by Derek Neal

In last month’s column, I wrote about the opening pages of Philip Roth’s Nemesis, and how Roth creates the backdrop of 1940’s Newark upon which the events of the novel play out. I’m using the words “backdrop” and “play out” intentionally, as these pages really do function as a sort of stage set that provides the context for the story which follows. This kind of storytelling is, I suppose, somewhat traditional or old fashioned. What it suggests is that the characters are products of their environment, and it’s important to explain the context in which they exist if the characters are to be understood. The setting of the story can also be seen as its own character, such that we must have a grasp of 1940’s Newark to comprehend the protagonist of the story, Bucky Cantor, because his understanding of the world and how he moves through it, his hopes, his dreams, and his fears, have been shaped, or to use a stronger word, created, by the fact of being born and growing up in Newark, New Jersey in the middle of the first half of the 20^th century.

This may seem obvious, but in foregrounding the setting of the story, it also goes against the idea that people are unique, ahistorical individuals, which seems to be an increasingly common contemporary assumption. Nemesis makes this point explicit by placing the narrator in the present, or at least in the future in terms of the events of the story, and then having him relate what has taken place in the past. This is an acknowledgement that to attempt to tell a story about a certain time period from within that time period would in some ways be deceitful and anachronistic, running the risk of assuming that people in past times thought about themselves and the world in the same way that we do, or mapping a contemporary morality onto the past. Because it would be nearly impossible to faithfully recreate a past consciousness (although this is what any story about the past attempts to do), the practical solution is to frame the story from the viewpoint of a narrator in the present and admit defeat from the outset. This serves the purpose of recognizing the futility of the attempt while still trying to achieve the goal of fully recreating a different time and place. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Some years after Carlos died, another friend and another noted development economist, Hans Binswanger, was diagnosed as HIV-positive. He initially took that as a death sentence and gave away much of the material things he had. But by then the new antiretroviral drugs were in use, and possibly because of them lived an active life for another quarter century, until he died in Pretoria, South Africa in 2017 at age 74. In 2002, shortly before he left his World Bank job, he founded and endowed an NGO in Zimbabwe, that supported about 100 mostly HIV-positive children and their families by providing education, supplemental health care, and counseling. In South Africa he married his boyfriend Victor in a traditional multi-day Zulu celebration. Since then he has always identified his last name as Binswanger-Mkhize.

Hans was born in Switzerland in a prominent Swiss family. He was a major agricultural economist with pioneering work on peasants’ behavior in the face of risk. This work was based on experiments carried out in India. I think I met him first in Hyderabad at ICRISAT, the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics, where he was the principal economist for 5 years, before joining the World Bank.

In 1977 he invited me and Kalpana to present papers at a conference in Hyderabad on the subject of rural labor markets (later he co-edited a book where these papers were published). I remember the lavish party he gave for all the conference participants at his home which was a stunning converted-fortress in Hyderabad. The intensive ICRISAT village studies that started under his leadership in India made possible data-intensive work by many agriculture researchers all over the world, and generated over the years hundreds of Ph. D’s. Since then I have interacted with him many times, particularly when he was doing some policy work for the World Bank on land reform in South Africa. He came to Berkeley and addressed my graduate seminar on Economic Development. I last saw him at a meeting in Delhi, just a couple of years or so before his death. Read more »

by Michael Liss

Carved in marble above the entrance to the Supreme Court Building is the motto: “Equal Justice Under The Law.”

It is a noble sentiment, expressing the highest ideals of our nation. Here, in this building, before these nine robed figures, the one essential that soars above means, above influence, and above race, religion or class, is equality before the law. Here is the place where justice is blind so that justice can be served.

That is the theory. The reality is nothing at all like it. Public trust in the Supreme Court as an institution has dropped markedly (a Quinnipiac University Poll conducted May 12-16, 2022, shows that 52% of the public disapprove). Far worse, respondents, by an alarming 63-32 margin, answered “politics” to the question: “In general, do you think that the Supreme Court is mainly motivated by politics or mainly motivated by the law?”

