Stephen Asma on TV discussing the universality of Monster culture from stephen asma on Vimeo.

On The Origin

I find an old copy of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
among my father-in-law’s
Bibles and theology books,
and my own laugh startles me
in the empty house. We never
talked about Darwin that I recall,
but of course this well-read man
wouldn’t have been afraid
of the church’s favorite villain
after Satan and Judas. His faith
was never threatened by thought.
I once thought that to be saved
was to laugh at science—what
a shock to later learn Darwin’s
sin was observing turtles and
pigeons, flying squirrels and bats,
and realizing that all things
change. I know that I can’t keep
everything and that nothing I take
will be enough to fill what’s lost,
but I pick the crumbling book
from the shelf, wrap it in tissue,
and tuck it into my suitcase to save.

by Katie Manning
from The Ecotheo Review

Fara Dabhoiwala at The Guardian:

Britain’s national myth about slavery goes something like this: for most of history, slavery was a normal state of affairs; but in the later 18th century, enlightened Britons such as William Wilberforce led the way in fighting against it. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807, before any other nation, and thereafter campaigned zealously to eradicate it everywhere else.

As Michael Taylor points out in his scintillating new book, this is a farrago of nonsense. Slavery was certainly an ancient practice, but for 200 years the British developed it on an unprecedented scale. Throughout the 18th century, they were the world’s foremost slavers, and the plantation system they helped create devoured the lives of millions of African men, women and children. In the name of profit and racial superiority, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish enslavers inflicted a holocaust of suffering on their human chattels, practising rape, torture, mutilation, and manslaughter.

more here.

Lev Grossman at The NY Times:

Since the last volume of “His Dark Materials” appeared in 2000, Pullman has written two more (superb) volumes of a second trilogy called “The Book of Dust”, as well as a few interstitial bits and bobs that fill in the odd blank spot in his vast legendarium. His latest work, “Serpentine,” is one of the latter, and as befits its title it is the slenderest of creatures, almost plotless and at 80 generously illustrated pages barely thick enough to have a spine. Set five years after the events of the first trilogy, the story finds Pullman’s heroine, the unquenchably curious Lyra, in an unquiet state of mind. She was once (in “The Amber Spyglass”) briefly separated from her daemon, Pantalaimon, and ever since then she’s been haunted by the question of what he did while they were apart.

more here.

Thomas Larson in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ANTHONY DAVIS, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera The Central Park Five, is a composer with a great future behind him. Five is his eighth opera, and during those labors, spanning four decades, he’s found the time and talent to write orchestral pieces and music for plays, to record solo piano albums, to gig widely, and to make records with his group, Episteme. Under the microscope, Davis, who is 68 and a professor at the University of California at San Diego, reveals a rare strain of the American composer’s DNA, a synthesis of the diasporic music of African descendants and the uncompromising voice of contemporary opera.

Fresh out of Yale and into New York City in 1977, Davis began to explore and reimagine jazz and composition, which he simmered with themes of social justice, à la his equally subversive forefather, Charles Mingus. Another primal influence was the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — havoc specialists, with roots in the 1960s, for whom live improvisation has been the gold standard. Yet Davis dislikes the “jazz” label. He prefers what he calls “a plurality of traditions,” an eclectic assortment of mentors from Wagner to Thelonious Monk, Stravinsky to Anthony Braxton.

More here.

Niall Ferguson in the TLS:

In 2002 the Cambridge astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal Lord Rees predicted that, by the end of 2020, “bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event”. In 2017 the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker took the other side in a formal bet. As the terms of the wager defined casualties to include “victims requiring hospitalization”, Rees had already won long before the global death toll of Covid-19 passed the one million mark in September. Sadly for him, the stake was a meagre $400.

