by Emrys Westacott

Like millions of others, my reaction to the result of the US presidential election was primarily relief. Relief at the prospect of an end to the ghastly display of narcissism, dishonesty, callousness, corruption, and general moral indecency (a.k.a. Donald Trump) that has dominated media attention in the US for the past four years. Also, relief that American democracy, very imperfect though it is, appears to be coming off the ventilator after what many consider a near death experience. The reaction of Trump and the Republicans, trying every conceivable gambit to thwart the will of the people, indicates just how uninterested they are in upholding democratic norms and how contentious things would have become had everything hinged on the outcome in one state, as it did in the 2000 election.

And let’s be honest: Biden’s electoral college victory was frighteningly close. He won Pennsylvania by 0.7%, Wisconsin by 0.4%,a and Georgia by 0.3%. Had fewer than 0.5 % of Biden voters gone for Trump in these three states, he would have been re-elected. Moreover, in each of these states the votes received by the Libertarian candidate was greater than Biden’s margin of victory. Who knows how things might have gone had there been no Libertarian candidate.

And let’s keep being honest. But for the covid pandemic, Trump would quite likely have won. Indeed, had he been a more intelligent populist demagogue he might have raised his popularity prior to the election by embracing the role of national champion leading the fight against the virus.

So, like millions of others, after breathing a few sighs of relief and drinking a few celebratory toasts, I find myself asking: How is it possible? Why did over 70 million people vote for a man who to so many of us appears quite obviously to be a pathologically self-centered con man who is callously indifferent to the well-being of others, and who spews an almost continuous stream of barefaced and often quite absurd lies. And I charitably forbear from mentioning his ignorance, his incompetence, his laziness, his bigotry, his sexism, his bullying, his corrupt dealings… Read more »

by Lawrence Blume and Raji Jayaraman

The United States is undergoing a long-overdue reckoning, in the highest echelons of government, with the problem of systemic racism. The new Biden-Harris administration has declared that “The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism…” The wide span of policy remedies it goes on to propose reflects the breadth of the problem. A further challenge is that systemic racism runs deep, operating not only at the level of interpersonal interactions but from the workings of our social systems. It may be sustained by formal structures such laws or rules, in which case an obvious remedy is to reform those structures. But it can equally be sustained by amorphous structures that are harder to combat.

One of the most insidious mechanisms through which systemic racism can be sustained is the vicious circle of self-fulfilling beliefs. Here is the idea. Suppose there are two groups, Blacks and Whites. Blacks hold beliefs about Whites, and Whites hold beliefs about Blacks. They interact with each other, choosing behaviours based on their beliefs. Everybody’s beliefs are validated by the behaviours they see.

We say that these beliefs are “in equilibrium” because each group’s belief enables the other. The representation each group holds about the other is correct because and only because each group holds these representations. When a large number of individuals in a market or some other social structure interact—and this is where the “systemic” part of racism enters—the beliefs turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Positive, “pro-social”, behaviours in this context are sustained by positive beliefs, resulting in a virtuous circle. Negative, “anti-social”, behaviours are sustained by negative beliefs, resulting in a vicious circle.

In his brilliant book, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal saw racial disparities in the United States in precisely this light. “White prejudice and discrimination”, he writes, “keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to White prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other.” While Myrdal implicated deliberate discrimination in this process, subsequent work by Kenneth Arrow and others has taught us that the vicious circle operating in systems with no deliberate prejudice, can still generate discriminatory outcomes.

How does this happen? Read more »

Imagine

our town rests in a mountain-bowl
at twilight, common and small
as dust and dream but huge in life
beyond what it seems, its few lights jitter
on the river’s skin,
the dam pond’s spillway
lets its waters out as
upstream they come in
under a steel truss bridge,
the dam buoys’ stillness
under street-light drapes
upon a river’s surface
with a hue of grapes
as a ridgeline drops
like the backs of snakes
until it meets a flow
without grudge
or hates

Jim Culleny
11/14/20

by Joseph Shieber

I’ve been reading Stanley Corngold’s surprisingly interesting Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic. I say “surprisingly interesting” because I only thought of Kaufmann as the author of a dated book on Nietzsche and a number of anthologies on Nietzsche and other existentialist figures.

