CIRCLING my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.” Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.
I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.
If you watch enough television, you'll witness what psychologists describe as birth order stereotypes. Take Alex P. Keaton of the 1980s U.S. sitcom Family Ties. Firstborn Alex was far more brash and competitive than his younger sisters, reading The Wall Street Journal while in high school, for example. Now scientists report that the stereotype is valid: eldest children are less cooperative, trusting, and reciprocating than their siblings.
Psychologists have been debating the importance of birth order since the days of Sigmund Freud. Those that argue that it plays a strong role in personality say, for instance, that middleborn children are more social than their youngest or oldest siblings because they get the least amount of attention from their parents and thus must make friends outside of their family. Psychologists base their findings on self-questionnaires and interviews with friends and family.
Evolutionary biologist Alexandre Courtiol of the University of Montpellier 2 in France and colleagues wanted a more objective test. So they asked 510 unrelated college students to play a two-person investment game. The game worked like this: Both players started with €3. Player A, the investor, could send any amount of her money to player B, the banker, who would triple that money. Then player B could return any amount of his now larger pool of cash to player A. Because player B didn't have to send any money back, the amount player A sends to him is a measure of trust. And the sum player B returns to player A is therefore a measure of reciprocity.
“Two thousand seventy-four pages and trillions of dollars later,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said recently, “this bill doesn’t even meet the basic goal that the American people had in mind and what they thought this debate was all about: to lower costs.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill makes no significant long-term cost reductions. Even Democrats have become nervous. For many, the hope of reform was to re-form the health-care system. If nothing is done, the United States is on track to spend an unimaginable ten trillion dollars more on health care in the next decade than it currently spends, hobbling government, growth, and employment. Where we crave sweeping transformation, however, all the current bill offers is those pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet—here’s the interesting thing—history suggests otherwise.
In recent months, the likes of Palestinian filmmakers Najwa Najjar and Annemarie Jacir, Jordan's Amin Matalqa, the U.A.E.'s Ali F. Mostafa, Arab-American Cherien Dabis, Lebanon's Chadi Zeneddine, Morocco's Hicham Ayouch and Saudi Arabia's Haifaa Mansour have all completed, or are in the process of completing, their debut efforts.
These young directors, many of whom grew up in the shadow of civil war and political strife in their native countries, are proving to be comfortable straddling East and West. That fusion is imbuing their filmmaking aesthetic with an often intriguing mix of Arabic subject matter and cultural influences from both Hollywood and Europe.
What's more, these up-and-coming talents are gaining the attention of some of the film world's biggest companies.
Zeneddine, for example, whose first film, “Falling From Earth,” is a poetically elliptical take on life in modern-day Beirut, has been signed up by Disney to develop “The Last of the Storytellers,” drawing on the Arab world's rich folkloric traditions.
Similarly, Ayouch has been enlisted by 20th Century Fox to make the studio's first Arabic-language feature film with “Samba,” about a Moroccan man who is obsessed with a Brazilian telenovela star and who teaches a samba class to a host of doting young women all eager to win his heart.
In June of this year, I posted a video here from the New York Times about the “Improbable American,” Todd Shea. Some people responded with suspicion and hostility to Todd's work in the comments to that post, but Todd reacted there with patience and good humor, taking pains to explain his admirable and important work in greater detail. Later in the summer, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Todd one day, and I was so impressed with his positive attitude and his courage that I promised to try to raise funds for his organization at 3QD this year.
Well the time to do that is now. We are trying to raise at least $2,500 before Christmas. Please take a few minutes to watch the video below again, read Todd's profile from the New York Times, and then please consider giving as generously as possible to Todd's cause, which is doing so much, not just for the poor of Pakistan, but also in terms of America's image in the hearts of people there.
Please use the ChipIn widget near the top of the right hand column here at 3QD to make contributions. Think what an excellent Christmas gift to the people of Pakistan this will be!
On Christmas day, I will publish a list of contributors (without the dollar amounts) who have given their permission for their name to be published. (I will write to you and ask, but you can make it easier for me by including a note when you pay.)
Let's try to exceed our target by as much as possible!
Adam B. Ellick in the New York Times:
The lone hospital in this Kashmiri mountain town was on the eve of hosting one of the year’s biggest social gatherings, a health fair for several hundred villagers, and Todd Shea was not happy.
The hospital’s founder, Mr. Shea, an American who resembles a football coach more than a health worker, was outraged because one of the employees had failed to purchase enough hygiene kits — freebies the villagers had come to expect at the fair.