Nicholas Christakis has given his rapidly written yet magisterial book about the pandemic the title Apollo’s Arrow. The allusion is to the plague the god unleashes against the Achaeans for kidnapping the daughter of his priest Chryses in Book One of Homer’s Iliad. An alternative title might have been Rees’s Bet. In a report from 1998 the US Department of Defense observed that “historians in the next millennium may find that the 20th century’s greatest fallacy was the belief that infectious diseases were nearing elimination”. Pinker was only one of many scholars who subscribed to this belief in the twenty-first century. “Disease outbreaks don’t become pandemics” any more, he argued in Enlightenment Now, because “advances in biology … make it easier for the good guys (and there are many more of them) to identify pathogens, invent antibiotics that overcome antibiotic resistance, and rapidly develop vaccines”.

Pinker was not alone in his complacency.

More here.

John M. Owen in The Hedgehog Review:

The 1990s now seem as distant as the 1950s. America is famously polarized into cultural tribes, each regarding the other with contempt and alarm. In the White House sits a populist entertainer with little evident commitment to constitutional norms. Sober scholars publish books with titles such as How Democracies Die ¹  and The Road to Unfreedom.² The coronavirus that burrowed into the country in early 2020 has made vices of the old American virtues of individual liberty and decentralized government. China’s relative competence in public health has lent its increasingly autocratic regime a new luster, notwithstanding its being the birthplace of the virus.

In thinking about the predicament of the American republic, we find ourselves looking not only within the country but abroad—at beleaguered democratic allies, at elected leaders sidling toward dictatorship, at Russian mischief, and at Chinese wealth and assertiveness. Scanning the world for trends in domestic regimes is a democratic tradition. For democrats hold the twin convictions, seldom defended but deeply felt, that self-government is an international phenomenon and democracies are in some way interdependent. If constitutional rule is spreading in the world, it is good for democracy in the United States; if authoritarian giants such as China and Russia are thriving, it is ominous for us.

More here.

Corina Copp at Bomb Magazine:

Silliness is not such a stretch as one would think, should one think of Wittgenstein. The ludic is at play, from conception, in the language-game itself; or the duck-rabbit as a vehicle of ambiguity, a perceptual “third thing,” a visual neologism: now ears … now beak, or “Both; not side-by-side, however, but about the one via the other.” Silliness is ruminative, i.e., we must look back over time for its sense to resonate. And it seeks a beyond. I consider the question of whether the two-headed calf should be counted as one animal or two—a serious moment for the Vatican Belvedere Gardens of 1625. Three, of course. “For the physicians, the feature distinguishing the individual was the brain; for followers of Aristotle, the heart,” wrote Carlo Ginzburg. And the dissection of the animal “was done with the aim of establishing not the ‘character’ peculiar to that particular animal, but ‘the common character’ … of the species as a whole.” A parallelism: Wittgenstein’s insistence that a student learn a new word by experiencing it through practice, being responsible to it and its usage, and eventually making the word meaningful for a greater understanding of her (whole) (linguistic) (yet shared, and seen) world.

more here.

After the Election: A Father Speaks to His Son

He says, they will not take us.
They want the ones who love
another god, the ones whose
joy comes with five prayers and
songs to the sun in the mornings
and at night. He says, they will
not want us. They want the ones
whose tongues stumble over
silent e’s, whose voices creak
when a th suddenly appears
in the middle of a word.

They want the ones who cannot hide
copper skin like we can. He says,
I am old. I lived through one revolution.
We can hide our skin.
We have read the books.
He says, we are the quiet kind, the ones
who stay late and do not speak,
the ones who do not bring trumpets
or trouble. He says, we are safe in silence.
We must become ghosts.

I think, so many are already dust.
tried to stay thin, be small, tried
breaking bone and voice, tried
to be soft. So many tried to be
empty, to be barely breath. To be
still enough to be left alone. Become
shadows, trying not to be bodies.

