In Prospect Magazine, Danny Kruger meditates on the Left, the Right and the fraternity in Britain’s political future.

[Gordon] Brown is following the advice of David Goodhart, editor of Prospect, who has called in a recent Demos paper for the left to embrace the concept of “progressive nationalism.” Goodhart’s thesis is that multiculturalism threatens the basis of the egalitarian settlement. He argues that “national identity may be the best way to preserve the left’s collective ideals.” And so he encourages an extension of the concept of citizenship and a rallying of loyalty around the rights and services provided by the state.

Ironically, this approach reflects late Hegel, the Hegel who adapted his philosophy to the reactionary climate of post-Napoleonic Prussia. In the brief interlude between the French defeat of Prussia in 1807 and Waterloo in 1815, the idea of the nation had emerged as the ally not of the state, but of the individual. As Karl Popper, albeit uncomprehendingly, put it, “Modern nationalism, strangely enough, was in its short history before Hegel a revolutionary and liberal creed. By accident it had made its way into the camp of freedom.” That was no accident: freedom and nationalism—liberty and fraternity—are allies. Yet after 1815, and thanks to the use which the Prussians made of Hegel, nationalism was co-opted into the service of the state: the loyalty that individuals felt to the nation was translated into submission to the government. In Bismarck’s day the outlines of the modern left’s domestic programme emerged. Anticipating Brown and Goodhart, Bismarck decided that one way to bind the German nation together was “progressive” state welfare (the other was militarism).

It is a staple of the left’s ideology that, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, tradition is an invention, an imposition of collective false memory by the ruling class. True to this analysis, the left is determined to invent its own tradition, its own idea of fraternity, and impose it through cultural conquest. National identity, says the Labour MP John Denham, must be “created, not discovered.” Brown’s “Britishness” is not the Britishness that the British people know: it is an artificial one, which must be brought into law by statute and regulation.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work.

A sign of Indian progress and development, Type 2 diabetes (in the NYT):

“Diabetes unfortunately is the price you pay for progress,” said Dr. A. Ramachandran, the managing director of the M.V. Hospital for Diabetes, in Chennai (formerly Madras).

For decades, Type 2 diabetes has been the “rich man’s burden,” a problem for industrialized countries to solve.

But as the sugar disease, as it is often called, has penetrated the United States and other developed nations, it has also trespassed deep into the far more populous developing world.

In Italy or Germany or Japan, diabetes is on the rise. In Bahrain and Cambodia and Mexico — where industrialization and Western food habits have taken hold— it is rising even faster. For the world has now reached the point, according to the United Nations, where more people are overweight than undernourished.

There is disagreement here at 3QD over the value of the Euston Manifesto (some have signed it, while others have strong reasons for not doing so). Although, I’m pretty sure that most if not all of us are in pretty strong agreement with the broad values espoused in it. There in now a document in support of the manifesto from a distinctly American vantage point entitled “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto”. (I’m unclear as to the particular value of an specifically American affirmation, and personally don’t want to touch let alone embrace the Cold War liberalism the document harkens back to. But enough editorializing…) You can read it here and add your name to the list of signatories if you wish. (Via Norman Geras.)

We are signers or supporters in the United States of the Euston Manifesto and its reassertion of liberal values. Our views range from those of centrists and independents to liberals of varying hues on to the democratic left. We include supporters of the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 as well as people who opposed this war from the beginning. However, we all welcome and are heartened by the decision of the writers of the Euston Manifesto in Britain to reassert and reinvigorate liberal values in the present context. Now we confront the issue of how to respond to radical Islamism. Some of us view this ideology and its political results as the third major form of totalitarian ideology of the last century, after fascism and Nazism, on the one hand, and Communism, on the other. Others regard it as having a history in the Arab and Islamic world that eludes the label of totalitarianism. We all agree however that it fosters dictatorship, terror, anti-Semitism and sexism of a most retrograde kind. We reject its subordination of politics to the dictates of religious fundamentalists as well as its contempt for the role of individual autonomy and rationality in politics, a rejection not seen on this scale in world politics since the 1940s. We understand that the United States must continue to take the lead with our allies in confronting this danger.

