can be properly basic. He describes the book as arising out of an attempt to examine alternative concepts of God to the classical one in which God is considered to be the “supernatural, omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent Creator ex nihilo” — the omniGod” (p. ix). Although he keeps classical theism in view, Bishop attempts to set out conditions for embracing virtually any theistic stance. His frequent reference to evangelical Christian faith, which requires putting faith in God as revealed in Jesus the Christ, suggests that he expects this version of theism to be familiar to his readers. Evangelical Christianity arouses strong passions — for and against — and it is often presented by adherents as something one might “believe by faith,” so it serves Bishop’s objectives. I will return to this topic.

One of the merits of Bishop’s work is his drawing attention to the felt difference in human experience between such broadly cognitive-affective states as taking a claim to be true in practical reasoning, and other related states of mind such as believing a claim, trusting it, and accepting it (35-41). His discussion of the limited circumstances under which we can generate beliefs lends credence to the view that a central concept in understanding religious commitments is holding claims as true, rather than believing them. Bishop’s phenomenological analysis of human acts belonging to religion adds to the knowledge of ourselves as unique, natural agents. Bishop is not the first to draw attention to important distinctions embedded in facile uses of such terms as ‘faith’ and ‘believe’, but his remarks strike me as especially insightful. The title of the book might lead one to expect an articulation of religion using these overused terms, but he does so without them. “Believing by faith” is not an effort expended in order to “make oneself believe” some claim for which the evidence is inconclusive, but consists of taking a claim to be true for practical purposes. This is the fideism that Bishop defends for those he describes as “reflective believers,” that is, people who are interested in justifying their religious acts.

David Biello in Scientific American:

Roughly 251 million years ago, an estimated 70 percent of land plants and animals died, along with 84 percent of ocean organisms—an event known as the end Permian extinction. The cause is unknown but it is known that this period was also an extremely warm one. A new analysis of the temperature and fossil records over the past 520 million years reveals that the end of the Permian is not alone in this association: global warming is consistently associated with planetwide die-offs.

“There have been three major greenhouse phases in the time period we analyzed and the peaks in temperature of each coincide with mass extinctions,” says ecologist Peter Mayhew of the University of York in England, who led the research examining the fossil and temperature records. “The fossil record and temperature data sets already existed but nobody had looked at the relationships between them.”

Pairing these data—the relative number of different shallow sea organisms extant during a given time period and the record of temperature encased in the varying levels of oxygen isotopes in their shells over 10 million year intervals—reveals that eras with relatively high concentrations of greenhouse gases bode ill for the number of species on Earth. “The rule appears to be that greenhouse worlds adversely affect biodiversity,” Mayhew says.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

I’ve never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy and death. But Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches’ brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned, right-wing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism.

A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week’s website, feminists and particularly the women’s studies professors among them, have developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalists. Hence, as anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation’s campuses this week, students are urged to stage “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”

Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the term “Islamo-Fascism,” which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn’t go off for me until I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining for the repeal of women’s suffrage. “If we took away women’s right to vote,” she said wistfully, “We’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream; it’s a personal fantasy of mine.”

Juliet Lapidos in Slate:

TV satirist Stephen Colbert told his audience on Oct. 16 that he would “seek the office of the president of the United States.” Over the next few days, he signed papers to get on both the Democratic and Republican primary ballots in South Carolina, and he unveiled a campaign Web site. If the Comedy Central host follows through with his bid and continues to use his show for political self-promotion, does he risk violating election law?

Yes. The Federal Election Commission prohibits corporations from making “any contribution or expenditure in connection with a federal election.” A “contribution” includes “anything of value,” including airtime. Thus each time Colbert promotes his candidacy on The Colbert Report, he’ll be accepting an illegal “in kind” contribution from Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom. The FEC does exempt news programs (including satires like the Report) from the “in kind” airtime ban, but not if a political party, political committee, or candidate (like Colbert) controls the show’s content.

