by Varun Gauri

In my last speech of my last high school debate round, at the finals of the Ohio championships, I claimed victory because our opponents, a team from the local private academy, our nemesis, neglected or “dropped” our argument that taxing cigarettes would certainly, absolutely, trigger nuclear war. Therefore, I declared, whatever you, dear judge, think of that argument or of our fast-talking style, a notorious debate technique known as “the spread,” there is no choice but to declare us winners. The rules of the game are binding.

“In the middle of the spread” are the last words of Ben Lerner’s widely acclaimed novel The Topeka School, which centers on a Kansas high school debater (Adam Gordon, seemingly a Lerner stand-in), as well as his partying friends, in the narrative retellings — de-centered, non-chronological, tense-shifting, montage-like — of his psychologist parents, his young debating self, a troubled family friend, and the debater as parent and “well-known poet,” who Lerner is. The primary thematic concern of the novel is the role of language in personal and public life. “A quote like that can save your life,” says the debater’s father, speaking of his colleague Klaus, whose family died in the Holocaust.

“The spread,” both a concentration and deformation of language, is a prominent image throughout this mesmerizing novel, standing in for the “thousands of generations technical progress” that make automobiles and other modern marvels possible, but also widespread alienation and predation in the modern world (“corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time”). Even poets will deliver “nonsense as if it made sense.” There appears to be an “instinct to spread,” given that language and culture, like the intermingling personal and professional relationships among the debater’s parents’ colleagues, commingle self-referentially, incestuously. They are quotation machines. For the person ensnared in the spread, “there is no outside, but one vast interior.” The novel, as it progresses, enacts the poetic spread by constructing an ever thicker, and continually illuminating, web of internal quotations and references. Some novels are praised for their “world building.” This novel is a hypnotizing feat of consciousness building. Read more »

by Chris Horner

The world we live in is changing, and our politics must change with it. We are in what has been called the ‘anthropocene’: the period in which human activity is threatening the ecosystem on which we all depend. Catastrophic climate change threatens our very survival. Yet our political class seems unable to take the necessary steps to avert it. Add to that the familiar and pressing problems of massive inequality, exploitation, systemic racism and job insecurity due to automation and the relocation of production to cheaper labour markets, and we have a truly global and multidimensional set of problems. It is one that our political masters seem unable to properly confront. Yet confront them they, and we, must. Such is the scale of the problem, the political order needs wholesale change, rather than the small, incremental reforms we have been taught are all that are practicable or desirable. And change, whether we like it or not is coming anyway: between authoritarian national conservative regimes, which with all the inequality, xenophobia, or that of a democratic, green post-capitalism. The thing that won’t survive is liberalism.

‘Liberalism’ is a notoriously hard term to pin down. But for the sake of clarity, I would just say that I am not using it in the sense that many in the USA do: as just the alternative to ‘conservatism’, the kind of thing the New York Times, the Democratic Party and so on might represent, a set of attitudes and policies contrasted with the kinds of things a Republican might might hold dear. Rather, I mean an entire political philosophy that most of those in both the aforementioned parties support, as well as those of no party at all. And this applies to most of the ‘centrist’ political parties in western Europe, Canada and Australia. So what is it?  Read more »

by David Oates

A missing tradition is haunting us, though we may not even realize it’s missing. It was called “conservatism,” and in the Anglo-American political tradition it has a record of partnering with liberals to create some of our greatest moments of democratic progress.

Our new president did once publicly hope to govern under a new and restored regime of that legendary chimera “bipartisanship,” liberals and conservatives hammering out compromise bills that advance the public interest. But that fantasy has quickly faded. Even after the departure of the former president and his hateful ways, what’s left of the Republican party seems to be a beast of unqualified partisanship, angry, ravenous, utterly uncompromising.

This became obvious when the “Covid Relief Bill” had to be passed in the Senate with only Democratic votes. Yet it was almost self-evidently needed as a response to an unprecedented public crisis. It was beneficial enough for some Republicans to take credit for it in public . . . despite having voted against it.

Where is the GOP that is heir to, for instance, the conservatives who helped pass civil rights legislation and who founded the Environmental Protection Agency? Or heir to the British conservatives (Tories) who expanded the electorate and made the entire system broader, less class-based, more democratic? Plaintively we ask, where are the conservatives of old? Ay, where are they?