It never works. To become nothing.
They come for the shadows, too.

by M. Soledad Caballero
from Split This Rock

Jonathan Rée at Literary Review:

When he died in 1677 at the age of forty-four, Spinoza left behind a compact Latin manuscript, Ethics, and his disciples quickly got it printed. It is a book like no other. It urges us to change our whole way of thinking and in particular to rid ourselves of the deep-rooted conceit that makes us imagine that our petty, transient lives might have some ultimate significance. The argument is dynamic, disruptive and upsetting, but it is contained within a literary framework of extraordinary austerity, comprising an array of definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs and scholia. The overall effect is not so much beautiful as sublime, like watching a massive fortress being shaken by storms and earthquakes. Many readers have found themselves deeply moved by Ethics but unable to say exactly what it means.

more here.

Frank Ferudi in Sp!ked:

Historically, US presidential elections were dominated by competing views on economic and social issues. No longer. This approaching election has increasingly been consumed by a cultural conflict, at the heart of which is a war over American history. But this is no mere disagreement over the precise details of what happened three or four centuries ago. It is a battle for the very soul of the United States. The principal battle is being fought over the founding of the US. As we will see, this is best captured, by, on one side, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which contends America was founded when African slaves first arrived in Jamestown; and, on the other, President Donald Trump’s mooted 1776 Commission, which reasserts the traditional, would-be inspiring narrative of revolution and independence as America’s founding moment.

All of this raises questions of the utmost importance. Why has America’s founding become such a vital issue in the 21st century? And, more broadly, how should humanity engage with the legacy of its past achievements?

History has rarely appeared more alive than it does in the West today. Even before the Black Lives Matters protests this summer, protesters had been treating symbols of the past, be they building names or statues, as if they were living things. Some protesters even claim that these inanimate objects pose a threat to their wellbeing, with some Rhodes Must Fall campaigners at the University of Oxford claiming that merely walking past Cecil Rhodes’ statue is traumatic. Many more treat these symbols of the past as if they are living adversaries, against whom every act of vandalism or toppling is a vital act. You could see something of this when activists pulled down the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol earlier this year. They did not simply want to topple it. They wanted to defile it, humiliate it, debase it. And so they pulled it down, and then dragged it along the street before throwing it into the river. It was almost as if they were parading the corpse of a hated tyrant before his liberated people, rather than a statue of a long-forgotten slave-trading merchant who died 300 years ago.

More here.

Susan Faludi in The New York Times:

Remarkably, in these fractious times, President Trump has managed to forge a singular area of consensus among liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats: Nearly everyone seems to agree that he represents a throwback to a vintage version of manhood. After Mr. Trump proclaimed his “domination” over coronavirus, saluting Marine One and ripping off his mask, the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld cast the president in cinematic World War II terms — a tough-as-nails platoon leader who “put himself on the line” rather than abandon the troops. “He didn’t hide from the virus,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “He was going to walk out there on that battlefield with you.” Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia tweeted an altered WrestleMania video in which the president was portrayed as pummeling senseless an opponent with a spiked coronavirus head. “President Trump won’t have to recover from Covid,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida gloated. “Covid will have to recover from President Trump.”

Meanwhile, the putatively liberal news media was conjuring its own version of the boxing ring: with Mr. Trump in one corner as atavistic chest-beater and Joe Biden in the other as evolved exemplar of feminist-sensitized manhood. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden “evoke different brands of manliness,” a Washington Post article argued: Mr. Trump channels “old-fashioned machismo” — “aggressive, physically tough, physically strong, never back down” (in the words of a gender-equity educator, Jackson Katz) — while Mr. Biden models what Mr. Katz calls “a more complex 21st-century version of masculinity,” defined by “compassion and empathy and care and a personal narrative of loss.”

But what if the one thing people agree on, they’re wrong about? What if Mr. Trump’s style of bullying and bombast aren’t relics of the old manhood, but emblems of a masculinity very much au courant? If that’s so, we may be fooling ourselves in declaring that his noxious model is heading for a natural extinction.

More here.