As it turns out, Kaufmann was a fascinating figure in his own right. Born in Germany in 1921, Kaufmann was raised Lutheran, but, finding that he couldn’t accept the doctrine of the Trinity, Kaufmann converted to Judaism – after the Nazis had already assumed power! – only to find that both his paternal and maternal parents had converted to Lutheranism from Judaism.

Kaufmann spent one year studying for the rabbinate in Berlin before fleeing Nazi German for the United States. Alone in a new country, Kaufmann taught himself English, enrolled at Williams College and then received an M.A. in philosophy at Harvard before joining the U.S. Army in Military Intelligence and returning to Germany, where he served as an interrogator, before returning to complete his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. He then embarked on a 30-year teaching career at Princeton.

Apparently, for all of the stability of his academic career, Kaufmann remained a peripatetic figure. Before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 59, Kaufmann had already traveled around the world – four times!

Reading Corngold’s chapter on the book that cemented Kaufmann’s reputation, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, I was struck by the ways in which Kaufmann’s own biography must have predestined him to be receptive to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Read more »

Phoebe Beasley. Sunrise Is Coming After While, 1998.

More here, and here.

by Robyn Repko Waller

As the fall term winds down for universities across the US (and abroad), what has one semester, interrupted, and another one, planned, under COVID taught us about university life?

In March 2020, with the growing community spread of COVID-19 upon the nation, universities shuttered in response to the seismic early rumblings of the pandemic. Starting on the West Coast, institutions such as University of Washington and Stanford closed their campuses, suspending in-person teaching and activities, a trend that would quickly reach institutions of higher learning across the nation all the way to the eastern shores of the US. 

Empty lecture halls and dormitories — at least in term time — are a rarity. Lecture halls, laboratories, and dormitories of universities are meant to ring and echo with the hustle and bustle of human interaction. Gilbert Ryle, in his well-known explication of ‘category mistake’ in The Concept of the Mind gave this imagined (mis)description of the University:

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks ‘But where is the University? I have seen the where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.’

Ryle’s aim was to illustrate that if one thinks, as the hypothetical visitor does, of the University as another member of the class of items which contains these buildings and locales, one has misunderstood what kind of thing the University is. One has seen the University already. But, I want to suggest, the COVID pandemic teaches us that neither the visitor nor Ryle even is entirely correct about the nature of the University. Visit the deserted campus structures and quad, vacated in response to COVID, and one has not really seen the University. Rather, the University is constituted by its human constituents, past and present — the academic community. 

But where is the University — the academic community — now? And what is the academic community now? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jackson Arn

Brutal Aesthetics, the second volume of art criticism by Hal Foster to come out this year, begins at the close of World War Two, when the human race was fine-tuning some clever new ways of killing itself. Nuclear war; totalitarianism; genocide on an industrial scale; the gnawing despair of living with all this—for an era that saw so many unprecedented threats to our species, we’d have to wait until … well, you know.

It was during these carefree days that five pioneers—Jean Dubuffet, Georges Bataille, Asger Jorn, Klaus Paolizzi, and Claes Oldenburg—developed an aesthetic of the brutal, the raw, the wild, the half-formed, the Dionysian, and the animalistic. “Positive barbarism,” Foster calls it, though the term has a neatness his subjects scorned. There is a family resemblance between Dubuffet’s bug-eyed “child art” and Jorn’s grinning monsters, Oldenburg’s ray guns and Paolizzi’s robots—and they all look something like the prehistoric cave paintings Bataille admired. For Foster, these resemblances suggest a deeper connection: five postwar westerners who were bold or daft enough to believe they could wriggle away from civilization.

You can’t be a 21st-century art historian and use the B-word without mentioning the Critical Theory Gods, AKA Adorno and Benjamin; that Foster does so is a mark of his book’s ambition. Positive barbarism isn’t the kind Benjamin had in mind when he wrote, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Nor is it the barbarism of Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What emerges from Brutal Aesthetics instead is barbarism as a form of creative destruction. Foster wants his quintet to reject the facile humanism of the West but build, or at least hint at, a new, tougher version, moving past the rubble of civilization without forgetting it entirely. He wants them to “begin again.” Read more »

by Eric Miller

1.