Replaced by reactionaries, every one. And this is not name-calling. It’s sober truth. The United States, as of this writing, has no conservative party. Probably hasn’t for a decade or more.

The grand Anglo-American tradition of careful conservatives offering measured reform and real progress has vanished from America. An apocalyptic trio has replaced them: resentment, revanchism, and reaction. With three “R’s,” alliterative, as if for a tidy little sermon. And I can’t help wondering: what is the sickness of soul that leads to such angry irrationality? Read more »

My friend Stephen Asma painted this oil portrait of Frederica Krüger at my request. I had just brought it home from the framer’s shop and propped it against a bookshelf in my office when Freddy arrived and proceeded to examine it very carefully. Then I asked her to turn around for a second and took this photo.

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

Eve was thrown out of heaven because she was a temptress, Sita had a trial by fire because she crossed a line, Lot’s wife (who doesn’t even get a mention by her own name) was turned into a pillar of salt because she was disobedient, but Mary was a saint for giving birth as a virgin. Collectively, the one thing that binds these narratives is a sense of shame. But what if these stories about women were told to us from a different perspective? What if we were told that Eve was a pioneer and a risk-taker for indulging her curiosity about the forbidden fruit? Or that Sita was charitable and fearless for wanting to help an old man in need, Lot’s wife was a patriot and a freethinker for looking back at the land that had raised her, and that Mary was a courageous single mother. How would women see themselves if they grew up thinking of themselves as survivors and not as victims blamed for their choices and penalized for their actions or praised for their purity and silence? What if we saw women for who they are instead of who we want them to be? What if didn’t shame women?

Aib, sharam, haya, izzat, laaj, dishonour — almost every language has a word for shame. And the burden of that shame lies on the shoulders of the female. Because when we grow up in a culture which penalizes women for the consequences of their choices, we internalize a culture of shame — a culture of victim blaming that shames women for asserting their sexuality and agency,  shaming them for raising their voices and scrutinizing their bodies. Women learn to curb their curiosity, to stifle desire, and to take ‘submissive and compliant’ as compliments.

As I saw the backlash against Pakistan’s Aurat (Women’s) March unfold this year, I was reminded of the politics of shame that so many women all over the world internalize. I found myself questioning… what does it mean to grow up knowing you are being watched? What does it mean to live in a voyeuristic bell jar where the collective weight of society determines the choices you make? When the length of your skirt can be responsible for your rape, when loving someone your family does not approve of can get you killed, when violence against you is tolerated and even justified because it is your fault that you could not understand the code of honor? From body shaming to slut shaming, the shame is all yours. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Perseverance, the fifth NASA/JPL rover to land successfully on Mars, is currently looking for life there. What if it finds it?

The discovery of life on Mars would provide evidence that life is ubiquitous and likely to arise spontaneously under moderately favorable circumstances. It would be evidence that life everywhere is very similar – or, alternatively, very different – and give us more reason to suspect that there is life elsewhere in our own solar system. It could even suggest that we – you and I – are Martians. What evidence of life on Mars will not do, despite what some have argued, is make it more probable that human beings will go extinct. That last suggestion, proffered by Nick Bostrom and echoed by others, is (to use a technical, philosophical term) bonkers. So, I will leave it for last.

Perseverance is not just looking for life. It’s exploring the potential habitability of Mars for future missions, collecting samples that may be returned to Earth later, collecting instrument data, and taking spectacular photographs. I am excited about it as I have been excited about every mission since Viking 1 in 1976. (Excited, that is, once I recovered from my initial disappointment that there didn’t seem to be any dinosaurs on Mars. Don’t judge me. I was eleven years old.) But occasionally when I share my excitement with others, usually in the form of photographs, I get a dispiriting response. “It’s just a bunch of rocks,” more than one person has said to be. Either way, it’s still fascinating to me. But, well, maybe, it’s not just rocks. Maybe there is life on Mars.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am not going to distinguish between definitive evidence of past life and current, you know, actual life. Of course, it’s more exciting if there is actual respirating and metabolizing going on there right now. Fossils of extinct life are, well, still just rocks. But we are much more likely to find evidence of past life than anything living. To see why consider the question, why can’t we just see that there is or isn’t life on Mars? It looks pretty dead. Whereas a probe to Earth would detect life from orbit. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Over recent times, many books have been published with the aim of writing women into history and crediting them for the achievements they have made to the benefit of humanity more broadly. Janice P. Nimura’s The Doctors Blackwell is in that genre of women’s history and she effectively narrates the biographies of the first two remarkable women to study and practice medicine in the United States: Elizabeth Blackwell and her younger sister, Emily.