“This is a problem, and there is a solution,” Mr. Shea, strident but good-natured, yelled to a staffer on the phone from the field. “Let’s see how good you are. I know there are kits lurking in the walls. I guarantee you that if I come there, I will find them. You know me!”
Seven hours later, at midnight, the employee returned from a nearby city with a sheepish smile and 100 kits he had managed to round up. Mr. Shea hugged him, “I believe in you,” he said.
If Mr. Shea, 42, had a résumé, it would by his own admission reveal far more experience as a cocaine addict than as a medical professional. But with his take-charge demeanor, he has transformed primary health care here in this mountain town in Kashmir, where government services are mostly invisible.
Sustainable Healthcare Initiatives Now Empowering Pakistan (SHINE PAKISTAN) and its Pakistan-registered entity, Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS), have been operating for nearly 4 years to provide preventive, primary and emergency healthcare services and health education to citizens living in remote and mountainous area that were devastated by the October 8 2005 earthquake in Pakistan Administered Kashmir. SHINE PAKISTAN/CDRS currently provide docotors, medical staff, volunteers, medicines, supplies and operational funds to 12 health facilities in cooperation with The Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) and the the Health Department of Pakistan Aministered Kashmir.
Thanks to Brian D'Amato not only for the interview but for original visual images not available elsewhere. Above, Koh's Game, copyright Brian D'Amato
In the early '90s, the artist and writer Brian D'Amato published Beauty, an international bestseller about cosmetic surgery and young love gone wrong, badly wrong.Back then, it was all slightly futuristic, right down to its not very cuddly protagonist, a metrosexual monster whose fate I shall not uncork here. Reading it was about as much fun as you could have within a 25-mile radius of New Haven; you kept running into Derrida, but it was trashy enough to make you nice and guilty too. I fondly recall its Mayan sub-theme, and was delighted to find, a decade and a half later, that Brian D'Amato had gone Mayan in the biggest possible way, with In the Courts of the Sun, volume I of a trilogy, The Sacrifice Game, set both in the very near future and in 664 CE, the high point of Mayan civilization.
It's the read you would expect from the writer of Beauty — smart, funny, always surprising, and very sure-handedly grounded in technology and philosophy of science. You can read this as literature, but you can also get the sci-fi fix you need. You could even read it to find out how an orphaned Maya refugee interfaces with some beamish and satanic Mormons. There are lots of reasons to get involved, and, whichever you choose, you'll be glad you did. Soon, The Sacrifice Game will be available not only as a trilogy but as a game — one more form of time travel for those with a thirst for it.
Recently, I caught up with Brian D'Amato, who writes from Lake Michigan these days.
I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as 'non-Western philosophy'. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light of slowly burning seal blubber, to engage in leisurely dialogue about the nature of space and time. That's different, I insisted, because they were only addressing the issue (I supposed) within the comfortable mythological confines of their culture, rather than asking what space and time look like when you strip away your culture's contingent myths, which are, as Spinoza would say, satisfying only to the imagination, and then see what is left over. I had an even stronger complaint about what had come to be called 'African philosophy', 'Native American philosophy', and so on. These, I thought, were more the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding brought about by the politics of identity, which supposed that every identity group –and often what counts as an identity group, I noted, is only slapped together in hasty response to the classificatory schemes of the West: as if there could have been anything like a unified tradition across the African or North American continent prior to the period of colonial expansion– must come up with its own version of whatever it is that the West is thought to do well. I felt horribly discouraged when, on more than one occasion, while working the 'philosophy table' at my university's open house, I would meet adult Cree and Mohawks thinking of returning to school who, as they explained, might want to study 'your' (i.e., my) philosophy someday, but didn't feel any particular urgency to do so, since “we've got philosophers of our own.”
The sun has been hanging low for a while now, so different from the high summer. I find myself imagining the extreme angle of its likely incidence, the cause of its fleeting presence nowadays. The garden gets next to no sun, and cold is setting into the house for the short but sharp winter that Delhi experiences. The cool dry air and gentle sun make this the season for mela-s, festivals of culture and commerce that are scripted into the cultural geography of all north India, but brought to exalted expression in the social calendar of New Delhi.
We began by buying soap made at an ashram in Gangotri, the Himalayan mouth of the river Ganga at the Dastkar handicraft mela. We traipsed through the sarees displayed at the Chinmaya Mission mela, and enjoyed the root-beer at the American Women's Association mela, and bratwurst with beer at the German Mela. This morning we're back from the Delhi Commonwealth Wives Association mela, where we bought woolen slippers and hats at a stall run by the wives of diplomats from Kyrgyztan.
