In turn, part of Schiller’s anthropological realism was his recognition of fundamental “drives” or desires in Man. They were of a lesser physical denomination than Freud was to posit later, even though the subconscious and sexual drives are addressed in some of his plays, most importantly in Don Carlos. But the two main drives that Schiller identified in his theoretical writings are what he called the Stofftrieb and Formtrieb. They refer to Man’s desire to accumulate matter, “stuff”, substance, but also to the necessity to give shape to the amassed material. Again, the issue is how these drives relate to, or are compatible with, Schiller’s concept of freedom. He did not suggest that we could, or should, attempt to emancipate ourselves from those urges. Freedom means that we make use of them “freely”. We should “play” with them, for they should not govern or even overpower us. Schiller’s concern about how we can preserve our freedom in the face of conflicting interests, external pressures and expectations was echoed some 200 years later when Heinrich Böll, the 1972 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, said in his last major interview: “Every day one segment of our liberties passes away.” These concerns are today more relevant than ever. We need to be careful not to turn into captives of our ever-growing desire to increase self-protectionism. To live means to be exposed to risk. We can try to minimise it but we will never eliminate it. Fate and failure strike when we least expect them. We should remain free in the way we deal creatively with risk. The risk assessors and managers of today, who failed so blatantly prior to the recent credit crash, should read more Greek and Shakespearian tragedies, and a great deal of Schiller before they start assessing risks again. In short, we cannot afford ever to forget Schiller again, in this country or anywhere else.

more from Rüdiger Görner at Standpoint here.

J. Bradford DeLong in Project Syndicate:

In America today – and in the rest of the world – economic-policy centrists are being squeezed. The Economic Policy Institute reports a poll showing that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the economic policies of the past year have greatly enriched the bankers of Midtown Manhattan and London’s Canary Wharf (they really aren’t concentrated along Wall Street or in the City of London anymore).

In America, the Republican congressional caucus is just saying no: no to short-term deficit spending to put people to work, no to supporting the banking system, and no to increased government oversight or ownership of financial entities. And the banks themselves are back to business-as-usual: anxious to block any financial-sector reform and trusting congressmen eager for campaign contributions to delay and disrupt the legislative process.

I do not claim that policy in recent years has been ideal. If I had been running things 13 months ago, the United States Treasury and Federal Reserve would have let Lehman and AIG fail – but I would have discounted their debt for cash at face value, provided that the debt also came with sufficient equity warrants. That would have preserved the functioning of the system while severely punishing the banking and shadow-banking systems’ equity holders, and today nobody would be claiming that their risk management practices were adequate and did not need reform.

If I had been running things 19 months ago, I would have nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for the duration of the crisis shifted monetary and financial policy from targeting the Federal Funds rate to targeting the price of mortgages.

For forty-five years a team of linguists, primarily led by Christian Kay at the University of Glasgow, has laboured to produce the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. It contains historically organised synonyms for almost every word in the second edition of the OED, and in addition contains the whole range of Old English words that the OED does not define (the policy of the OED is not to include words that didn’t survive into Middle English; the HTOED team wanted to include the entire history of the language). It is by far the largest thesaurus ever attempted in any language. We use a dictionary to look up a word; we will use the HTOED to look up a sense or a number of senses. It has no real precedent, and although it does at first seem daunting, with perseverance and concentration it becomes approachable; then you can see that soon it will provide support and entertainment, and soon after that it will have become an addictive companion, the two volumes stoutly flanking Shakespeare and the Bible on that shimmering desert island.

more from Elspeth Barker at Literary Review here.

