by Cynthia Haven

What is worse – coronavirus itself, or the social and economic catastrophe that comes with it?

René Girard, one of the leading thinkers of our era, argued that the biological and social aspects of a plague are interwoven: he points out that historians still debate whether the Black Death was a cause or a consequence of the social upheavals in the 14^th century.

The Stanford professor, who died in 2015 at age 91, has been called “the new Darwin of the human sciences,” but he began as a literary theorist. His work, beginning in the 1960s, offered a new concept of human desire: our desires are not our own, he said, but are “mimetic.” As social creatures, we learn what to want from each other. Imitation leads to competition, which leads to conflict, which then spreads contagiously throughout a community. Eventually, the community targets one person or group to blame for the disorder, someone like Oedipus. The targeted scapegoats are punished, expelled, or in the past, often killed. Girard began in literature, but quickly took on anthropology, sociology, religions, and more. And while he initially wrote mostly about myths in archaic societies, he eventually became an observer of contemporary culture, focusing on rivalry, violence, and warfare today.

Towards the end of his life, he wrote about the social ramifications of natural disasters, and plagues are no exception. Certainly our desires and hostilities have proven as contagious as COVID-19, which has in many ways fueled and exacerbated them, and variously targeting presidents, governments, protestors, and the Chinese for blame.

In 2005, Girard met with Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age; Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, and The Dominion of the Dead, for a two-part interview on Harrison’s celebrated “Entitled Opinions” radio and podcast series, available on iTunes.

The full transcript is among the interviews included in the Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy, edited by Cynthia L. Haven, published this month by Bloomsbury. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Like most people who have time to think in these stressful days, I have been thinking about life after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed – mostly at a personal level, but also a little about the world at large. This essay is an attempt to put some of these thoughts down as a time-capsule of how things appear from this perch in May of 2020, the first year of the New Plague.

The most important lesson that the current calamity should teach every one of us is humility, though it will surely fail to do so until it is too late. The armchair thinker, however, has the luxury of indulging in the vanity of speculation without risking anything more than a proverbial dish of crow – delivered, one hopes, untouched by human hands and at a safe distance. But the time for that will come later, in a different world with different delicacies and intimacies. This is a message from the “here and now.”

So what will the world come to?

The biggest – and totally unknown – factor that will influence the answer to this question is the future course of the pandemic. Broadly there are four possibilities:

1. An effective vaccine or prophylactic is found by late 2020 and is deployed worldwide by next spring, resulting in virtual eradication of the SARS Cov-2 virus sometime in 2021.
2. No vaccine or prophylactic is found soon, but a post-infection treatment is developed by early 2021 so that COVID-19 becomes a treatable disease – possibly at significant expense and/or inconvenience.
3. Finding a preventive or treatment takes much longer than a year, resulting in a second, third, and more waves of infections before something usable is found or herd immunity develops everywhere.
4. No preventive or treatment is found, and herd immunity fails to develop for some reason.

Possibility 4 is the stuff of apocalypse, so let us assume that it is extremely unlikely. Possibility 1 is conceivable given the scientific firepower being directed at the problem, but seems rather optimistic. If it does come to pass, most things will probably go back to the way they were in November 2019, leaving behind a detritus to bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, disrupted lives, and a deep economic recession. Possibility 2 has similar prospects, but would lead to more significant changes in areas such as work patterns, wearing of masks, large gatherings, etc. The more realistic possibility is number 3, which will have a profound effect on humanity. Going through such an extended trauma will alter life in ways that defy imagination. While humanity waits on science, uncertainty will grip the world. Everything – social interaction, work, education, healthcare, entertainment, sports, travel, politics, business, the media –will change so much during this time that it will be impossible to return to earlier ways. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

What’s the universe made up of? Most people who have read popular science would probably say “Mostly hydrogen, along with some helium.” Even people with a passing interest in science usually know that the sun and stars are powered by nuclear reactions involving the conversion of hydrogen to helium. The dominance of hydrogen in the universe is so important that in the 1960s, two physicists suggested that the best way to communicate with alien civilizations would be to broadcast radio waves at the frequency of hydrogen atoms. Today the discovery that the stars, galaxies and the great beyond are primarily made up of hydrogen stands as one of the most important discoveries in our quest for the origin of the universe. What a lot of people don’t know is that this critical fact was discovered by a woman who should have won a Nobel Prize for it, who went against all conventional wisdom questioning her discovery and who was often held back because of her gender and maverick nature. And yet, in spite of these drawbacks, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin achieved so many firsts: the first PhD thesis in astronomy at Harvard and one that is regarded as among the most important in science, the first woman to become a professor at Harvard and the first woman to chair a major department at the university.