Geoffrey Hawthorn in the LRB:

It is a distinctively Latin American story. Yet a comparison does come to mind. Thucydides said of Pericles, the political general who extended the ‘ancient liberty’ in Athens in the 440s and 430s BC, that he had ‘advantages in abundance’. Indeed he reported Pericles himself as having told the Athenians that he had them all: an ability to see what to do, the capacity to expound it to an audience, unimpeachable patriotism, and an indifference to personal gain. Pericles was a rich patrician from a distinguished line. Chávez, part criollo, part Indian, part African (the three constituencies of the Venezuela that Bolívar described), shares his gifts. He is the son of a poor primary-school teacher in the provinces; he joined the army, he says, to play baseball in the military leagues. Athens had a wide empire, whose tribute it had to strain to maintain. Chávez has oil, which once he had managed to wrest Petróleos de Venezuela away from directors who favoured American buyers and their own pockets (eventually firing them on television in terms borrowed from baseball), he has not had to defend against anyone. And the tribute of the markets (the US remains the largest) meanwhile rose from $9 a barrel in 1999 to more than $60 in 2006 and touched $80 this summer. Both Pericles and Chávez, however, can be seen to have been carried away by their own success. Pericles insisted that Athens could win against Sparta; yet his very insistence suggested that he knew the risks, and was anxious.

Chávez is showing something of the same anxiety.

From Newsweek:

Today no other country on earth is arguably more dangerous than Pakistan. It has everything Osama bin Laden could ask for: political instability, a trusted network of radical Islamists, an abundance of angry young anti-Western recruits, secluded training areas, access to state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to the West and security services that don’t always do what they’re supposed to do. (Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, there also aren’t thousands of American troops hunting down would-be terrorists.) Then there’s the country’s large and growing nuclear program. “If you were to look around the world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it’s right in their backyard,” says Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council. The conventional story about Pakistan has been that it is an unstable nuclear power, with distant tribal areas in terrorist hands. What is new, and more frightening, is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda elements have now turned much of the country, including some cities, into a base that gives jihadists more room to maneuver, both in Pakistan and beyond.

In recent months, as Musharraf has grown more and more unpopular after eight years of rule, Islamists have been emboldened.

More here.

From Science:

Eat your vegetables, they say, but a new study might make you want to rub them on your skin instead. The paper shows that an ingredient extracted from broccoli can help prevent sunburn damage. The researchers hope that the findings will eventually lead to a new type of sun protection that perks up the body’s own defenses. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation and many chemical compounds cause oxidative damage to our DNA, which can lead to cancer. Humans have a natural defense system to break down these oxidizing agents, but UV radiation doesn’t kick it into high gear. That’s why cancer researchers have been looking for ways to activate these natural antioxidants.

Broccoli and related vegetables produce a compound called sulforaphane that is known to do just that.

More here.

When Johann Gottlieb Fichte read the Critique of Pure Reason in 1791, he was so excited that he set out for Königsberg to visit the famous Immanuel Kant. But what he found there was an old, disinterested man who sent him back home. There, in exactly five weeks, Fichte wrote “An Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation,” sent it to Kant, who was suitably impressed and found a publisher for him. For fear of censorship, the book appeared anonymously. The critics at the “Allgemeinen Literatur” newspaper in Jena wrote that anyone who knows even a bit of Kant will recognise that this new work can only be from him. Kant explained in a letter to the editor that a certain Fichte, and not he, was the author. And so he became famous overnight.

Rüdiger Safranski’s fabulous book on Romanticism doesn’t only consist of such stories but it so smoothly combines philosophical analysis with anecdotal perspective, and so gracefully switches between profound reflection and biographical wit, that we are presented with a genuine rarity: exciting German intellectual history. “Romanticism. A German affair.” That’s the title. It refers to both the epoch which lasted an astonishingly brief 30 years as well as the ongoing influence of Romantic thought and its often dangerous mutation into the political realm. In 1798, Novalis wrote, “In giving the entirety a higher value, the usual an element of secrecy, the well-known the value of the unknown and the finite the appearance of infinity, I romanticise.” This preamble to the Romantic constitution was to be fatally radicalised later by dark ideologies and their masters. Goebbels used the term “steely romantic.” And Safranski sees in Ernst Jünger “the warmongering version of the Dionysian,” which plays an instrumental role in Nietzsche (also a Romantic renegade).