Can a bad economy make for great poetry? Hugo von Hofmannsthal thought so. Indeed, he saw his own gift for lyrical writing and reflection as being, in a way, a consequence of the stock market crash of 1873. This self-understanding starts with the fact that Hofmannsthal was conceived at the very moment of the bust. His father, a banker, got word of it soon after arriving in Naples for his honeymoon. Cutting his trip short, he hurried back to Vienna, where he was able to confirm that the family fortune, which stemmed from his silk-trading, noble “von”-earning, devoutly Jewish grandfather, had evaporated. But even harder hit, Hofmannsthal believed, was his mother. She already suffered from weak nerves; according to him, the cause was the tumultuous context of her own birth: the revolutions of 1848. When financial worries came, she dealt with them poorly. In Hofmannsthal’s view his mother’s stress imprinted itself on him in the womb. Its mark was the special sensitivity of the poet. Clearly, Hofmannsthal liked to spin myths about himself. Yet in treating his talent as a phenomenon that demanded a back story, he was merely acknowledging what was plain to see. Even Karl Kraus, who loathed Hofmannsthal and seized every opportunity to debunk him, acknowledged that Hofmannsthal was a great writer. In a fin-de-siècle Viennese literary scene famously well stocked with brilliant poets and thinkers Hofmannsthal stood out. It helped that he entered the scene so young. He was still in high school when, under the pseudonym “Loris”, he began placing essays and poems in literary journals. His precociousness as well as his virtuosity and the refinement of his observations were unrivaled.

more from Paul Reitter at the TLS here.

John Allen Paulos in his excellent column Who's Counting at ABC News:

I must admit I read tabloid headlines while in line at supermarkets.

Often the headlines and stories are true enough in a literal sense, but seriously misleading. In this regard they're not always that different from some cable or mainstream media stories.

In any case, here are five possible tabloid stories followed by five brief explanations. You might want to figure out your own explanations before reading the ones here.

Can You Spot the Misleading Headlines?

1. Thousands to Die After Swine Flu Vaccination

Many public health authorities privately fear that there will be many heart attacks among older people and miscarriages among pregnant women occurring soon after these people are inoculated with the H1N1 vaccine. In fact, they expect there to be thousands of cases of this sad combination of events. Autism activists may take this as further reason to skip not just the H1H1 vaccine, but other childhood immunizations.

2. New Birther Claims About Obama Well-Documented

A new birther group has come up with incontrovertible evidence that President Obama was, in fact, born overseas and not in the contiguous United States. The documentation this time is rock solid, and there are reports that Obama himself has privately acknowledged the group's claim.

More here.

Maywa Montenegro in Seed:

When delegates from 192 nations arrive in Copenhagen in December for the UN COP15 summit, they will confront a 181-page draft negotiation text, 2,000 bracketed passages still in dispute, and just 11 days in which to come to some sort of consensus. To power them through these discussions, Denmark has promised a smorgasbord of ecologically minded fare: All water will be tap (not bottled), tea and coffee will be fair trade, and the food menu will be no less than 65 percent organic.

Though undoubtedly well-intentioned, this last provision is troubling, but not because anyone really cares about the provenance of Ban Ki-Moon’s turnip greens. Rather, it suggests a willful and dangerous ignorance about the tenuous state of global agriculture, and the prospects for feeding 9 billion people while also addressing biodiversity loss, water shortage, and, yes, climate change. Organic foods are enjoying skyrocketing popularity in the US and Europe, as are their ill-defined sidekicks, “natural,” “whole,” and “real” foods. Yet popular notions that these foods—and the agriculture that begets them—are at once better for people and for the planet turn out to be largely devoid of experimental support. Worse still, “organophilia” tends to go hand-in-hand with technophobic skepticism towards the very sorts of scientific approaches most likely to supercharge an ailing food system while leaving our planet intact.

More here.

This is from a couple of years ago, but I thought it worth posting anyway. From The Smart Set:

I came to the current religion debates a bored man. Started by the discussions around “intelligent design” and by the books of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris (The Four Horsemen), the debate seemed to pit two irreconcilable views against one another, both vying for an empty prize. Religion, I gathered, will always have its place, as will the practices of science and rational inquiry. Perhaps one day some other arrangement, some other separation of powers, will come about, but it won’t be any time soon, and it will happen when no one is looking. It will happen on its own time, with the lazy mastodon movements of history, which lumbers and rarely sprints.

