“THE USES AND ABUSES OF MULTICULTURALISM.”

Brilliant stuff as usual by Sen from The New Republic:

The demand for multiculturalism is strong in the contemporary world. It is much invoked in the making of social, cultural, and political policies, particularly in Western Europe and America. This is not at all surprising, since increased global contacts and interactions, and in particular extensive migrations, have placed diverse practices of different cultures next to one another. The general acceptance of the exhortation to “Love thy neighbor” might have emerged when the neighbors led more or less the same kind of life (“Let’s continue this conversation next Sunday morning when the organist takes a break”), but the same entreaty to love one’s neighbors now requires people to take an interest in the very diverse living modes of proximate people. That this is not an easy task has been vividly illustrated once again by the confusion surrounding the recent Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and the fury they generated. And yet the globalized nature of the contemporary world does not allow the luxury of ignoring the difficult questions that multiculturalism raises. 

One of the central issues concerns how human beings are seen. Should they be categorized in terms of inherited traditions, particularly the inherited religion, of the community in which they happen to have been born, taking that unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving politics, profession, class, gender, language, literature, social involvements, and many other connections? Or should they be understood as persons with many affiliations and associations, whose relative priorities they must themselves choose (taking the responsibility that comes with reasoned choice)? Also, should we assess the fairness of multiculturalism primarily by the extent to which people from different cultural backgrounds are “left alone,” or by the extent to which their ability to make reasoned choices is positively supported by the social opportunities of education and participation in civil society? There is no way of escaping these rather foundational questions if multiculturalism is to be fairly assessed.

More here.

Dave Pell has created a very interesting thing called Rollyo: a way to create custom search engines. This is from the Rollyo website:

Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others.

Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines – with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we’ll create a custom search engine for you.

Check it out here.  [Click on “Learn more about Rollyo” for more information.]

I happened to catch a recent lecture by Arthur Danto at SVA here in New York City called “Embodied Meanings.” It was an excellent talk in general about how, contra certain formalist readings, meaning is an important component of contemporary art indeed.

Anyway, in illustrating his point he spoke much of the work of Ágnes Eperjesi, a Hugarian artist who currently has a show up at the Hungarian Cultural Center. The blurb on the website says: “Since the 1989 change in Hungary’s political system, Eperjesi has been systematically collecting images and graphics printed on plastic, such as commercial packaging, plastic bags and wrappers . . . taking the humble sign language of ordinary household chores, and recreating them as objects of beauty and irony.”
In Danto’s essay (forthcoming) he writes: “in transfiguring the isotype into an art work, an interesting reversal of Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction has taken place: the art of mechanical reproduction has acquired, through transfiguration, an aura . . . Eperjesi’s easthetic enhancement of workday images is as distinctive as Andy Warhol’s transformations of Polaroids into portraits.”
Her own website can be found here.
Her show is only up until March 6th. I think she’s doing something great, really great. So go see it.

Novelist, essayist and playwright Julieta Campos has employed various genres with formal mastery and stylistic audacity. “Today I feel that I can reconcile myself, at last, with my split identity,” she wrote in the introduction to Reunión de familia (Family reunion) (1997), a compilation of her early narrative works and one play. Campos’s confession alludes not only to the many genres she has explored but also to the alliance she has wrought between her literary vocation and real life’s call: to better the lives and living conditions of Mexico’s poor indigenous population. In fact, the discovery of a pact between the alchemy of writing and the temptation to modify actual existence appears, in her case, to have smoothed the way for the reconciliation of these two facets of experience often considered contradictory, even adversarial. Yet there is still a third way to interpret this “reconciliation”: the Cuban-born author’s intellectual and biographical paths have led her to recognize that Mexico, her adopted home, is a definitive place in her life.

more from BOMB here.

In the beginning was not the word, or the deed, but the face. ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep,’ runs the King James Version in the second verse of the opening of Genesis. ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Two uses of ‘face’ in one verse, and a third implied face, surely: God’s own, hovering over the face of his still uncreated world. The Almighty, looking into the face of his waters, might well be expected to see his face reflected: it is profoundly his world, still uncontaminated by rebellious man.