more from Sign and Sight here.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs of Japanese having sex at night in Tokyo’s public parks, which ran at the Yossi Milo gallery in New York and now moves to the Doug Udell gallery in Vancouver on November 22, are revelatory in much the same way. They would simply be tawdry and exploitive if they weren’t also, like the Craig saga, so odd and funny. The behavior they record has to my knowledge never been recorded before on film. In an essay that accompanies a reissue of The Park, the long out of print book that for most people has been the only source until now about Yoshiyuki and his work, the critic, Vince Aletti, calls them “among the strangest photographs ever made”.

Taken between 1971 – 1979 at a time when sex all over the world was more crazy-casual than it is now, the pictures show both straights and gays getting their rocks off under trees and on the bare ground. Yoshiyuki shot with infrared film and a discreet electronic flash so that he himself was all but invisible. The figures loom in the foreground as bright smears, their limbs entangled and eyes glowing monster-like from the tiny explosions of light. Faint traces of the city can be seen in the distance in a few pictures. But civilisation is for the most part beyond the frame, as black night swallows the actors in primeval darkness.

more from The Guardian here.

Via Paul Krugman, who via Nicholas Beaudrot, Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey draws our attention to an startling statistic–in the United States there are more players of World of Warcraft than there are farmers:

They send a reporter to literally Middle America, and surprise, discover that they don’t much care for them Hollywood movies. Suuuurrr-prise!

But one chunk of this report, to me, is symptomatic of a larger issue that grinds my molars.

ANDERSON: We stopped by the Lebanon [Kansas — ed.] hotspot, Ladow’s Market, where one local told us Hollywood just can’t relate to a farming way of life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They’ve never been back in here to know what it’s like to actually have to make a living doing this.

You know what, Unidentified Male? You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to have to make a living farming. NOBODY DOES.

For chrissake, only 17% of Americans live in rural settings anymore. Only 2 million of those people work on farms or ranches (USDA figures). Hell, only ten percent of the average farm family’s income even comes from farming anymore (did you know that? I didn’t. Funky)…

Four million people in the US play World of Warcraft. And yet, do I ever hear:

ANDERSON: We stopped by the gates of Ogrimmar in Durotar, on the east coast of Kalimdor, where one local told us Hollywood just can’t relate to the level-grinding life.

UNIDENTIFIED ORC: They’ve never been back here, questing Razormane or Drygulch Ravine, y’know … or farming for Peacebloom and Silverleaf. They’re out of touch.

No. No I do not.

Of many of these palyers can’t vote. [H/t: Dan Balis.]

From The New Yorker:

Shortly after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared her candidacy for President last winter, Roger Cohen, writing in the International Herald Tribune, declared that “a delicate problem confronts her that few people are talking about: almost two decades of dynastic domination of American politics.” Well, they’re talking about it now. “Forty per cent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House,” a recent Associated Press story, by Nancy Benac, begins. “Talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate,” Benac goes on. “If Hillary Clinton were to be elected and reëlected, the nation could go twenty-eight years in a row with the same two families governing the country.

If anything, the dynastic dynamic has picked up speed in the past half century or so. It reached a perfect storm in 1962, when Massachusetts voters filled the Senate seat vacated by John F. Kennedy, grandson of Congressman and Mayor John F. Fitzgerald and son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, when he was elected President—the very seat that, in 1952, J.F.K. had wrested from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who was a great-great-great-grandson of Senator George Cabot, a grandson of the Senate titan Henry Cabot Lodge, and a son of George Cabot Lodge, who, though himself a poet, married a Frelinghuysen. (Are you following this?) The 1962 Democratic nominee for senator was, of course, Edward Moore Kennedy, then thirty years old. His Republican opponent was—wait for it—another George Cabot Lodge, this one a son of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and a great-great-great-great-grandson of, etc. Nor was that all. There was a third-party “peace” candidate, too, a professor of European history at Harvard: H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York, Chief Justice of the United States, and 1916 Republican Presidential nominee. During a primary debate, Kennedy’s opponent for the Democratic nomination told him that if his name were just Edward Moore his candidacy would be a joke.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection. They know, too, that some people get by on as few as three hours a night, even less, and that there are hearty souls who have stayed up for more than week without significant health problems.

Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

More here.

Michael Shermer and Dinesh D’Souza debate the issue:

(Via richarddawkins.net)

NatureNews’ Declan Butler looks at the innovative Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab:

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is pioneering the concept of randomized trials, more commonly associated with drug safety tests, to assess what works and what doesn’t in development and poverty interventions. The strategy has inspired the World Bank, which in December will choose winning proposals in a €10.4-million (US$14.9-million), 3-year programme that will use randomized trials to study the fight against poverty.

Based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, J-PAL was founded in 2003 and this year has more than 60 projects on the go in 21 countries. Esther Duflo, one of the lab’s founders, says she set it up to help rigorously test the many programmes that are meant to aid the poor. “Whereas one would not dream of putting a new drug on the market without a randomized trial,” she says, “such evaluations were, and to a certain extent still are, very rare for social programmes.”

Although young, J-PAL has already notched up some successes. One of its first studies, involving more than 30,000 youngsters in rural Kenya, found that deworming children reduced the number of days taken off school by 25% (E. Miguel and M. Kremer Econometrica 72, 159-217 ; 2004). Another study, in India, showed that hiring young local women to help at schools with underperforming students significantly increased test scores, and was six times cheaper than the computer-assisted learning already being tested (A. Banerjee et al . Q. J. Econ. 122, 1235-1264 ; 2007). “J-PAL’s results in education are solid and important,” says Nilima Gulrajani, an expert in aid management at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Over at Conversations with History, Harry Kreisler talks to the philosopher Thomas Scanlon:

[Kreisler] What did you come to see as the important dimensions of freedom of expression? We’re in the realm of political philosophy where we’re talking about people’s relations with their institutions.

[Scanlon] In this first article I wrote, I was very taken with the idea of individual autonomy. It’s important for citizens not only to be able to make up their own minds about important questions about life and politics, but also to have their relations with each other, and with government, defined by the idea that they are autonomous. I thought that recognizing other people’s autonomy, recognizing citizens’ autonomy, drew a sharp line. It’s incompatible with seeing citizens as autonomous for government to decide this can’t be published because it might lead them to draw some false conclusion. Whether the conclusion is false is up to them to decide. That’s what it means to treat them as autonomous.

Later on, I came to think that the restriction on the way speech could be restricted was too tight and one should adopt a more — I don’t know if I want to say practical, but a more instrumental view. The main reason why government can’t have unlimited power to restrict speech has to do with the dangerousness of giving governments that power. We’re properly more willing to allow governments to restrict some kinds of false advertising than we are to allow them to restrict what they take to be false political speech. Government is — one might assume, although this isn’t always true — somewhat less partisan, less untrustworthy and less likely to abuse its power in the realm of false advertising about products (about how dangerous your lawnmower is, or how long your car’s going to last) than it is in the realm of deciding what answers to the basic political questions of our time are true.

Also in The New Yorker, a profile of David Simon, the creator of my favorite television show of all time, The Wire.

The show’s title referred to the wiretap that a unit of the Baltimore police force was using to keep a local drug organization under surveillance. Ultimately, the term suggested more—the way that the show allowed viewers to eavesdrop on various recondite power plays, and the way that poverty, politics, and policing were interconnected in a struggling post-industrial city. In Simon’s view, “The Wire” was never “a cop show. We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city.”

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

In The New Yorker, a short story by Andrei Platonov (translated by Robert Chandler):

In the gloom of nature, a man with a hunting rifle was walking through sparse forest. The hunter’s face was a little pockmarked, but he was handsome and, for the time being, still young. At this time of year, a whiff of mist hung in the forest—from the warmth and moisture of the air, the breath of developing plants, and the decay of leaves that had perished long ago. It was difficult to see anything, but it was good to walk alone, to think without meaning, or to do the opposite—to stop thinking altogether and just droop. The forest grew on the slope of a low hill; large boulders lay between the small thin birches, and the soil was infertile and poor—clay here, gray earth there—but the trees and grass had got used to these conditions, and they lived in this land as best they could.