In this modern world where the sky is literally the limit for women should they have the ambition, determination and the opportunity, it is sometimes difficult to think of them being stifled in such a way as to constrain their potential, yet that has been the plight of women throughout history, and indeed remains the situation for many women across the globe. Gender has been a crucial factor in defining the lives of women, probably exacting a terrible toll of lifelong intellectual frustration and stifling ambition for many of them. As Nimura’s book reveals, Elizabeth Blackwell, a ‘solitary, bookish, uncompromising high-minded’ young woman was one such woman, until she found her way into medicine. Read more »

Maxim D. Shrayer talks to Cynthia L. Haven about her new book, The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline

Cynthia, let me begin by asking you to describe your path to the book—a double path that led you to Joseph Brodsky and to George L. Kline.

I studied with Joseph Brodsky at the University of Michigan—his first port of call in the U.S. It was psychological and aesthetic jolt, like sticking your finger into a light socket. And yes, we memorized hundreds of lines of poetry in his classes.

For many of us, Brodsky’s Selected Poems in 1973 was a radical reorganization of what poetry can be and mean in our times. However, I didn’t connect with the book’s translator, George Kline, until after I published Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2002. George and I stayed connected with Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. But we’d never actually met face to face—so I had no real sense of his age, until in late 2012, when he mentioned that he was almost 92.

George was a champion for Joseph Brodsky and his poetry—many people know that, but many don’t know that he was also a wise and kindly supporter of poets, Slavic scholars, and translators everywhere. He had never given a full account of his collaboration with the Russian-born Nobel poet, however, and I realized time was running out. So we began recording conversations.

His health was failing, and our talks became shorter and more infrequent. Towards the end, he urged me to augment our interviews with his articles, correspondence, and papers, reconstructing a portrait of his collaboration with Brodsky. George died in 2014. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Philosophy of science, in its early days, dedicated itself to justifying the ways of Science to Man. One might think this was a strange task to set for itself, for it is not as if in the early and middle 20th century there was widespread doubt about the validity of science. True, science had become deeply weird, with Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics. And true, there was irrationalism aplenty, culminating in two world wars and the invention of TV dinners. But societies around the world generally did not hold science in ill repute. If anything, technologically advanced cultures celebrated better imaginary futures through the steady march of scientific progress.

So perhaps the more accurate view is that many philosophers were swept up in the science craze along with so many others, and one way philosophers can demonstrate their excitement for something is by providing book-length justifications for it. Thus did it transpire that philosophers inclined toward logical empiricism tried to show how laws of nature were in fact based on nothing more than sense perceptions and logic — neither of which could anyone dispute. Perceptions P1, P2, … Pn, when conjoined with other perceptions and carefully indexed with respect to time, and then validly generalized into a universal proposition through some logical apparatus, lead indubitably to the conclusion that “undisturbed bodies maintain constant velocities” — you know, that sort of thing.

Alas, the justifications never quite worked. Philosophers are very clever, especially when it comes to exploiting logical loopholes with surprising counterexamples. And so were introduced, alongside the venerable problem of induction, new problems like the raven paradox, the grue problem, and other hijackings of the justifications provided for science. Rescue attempts were made, only to prompt new mutations of the initial problems. It began to look as if logic and sense perceptions may not be quite enough to establish the full rationality of science. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I have joked, mostly to myself, that if I ever wrote a memoir, it would be entitled “Never Gone Nowhere, Never Done Nothing: The Mike O’Brien story”. Such a lifestyle stands in near-total contraposition to that of Belén Fernández, at least in its status quo ante March 2020. Prior to that, she tells us, she had never spent more than a few months in the same place since leaving college. An American who goes to great lengths to avoid ever setting foot in America, she had arrived in Mexico on March 13 with the intention of setting off to yet another destination a few days later. Covid, of course, had other plans.

Her slim but dense (though never plodding) book, “Checkpoint Zipolite”, is a tale of forced stillness that stops her globe-trotting life in its tracks. The titular locale is, we are told, Mexico’s only clothing-optional beach, and carries the ominous and purportedly well-deserved nick-name of “Playa de la muerte“. Of course, mortality stalks around every corner in the age of Covid, so the “Beach of Death” might be as good a place as any to ride out a shelter-in-place-order. From my snowy Canadian suburb, it sounds downright idyllic.