Donovan Moore has performed a service in bringing this remarkable woman’s life story to a broad audience, and he tells it with sensitivity and a wonderful sense of place. His story focuses on the human personalities, and while I was a bit disappointed that the book is way too light on the science, it is still a worthy read. Payne grew up in a quintessentially Edwardian England in the late 19th century, a time when women were all supposed to be like those in “Little Women”, grooming themselves to be proper girls who spent all their time cultivating skills that would make them prime prospects for marriage to a wealthy man. But Cecilia was different from the start, largely because of her parents; she did not care much for looks and dresses and much more instead for exploring nature and playing with her two siblings. Her doting father, a lawyer, writer and musician who was fifty-five when he had her, spared no efforts to get her interested in science, music and books. Read more »

Do Ho Suh. Staircase III.

Installation at Tate Modern, London, 2011.

More here, here, and here.

by Jeroen Bouterse

I sometimes consider becoming a skeptic, but then I’m not so sure what that entails.

Mind you, I mean a proper skeptic, a Pyrrhonist or something. What attracts me is not this unsustainable Cartesian angst about maybe living in the Matrix, but the wholesome promise of the ancient skeptics: that if you can live with uncertainty, you unlock this treasury of psychological benefits. Suspension of judgment, not believing to know what you don’t know, supposedly allows you to level up intellectually: to be inquisitive and critical, to open your mind without your brain falling out. The ancient skeptics were smart and prescient about contrasting themselves to the ‘dogmatists’ – who wants to be a dogmatist anymore?

So what’s holding me back? Well, I’m ashamed to say that the first thing that comes to mind are those paradoxes. You know them. Does our skepticism extend to the truth of skepticism, and similar objections. Also, are we supposed to suspend judgment about the truth-value of identity-statements, tautologies or contradictions? And if not, don’t those simple tautologies bleed into more complicated analytical truths, or even into mathematics? I’m not sure. Do I have to have a clear-cut opinion on questions like these before I can, with conviction, call myself a skeptic – all the while maintaining my suspension-of-judgment? That is a difficult balancing act that sounds almost like work.

Even though I humbly admit that I don’t know enough about these issues, I fear that my very insecurity about them demonstrates that I don’t have the mind to be a skeptic. I’m afraid to be a dogmatist about any of these questions, because I’m afraid to be wrong. That’s a condition that can easily escalate into desiring to be right. The skeptic on the other hand, while interested in problems surrounding knowledge, somehow manages to see all of them as somebody else’s problems. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafiq Kathwari

Mother passed away in her sleep at Hebrew Home, The Bronx. The last time I visited her was on 7th March. Hebrew Home locked down on the 10th. Mother died alone on 31 March. She was 96.

Mother’s caregiver, Sabila from Nepal, who over the last 10 years created an extraordinary bond with mother, called her Ami Jan, an endearment, and who follows the Hindu faith, once gave Mother a framed picture of Mother India or Bharat Mata, which Sabila thought symbolized her relationship with Mother who, in turn, taught Sabila to recite the first surah of the Koran which, consequently, Sabila did most beautifully and by heart.

So, here she is Bharat Mata, or as Sabila saw my mother, wrapped in a bright sari, superimposed on a map of India painted on a box of safety matches. It’s incendiary. Kashmir crowns the Mata who wields a trident in her right hand. A multi-color flag erases Afghanistan and Pakistan. Left-hand shadows Bangla Desh gesturing towards Myanmar. Her foot seems bigger than pearl-shaped Sri Lanka which forms the central story of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Here’s how Sabila told Mother the story.