Would you like to go to Salt Spring Island? Of course you would. You’ve never been. We have to pack with care. Don’t forget the coffee. Don’t forget the wine. Check the skybox! It keeps getting loose. How do the bolts unfasten so fast? Everyday stress, I guess. Tell me about it! October moulders flaming, yellow leaves, red leaves, a mock-conflagration so sopping it ravishes without imparting heat. The neighbour’s hortensias, can you believe? They try every colour. You would hardly think they all could grow on the same bush. Sea anemones, amethystine geodes imitated in silk, a purple that deepens, dyed flagrant by the tarrying of attention—foreplay of a kind, a courtship long antecessory to our eros. We peer stunned as pollinators in spring, what fructifications of gripping rot! Stop staring. Let the uncouth mushrooms, rotten when they ripen, tumesce to hail those clusters and pledge them fleshy service amid the twinkling of wet ambulating spiders, the spittled glissade of gradual slugs. True it’s tough to ignore this prodigy, just in order to praise that one. Don’t you feel obliged? Kaleidoscopes can detain us even after we have stopped cranking patterns. Decomposition is composition too.

Step over here with your crate and it is as warm as August, step over there with your bag it is as gelid as January. A confused crocus is bobbing up, too simple for this world. Poor untimely vegetable marmot! Even above town a band of Canada geese bashes chorally overhead. What long necks, what blunt daft bodies, what overlap of air churned by wings, of air alembicated into black-beaked shouts! No frost yet has stiffened the grass to a moussed quiff, or stippled the tarpaper shingles. Therefore, we still resolve to swim when we get to the lake. Who cares how cold it is? I do, a little. Swimsuits, swimsuits. We remember the panoply of paraphernalia belonging to the dog, her shining dishes, her musty pad; we forget the dog herself. Is she in the kennel in the back of the car? No, she is cowering under the kitchen table. What a face, her nose as dark and eloquent as her eyes! There, now she’s with us. Read more »

The upper fortress of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in November of 2020.

by Alexander C. Kafka

What is it about Frank Zappa’s eyes? They leer. They challenge. They invite play and fun and nonsense. But they’re also afraid. They don’t look away. They fix on you defiantly as if he’s expecting to be slapped for something naughty that he said. And he said many naughty things. 

One sees a lot of those hypnotizing eyes in the superb new documentary Zappa, directed by Alex Winter. Yes, that Alex Winter, of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, who is also the serious-minded director of documentaries on the Panama Papers and blockchain. Creating Zappa was an adventure in itself — five years in the making, with access to the artist’s archives and cooperation from the family and a slew of Zappa’s fellow musicians. It was funded through the largest crowdsourced campaign ever for a documentary. Eight-thousand backers invested $1.2 million. It’s the kind of free enterprise Zappa would have applauded.

Winter’s is a wild, often melancholy portrait of a counterculture hero who, in 1993, died from prostate cancer at age 52. It strengthens the case suggested by the 115 albums of Zappa’s music — 53 of them posthumous — that he was a multi-genre composer for whom rock stardom and guitar virtuosity were tools, not ends in themselves. He was also a visual artist, filmmaker, audio innovator, First Amendment freedom fighter, and proud entrepreneur. Zappa produced and briefly even distributed his own material. He also produced albums for Alice Cooper, the GTOs, Zappa’s high-school buddy Captain Beefheart, and other musicians, as well as an album from Lenny Bruce’s last live performance.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

Look on the back label of most wine bottles and you will find a tasting note that reads like a fruit basket—a list of various fruit aromas along with a few herb and oak-derived aromas that consumers are likely to find with some more or less dedicated sniffing. You will find a more extensive list of aromas if you visit the winery’s website and find the winemaker’s notes or read wine reviews published in wine magazines or online.

Here is one typical example of a winemaker’s note:

The 2016 Monterey Pinot Noir has bright cherry aromas that are layered with notes of wild strawberries and black tea. On the palate, you get juicy, black cherry flavors and notes of cola with hints of vanilla, toasted oak, and well-balanced tannins. A silky texture leads to a long finish.

The purpose of tasting notes is apparently to give prospective consumers an idea of what the wine will smell and taste like. And they succeed up to a point. Wine’s do exhibit aromas such as black cherry, cola, and vanilla.