Sometimes the hunter would stop for a moment; then he would hear the many-voiced drone of the life of midges, small birds, worms, and ants, and the rustle of the lumps of earth that this population harried and shifted about, so as to feed itself and stay active. The forest was like a crowded city—not that the hunter had ever been to a city, but he had been trying to imagine one for a long time. Once, he had passed through Petrozavodsk, but even that had been only in passing. Screeches, squeaks, and a faint muttering filled the forest, perhaps indicating bliss and satisfaction, perhaps indicating that someone had perished. Moist birch leaves shone in the mist with the green inner light of their lives; invisible insects were rocking them in the steamy damp rising from the earth. Some far-off small animal began to whimper meekly in its hiding place; no one was doing it any harm there, but it was trembling from the fear of its own existence, not daring to surrender to its own heart’s joy in the loveliness of the world, afraid to make use of the rare and brief chance of inadvertent life, because it might be discovered and eaten. But then the animal should not really even have been whimpering: predators might notice and devour it.

Carlos Jacanamijoy. No Solo Como Diversion. 1993.

Painting and drawing.

More on this Colombian artist here and here.

Thanks to Dr. Luis Felipe Uriza for introducing this artist to me.

Rodolfo Hernandez-Corchado

In 2006, after attending a conference, Louis met Mikhail for the first time in a cold Berlin afternoon. After a brief chat, the two men got into a car, the same one in which Mikhail was later photographed. Mikhail, was nicely dressed: a black suit and a coat, blue tie and a grey scarf. Louis appeared, as always: timeless. After more than a century, both of them were finally together. Louis was born in 1821 in Jura, France and Mikhail was born in Privolnoye, Russia in 1931.

There is not much information about what happened when Louis and Mikhail got into the car. Only one photograph was taken of Mikhail (his stain in the forehead is almost unnoticeable) sitting in the back seat of the car and staring through the right window, grasping firmly the interior right door handle with his hand. But where is Louis?

What they talked about? After waiting more than a century to be together, it is hard to believe that both of them were together for such brief time, with not so much to talk about it. Did Louis get off the vehicle?
Did Louis say something to upset Mikhail? Who knows? The fact is that at the end of the day, Mikhail Gorbachev rode alone with a Keepall 60 travel bag, designed by the Louis Vuitton Company. Perhaps Louis forgot it, or was it a gift? I imagine Louis saying: “Mikhail, look at this, do you mind if we take a photograph of you?

Needless to say Mikhail accepted to model with the travel bag, and that is why we have this photograph, as part of the Louis Vuitton 2007 campaign that includes among others the French actress Catherine Denuve and the tennis player Andre Agassi. This is not the first time that we have the opportunity to see Mr. Gorbachev participating in an advertising campaign. In 1997, he appeared in a spot for the fast food chain Pizza Hut with his granddaughter Anastasia.

When asked about his participation, Mr. Gorbachev argued about his economic needs: “I am in the process of creating a library and a Perestroika archive, and this project requires certain funds”. That statement certainly informs us about the terrible impacts that the economic reforms and liberalization policies (“shock therapy”) had during the early 1990s in the former USSR: private savings coming to nothing as a consequence of the inflation, sixty percent of the population under the poverty line, late wages, cutbacks in education and health care, a drop of the 50% of the industrial and agricultural production. In the midst of the economical and political turmoil, even the former president had to deal with corporate capitalism in order to survive.

But we should not misinterpret Gorbachev’s actions as selfish and greedy. Probably his goal was not only to promote consumption and market expansion in the former USSR, and get some money for his library. “It is not only consumption, it is also socializing”, Mr. Gorbachev explained why he participated in a pizza advertising campaign and not in another type of advertisement. That 1997 spot, ended with the slogan “Have you been to the edge?”

