by Charlie Huenemann

I routinely remind my students that human minds have always been as complicated as they are now, from when we dropped out of the trees to when we step upon the escalator. When we are reading in the history of ideas there is always the temptation to turn intellectual landscapes into cartoons where options are limited, painted in bright primary colors, and uncomplicated, like a toddler maze in Legoland. What’s going on, I suppose, is some hidden supposition that people who lived in earlier times must have been like us when we were children; or to put it more accurately, we suppose that people of earlier times must have been like we now conceive ourselves to have been when we were children. For we are wrong on both counts. Our lives when we were children were more complicated than we now remember, and every life that has ever been lived has been more complicated than we are now likely to suppose, because that’s just what it is to be human: we are complication engines.

But it is also true that we know more than we have in the past. (That of course doesn’t make the minds of the past any less complicated: minds are not complicated by what they know, but by what they think they know). This is clearly true at the species level: humans know more now than they ever have before – Moon shots, penicillin, Higgs boson, and all that. But I am guessing that it is also true that we as individuals, on average, have more knowledge in our heads than our historical counterparts, on average. I have to guess this because how on earth could anyone know for sure that this is so? What would they measure? Whom would they measure? When would they measure it?

For what it’s worth, IQ scores have been going up since their inception (see the Flynn effect; though note that IQ scores seem to be hitting a plateau in recent times). But it stands to reason that if more people are getting more education, and if what people are being taught to some degree tracks what we, as a species, have come to know about the world, then more individuals should be gaining more knowledge than previously. Of course, this general truth – if it is a truth – falls apart as soon as we start complicating the discussion by asking what we are measuring as “knowledge”. So long as we stay at the unfocused level of “you know, truths about the world”, we can maybe get away with the general claim that individuals know more now than they have in the past.

But our advance in knowledge has come with an advance in the complexity of our problems. Read more »

She Drives as I Scribble on London

I wear my French bodice and you don’t even notice
I dread turning into a submissive housewife
Will you still hug me after we are married?
I understand the off-side rule in football better than many men I know
When I’m premenstrual, I want to smash glass
I can’t bear the thought of dead meat in my stomach
London is a city of roundabouts
This is not New York
We give way to other drivers
The best view is from the Waterloo bridge
I don’t want a dowry—that’s so South Asian
I never ever indulge in malicious gossip
We have our demons
When I was a child in Mombasa, I jumped rope with the cook’s daughter

By Rafiq Kathwari — his new collection of poems, “My Mother’s Scribe” (Yoda Press 2020), is available here. Please do read. Thank you.

by Mary Hrovat

Escape. When I was a child, I read at every opportunity. If I could, I’d read on the playground; at one point, I was allowed to spend recess in the library and read there. Overall, teachers seemed unenthusiastic about the idea of a kid reading during recess. My mother, a great reader herself, used to tell me that reading was a treat, to be saved for the end of the day when all the work was done. When I was reading, I wasn’t playing with the other kids or helping out with the housework, as I should have been. But I was one of those people described by Penelope Lively, people who are “built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”

My family went to the public library every two weeks, and there were books in the house, so I was given at best a mixed message about reading. I seized the opportunities offered by the books around me while evading the imposed limits. I read in the closet in the evening after my sister was asleep, or in the living room late at night when everyone was asleep. When I could, I read while I ate. Perhaps I was fortunate to have a boundary to transgress, ever so gently and passively, so as to avoid being entirely subsumed in the role of good girl.

I was reading to learn, but also to escape. Reading for escape is sometimes seen as an inappropriate use of time or a failure to accept reality. Look what happened to Emma Bovary and Catherine Morland (characters created by Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen, respectively), who came to grief (in very different ways) by taking novels far too seriously. But escape from boredom, emotional distress, or anxiety is no bad thing. I tend to agree with W. Somerset Maugham, who said that reading provides “a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” I was lucky this refuge was available to me. The power to escape into a book was a rare means of control over my circumstances, and I can’t imagine what life would have been like without it.  Read more »

by Peter Wells

Christmas is traditionally a time for stories – happy ones, about peace, love and birth. In this essay I’m looking at three Christmas stories, exploring what they tell us about Christmas: the First World War Christmas Truce, The Gift of the Magi (O. Henry), and the Nativity story.

Peace: The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is, as the Imperial War Museum admits (link), one of the most mythologised events of the First World War. Here is one version, which is probably as near the truth as we are going to get:

Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. After Boxing Day, meetings in no man’s land dwindled out [Imperial War Museum website, my emphasis].