One day, God Rama saw Sita  bathing nude in Sitaharan a spring near the Line of Control in Kashmir: It was lust at first sight. Enter Ravana, demon king who abducted Sita to Sri Lanka to avenge a previous wrong, angering  Rama who flew south to Lanka in his glitzy winged chariot Made in Prehistoric India using indigenous materials, piloted by a crew of monkeys.Rama, who shot a divine arrow which pierced Ravana in the heart and killed him, flew Sita back to Kashmir where legend has it they lived happily until India divided herself 73 years ago.

Mother said, broods of the Dogras want their land back, flora, fauna, valleys, peaks, pashmina goats, Mother said after I told her that Hindutva goons are calling it Zameen jihad.  Of course, they will, she said. It’s the nature of fascists to clasp opposite concepts to serve their own propaganda. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

One of the things that fascinates me about history is the different ways we know historical periods. We know the times we live through in a very deep way, not just the events and how they affect us, but the details of daily life. We know the slang, the jokes, the mid-list books; the forgettable songs and the ephemeral news; what the world smells like and how it tastes and sounds. It’s very hard to know another time period in anything like the detail we know our own: what people wore to work, what they did on Saturday afternoons, what all the machines did and why they were made.

However, it’s easier to see more distant periods of history as a cohesive whole, or a completed story. As details inevitably fade from collective memory with time, and most of the possible futures are abandoned, meaning and coherence can emerge. Distillation and compression over time reveal story lines, themes, and meanings that weren’t obvious in the rich confusion and immediacy of experience.

The meaning we find or make may be illusory, but we value it anyway. Galen Rowell, in The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography, says, “Minute by minute, year by year, details fall away as our mental imagery becomes more iconographic. That’s how we see; that’s how we think.” Perhaps it’s also how we remember, and especially how we form collective memories.

I can only guess how future generations will view the times I lived through. It seems obvious that the Apollo moon landings and the COVID-19 pandemic will loom large. It’s more difficult to say which politicians or writers or entertainers will be remembered (or for what), or even which disasters or events. I don’t know how things will turn out. It’s even harder to guess which books or paintings or films will survive, or how much anyone will know about, say, how we worked or vacationed or died. Read more »

Dandelions in our backyard in April, 2020.

by Charlie Huenemann

“Every country is going through these decisions, none of us are through this pandemic yet, but some countries are starting to look at slightly expanding what people would define as their household — encouraging people who live alone to maybe match up with somebody else who is on their own or a couple of other people to have almost kind of bubbles of people,” she [Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon] told BBC Radio Scotland.

“Want to join my bubble? This is what your future social life could look like”, Angela Dewan, CNN, April 29th, 2020.

A crisis, by definition, has dramatic effects. It changes how we behave, where wealth goes, what policies we enact, and what we hope. But it also can bring into higher relief features of our lives that have not changed, but turn out to be more important than we realized.

Like the fact that human life takes place in bubbles. This just means that humans like to form groups: somewhat closed networks of interactive relationships among a small number of relatives or friends whose principal job it is to care for one another. “Semi-permeable palliative social matrices” one could call them, but “bubbles” will work just fine. A bubble is an enclosed space, protected from the outside by a fragile boundary; all its points are equidistant from a center; it is almost invisible, but offers a hopeful shine when the light hits it right. All the same can be said of a circle of good friends. And all of human history has been built upon such bubbles.

This crucial anthropological insight has been explored in nearly inexhaustible depth by the contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, particularly in his trilogy Spheres. Humans are born from round wombs into family circles, sometimes gathered in igloos and tipis, or around a hearth, following a circle of seasons under the orbs of moon and sun, growing into adulthood before they start the cycle again. Read more »

I look at my grandchildren and know that, being so young, they have little
serious understaning of Covid and wonder what parts of it they’ll recall.
Or will it linger…? How vague a memory will it be. What sort of meaning
will it have, one like mine of world war?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Meaning of the Thing

             —May 8, 1945

Suddenly Mom ran out the door,
she’d yanked it’s stubborn latch-side free
bolting into open air
thick with sirens, bells,
the horns of cars, ecstatic yells,
everything that blew that May day free,
crammed with audible relief,
cacophonous confetti,
in a joyous requiem for war:
the death of hell

Mom sobbed kneeling in the drive
and thanked the god who’d just undone
his bloody recklessness by fiat & surprise,
suddenly, in May— coincidental with
when life re-bounds

and I said, Mom, what’s wrong,
what are you crying for?
 