Our views in foreign policy are rooted in the traditions of Franklin Roosevelt as well as Harry Truman, who battled dictatorships of the right as well as the left respectively. For their generation, the key questions of international politics concerned totalitarianism in Europe and Asia. They led the country in war to defeat fascism, Nazism, and Imperial Japan and then founded the institutions that led to the peaceful victory in the Cold War over Communism. The key moral and political challenge in foreign affairs in our time stems from radical Islamism and the jihadist terrorism it has unleashed. We favor a liberalism that is as passionate about the struggle against Islamic extremism as it has been about its political, social, economic and cultural agenda at home. We reject the now ossified and unproductive political polarization of American politics rooted as it is in the conflicts of the 1960s, not the first decade of this century. We are frustrated in the choice between conservative governance that thwarts much needed reforms at home, on the one hand, and a liberalism which has great difficulty accepting the projection of American power abroad, on the other. The long era of Republican ascendancy may very well be coming to an end. If and when it does, we seek a renewed and reinvigorated American liberalism, one that is up to the task of fighting and winning the struggle of free and democratic societies against Islamic extremism and the terror it produces.

From Time:

A few hardcore ski bums might have awakened Tuesday morning and blinked their eyes in disbelief, but Clear Creek County, Co., where I live, ranks first in the U.S. for longevity, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study appearing in the Sept. 12 issue of Public Library of Science Medicine.

In fact, seven Colorado counties are the top seven ranked counties in the nation, all with a life expectancy of 81.3 years. And it hardly seems coincidental that all seven — Clear Creek, Eagle, Gilpin, Grand, Jackson, Park and Summit — lie either on, near or adjoining the Continental Divide and are spectacularly beautiful. Dr. Ned Calonge of the state health department told the Rocky Mountain News in Denver that there’s nothing magical about high-country air. He thinks the longevity results are because Colorado residents have active lifestyles, low smoking rates and the lowest-in-the-nation numbers for obesity.

Maybe.

More here.

From The Seattle Times:

AS we mark the fifth anniversary of that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001, which changed our world, I remind myself once again that we cannot go back to the pre-9/11 America but we can build a better and more conscious America.

As a Pakistani-Muslim immigrant American, it is this thought that gives me hope in spite of untrustworthy political leaders, increasing racism, and the current cycle of violence around the world. It is a hope that derives from the actions of millions of Americans who have shown the willingness to look beyond wartime propaganda and often one-sided media coverage of events and extended a hand in support to fellow Americans of a different religion. I arrived in the United States as an immigrant at the young age of 13, more than 20 years ago. My parents moved us here, leaving our native Pakistan, so each of us children could have a life of peace and security, a quality education, and a chance to succeed.

For the most part, this country has given me all of that and I have appreciated the freedoms I have enjoyed here. Then, that dreadful day of 9/11 occurred and the world changed.

More here.

Candidates for the UN Secretary General will participate in a forum on the process and their agendas on September 26th at the Waldorf-Astoria. The forum is a remarkable step towards transparency in what historically has been an opaque process. The forum is being organized by UNSG.org and Bridging Nations. Contact Julio Martinez at Bridging Nations by email at [email protected] or phone at 202-741-3875 for more information on the forum.

Over at Abstract Nonsense, Alon teaches me something in just 4 short paragraphs.

Sometime in the last hour and a half I got a Google hit on integer that is both a square and a cube. Never one to fail people who read my blog, I feel I should talk a bit about it.

First, in the ring of integers Z, like in all other unique factorization domains, it’s simple: an element is both a square and a cube if and only if it’s a sixth power. Examples of integers that are both squares and cubes are then 1, 64, 729, 4096, and 15625.

However, without unique factorization, it’s more complicated. Take the ring Z[x], the ring of all polynomials with integer coefficients. That ring has unique factorization, by a theorem that says that if R is a UFD, then so is R[x]. But we can take the set of all elements in Z[x] whose x-coefficient is 0, such as 7, x^2 – 5, x^5 + x^4 – x^3, etc.; this set forms a subring of Z[x] because we can still add, subtract, and multiply in it. In that ring, we naturally have x^6 = (x^2)^3 = (x^3)^2, but since x is not in the ring, x^6 is not a sixth power.