Love: The Gift of the Magi

O. Henry’s 1905 story, The Gift of the Magi, is a Christmas story about “two foolish children” – an impecunious American couple, aptly surnamed “Young.” We are introduced first to Della, who has only $1.87 to buy her husband, Jim, a Christmas present. She sells her exceptionally long and beautiful hair to a wigmaker, so that she can buy Jim a present that reflects her love for him. This earns her enough money to buy a gold chain for his beloved fob watch, and she is blissfully happy. Then he arrives, sees her with her shorn head, and the chain, and reacts in a terrifying manner:

His [Jim’s] eyes looked strangely at Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not understand. It filled her with fear. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor anything she had been ready for. He simply looked at her with that strange expression on his face [my emphasis].

This wild look comes about because Jim has bought, for Della’s Christmas present, a set of combs for her vanished hair. As a further irony, in order to buy the combs, he has sold the watch. So there are a number of emotions going through Jim’s mind, none of them happy, and none of them anti-Della, though they are very much anti-something. Read more »

I visited this old friend who lives in a park in Brixen, South Tyrol, last week.

by Mindy Clegg

Actor Ryan Reynolds recently directed two commercials for the dating website Match.com that summed up this year for many. A bored Satan in Hell gets an alert on his phone. His eyes widen and soon he’s meeting a young woman under a park bridge—who insists he calls her twenty-twenty. It’s a love at first sight, full of references to the year of hell.

A second commercial parodies the classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally.

A good bit of comedy to be sure. This year continues to dole out a serious amount of misery. Although it feels like this year is “happening to us,” in reality the things going on are a product of complex interactions between all of us on a global scale. If nothing else good emerged, this year magnified some of the core problems in our modern political, economic, and global social systems. In this month’s essay, I argue that 2020 has become a summation of failures not only of the current administration, but of the larger failures in our systems that we’ve left to rot for far too long now. The Trump administration did not find a pristine political and economic landscape on which to impose their will, but merely continued the already existing process of strangling the government in the bathtub, advocated by Grover Norquist. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Christmas gets me thinking about magic. Remembering the way I enjoyed Christmas as a child brings me back to a time when I believed in the power of supernatural phenomena. The most exciting piece of magic I performed was writing a message on a piece of paper, addressing it to Santa Claus in the North Pole, and setting it alight so that the smoke would be carried away on the winter breeze and read by him (I thought flying reindeer seemed pretty neat as well). The joy was of taking some of my innermost desires, embodying them materially and sending them into the world through a very practical activity, so that the universe could respond.

The sadness I felt at my loss of belief in Santa came from the realisation that I was living in a solely ‘material’ universe. As a scientifically curious child with no religious beliefs, the last bastion of magic had fallen. This death of magic was deeply disappointing, but this loss is not just at an individual one. In society as in biology, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is to say, I was merely following in the steps of a journey of disenchantment that many secular societies had already been on. 

Max Webber was the first to comment on the way the triumph of science and bureaucracy was melting away traditional beliefs about the power of religion and the supernatural. He christened this process, which is distinctive of modernity, ‘disenchantment’. Science, by reducing the functioning of the universe to physical cause and effect gets rid of the need for explanations in terms of magic and gods and spirits. Likewise, modern bureaucratic systems reduce social life to rationalised processes which become ever more difficult to escape from, and dilute social activities of their traditional meaning in the name of efficiency and process. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has exactly one strategy in his EU trade negotiations: threatening to drive Britain into a no-deal wall unless he gets what he wants. In other words, Johnson has been approaching this extraordinarily important matter of national interest as a peculiar version of the game of chicken. This explains much of his bizarre behaviour over the last 18 months, such as his antagonistic attitude, stubbornness, time-wasting, and even (part of) his buffoonery. Nevertheless, to be explained is not to be justified. Not only will the strategy fail, as it did before when Johnson used it in the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations. It has also foreclosed any hope for a substantive trade deal that could have fulfilled the positive aspirations of Brexiteers.

In a traditional game of chicken, two teenagers drive their cars directly towards each other at high speed, threatening mutually comprehensive destructive. The one who swerves away first is the loser, but still better off than if they had crashed. It is a game that rewards the most reckless player, and so it is no wonder that a famously irresponsible politician like Johnson would select it. He is willing to make huge bets with Britain’s national interest because he seems to see politics as just another game, and one that he gets to play with other people’s money rather than his own. The way Johnson decided to support the EU referendum back in 2016 illustrates this. He calculated that supporting Brexit gave him his best chance of winning the Prime Ministership – naturally the public interest was irrelevant to his considerations.  Not unrelated to Johnson’s disinterest in taking politics seriously, the other reason he relies so heavily on gambling as a method of government is that he is famously lazy and incompetent (in stark contrast to his Churchillian self-image). Thus, Johnson decided to play the trade negotiations as a game of chicken both because he knows that EU politicians and institutions do take the responsibility of politics seriously and will be unable to match his recklessness, and also because he knew that neither he nor the witless Brexit loyalists he has filled his government with would be capable of conducting a normal negotiation process. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio version