John Roberts, a man who believes deeply that the mission of the Court to be a cool and impartial arbiter, has got to be in despair. He is now stuck with two stories of leaks and the growing sense of irrelevance inside his own conference. The Chief Justice is a gradualist, a man who wants conservative change, but by degrees, constructively, gently, and respectfully. As this Term has shown, the newly empowered hard right have brought the bulldozer and a healthy supply of scorn for the past to go with it. Read more »

Napoleon Jones-Henderson. TCB, 1970.

Woven tapestry.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

When I was twelve, I ran away to Disneyland; not by myself. I went with an older kid, one or two grades above me. Ed, the older kid, was ‘bad to the bone’ – so much so, he deserves his own story.

Read more »

Moonrise from my window last week.

by Rafaël Newman

I had a colleague, a great reader, whose favorite material was mid-century Japanese short-form realism. Frequently epistolary and often featuring at least one frame narrative, these novellas typically have as their narrator someone captivated, not to say obsessed, by a memory; and that memory, it seemed to me when I read the works my colleague lent me, is almost inevitably fed by an erotic or romantic encounter, as well as by its often calamitous sequelae.

When I asked her about this preference, my colleague explained that what she admired in such novellas was the fact that they were—and here she paused briefly to seek the appropriate English term: for she was a native francophone, and read her Japanese literature, for the most part, in French translation—“pudique.”

Now it was my turn to consult a mental lexicon. Pudique? I was reminded of the anatomical term “pudendum,” meaning the human genitals, derived from the Latin gerundive and meaning “that about which one ought to feel ashamed”. I remembered a TV news clip, viewed during a sojourn studying in Paris years ago, in which a certain politician, accused of corruption (I no longer recall whether fiscal or sexual), was seen escaping in his limousine and admonishing the reporters hounding him for a statement: red-faced with indignation, he called for the paparazzi to exhibit “un peu de pudeur”—for shame, his expression suggested, and as an Anglo-American politician in the same situation might have said. Could this really be what my colleague valued in her bedside reading: a sense of shame, of the shameful, of being ashamed, especially as regards intimate affairs? Read more »

by Bill Benzon

The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps even earlier, perhaps more recently. We don’t know. The Third Arena is that of human culture. We have changed the face of the earth, have touched the moon and the planets, and are reaching for the stars. That happened between two and three million years ago, the exact number hardly matters. But most of the cultural activity is little more than 10,000 years old.

The question I am asking: Is there something beyond culture, something just beginning to emerge? If so, what might it be?

Let us review.

Complexity and Abundance in an Evolving Universe
My basic thinking about the nature of the universe, about ontology and cosmology, is grounded in two ideas: 1) complexity, which I take from Ilya Prigogine, though he is by no means its only exponent, and 2) abundance, from the philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. Complexity of this kind is more than complication. It is, paradoxically, the capacity for simple systems to undergo self-organization and thereby to become more complex, and still more ever complex. And complexity accounts for the universe’s abundance.

Abundance? Here is a remark that Feyerabend made to John Horgan, the science journalist:

… he told me about a book he was working on, The Conquest of Abundance, about the human passion for reductionism. It would address the fact that “all human enterprises” seek to reduce the natural diversity, or “abundance,” inherent in reality.

“First of all the perceptual system cuts down this abundance or you couldn’t survive.” Religion, science, politics and philosophy represent our attempts to compress reality still further. Of course, these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new complexities.