In the Public Library of Science, a study on life expectancy by race and region finds 8 Americas, with the distance between best and worst comparable to that of the best developed nation and worst country.

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the “eight Americas,” to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs…

The eight Americas were defined based on race, location of the county of residence, population density, race-specific county-level per capita income, and cumulative homicide rate. Data sources for population and mortality figures were the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. We estimated life expectancy, the risk of mortality from specific diseases, health insurance, and health-care utilization for the eight Americas. The life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001. Within the sexes, the life expectancy gap between the best-off and the worst-off groups was 15.4 y for males (Asians versus high-risk urban blacks) and 12.8 y for females (Asians versus low-income southern rural blacks). Mortality disparities among the eight Americas were largest for young (15–44 y) and middle-aged (45–59 y) adults, especially for men. The disparities were caused primarily by a number of chronic diseases and injuries with well-established risk factors. Between 1982 and 2001, the ordering of life expectancy among the eight Americas and the absolute difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups remained largely unchanged. Self-reported health plan coverage was lowest for western Native Americans and low-income southern rural blacks. Crude self-reported health-care utilization, however, was slightly higher for the more disadvantaged populations…

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

In openDemocracy, Ehsan Masood looks at cricket in the wake of last months controversy.

In Lagaan, a Bollywood film set in British India, an experienced team of British soldiers challenge farmers from a village to a game of cricket. But this is to be no ordinary match. If the villagers win, the crippling tax (lagaan) they owe to the Raj is to be waived. If they lose, the tax is to be trebled. None of the farmers have played before, and the district’s feudal prince begs them not to become lambs to the slaughter. But the villagers, whose captain is played by actor-director Aamir Khan, feel they have little to lose as the tax is already unaffordable. For readers who may not have seen this film, I won’t spoil the ending. What I can say is that it is another example of how a global audience is reading and watching the history of India from its own perspective.

I was reminded of the film last month when a match between England and Pakistan ended abruptly amid much controversy on 20 August. As with the fictional Lagaan, this real game of cricket between a rich nation and its (former) colony offered its spectators the same mix of sport, power, colonial politics, allegations of racism and cheating, together with flashes of comedy. Its cast even included the descendant of royalty in the shape of Shahryar Khan, chair of Pakistan’s cricket-governing board and the country’s former ambassador to London; his grandmother was the queen of Bhopal in north India.

I’m on Zoram’s Strand and this lvl 23 Tauren son of a bitch is camping me. Every time I steer my soul back into my body and rezz he takes advantage of my low health and ganks me without mercy. As I’m going down for the fifth time I send out a call on Local Defense, then steer my will o’wisp soul back from the rezzy point to my corpse. Just when I get to my body I see them thundering through the purple fields like the cavalry: a Shaman, a Warrior, and a Hunter, and they pwn that smug Tauren all over the glade. I rezz just in time to sink my kris into his back and he goes down like a ton of pixilated bricks and we’re off, running through the field, taking lazy leaps and rolls like a group of fighter jets. Someone says “LFG Sleeper Awakens” and we all click yes, and we’re off to escort the Druid Bearclaw through contested territories to Maestra’s Post, my comrades and I. Carsickness, Gangrene, Isoceles, and NancyReagan running through the woods with murder on our minds and digital sunlight on our faces. I’m playing World of Warcraft and I’ve never been happier.

more from n+1 here.

DURING THE WORLD CUP–obsessed summer of 2006, Berlin may have been the epicenter of soccer culture, but for decades it has been the unofficial global capital of sound art, which the city’s institutions have steadfastly and proudly supported. In 1980, the Akademie der Künste presented “Für Augen und Ohren” (For Eyes and Ears), a landmark exhibition that provided a historical backdrop for the emergence of sound art as a distinct category and introduced a generation of artists for whom sound was the primary medium. Berlin’s commercial galleries have been friendly to sound since the late ’70s, when Rolf Langebartels opened Galerie Giannozzo in the Charlottenburg district. (This tradition is continued today by Carsten Seiffarth’s Singuhr-Hörgalerie, still one of the very few spaces in the world dedicated exclusively to sound installation.) However, prior to this past summer, the most significant event hosted by this sound-art center was “Sonambiente 1996,” a multivenue exhibition curated by Matthias Osterwold, Georg Weckwerth, and Christian Kneisel and named after the American designer Harry Bertoia’s sound-sculpture studio. Taking place amid Berlin’s flurry of post-wall reconstruction, the festival assembled a who’s who of European and American audio artists and helped to launch the sound-art boom of the past decade.

more from artforum here.