When you say you have an ancestral temple, it sounds fancy. To be fair, some are. My mother’s ancestral temple, the Vaitheeswaran Koil, is a vast complex with five towers and hall after cavernous hall housing both worshippers and elephants. The temple is dedicated to Shiva in his incarnation as a healer. Perched on the banks of the Cauvery river, a dip in any one of its eighteen water tanks is said to cure all ailments. Dedicated to Mars, it is one of only nine ancient Tamil temples devoted to the planets. (Before you get excited about the prescience of the nine, I feel obliged to inform you that two of them are the sun and the moon, and another two are “Rahu” and “Ketu” who reside somewhere between the sun and moon, causing eclipses.) It has gold plated pillars; emerald encrusted deities; and inscriptions dating back to at least the Chola period in the twelfth century. All very impressive.

I would bask in the reflected glory except that I don’t stem from a matrilineal religious tradition, so my ancestral temple is said to be my father’s. Our parents’ biannual visits to India always included a temple tour with a mandatory visit to the ancestral temple. The itinerary never included Vaitheeswaran Koil, and looking back, I can see why. My ancestral temple was in a village called Tholacheri, and I use the term “village” loosely. Tholacheri contained four or five mud-walled, thatched roof structures surrounding three sides of a viscous pond. On the fourth side lay the temple compound.

The compound’s architectural ensemble comprised the temple itself, consisting of a small anteroom and alcove; a hut that served as the priest’s residence; and four or five giant-sized painted terracotta statues of Ayyanar deities. These statues were armed with machetes. They had bulbous eyes, protruding tongues, and outsized fangs. As an adult they looked almost comical but as children they struck the fear of God in us, which I suppose was the whole point. Read more »

by Jackson Arn

I: Bubbles

Not knowing they’re impossible, they slip

through geometry or fitting, go

squarish where they must, kissing

the rainbow mouths to right-left-up-down

from here to death.

Bathing in clones, each holds,

with skin and neighbors,

a secret breath.

Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

There is a spate of popularizations of neuroscience promoting the idea that “reality isn’t something you perceive, it’s something you create in your mind”, that “everything we perceive is a hallucination created by the brain”, or — as one Scientific American article put it — “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.”

These popularizations are unfortunate, because they run together at least two claims that we should distinguish from each other. The first claim is that perception isn’t merely a process in which the brain passively receives impressions from the world. Rather, it’s a process in which the brain is an active participant, testing predictions about the world against the inputs that it receives. The second claim is that, if the brain is an active participant in perception, then perception “creates reality in your mind” or is a “hallucination”.

Now, when neuroscientists make the first sort of claim, they’re speaking on the basis of their expertise as scientists. Indeed, the past thirty years have seen the rise of views in psychology and neuroscience that understand the brain as, in the words of  the noted philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, a “prediction engine”.

Here’s how Lisa Feldman Barrett puts this idea in her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain :

The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. … Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest. (Feldman Barrett, Chap 2)

Of course, it’s important not to downplay the significance of this development in our understanding of perception. Traditionally, philosophers drew a stark distinction between perception and inference. On this traditional view, perception is the primary route by which we acquire new information, whereas inference can only transmit information that we already acquired. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Tapestry. November, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Emrys Westacott

Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class is a famous, influential, and rather peculiar book. Veblen (1857 – 1929) was a progressive-minded scholar who wrote about economics, social institutions, and culture. The Theory of the Leisure Class, which appeared in 1899, was the first of ten books that he published during his lifetime. It is the original source of the expression “conspicuous consumption,” was once required reading on many graduate syllabi, and parts of it are still regularly anthologized.

The central argument of the can be briefly summarized. In the earliest human communities, pretty much everyone contributed to securing the means of life. In this situation there was no steep or rigid social hierarchy. Cooperative traits were socially valuable and therefore generally respected, and individual property was not important. At some point, however, certain members of the group created a situation in which they didn’t need to beaver away at mundane tasks like tending crops or making clothes. These individuals would typically be the biggest, strongest, boldest, most competitive types–for example, men who were good at hunting, which made them also good at fighting against other hostile groups. Social hierarchies emerged. Women and the less able-bodied men drudged away to produce the means of life; men who possessed the necessary traits engaged only in activities such as hunting and fighting. These men became the “leisure class.”