—and she: It’s done!
 
—and I:  What’s done?

—and she: the War!

…… as if I’d known the meaning
of the thing at four

Jim Culleny
4/21/20

by Liam Heneghan

When I was a child growing up in Dublin, a friend dropped her pet hamster on the kitchen floor. The animal survived but thereafter he could only walk in circles. As the hamster got older, the circles got wider but like a ship permanently anchored to shore it never got particularly far.

Like most children, I had taken a fall or two and because I was a worrier I felt concerned that like that hamster I would never travel very far. Though I did, indeed, travel and I am now thousands of miles from home, I still think of my life as occurring in a series of ever widening circles.

At first, I was confined to our back garden. We lived in the Templeogue Village an inglorious suburb on what at the time was a trailing edge of Dublin. Over the garden wall were farm fields and farther off were the Dublin Mountains.

Sure enough over the years, I explored the fields and when I got a little older, I would cycle into the foothills of those mountains.

Now there was one hill in particular that I was drawn to: officially called Montpelier Hill it is also called The Hell Fire Club. The story was that a structure built there in the early 1700s as a hunting lodge for delinquent aristocratic youth had also been used by them for somewhat darker practices. One night the devil himself showed up there at a card game. In the hubbub that followed, a candle was knocked over and the lodge burned to the ground. By the time I started to cycle there, The Hellfire Club was an innocuous forestry plantation. The burned lodge remains. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

One of the heartening ramifications of the otherwise devastating Covid-19 pandemic has been the public’s high level of trust in science and expertise. As a March 19-24 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates, over ⅔ even of low-trusting people surveyed trust public health officials to do an excellent or good job in dealing with the outbreak.

In fact, even corporate Twitter accounts for shaved meat products can boost their following by amplifying the experts:

This increased trust in scientific expertise is part of a growing trend. A Pew Research study in 2019 found that, since 2016, when less than ¼ of the public had “A great deal” of confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public, by 2019 more than ⅓ of the public expressed “A great deal” of confidence in the actions of scientists.

The rising levels of trust in scientific expertise stand, however, in stark contrast to the current UIS Administration’s flagrant disregard of science. Indeed, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund have tracked 417 “government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information” since the 2016 election. Read more »

Rasheed Araeen. In the Midst of Darkness 1, 2012-2013.

More here, here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb.

by Samia Altaf

My son, it was reassuring to talk to you. We’re lucky that communication has become so easy, though I’d rather hold your dear face in my hands.

They’re quite a miracle, aren’t they, these phone calls, especially in these terrible times when one does not know what is going to happen to us, and to this country, this world. When we were in college in the U.S. in the late seventies, to talk to parents in Pakistan you had to book a call three weeks in advance. When your name came to the top of that line, you had to sit around the phone (there were no cell phones then) for ten hours. The call was expected to get through at any time during that window, for it had to be bounced over a satellite or some such complicated technological thing. What I recall most vividly about those moments is the excitement in the operator’s voice when the connection eventually happened. “Go ahead, ma’am/dear/hon,” they’d say, a triumphant edge to their tone, “your party is on the line.” I imagined the operator standing astride the Atlantic, a colossus holding the phone line up above her head out of the water just for the three minutes of my booked time so I could talk to my mother.

My mother, my “party,” was invariably in the kitchen when she was called to the phone. I could almost see her wiping her hands on the edge of her dupatta as she hurried over to scream How are you? into the phone. We’d talk about what she was cooking and other ordinary things. The world was safer then. No need to worry about face masks and sanitizers and such. The phone system that you laugh at did not seem too cumbersome then or too difficult—just normal for that time, even advanced. We thought we were lucky to be able to get to talk to folks back home, ten thousand miles away, on the other side of the world. Even grandma, Baiji, half deaf and half zonked on meds, was brought to the phone, and allowed to say Who? What? Read more »

by Brooks Riley