The committees of translators appointed by James I knew what they were doing. The face of God and the face of the world (or of mankind) will become a running entanglement throughout the five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Man will fear to look upon God’s face, and God will frequently abhor the deeds of the people who live on the face of his world. Once Cain has killed Abel, and has been banished by God, he cries out: ‘Behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid.’ When the Almighty decides to flood his world, he pledges to destroy every living thing ‘from off the face of the earth’. After wrestling with a divine stranger all night, Jacob ‘called the name of the place Peniel: For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.’

more at the LRB here.

From The National Geographic:

Researchers have developed an interactive computer system that uses artificial intelligence and gaming techniques to teach Arabic to U.S. soldiers. Soldier-students equipped with microphones navigate through an Arabic-speaking environment on a computer screen. If they successfully phrase questions and understand the answers, they can move on to the next level of the game. But this is more than just a language lab.

The system emphasizes nonverbal behavior. Users are taught to adopt local customs such as putting their right hand over their heart when meeting someone for the first time. The characters that users face in the game, meanwhile, are animated by artificial intelligence. They may nod in approval or cross their arms with skeptical hostility in response to the users’ actions.

“Language without any context is hard to learn,” said Vilhjálmsson, a research scientist with the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “But if you put it into the context of face-to-face communication, allowing for gestures and other non-verbal behavior, it becomes easier [to learn].”

More here.

From The New York Times:

In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all. The research not only backs up the common advice to “sleep on it” when facing difficult choices, but it also suggests that the unconscious brain can actively reason as well as produce weird dreams and Freudian slips. “This is very elegant work, and like any great work, it opens up as many questions as it answers” about the unconscious, said Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the book “Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.” He was not involved in the research.

Psychologists have known for years that people process an enormous amount of information unconsciously — for example, when they hear their names pop up in a conversation across the room that they were not consciously listening to. But the new report suggests that people take this wealth of under-the-radar information, combine it with deliberately studied facts and impressions and then make astute judgments that they would not otherwise form.

More here.

From The Australian:

Scientists working in west Africa have caught chimpanzees on camera using a “tool kit” to break into a termite mound.

The remarkable film shows one chimp using its feet to push a thick stick into the termite nest, like a gardener digging up potatoes. Then the same animal takes another tool, a slender stem with a frayed end, and inserts it into the hole to fish out the insects.

Chimps have been observed before cracking nuts with stones and catching ants and termites with twigs and leaves. But this is the first recorded example of the apes equipped with multiple tools.

The video footage, which has just been brought back from Africa, was taken by a team of scientists in the Congo using a hidden camera.

More here.

Many of you have probably seen the digraceful and disrespectful hack job of a review in yesterday’s NY Times (what is up over there?) by Leon Wieseltier, of Daniel Dennett’s new book Breaking the Spell. (Robin posted it a couple of days ago here.) It would be one thing if Wieseltier were simply confused, incompetent, or incapable of comprehending Dennett (all of which he is), but it is much worse: he knowingly and deliberately miscontrues what Dennett writes, repeatedly. I will give a single example from the beginning of Wieseltier’s review:

If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as “protectionism.” But people who share Dennett’s view of the world he calls “brights.” Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that “brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest”?

Dennett has written this book with a very wide audience in mind, and at the beginning of the book he tries his best to very honestly make clear his own beliefs and motivate readers (specially religious ones) to read the whole book before making up their own minds. This is what he says:

I ask just that you try to keep an open mind and refrain from prejudging what I say because I am a Godless philosopher, while I similarly do my best to understand you. (I am a bright. My essay The Bright Stuff, in the New York Times, July 12, 2003, drew attention to the efforts of some agnostics, atheists, and other adherents of naturalism to coin a new tern for us non-believers, and the large positive response to that essay helped persuade me to write this book. There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful highjacking of the ordinary word “gay” by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they’re straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim. They might like to choose a name for themselves. Since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural, perhaps they would like to call themselves supers. It’s a nice word with positive connotations, like gay and bright and straight…) [p. 21]

In this long parenthetical statement, Dennett is just putting his own convictions on the table. Nowhere does he claim that he thinks that he is brighter or smarter than others. On the contrary, he goes to pains to make himself clear on this. Two hundred and fifty-eight pages later, while considering evidence for the hypothetical claim that perhaps religion makes people morally better, he writes:

…when it comes to “family values,” the available evidence to date supports the hypothesis that brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest (Barna, 1999). [p. 279]