I’m not sure I can tell you the difference between a “personal history” and a memoir, but Jonathan Franzen’s contribution to the genre is so expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking, that I wish I could yank it off the shelf where it will inevitably sit with the autobiographical writing of other hip authors perhaps too young to be writing autobiography (Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, etc.), and toss it into the bleak anonymity of some loosely defined territory like “General Nonfiction.” The only problem is that the six essays in The Discomfort Zone, though they tackle topics as various as Charles Schulz, Franz Kafka and bird watching, are frankly autobiographical. Together they add up to an account, often artfully indirect, of Jonathan Franzen’s protracted coming-of-age—a period that overlaps, in part, with his development as a novelist. Though it never actually mentions either his first two novels or The Corrections (2001), The Discomfort Zone doubles as a map of the route Mr. Franzen traveled to get to the point where he could write his wonderful third novel. So this is, willy-nilly, a writer’s personal history.

more from the NY Observer here.

Laid out in the first four essays, Crews’s brief against Freud is hard to refute. Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered. In four further essays, Crews documents the continuing pernicious influence of Freud in the “recovered memory” movement. The idea that childhood sexual abuse can be repressed and then recalled originated with Freud, and has been used by therapists to evoke false memories which have traumatized patients and shattered families.

more from the TLS here.

Empire is the classic. It was outrageous – yet somehow it worked. An eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, it was high concept, not in the Hollywood sense, but the art sense. It’s got potency, resonance. Andy even said the Empire State Building was a star. It’s so New York, which was the centre of the artistic universe at the time, the 1960s. That’s why I decided to begin the Andy Warhol show I am curating with Empire.

I can’t recall when I first saw a Warhol. I feel as though he was always in my consciousness. I started making films at the same time he did, and the New York underground scene is what influenced me – and that was Andy. He didn’t think you needed access to anything to do what he was doing – just grab a camera, do your own thing, and it’ll work.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Guardian:

Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, was a domestic tyrant who issued a ‘Draft Constitution’ to his mistress, instructing her how to carry out household chores and look after his children. A new book reveals that Hughes’s lover, Assia Wevill, was ordered by him not to have lie-in, wear her dressing gown around the house or take a nap during the day. Wevill told friends the poet’s lovemaking was so ferocious that ‘in bed, he smells like a butcher’. The claims are made in A Lover of Unreason: The Biography of Assia Wevill, by two Israeli journalists who have spent 15 years researching her story.

More here.

The twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center smolder (top) after terrorists flew two jetliners into them on the morning of September 11, 2001. The towers would soon collapse, killing about 2,750 people and making the Empire State Building (bottom) the tallest building in the city for the first time since 1972.

More here.

by John Allen Paulos

What can I say or recall about 9/11 that hasn’t been said or recalled at least 911 times? Not much. Despite the incessant and synecdochic repetition of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 (or maybe because of it), I find it very hard to project myself back into the state of mind I had on that date. I know that my reaction wasn’t special – the usual combination of astonishment, fear, sadness, anxiety, and revulsion at the ubiquitous images of planes, buildings, and falling human beings. Relieved when we finally reached our children, who were in NY at the time, my wife and I spent the day in front of the TV. Our shell-shocked kids managed to get on an Amtrak train out of NY late on the night of the 11th, and I remember dazedly picking them up at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia well after midnight. I also remember playing basketball with them sometime later and feeling queasy at every plane that passed over. And, yes, I felt very American.

What else did I feel? So much has transpired since 9/11, so much has been “justified” by it, that my memories of that week are fuzzy and inextricably colored by the Bush Administration’s policies and actions since then.