Diverting as these outings are, they're just sideshows to the real mela event of the season, the India International Trade Fair. The IITF, as it is universally referred to, is promoted by a government body and held in a specially-constructed fair grounds called Pragati Maidan, literally 'Progress Pavillion.' The first IITF was held in 1980, at the very zenith of India's era of socialism. In keeping with the state symbolism of those times, the event would be inaugurated on the 14th of November ever year, the birth anniversary of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Over the years, Pragati Maidan's 150 acre site accumulated new halls, auditoria and spectacle sites in keeping with the annual needs of the IITF. Some of the major states of India, were allotted sites where they have built semi-permanent pavilions that strain to capture the cultural and economic ethos of their region. Karnataka's pavilion is built as an over-scale replica of the medieval stone temples that dot its rural landscape. Just across, Gujarat has traded up the standard kitsch-tourism representations in favor of an unconvincing replica of modern technology park, replete with multiple satellite dishes and LED displays. This seems more and more the style these days, with Punjab also featuring full-scale models celebrating call centers.
Once you step inside, each state pavilion offers more or less the same set of propaganda pieces: infrastructural achievements, investment opportunities, and culture and tourism destinations. The differences lay in the quality and manner in which these regional stories are told. West Bengal, where nothing has changed in 30 years is still using dioramas and macquettes to illustrate state projects like wind mill farms, and paying homage to its leading intellectuals through a gallery of heroes made up of black and white photographs. On the other hand, Bihar, now under new and dynamic leadership, is showing interactive displays which promise new kinds of investment opportunities in the state. There is something winning about this kind of regional self-celebration, for it suggests that the diverse infrastructural, trade, and business activities that go on in a particular region eventually come together to create a larger whole, whose total meaning is the state itself.
Geese This morning when the sky’s red skin is drawn across a beginning and the grass is taut with frost and the clarity of the edge of things recalls the precision of an engraver’s point an irregular V of geese passes left to right like beads of an animated rosary each a honking Hail Mary a striving prayer an individual articulating dot an I-am of we-are
we are moving south we are honking like hell we are drifting up and down in a wandering V together to reach some destination by a means coded in our cells by a wisdom unknown by an accident or lovely intention on a whim or a want on an updraft or drawn down by a turn in the weather
we have been invited and we are moving south implacably as life moves
Tolu Ogunlesi summarizes the ‘Big Ideas’ arising from discussions at the two-day African Media Leaders Forum 2009, which took place in Lagos, Nigeria, in November.
THE CENT AND THE CONTENT
Monetising content – especially in the Age of the Internet – will remain one of the media’s biggest challenges.
It was the recurring query in the Forum’s discussions: “How do we monetise this content?”
John Lavine, Professor and Dean of the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, USA advocated a shift in perspective; from a “consumer media” outlook to a “business media” outlook. He argued for a micropayment model, saying that farmers for example would not mind paying a small fee for “farm information” (improved varieties of seed and water usage); and that a penny from each of a million people is a more sustainable revenue model than a dollar from ten persons. He classified audiences into two: “general” and “deep.” The general audience, he said, will be attracted, and satisfied, by the breaking news and the “go-to-do” information, while the deep audience will pay for premium content – “deeper news” and “analyses”.
What is certain is that most media businesses will have to struggle with balancing the journalism and the business. The observation by Robert Kabushenga, CEO of Uganda’s New Vision, that: “New [media] versus old [media] is a problem of the newsroom, not the boardroom,” helps to illustrate the often-conflicting realities faced by the content-producing and the content-marketing wings of any media business.
In the minds of many, including scientists from the more successful sciences, the field of psychology is not a science and may never be a science. The Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, was kind in his criticism of psychology as a science when he said that we have the form [of science] down, but we are not producing any laws of nature. In my view, psychology as a science has made some important contributions to describing mental life and behavior in animals and humans, but, on the whole, I tend to agree with Feynman.
I care about psychology as a science, very deeply. But, why should I care? Why should anyone care? Scientific psychology must care if we are to have confidence in our discipline as a science, in ourselves as scientists, and be respected by the larger scientific community as colleagues on an equal footing. For anyone who doubts that psychological science had a serious problem of credibility, consider the following:
The American Psychological Association (APA) did not issue a position in support of science in the classroom in the recent Dover, OH school case. The case involved the integrity of the school district's science curriculum for teaching of the science of evolutionary biology, and against the introduction of faith-based pretenses to science.
The ascendancy of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) is due, not in a small way, to the failure of mainstream psychology to embrace the mantel of science.