This is just one of a long list of moral virtues that Dennett examines, always citing evidence of what he is saying, so nothing hugely important to Dennett’s argument rests on this particular claim. But now reread how Wieseltier disingenuously and sleazily uses these quotes, from more than two hundred pages apart and completely out of context, to demonstrate Dennett’s supposed arrogance. The rest of Wieseltier’s review is filled with such ad hominem attacks on Dennett along with a few remarkably muddle-headed and pathetically feeble attempts at philosophical argument. It is Wieseltier’s hubris which is unbelievable throughout, such as the risible notion that he understands Hume better than Dennett! (If you haven’t read Hume yourself, imagine some editor at a science magazine lecturing a world-famous professor of physics on Einstein’s theories, and you’ll get some idea of just how ludicrous this is.)

No one who knows the first thing about philosophy can take this review seriously, but more importantly, it is so vindictive and poorly argued that nor can anyone else. Read it for yourself! It is an absolute disgrace that the NY Times not only published this rot, but felt so proud of it that they advertised it on the front cover of this week’s Book Review, and then again drew attention to it on page four in a bizarre editorial introduction. How low will they sink?

I strongly urge you to protest this sort of intellectual terrorism and the extremely shabby treatment of one of the most well-repected and admired philosophers alive today by the Times, by writing to the publisher at [email protected], to the president at [email protected] and to the editor at [email protected].

Meanwhile, read Brian Leiter’s review of Wieseltier’s review:

The New York Times has done it again:  they’ve enlisted an ignorant reviewer to review a philosophical book.  The reviewer is Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic.  The book is Daniel Dennett’s latest book, a “naturalistic” account of religious belief.   Whatever Mr. Wieseltier knows about philosophy or science, he effectively conceals in this review.  The sneering starts at the beginning:

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

Perhaps it is correct that the “question of the place of science in human life” is a philosophical, not scientific question, though I wish I could be as confident as Mr. Wieseltier as to how we demarcate those matters.  But “the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical” is not a “superstition,” but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual, expanding success of the sciences, and especially, the special sciences, during the last hundred years.  One should allow, of course, that some of these explanatory paradigms may fail, and that others, like evolutionary psychology, are at the speculative stage, awaiting the kind of rigorous confirmation (or disconfirmation) characteristic of selectionist hypotheses in evolutionary biology.  But no evidence is adduced by Mr. Wieseltier to suggest that Professor Dennett’s view is any different than this.  Use of the epithet “superstition” simply allows Mr. Wieseltier to avoid discussing the actual methodological posture of Dennett’s work, and to omit mention of the reasons why one might reasonably expect scientific explanations for many domains of human phenomena to be worth pursuing.

More here. And then read P.Z. Myers’ review of Wieseltier’s review:

[Wieseltier’s review of Dennett] is full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:

You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett’s natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason.

One moment he’s telling us that just tracing the origins of an idea is insufficient to disprove it (sadly for Mr Wieseltier’s argument, there is no sign that Dennett disagrees), the next he’s telling us that the origin of Dennett’s reason is “creaturely” and “animalized”, and therefore of a lesser or invalid kind. I had no idea we could categorize reason by the nature of its source (I’d like to know what varieties of reason he proposes: “creaturely”, “human”, “divine”? Is there also a “vegetable reason”?), but even if we could, by his initial premise, it wouldn’t matter: he needs to address its content, not carp against it because it is the product of natural selection rather than revelation.

More here. And if you want still more, check out more reviews of the review at Majikthise, here.

Oh, and if you want to see my review of Dennett’s book, it is here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. 2000.

Acrylic on canvas.

Private collection of Peter and Sekyo Haines, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Posted with permission.

Hussein Agha, Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books:

Out-and-out victory was not what Hamas had expected or, for that matter, what it had wished for. It had come to see itself as a watchdog on the sidelines, sitting in the legislature without controlling it, shaping the government’s policies without being held accountable for them, taking credit for its successes and escaping blame for any setbacks. Its triumph presents it with challenges of a different, more urgent, and less familiar sort. Hamas suddenly finds itself on the front line, with decisions to make and relations to manage with the world, international donors, Israel, Fatah, and, indeed, its own varied constituents. The Islamists may have secretly expected to sweep the elections but, if so, that secret remains well kept. Referring to Iraq, President Bush once spoke of America’s catastrophic success. Judging from the Islamists’ initial, startled reactions to their triumph, this may well be theirs.

