by Akeel Bilgrami

The notion of a miscellany fetches no particular interest, except in the light of its contrasting ideal of integrity. I don’t mean integrity in the moral sense–a person’s action keeping faith with her principles– but in the stricter sense of things being of a piece, being integrated rather than miscellaneous.

The intellectual pleasures offered by literature tend to be inherently miscellaneous, while science and philosophy are marked by a drive towards integrity, towards eliminating the element of miscellany. For someone given to both literature and philosophy, as I have been from an early age, each of these contrasting satisfactions can provide a sort of relief and release from the other.

It is often asked: what is the difference between imaginative literature and other sorts of intellectual endeavor? Are there any kinds of knowledge uniquely available, say, from novels and poems? Why do we read them when we could read books in psychology, sociology, moral philosophy—especially if these are illustrated with vivid examples of ethical, psychological, and social experience? There are many possible answers to such a question, and I want to explore only one of them, the one that has to do with the contrast between the miscellaneous and the integrated.

But first I need to address a larger theme –the special forms of knowledge that can accompany emotions. More often than any other form of intellectual enterprise, the writing of a poem or novel is expressive rather than ratiocinative; and the notion of expression places special significance on the states of mind we call emotions. We tend to say: we ‘express’ emotions, while we ‘present’ our thoughts. We could say that we ‘express our thoughts’ when we speak them, but that use of the word ‘express’ is innocuous. It might just as easily be replaced by the verb ‘present.’ But if we try to make the same substitution when we talk of ‘expressing our emotions,’ a crucial remainder is left out. That remainder is what gives a special character to literature. We can present and represent and study the emotions in our psychological and philosophical and other treatises, but we don’t, at least not without bending genres, express them there. It is not merely that the language is more literary when emotions are expressed rather than presented –a different set of expectations is created in the reader because a different set of pleasures is offered.

This is not the tired duality between rational thought and irrational emotions. As T. S. Eliot saw, that dualism is disastrous for literature. For one thing, expression should not be assumed to require spontaneity, as the multiple revisions that lie under the surface of serious literature demonstrate. More important, in expressing one’s emotions, indeed in possessing them, one is in fact often given a way of perceiving what one thinks and what one’s intellectual and moral commitments are. But it is a very special way of perceiving them.

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by Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin

We, the authors, are atheists. Some will no doubt hold that since atheists abhor religion in all its forms, consistency demands that they oppose the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (which in fact is neither a mosque nor at ground zero). The thought is that atheists must oppose the building of any new building devoted to religious observance. But this view about what atheists must believe is false. Abhorrence of religion does not entail abhorrence of the freedom to practice religion. Atheists indeed affirm freedom of conscience, even though they oppose the views to which many are led by their consciences.

We atheists are particularly well placed to speak to public matters concerning religious tolerance. As we have no religion of our own, atheists are especially well practiced at tolerating religion. More importantly, atheists are also keenly attuned to the importance of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience for a democratic society. And the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque is a clash over these very principles. Our view is that those who oppose the Mosque have abandoned fundamental principles at the core of the form of constitutional democracy originated by the United States.

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A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

(Read Part I and Part II.)

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

Sam Kean: Do you think your career or your scientific work have been different if you’d done a novel very early on as opposed to a later stage?

EW: That’s an unanswerable question because it would never have occurred to me to write a novel early on. I never would have had any ambition like that. All my hopes, all my dreams were to be a scientist. I didn’t even get into popular nonfiction until—I think the earliest date you could put on it would be 1978. That would be On Human Nature. That’s the first time I ever wrote a book for a popular audience, a broad audience.

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A Review by Ahmad Saidullah

Sudipta Kaviraj. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 299 pp. $29.50.

I. Approaching India

Written in the 1980s and 90s, Sudipta Kaviraj’s eight essays on the intellectual history of politics and culture in India, with their heavy overlay of theory, are not meant for the casual reader.

He covers various topics: the specific nature of Indian democracy; aspects of Jawaharlal Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's regimes; political culture in independent India; the construction of colonial power; the relationship between state, society, and discourse; the structure of nationalist discourse; language and identity formation in Indian contexts; the links between development and democracy; and the interactions among religion, politics, and modernity in South Asia.

In investigating the specificities of Indian history, Kaviraj who is Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia presents himself as an outsider, a social theorist wary of rushing in where “historians, the most well-informed group about colonial societies” fear to tread.

Kaviraj has been associated with marxist and subaltern approaches to studying India's social and political life. These views have challenged the historical presentation of European colonialism as the great story of the triumph of western reason, science, and modernity. This narrative of modernity influenced Indian nationalists, the writing of nationalist histories, and the developments of the postcolony itself. “The external character of modernity is inscribed on every move, every object, every proposal, every legislative act, each line of causality including the externality of the historical project,” Kaviraj notes.