A recent poll suggests that one thing likely hasn’t changed over the past five years, and that is the strangely symmetric misconceptions about the instigation of the 9/11 attack. Just after September 11th, there were countless news stories about the “Arab street” believing that Israelis knocked down the World Trade Center or at least knew about the bombings beforehand. This belief was widely and rightfully mocked and decried. But the companion belief held by 70% of Americans shortly thereafter was that Saddam Hussein was behind the WTC bombings, and this belief was at least tacitly encouraged by many who knew better. Probably an unhealthy fraction of Arabs continues to believe the nonsense about Israeli involvement in 9/11. Even now almost half of all Americans, according to a Zogby poll taken over this past Labor Day weekend, believe there was a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. And 65% of Republicans still believe this. Many Arabs have an excuse for their benighted beliefs. Most live in overtly repressive regimes with tightly controlled media. Americans don’t have this defense, at least to anything like the same degree.

The last paragraph illustrates the claim made above, namely that I can’t easily think about the nightmare of 9/11/01 without thinking about the ongoing disaster that persists on 9/11/05. Ah, but the memory of the rampant number madness that surfaced just after the attacks does manage to come to this mathematician’s mind through the miasma of the last five years unfiltered. It was a kind of madness that was clean and bracing. There were the myriad amateur numerologists online and elsewhere who began by pointing out that Sept. 11 is written 9/11, the telephone code for emergencies. Moreover, the sum of the digits in 9/11 (9 +1+1) is 11, Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year, the sum of 2, 5, and 4 is 11, and after Sept. 11, there remain 111 days in the year. Stretching things even more, they noted that the twin towers of the WTC looked like the number 11, that the flight number of the first plane to hit the towers was 11, that various significant phrases, including “New York City,” “Afghanistan,” and “The Pentagon.” have 11 letters, and that many other attack-related words have 9 letters.

I also recall bogus Nostradamus quotes (as if the original version’s weren’t bogus enough). One of the most popular was “The big war will begin when the big city is burning on the 11th day of the 9th month that two metal birds would crash into two tall statues in the city and the world will end soon after.” Seemingly prescient, this verse was simply made up, supermarket tabloid style. But these numerological excrescences were nowhere near as pernicious as the unthinking responses (excepting Afghanistan) to the WTC attacks and the twisted rationale for our completely unwarranted and massively counter-productive invasion of Iraq.

No matter how you play with the numbers and banal coincidences, no matter how you reckon the intervening years or evaluate the risks of terrorism, September 11th, 2001, has to be counted as a bleak and heartbreaking day. Obviously much more can be, will be, and has been said, but I never liked such anniversary reminiscences (despite participating in one now). Why pay such homage to the calendar anyway?

And They Were Like Wild Beasts                        Is This What You Were Born For

Bury Them and Be Silent                                        It Will Be the Same

Francisco Goya y Lucientes, The Disasters of War. 1810-20. Published posthumously 1863.

Goya’s series of 85 etchings based on the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, speaks universally of the sheer senselessness of war, violence, violation, brutality, misery, devastation, and abandonment of humanity and moral values.

Do look at some of the others here and here.

Thanks to Heidi Katz & Carl Chiarenza for the suggestion.

This is possibly the most powerful photograph from 9/11/01 that I have seen.

Tom Junod in Esquire:

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him.

More here.

[Thanks to my friend Tom Jacobs, who posted this in 2004 here at 3QD as part of a characteristically brilliant post. Go read it.]

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

By coincidence, the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens—another way of putting this is to say, the way in which history becomes drama—had been much on my mind earlier that morning, because the play I was going to be teaching on Thursday that week was a work I typically teach when introducing students to the subject of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians. First produced in the spring of 472 BC, Persians is noteworthy in the corpus of the thirty-two extant Greek tragedies in that it is the only classical Greek drama that dramatizes an actual historical event. That event was the improbable and glorious defeat, by a relatively tiny force of Greek citizen-soldiers, of the immense expeditionary force sent by the Persian monarch Xerxes to conquer Greece: the first global geopolitical conflict between East and West that the world would see.

This remarkable event had taken place a scant eight years before Aeschylus’ drama was staged, and it is tempting to wonder just what the Athenian audience was expecting, that spring day, as they walked in the pre-dawn light to the theater of Dionysus. The treatment of historical material on the tragic stage had, after all, brought disaster to playwrights in the past.

More here.