More here.

Stephen J Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in the New York Times Magazine:

And how many drivers have been killed since his death in 2001?

Zero. In more than six million miles of racing — and many, many miles in practice and qualifying laps, which are plenty dangerous — not a single driver in Nascar’s three top divisions has died.

On U.S. roads, meanwhile, roughly 185,000 drivers, passengers and motorcyclists have been killed during this same time frame. Those 185,000 deaths, though, came over the course of nearly 15 trillion miles driven. This translates into one fatality for every 81 million miles driven. Although traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans from ages 3 to 33, this would seem to be a pretty low death rate (especially since it includes motorcycles, which are far more dangerous than cars or trucks). How long might it take one person to drive 81 million miles? Let’s say that for a solid year you did nothing but drive, 24 hours a day, at 60 miles per hour. In one year, you’d cover 525,600 miles; to reach 81 million miles, you’d have to drive around the clock for 154 years. In other words, a lot of people die on U.S. roads each year not because driving is so dangerous, but because an awful lot of people are driving an awful lot of miles.

More here.

John Huxley in the Sydney Morning Herald:

A few years back, at the end of a tiring book promotion tour, Graeme Gibson and his wife, fellow novelist Margaret Atwood, took time out to do some serious birdwatching in northern Australia.

One evening, while sitting on the balcony of Cassowary House, north of Cairns, they spotted red-necked crakes – rare rainforest birds – scuttling through the underbrush.

As Atwood, who won a Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, later explained, it was in that moment that her dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, was conceived. “It occurred to me almost in its entirety. When two or more birders are gathered together they always talk about ruination and horrible population crashes and extinction and things like that … I began making notes immediately.”

By a happy coincidence, this land, that trip, those birds, also inform and illuminate Gibson’s marvellous avian miscellany, which reads, looks and, perhaps because of the quality of the production, even smells good.

More here.

Roxanne Khamsi in New Scientist:

A mathematical proof is irrefutably true, a manifestation of pure logic. But an increasing number of mathematical proofs are now impossible to verify with absolute certainty, according to experts in the field.

“I think that we’re now inescapably in an age where the large statements of mathematics are so complex that we may never know for sure whether they’re true or false,” says Keith Devlin of Stanford University in California, US. “That puts us in the same boat as all the other scientists.”

As an example, he points to the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, a claimed proof announced in 1980 that resulted from a collaboration in which members of a group each contributed different pieces. “Twenty-five years later we’re still not sure if it’s correct or not. We sort of think it is, but no one’s ever written down the complete proof,” Devlin says.

Part of the difficulty is the computer code used nowadays to construct proofs, says Thomas Hales, at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, as this makes the proofs less accessible even to experts.

More here.

Joshua Freeman, Gordon Lafer, Michael Merrill, and Eve Weinbaum discuss the state and future of the labor movement.

[Joshua Freeman] Many of us feel ambivalent about the split in the labor movement. The discussion that accompanied it was narrow and rancorous. The odd alliances that emerged seemed as motivated by individual and institutional self-interest as by principle. Enormous energy was devoted to a parting of ways that might not have been necessary. Still, some good may come of it.

Unionists on both sides of labor’s fissure were deeply disappointed by the events of the last decade. The ouster of the old leadership of the AFL-CIO brought refreshing breezes into the musty, sometimes foul, atmosphere of the House of Labor. John Sweeney and his allies did so many things right: embracing militancy and the cause of low-wage workers; preaching the gospel of organizing; beefing up labor’s political operation; reaching out to students, clergy, and the left; and bringing greater diversity to the leadership of the AFL-CIO. Yet today, in many respects, labor is worse off than when Lane Kirkland held office.

Organized labor itself caused some of the problems. Although the AFL-CIO managed to bring new attention to workplace injustice, it failed to engineer a wholesale shift in national perceptions.

Here’s an interesting site, the Turing Archive for the History of Computing:

The documents that form the historical record of the development of computing are scattered throughout various archives, libraries and museums around the world. Until now, to study these documents required a knowledge of where to look, and a fistful of air tickets. This Virtual Archive contains digital facsimiles of the documents. The Archive places the history of computing, as told by the original documents, onto your own computer screen.