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

American society is prone, political theorist Langdon Winner wrote in 2005, to “technological euphoria,” each bout of which is inevitably followed by a period of letdown and reassessment. Perhaps in part for this reason, reviewing the history of digital democracy feels like watching the same movie over and over again. Even Winner’s point has that quality: He first made it in the mid-eighties and has repeated it in every decade since. In the same vein, Warren Yoder, longtime director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, responded to the Pew survey by arguing that we have reached the inevitable “low point” with digital technology—as “has happened many times in the past with pamphleteers, muckraking newspapers, radio, deregulated television.” (“Things will get better,” Yoder cheekily adds, “just in time for a new generational crisis beginning soon after 2030.”)

So one threat the present techlash poses is to obscure the ways that digital technology in fact serves many of the functions the visionaries imagined. We now take for granted the vast array of “Gov Tech”—meaning internal government digital upgrades—that makes our democracy go. We have become accustomed to the numerous government services that citizens can avail themselves of with a few clicks, a process spearheaded by the Clinton-Gore administration. We forget how revolutionary the “Internet campaign” of Howard Dean was at the 2004 Democratic primaries, establishing the Internet-based model of campaigning that all presidential candidates use to coordinate volunteer efforts and conduct fundraising, in both cases pulling new participants into the democratic process.

An honest assessment of the current state of digital democracy would acknowledge that the good jostles with the bad and the ugly.

More here.

Ivana Kottasová at CNN:

Recent case and fatality figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) show that while recorded Covid-19 cases are spiking in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany and other European countries, deaths are not rising at the same rate.

“The fatality rate has declined, in the UK, we can see it going down from around June to a low point in August,” said Jason Oke, a senior statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. “Our current estimate is that the infection fatality rate is going up a little bit, but it hasn’t come up to anywhere near where we were and that’s unlikely to change dramatically unless we see a really surprising increase in the numbers of deaths.”

Oke has been tracking Covid-19 fatality rates along with his colleague Carl Heneghan of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and health economist Daniel Howdon. Their research shows that, at the end of June, the fatality rate was just below 3% in the UK. By August, it had dropped as low as about 0.5%. It now stands at roughly 0.75%.

“We think it’s probably driven a lot by age, but also other factors, like treatment,” Oke said.The lower death rate isn’t unique to Europe.

More here.

Leanne Ogasawara, and artwork by Morgan Fisher, in Kyoto Journal (republished here):

1.

Back in the Tang dynasty, it was the heart that mattered. Thinking too much, philosophers warned, will only give you a headache. This fact was supported by the finest investigations of Chinese physicians and theologians who urged people to “still their hearts” and “empty their minds” in order to achieve liberation from suffering.

But Chinese Buddhists of the 7^th century had a big problem to solve. One that would require some heavy-duty thinking.

How to translate abstract philosophical terms from Sanskrit –a language with an extraordinarily rich epistemological and ontological lexicon– into Chinese, a language poor in abstract vocabulary.

Words had to be invented. And it wouldn’t be easy, for how can a translator know if a translation is correct if they don’t have access to the original text?

It was to this task that Xuanzang, the Buddhist monk and translator extraordinaire devoted his life. Read more »

[Thanks to Brooks Riley.]

Domestic Violence

1.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.

Everything changed the year that we got married.
And after that we moved out to the suburbs.
How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,
Their voices high, sharp:
nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.

2.

In that season suddenly our island
Broke out its old sores for all to see.
We saw them too.
We stood there wondering how

the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,
the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes
we thought we knew
had been made to shiver

into our ancient twelve by fifteen television
which gave them back as gray and grayer tears
and killings, killings, killings,
then moonlight-colored funerals:

nothing we said
not then, not later,
fathomed what it is
is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.

3.

And if the provenance of memory is
only that—remember, not atone—
and if I can be safe in
the weak spring light in that kitchen, then

why is there another kitchen, spring light
always darkening in it and
a woman whispering to a man
over and over what else could we have done?

4.

We failed our moment or our moment failed us.
The times were grand in size and we were small.
Why do I write that
when I don’t believe it?

We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one.
Children were born and raised here
and are gone,
including ours.

As for that couple did we ever
find out who they were
and did we want to?
I think we know. I think we always knew.

by Eavan Boland 
from Domestic Violence
W. W. Norton, 2007