Well, sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Louis and Mikhail went to the edge, or to the remains of the geographical frontiers of the Cold war. They rode along the physical limits between the socialist camp or the real socialism and capitalism: the Berlin Wall. Hard to believe Mr. Gorbachev? Not long gone are the years when Mr. Gorbachev defended the notion that Socialism and the market were not only compatible, but also indivisible in substance.

Was the place of the photography casual? I imagine, Louis saying to the car driver: “turn to the right, I want to show something to Mikhail”. My guess is that traveling to the historical frontier that symbolizes the end of what the English historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) called the Short Twentieth Century, which began with the First World War in 1914 and ended in 1991, Louis wanted to tell Mikhail and to us about the ephemeral condition of all things, persons, social structures, institutions, nation-states, and about history.
“All that is solid melts into the air”, said Marx and Engels referring to the destructive and revolutionary capacity of capitalism more than a century ago in 1848 when Louis was only 27 years old. When the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961, the travel bag carried by Mr. Gorbachev had been moving around the planet for 31 years. Now the Berlin Wall has gone, but the Louis Vuitton travel bag, a harmless and delicate bag, and expensive too, is still here. Is that why it is advertised as “recognized the world over for its timeless shape”?

If the Short Twentieth Century ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp in Easter Europe, the Keepall 60 carried by Gorbachev is the statement of the power of the commodity and the social relations embedded in it as timeless: the only possibility to transcend is through the commodity. Perhaps the Soviet Union is gone but the Keepall bag deigned in 1930 is still sold in 130 stores all over the world -including Russia and China.

While Mikhail and his bag with the worldwide famous monogram “LV” moves along is trying to persuade us that past doesn’t dominate the present. In the photograph, the Berlin wall is seen in the background trough the window of the car. As the car moves, Mikhail and Louis leave the Short Twentieth Century behind. Behind them are two World Wars, Stalinism, the Gulag, Nazism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Cold War, US military interventions in Latin America, and its collection of dictatorships: the Batistas, the Banzers, the Galtieris, the Pinochetts, the Videlas, the Stroesners.

But for Louis and Mikhail the only reality is the present and the future embedded in that bag. Yes, both of them are making a historical statement, but maybe just one of them is conscious about it, and the other one cannot resist the impulse. Do they really move to the future? Mikhail dares to ask Louis: “Louis, will I see you for the 2008 campaign?” Dear, I suspect that after all you have not understood anything. We are not going to need you next year. I am the only future. But keep the bag, it is yours.

Last spring, Martha Nussbaum made the case against academic boycotts (specifically in the wake of the movement to culturally boycott Israel) in Dissent.

I MUST COMMENT on one very alarming rationale that has been offered in this context. In some of the defenses of the boycotts, the wrongdoing alleged is failure to dismiss scholars who take political positions that the group of boycotters does not like. Here the principle of academic freedom becomes relevant in the most urgent manner. Surely the institutions in question should protect these people, unless they do something that counts as hate speech targeted at individuals, or some other form of criminal conduct. We all know what happened in the McCarthy era, when scholars were fired for political positions that a dominant group didn’t like. As someone whose hiring, along with that of other “leftists,” has been criticized on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (in a way that my dean, at least, took as tantamount to a McCarthyite call for my firing), I believe that if this principle is once breached, it will hurt most those whose positions go most against the dominant currents of governmental power: feminists, advocates of gay rights, whatever.

In the current issue of Logos, Lawrence Davidson makes the case for a boycott:

The boycott’s impingement on the academic freedom of Israeli scholars has been repeatedly condemned. It has been called “contemptible,” “ hypocritical,” and “an unacceptable breakdown in the norms of intellectual freedom” (these terms have not been applied by these same critics to the destruction of Palestinian academic freedom). For simplicity sake, let us work from the statement of Dena S. Davis, a law professor at Cleveland State University, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 18, 2003. Davis writes that “Academic boycotts undermine the basic premise of intellectual life that ideas make a difference, and the corollary that intellectual exchanges across cultures can open minds.”12 Unfortunately, there is nothing necessary about the assumption that the “difference” ideas make results in a more humane world or more humane outlooks. Thus, it is not only positive ideas that can make a difference.