The leisure class came to include others who did no genuinely productive work, for instance, priests and administrators. This elite came to look down on productive work, which was performed by the majority who had to do it out of necessity. Not having to do such work thus came to be a distinguishing mark of a person’s higher social standing. In smaller societies it was fairly easy to flaunt this privilege in the form of “conspicuous leisure”, but in larger, more complex societies, one exhibited one’s status by showing off one’s wealth through conspicuous consumption. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

Academic titles aren’t everything. But they signpost what might not otherwise be socially salient; I, and others like me, are present here as members of this academic community. 

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published a now widely criticized op-ed piece, imploring Dr. Jill Biden to drop her academic title from her public persona before her tenure as First Lady. Many outlets have condemned the misogynistic tone of the piece, which refers to Dr. Biden as “kiddo,” disparages her dissertation as sounding “unpromising,” and encourages her instead to focus, as if it is mutually exclusive, on the excitement of living in the White House. Even the author’s former employer has distanced themselves from his views. 

Now, the author, Mr. Epstein, does provide an argument of sorts for his views, backed with anecdotal evidence. He cites his decades-long career as a university lecturer and editor of a scholarly publication, a career he has advanced without a Masters or PhD. Sometimes, he notes, students have called him by ‘Dr.’ He reports that he has an honorary doctorate, but he speaks poorly of the kind of individuals who typically have such honorary degrees bestowed upon them in contemporary times — wealthy donors and entertainers. Rather, he quips, “no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.” (An apropos male doctor reference in a misogynist piece.) Charitably (against all initial recoiling), we may read this as the view that the mere possession of a doctorate, at least of the honorary variety, does little to track the merit or quality of work or worth of the individual. Using the title, then, presumably, does not signify what it seems.

Of course, we may well agree that plenty of meritorious work, academic or otherwise, has been produced by those without a doctorate or even a bachelor’s degree. To think otherwise is to slide into the growing elitism about the “uneducated.” I was a first-generation (undergraduate) college student. Having grown up in a proud working-class family, whose character —community-mindedness, warmth, ingenuity, courage — and work ethic were second-to-none, I also recoil at  this growing elitism. Plus I can understand the frustration about celebrity and money trumping desert for academic accolades. Few scholars, if any, have gotten nearly as much attention as Nicole Polizzi, aka Snooki, did when delivering a lecture to a university (although I’m sure it was an interesting address). More seriously, there is a severe socioeconomic barrier to entry into college in the US and elsewhere.  Read more »

Ducks on a pond in Brixen, South Tyrol, in December of 2020.

by Eric Miller

To the mainland

When we climb the stairwell out of the depth of the ferry, where our car rests parked amid grimy trucks, we find taut bands of yellow plastic tape setting off the tables and benches of the observation decks. We have to sit far from other people. Someone took pleasure in this prohibitive festooning, officious pleasure perhaps but also childish joy. It is like decorating for a dance, though its effect is opposite: to un-couple us, to make all of us wallflowers. A disinvitation to the ball! Now our huge white ferry sets off from Swartz Bay—a self-willed tower. Excluding wind and sound, impervious windows mute the passing islands, each projected for us as in a theatre. The thrum of the engine pleases, supplying constant reassurance that everything is fine. Its weak, unvaried arpeggio would seem to guarantee the integrity of our own simmering organic system. A humming machine befriends us. It defends and supports us by a flattering yet ideally stable mimesis of our private vibe, our autonomic hubbub.

The Salish Sea imparts not the least sensation of rocking to the vessel, the vessel is so big relative to the swell. When I see that yellow tape, however, I always worry about the disposal of it. It consists of a sort of plastic that stretches thin, but is reluctant to disappear. Round and round the globe like longitudes and latitudes, such tape persists impertinently after the end of perceived emergency that—once upon a time, it will have been so long ago!—cordoned off part of the habitable world from the rest. The rationale is Covid-19.

From where I sit like a moviegoer, I watch the water. Without pangs of apocalypse or a sense of my witness being in any way representative, my contemplation accumulates the fewest seabirds I have ever seen, the fewest birds in general I have ever seen, between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. Three gulls. Three cormorants. On other occasions Bald Eagles have been as common as crows, murres dove before the bland advance of our blanched castle, rafts of ducks, mergansers, all nonchalance, paddled a derisive minimal distance from our apparition. The ocean almost stagnates, preserving the bubbles of our ferry’s hours-before previous passage as though so surpassingly enervated as not to prick them. Flabby Neptune’s trident is too dull, this August day, to lance any eruption. We can see how little the skipper deviates from a set course by these viscous-looking residues. The brisk ship hurries to escape an ambient torpor. Read more »