But do notes like this give you much information about the quality of the wine or what a particular wine has to offer that is worthy of your attention? Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Shadi Hamid, contributing writer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, states reproachfully that “Donald Trump’s election (in 2016) led to a whole cottage industry of thinking that fascism is near, right here at home.” For many scholars and writers in this proverbial “cottage industry,” Joe Biden’s victory will do little to change their minds regarding what they see as the growing threat of fascism in the United States. For Hamid, this is a mistake with serious implications. He is concerned that people who reference fascism to describe what is happening in the United States, either as a warning of the unforeseen terror to come or as an analysis of what is already happening, are confused about what fascism actually is. To highlight the dangers of relativistic thinking in regards to fascism, he quotes George Orwell who wrote, “I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” Orwell’s point and Hamid’s fear is that when words/concepts become relative—when signifier and signified float willy-nilly along the shifting winds of power and ideology—they risk undermining the critical capacities of language. More specifically, Hamid argues that the relativity of the term is causing these scholars and commentators to ignore examples of “real” fascism when they occur. The consequence of this ignorance, he argues, negatively impacts the people who are struggling to survive fascist violence throughout the world. Hamid writes,

Words matter because they help order our understanding of politics both at home and abroad. If [Senator Tom] Cotton is a fascist, then we don’t know what fascism is. And if we don’t know what fascism is, then we will struggle to identify it when it threatens millions of lives—which is precisely what is happening today in areas under Beijing’s control. Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on Hong Kong. And while the world watches, they are undertaking one of the most terrifying campaigns of ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide since World War II in Xinjiang province, with more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs in internment camps, as well as reports of forced sterilization and mass rape.

In the face of Hamid’s concerns, and in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory, what should we make of the scholarship and academic journalism that resurrects and reconstructs the concept of fascism to explain what is currently happening in the United States or to warn people about what is politically probable if the Nation doesn’t radically change course? Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.

The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen. Read more »

by David Oates

How hard it is to watch our national election ordeal as it draws us into yet another week of chicanery and bad faith. How hard to watch. How hard to turn away.

I write this in an attempt to avoid both avoidance and obsession. (Can I do it? I’ve been trying all these horrid four years, with such mixed results.) I reflect that Donald Trump’s ceaseless attention-stealing, itself, is a powerful reason to eject him from our public life. Whatever else this corrupt president turns out to have stolen (and surely there are revelations to come), he has already stolen our time and our attention – hogged the spotlight with a truly weird skillfulness – and crowded nearly all other thoughts off our mental stage.

Bonnie Kristian, a conservative commentator, warns about “politics’ creeping infestation of obligation in our lives,” reflecting that the Founders set up this  representative democracy precisely in order to allow citizens their freedom of mind and attention – while the politicians went about conducting the necessary tasks of government. But “Trump is always on our minds, and he is teaching the rest of Washington his methods.” She points out, fairly enough, that this trend predated the Current Occupant. He has merely made it worse – I would add, by several degrees of magnitude. The vacuous emptiness of his nonstop lying expands like a gas, filling all available space.

What is it like, to live under this continuous assault? To have mind and feelings hijacked daily, hourly? Read more »

Glenn Ligon. Another Country (After James Baldwin). 2017.

More here, here, and here.

by Jeroen Bouterse

Here’s an interesting game. You receive 20 dollars, and you and three others can anonymously contribute any portion of this amount to a public pool. The amount of money in this pool is then multiplied by 1.5 and divided equally among all players. Repeat 10 times, then go home with your money. What will happen? How much would you contribute in round one, if you knew nothing about your fellow players?

This ‘Public Goods Game’ is one example of the many sophisticated social-psychological experiments that Joseph Henrich brings into play in his recent book The WEIRDest people in the world. It is also a good example of how he puts those experiments to use. One lesson from this game is that people are more cooperative than models of economically rational behavior would suggest (are more homo reciprocans than homo economicus (211)). Another is that average first-round contributions vary significantly between populations. ‘WEIRD’ stands for ‘Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic’, and also serves to emphasize that WEIRD populations are weird in the sense of unusual: they are psychological outliers in a lot of ways.

To stay with the Public Goods Game: Henrich shows that the average share of their endowment that participants from a given country put into the pool in round one correlates negatively with how strongly kinship ties are in that country, as measured either by the so-called ‘Kinship Identity Index’ or by the prevalence of cousin marriage. This is not a surprise to Henrich, who sees the same pattern repeated in other negative correlations: between the strength of kinship ties and the number of blood donations for instance (221), and in general between the strength of kinship and “impersonal prosociality”: a cooperative attitude towards anonymous strangers. Read more »