The universe is complex, it is abundant, it is overflowing. It is, above all, the capacity of one arena to give rise to another: inorganic matter gives to life, life to mind and eventually to culture. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the early 1980’s apart from joining the September group, there were two other outside organizations I was invited to join which expanded my intellectual horizons. The first was the South Asia Committee of the Social Science Research Council in New York. This Committee planned some research projects on different topics of social science in South Asia and also gave out research fellowships and postdoctoral research grants. It gave me the opportunity to interact with some of the top scholars working in the US on South Asia, including Myron Weiner, the distinguished political scientist, Bernard Cohn, the historical anthropologist, Wendy Doniger, the Sanskrit scholar, Ralph Nicholas, cultural anthropologist of Bengal, Richard Eaton, cultural historian of medieval India, and Ronald Herring, political scientist on agrarian development in India.

Of these the most colorful person was Wendy who used to entertain us with her charming stories drawing upon the erotic aspects of ancient Hindu texts. Myron, when he was the chair of the Committee always began the meeting with his collection of jokes. Myron was downright serious, though, in his work where he was insistent in bringing to the attention of Indian policy makers the crucial importance of universal child education and reform of the prevailing, widely connived, practice of using child labor. Ralph used to share with me his stories of his experience of ethnographic work in Bengal villages (he was fluent in Bengali and during his field visits he’d often be chatted up by curious villagers who’d tell him that as he was from America interested in their lives, he must be a CIA agent, and were utterly disappointed when they heard his emphatic denial). Read more »

by Paul Braterman

An Immense World; How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong, Random House/Bodley Head, June 2022

This book is an enormous achievement. A thrilling read, taking us into the Umwelt, or perceptual world, of numerous mammal, fish, reptile and insect species. A major work of scholarship, with over a thousand references to a 45-page bibliography, as well as accounts of interviews with numerous researchers and visits to their laboratories. An exploration of many ways of sensing the world, some of which we share, while others are beyond our imagining. The evolving interplay of perception and action, communication and deception, environment and response. And an enhanced insight into what it is like to be a bat, a bird, a blue whale, a beetle, or a human.

From the wealth of detail in the book, a consistent grand narrative emerges. Some physical process interacts with living matter. This is the raw material for sensation. Sensory abilities then shape a creature’s Umwelt, being developed according to the demands of its environment. But every perceiver is itself an object of perception to others, and we have colour displays and camouflage, smells as signals and identifiers, sound as communication to others and, by echolocation, back to the creature who generates it, and the same is true of other senses that we do not share, such as the detection of tiny electrical fields. Senses combine and even, we suspect, merge, and what we ourselves perceive is but part of an immense pattern. But the heedlessness with which we amplify our own signals disrupts this pattern, contributing to our destruction of nature, and we ourselves are the poorer for it.

Let me offer a few samples from the book’s wealth of detail. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Be Unvaan. June 11, 2022, Cambridge, MA.

Digital photograph.

by Tim Sommers

“If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I can’t find the origin of this unfortunate slogan, but it’s been around – and oft repeated – at least since the 1970s. “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” That’s Wayne Lapierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, the day after the Parkland Shooting. The trouble with slogans and bad arguments like these is that it takes much less time to make them than it does to break them. The point of outlawing guns is to make it the case that outlaws and bad guys won’t have as many guns. But Sam Harris, prominent “rationalist”, denies that “restrictions would make it difficult for bad people to acquire guns illegally.”  (Compare, restrictions on bank robbery or speeding don’t make it any more difficult for people to rob banks or speed.) Sometimes, you get a more neutral argument along the same lines. “Maybe, having a lot of guns around will lead to more violence. On the other hand, maybe, having more guns around will prevent more violence than it causes. We can’t know.”

But this is not an unknown. It’s known. More guns cause more homicides. More guns cause more suicides. It’s a simple equation. More guns = more death. There are hundreds of studies (done in just about every which way), asking whether or not increasing the availability of firearms contributes to more suicides and more homicides. It does. At this point, it’s like asking whether evolution is real, whether smoking causes cancer, or whether the increase in the level of certain gases in the atmosphere is causing global temperatures to trend upward. The answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes. These are all things we do, in fact, know.

This is important. Guns are now the leading cause of death among teenagers. And children. How can people not know that more guns lead to more deaths? Read more »

by Brooks Riley