The book is essentially a travel diary, woven through with frequent socio-political rants, personal reflections and historical factoids. There is a buzzing, over-active and effusive character to her life, her mind, and her writing, and when one outlet is blocked, it spills out through another. The repressed desire to travel is apparent in the daily minutiae (buying buckets, searching for yerba mate suppliers, negotiating space-sharing agreements with domestic insects) that serve as jumping-off points for recollections and rhetorical flights that span centuries and continents. Fernández’s life of incessant travel and political observation has provided ample material for weaving such connections, and though these digressions are conspicuous for their ubiquity, they don’t feel over-played. I could imagine many of the cited facts and events being replaced by equally poignant and entertaining substitutions from among Fernández’s own rich supply. Read more »

Pi —(Pi day, one day late…)

pi is perfection with a loose end
3 point 1 four and so on
without pattern or closure

the precision of a mandala
drawn by a drunk on three martinis
not describing wholeness merely
but thinking odd numbers
spouting them while rambling home
disheveled, irrational, unseemly
as the similar square root of 2
at the point of life and infinity
.

Jim Culleny
3/14/15

Sughra Raza. Crowing! Rwanda 2016.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Peter Wells

One of humanity’s greatest problems is that everyone thinks they are right. We are aware, of course, that we might be wrong, because we know that on certain issues we have changed our minds, and therefore must have been wrong at least once.  Nonetheless, at any given moment, we believe that we are right. The contrary would be ridiculous. We can say, if we wish, ‘I believe in the nuclear deterrent, but I might be wrong,’ but we can’t possibly say, ‘I believe in the nuclear deterrent, and I am wrong.’

Our beliefs on specific issues are part of a pattern of interconnected opinions, which we believe to be consistent, and they are related to the beliefs of members of our community, particularly our friends and colleagues. This tendency for our attitudes to be reinforced by our community has been exacerbated in recent years by social media. On the whole, we meet disappointingly few people who disagree with us, and this reduces the possibility that we might be persuaded to reconsider our views, to modify them or to compromise – which means we have fewer opportunities to grow in maturity and understanding.

In his essay ‘Trinity and Pluralism,’ Rowan Williams has an arresting observation about what people should do about the beliefs they hold – how they should regard them, and what they should do when they encounter people who hold different beliefs. He writes, of course as a Christian, but I wonder if the suggestions he makes can be applied to people of different persuasions. He proposes that

The Christian does not ask how he or she knows that the Christian religion is exclusively and universally true; he or she simply works on the basis of the ‘christic’ vision for the human good, engaging with adherents of other traditions without anxiety, defensiveness or proselytism, claiming neither an ‘exclusivist’ perspective invalidating others, nor an ‘inclusivist’ absorption of other perspectives into his or her own, nor yet a ‘pluralist’ meta-theory, locating all traditions on a single map and relativizing their concrete life.

Let’s unpack what Williams is saying. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I heard a discussion about animal ethics recently, and the concept of “full moral standing” came up. The presumption was that we humans, certainly most of us and maybe even all of us, enjoyed this full moral standing, and the ethical quandary to be sorted was whether any other beings did as well. This is a common standpoint from which to philosophize about the rights and recognition due to our fellow earthlings: the view from the top. It is still quite common to assume that we are alone there. I suppose that this is a very sensible assumption, given the available data. Old modern myths, unfounded by anything except ignorance, arrogance and a deliberate withholding of curiosity about others’ experiences, denied animals any basis of consideration at all; no sensation, no consciousness, no “there” there at all. Increasing accumulation of knowledge, and decreasing self-delusion about the propriety of our collective abuse of nature, has lent more credibility to arguments for the moral enfranchisement of animals.

But facts only get you so far. When I was a wild and crazy youth, I pursued graduate philosophy studies and read a lot of works on sovereignty and the legitimacy of political power. One of the main take-aways of thousands of pages of obscure theory was the importance of make-believe. Not as a substitute for facts and logic, but rather as an accompanying dimension of thought. Even if humans are, in fact, completely determined in their behaviour by the laws of physics, the task of accurately predicting what billions of us will do decades hence is beyond our faculties. If we were simple enough to be predicted, we would be too simple to do the predicting. So, if we want to tell stories of what our collective future will look like, we have to make them up. The alternative is to be silent, and we are not the sort of apes to do that. Read more »