Like his colleague Partha Chatterjee at Columbia, Kaviraj prefaces his essays by acknowledging the limitations of these counter-approaches. Some forms of marxist thought reduce the history of rationalism to an economistic account of extractive capitalism. Others, in their attempts to draw a picture of society, seek to bring forward “an alternative epistemology of the subaltern classes…a hard task under any circumstance but particularly difficult for intellectuals drawn from the middle class.”

He examines Indian politics through western political philosophy and the perspectives of Indian history and indigenous political thought. Kaviraj is interested in India as a cultural entity with a diverse history and culture. His work is shaped by a belief in the plasticity of Indian politics in reflecting and shaping the world in which people live. He is keen on investigating whether the concepts used by historians of all stripes are adequate for understanding the culture and politics of India.

As colonialism ruptures the self–relations of a society through time, he sets out to find fundamental histories of epistemological concepts embedded in social practices that can enable scholars of Indian society to draw legitimate interconnections between the “world, nation and self.”

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by David Schneider

I'll give one thing to the demagogues – they sure know something about basic human psychology. For those of us waterboarded by the economy, we're close to Depression desperation. It's a commonplace that depression is “anger focused inward”; and the cheap-and-easy way out, if you're too cash-strapped for the shrink or the meds, is to displace that anger outward to the nearest, easiest target.

O America, if there's anything we suck at, it's adequate self-reflection. Oh sure, we love looking at ourselves, we paragons of self-flattery on the flat screen; but thinking about ourselves (by which we mean, interrogating history) – well, that's injurious to our self-esteem. After all, we tried it a couple times: Jimmy Carter, and what the right-wing called the “politics of resentment” in the “radical left-wing” academy of the '80s and '90s. Reagan's “Morning in America,” and the Neoconservative revels after Communism's collapse, sure showed those liberal pantywaists. The power of positive thinking. Huh.

I've thought a lot about the acolytes of that cipher, George W. Bush, as the last decade broke and darkened. And I thought of my father, who, as I was growing up, could do almost anything but admit he was wrong. I thought about hard-line Communists in the Politburo, as the Soviet Union dissolved: what happens when everything you've believed in is a lie?

When the economy collapses and your phallus is your finances, you're getting kicked in the nuts. Pretty humiliating.

So you can actually feel really embarrassed, humiliated and ashamed – and pledge to reform, and actually reform – but that involves a lot of thinking, and gee, there's so much to think about already. On the other hand, you can get angry. Throw that anger away from yourself, as far as you possibly can: to the Other: socialists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, and the mythical chimaera of all three, the President of the United States of America.

In Britain, August is “the silly season”; in America, we scapegoat. It's a necessary action, according to the Old Testament – all the sins of the Israelites, placed upon a goat's head, which is then thrown off a cliff or banished to the wilderness. It's the prerequisite to Atonement, which Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck pantomimed before the giant of Lincoln, in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Only then, after the scapegoat is cast out, and the ceremony of Atonement is complete, can you re-establish the Covenant, and be written into the Book of Life again, as the new Republican Pledge attempts.

Tragedy is the goat's song.

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If you have children, you have probably noticed a fascinating and common phenomenon: seemingly without instruction or reading manuals, they know more about computers and cellphones, in fact most technology, than you do. They impatiently seize controls out of your hands saying, “Let me show you how to do it.” And then, you the parent, weary and old, with too many mundane details of life clogging up your brain say, “How do you know how to do that?” Then your child, whether they’re 5 or 15, rolls their eyes and says “Duh!” Children get technology, seemingly instinctively, and they love it.

Over the last 10 months or so, I’ve ruminated in this blog on two major themes that seem, at first glance, only casually to have anything do with each other: educating children for 21st century success and children’s use of social media and technology. As it happens, I think that these two topics can and should be thoroughly integrated. We can debate the value of test taking and how else students’ progress might be evaluated, discuss the virtues of rote memorization and heavily invasive teaching methods, where most of the communication is a one-way transfer (or attempt to transfer) knowledge from the teacher to the students, but I would assume there can be little argument when I say that children, everyone really, learn best when the thing they are learning about interests them, or the teaching method is enjoyable. And there is no doubt that most children find technology enjoyable. Whether computers, cellphones or video games, these clearly engage children (and adults). So why don’t we utilize technology to better effect in education?

Most schools spends a lot of time trying to stuff facts into children’s heads and then repeatedly test to see how quickly and efficiently those facts can then be pulled out again. But we have ample evidence everyday that this is not the way children really learn; they’re curious, they explore, they experiment, they learn from each other. So why do we expend so much time, money and energy trying to educate them in these other, counterintuitive ways?

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