The de facto secession of Division 14 from APA and the creation an independent professional association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).
Students today are not as [insert your own text] as when I was a student.
I began teaching psychological research methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels after two careers in research psychology – one at IBM Corporation, and another as a social science research consultant. The new mission I gave myself was the training of the next generation of research psychologists. Very quickly, I fell in love with teaching, and I fell in love with my students (not inappropriately, I might add.) For the father in me, it felt like having my children back home again.
(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.) __________________________________________
‘Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience, which grows in turn out of man’s overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and emotion to this experience.’ [1]
Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, first arose in Syria and Iraq in the 8th century CE. Arab conquerors, a century earlier, had taken Islam all over the Near East, which included lands with a long tradition of ascetic thought and eastern Christian monasticism—a tradition that valued religious poverty, contempt for worldly pleasures, and a secret world of virtue beyond that of obedience to law—no doubt encouraged by the fact that for three centuries, until after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, Christians in the Near East were a minority subject to suspicion and persecution by the pagan Romans.
But old habits die hard, and even as Islam spread, many new converts, beneath a slim veneer of their new faith, persisted with asceticism and detachment. What transformed asceticism into mysticism was something quite radical: an unabashed love of God. This transformation has been symbolically ascribed to a woman from Basra, Rabi’ah al-Adawiyah (d. 801?), among the first to articulate the mystic ideal of a disinterested love of God, as in her prayer below.
‘O God, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, grudge me not Thy everlasting beauty.’ [2]
Many believers who were also drawn to rational philosophy found its objective accounts of God unsatisfactory. They yearned for a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the philosophers and the legalistic God of the theologians (the ulema). Early Islamic mystics, or Sufis, [3] thus evolved a more subjective notion of God: each of us can experience the divine differently; revelation is an event that unfolds deep within us; each of us, through our own effort, can reach out to the divine.
A systematic destruction of the ego (fana) and surrender of the self to God became central to the Sufi ideal: one who discards his ego to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. ‘Man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.’ [4] Many practiced celibacy as a mystic ideal, flouting the example of matrimony set by Muhammad himself. Scholars like Majid Fakhry have noted Hindu influences on ‘this bold concept of annihilation of the ego and the reabsorption of the human in the divine’ (many early mystics in Persia had Hindu teachers).
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But defenders of religion like [Kathryn] Lofton and Karen Armstrong and the not-quite-pro-religion-but-getting-there types like Terry Eagleton invariably attack atheists for their lack of charm, style, empathy and another nebulous quality (I think of it as *mysterianism*) which keeps them from fully appreciating the true nature of religion. In the first part of her article Lofton sticks to that formula. Toward the end however, she introduces a new accusation that I have not until now seen hurled at the new (or old) atheists.
What is religion? The New Atheists reply, with clarion diagnostic consistency: Religion is something that sells you something invisible so you may feel that which you cannot find elsewhere. It is something for which there is insufficient evidence. It is something people do because they have always done it, not because they know how to think about it. Religion is irrational, it is emotional, and it is instinctual. Religion enslaves you with its wiles, then forgets to remove the handcuffs. It is the fortune teller reading entrails, not the captain consulting his compass. It massages and preys and toys and plays and screws you over, time and again, with a promise it won’t keep because of its irrationality and its whimsy. Religion is a know-at-all with no knowledge. It makes “a virtue out of not thinking.” Religion is cutting the hedge repeatedly around an erection. Religion is, it turns out, a lot like a girl.
Religion as effeminacy is nothing new. Nor indeed is the accusation that religion is socially sanctioned lunacy. Treating it as a neurological disorder, however, sets the New Atheists within a long tradition of critical misogyny. Under the guise of protecting your children, in the effort to best serve your sweet flock of idiots, if you want to be a New Atheist you have reclaimed a New Virility to counter your post-industrial emasculation. This virility plays out in demonstrations of protective strength, plowing away at the big two nemeses (Christianity and Islam) in the interest of protecting the little guy. It is also exhibited in grand tours of scientific proof, or plodding expulsions of religious duplicity.
Wait a minute! Have atheists and skeptics ever said that religion is like a girl? (Not that there is anything wrong with being a girl) Or that believing in unverifiable myths for comfort is exclusively a womanly quality? Have atheists refused to admit women into their fold? Do they claim that women are genetically incapable of possessing rational minds? On the other hand, organized religion has diligently kept women out of leadership roles through much of history. So, the charge of misogyny from a defender of “faith” sounds strange.
CIRCLING my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.” Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.