This site also contains a section on codebreaking and a series of reference articles concerning Turing and his work.

Even when the subject is, alluringly, happiness, readers may fear that a 544-page, heavily annotated book will be a dry, abstruse tome. Be not afraid. Erudite and detailed without being pedantic, Happiness is lively, lucid and enjoyable. Darrin M. McMahon’s history of happiness concentrates on the great books of the Western world. From ancient Greek tragedies’ portrayal of happiness as a gift of the gods, through Roman celebrations of everyday comforts and pleasures, the medieval Christian focus on eternal bliss, and the modern conviction that earthly happiness is not just a right but practically a duty, McMahon traces the way conceptions of happiness have changed. The author, a professor of history at Florida State University, demonstrates “not only the centrality of the issue of happiness to the Western tradition, but the centrality of that same tradition and legacy to contemporary concerns.”

His book abounds with intriguing material. For example, it shows how G.K. Chesterton’s aphorism “The world is full of Christian ideas gone mad” applies to happiness. Also noteworthy is McMahon’s observation that traditionally, “a life of privilege was a life without labor . . . .That men and women should come to believe — even to expect — that work . . . should sustain their happiness, serving as a source of satisfaction in its own right, is therefore a recent and quite remarkable development.” McMahon displays his gift for nimble commentary by adding that it is “one of the delicious ironies of history” that “Marx’s contention that not only should we enjoy the fruits of our labor, but labor itself should be our fruit, is today a central tenet of the capitalist creed.”

More here.

Randy Dotinga in the Christian Science Monitor:

In her captivating book The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, British author Joanna Kavenna brings the Thule myth to life, seamlessly combining elements of travelogue, detective story, and history book.

Don’t be alarmed if you’ve never heard of Thule. It’s more well-known in Europe than in the United States, and even across the pond the word probably rarely crosses anyone’s lips. But Thule is far from forgotten.

The whole story begins back in the 4th century BC, when a Greek explorer named Pytheas claimed to have discovered the most northerly land in the world, which he named Thule. North of France, north of Britain, it was near a frozen ocean and home to inhabitants accustomed to seasons of eternal light and darkness.

More here.

Raja Shehadeh in The Nation:

Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews have fundamentally different attitudes toward the origins of the conflict that at once divides and binds them. The number of Israeli books about the early settlements and the 1948 war–histories, memoirs, novels–exceeds by far the number of those written by Palestinians. In the face of a work like Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, which drew upon spurious demographic “data” to deny that Palestinians were ever the majority in their own land, a Palestinian is angered but not moved to action. Indeed, the rebuttal to Peters came not from a Palestinian but from Norman Finkelstein, an American Jew.

This may seem strange, but it is not. For the question of whether Palestinians did or did not exist in Palestine when the first Zionist settlers arrived is more of an American/Israeli issue than a Palestinian one, as is the question of whether Palestinians were driven from their homeland. Among Palestinians there is no debate about their roots in Palestine, or about the causes of their dispossession. They either had family living in 1948 Palestine or heard from those who had family about what life was like and the circumstances under which they were forced to flee. A Palestinian author writing in Arabic for an Arab audience is not weighed down by the burden of having to prove anything about the Nakba, “the catastrophe.”

Not so for Palestinian authors writing in English for a Western audience. This may explain why much of the historical work on the Nakba by Palestinians such as Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was written originally in English–and why the Israeli “new” historians who reached the same conclusions much, much later found it easier to persuade readers in the West that the 1948 refugees had not simply left of their own accord. As Edward Said frequently observed, part of being Palestinian is being denied the right to narrate one’s own experience.

More here.

From BBC News:

The popular view of our ancient ancestors as hunters who conquered all in their way is incorrect, scientists have told a conference in St Louis, US. Instead, they say, early humans were on the menu for predatory beasts. This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory. Despite humankind’s considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists. James Rilling at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation. He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.

From the parts of the brain that were activated during the game, he found that mutual co-operation is rewarding. People also reacted negatively when partners do not co-operate. Dr Rilling also discovered that his subjects seemed to have enhanced memory for those people that did not reciprocate in the experiment. By contrast, our closest relatives – chimpanzees – have been shown not to come to the aid of others, even when it posed no cost to themselves. “Our intelligence, co-operation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator,” said Robert Sussman of Washington University in St Louis.

More here.