It has also often struck me in some inchoate way that while the basic tenets and practices of any specific religion aren’t terribly impressive, the intellectual dilemma of faith and faithlessness has something to it. Sure, religion has its ugly side and must strike everyone in at least one moment of clarity as being something close to crazy. But, then again, the cleverest of the religious thinkers have always admitted this, have even tried to turn it into a strength. It is hard, for instance, not to admire the way that Tertullian, the Carthaginian Christian philosopher of the second century, stood up to the fundamental absurdity of his faith and proclaimed “credo quia absurdum,” “I believe because it is absurd.” Not I believe even though it is absurd, but I believe because it is absurd. In a more modern variant, the tortured mental gymnastics that Kierkegaard goes through in his defense of the story of Abraham and Isaac goes beyond simplistic apologetics. For Kierkegaard, the story is powerful because it makes no sense from any reasonable perspective; it is utterly unthinkable that God would tell Abraham to sacrifice his son and then wait to see if he’d actually go through with it. The story is so terrible that it demands attention, and in demanding of us it gives us access to something more powerful and more true than what is generally encountered in the world of practical necessity and contingent decisions that we live in the rest of the time. It forces a decision.

More here.

A Question of Choice

I am a mountain
I laugh with those who laugh loudest
I’ve been a church
Seen them come
Of different ages, sizes, colours
Black, white, yellow, red and pink

A walk in and walk out
By the rich and the destitute

I have been beaten
Spat at, kicked and raped
My brain is a cold room
That stores torturous secrets
My flesh is like a football
Kicked all the way round

I am a balancing rock
Having survived all weather
A resting place for peace-loving birds
I live the way I believe
Because l have a strong will

by Freedom T.V. Nyambaya, 2009

from Poetry International, 2009

Evgeny Morozov in the Boston Review:

Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed.

Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor.

The enthusiasm may not always be well-informed, but it is understandable. From the start, Wikipedia was an improbable outcome. According to a popular techie quip, it works in practice, but not in theory. Think about it: a bunch of strangers—and not the world’s most sociable strangers—leveraged the power of the Internet to create a highly functioning, über-productive community that voluntarily creates usable (and frequently used) knowledge for others. How much money would you have been prepared to bet against that result a decade ago?

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Mushahid Hussain in The News International:

Hillary Clinton's visit with a difference was probably the most significant event in Pakistan-American relations since the advent of President Barack Hussein Obama. She came, she saw, but while she did not quite conquer the “hearts and minds” of Pakistanis, Hillary at least earned their grudging admiration. She showed more guts than the bunkered-up Pakistan rulers, who refuse to leave the comfort and safety of their “5-star prisons” in Islamabad. Unlike the aloof and abrasive Holbrooke, Hillary reached out to the “real” Pakistan. She got a peep into the emerging Pakistani society — dynamic, vibrant, outspoken and self-confident. She seemed taken aback, used as visiting high-level Americans are to a sanitised Islamabad, where the officially-certified truth of the fawning ruling elite links sycophancy and servility to their self-perpetuation.
A profile of this “new” Pakistan is instructive, with three key ingredients. First, while the “old” Pakistan was politically a “one-window operation” — monolithic and centrally-guided — today's multiple power centres go beyond the military-security Establishment or the traditional political elite, and these now include the fiercely-independent media, an assertive civil society, confident young men and women with faith in their country's future, and a free judiciary that for the first time is truly an autonomous player.

Second, in contrast to the “old” Pakistan where the political elite was united in its belief that the road to Islamabad lies through Washington, the “new” Pakistan has little time for 'business-as-usual' political shenanigans, an absence of fear of power and authority, and no “Holy Cows.”

Third, there is a broad popular consensus woven around a rejection of the mediaeval mindset and terrorism of the extremists, the corruption and capitulation of the ruling elite, and the hubris and diktat emanating from Washington.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Ayn Rand was finally getting her due. After Time magazine had called her masterpiece—the novel Atlas Shrugged—“a nightmare,” after the eminent philosopher Sidney Hook had savaged her in the New York Times Book Review, she had been invited to Harvard to present a paper on her philosophy of art. Her host, John Hospers, a rising young philosopher from Brooklyn College, belonged to the American Society for Aesthetics, which was meeting in Cambridge in October 1962.

Rand’s appearance at Harvard marked a pinnacle in her already astonishing career. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, the eldest daughter of affluent Jewish parents, she fled Russia in 1926, embittered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which had destroyed her family’s livelihood. Upon arrival in New York, she assumed the more glamorous nom de plume Ayn Rand and headed for Hollywood. Rand’s new name was the first of her many reinventions. She began as a hack Hollywood writer but then wrote two plays and a novel. Soon she was a political activist, too, working to defeat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which she feared was only the first step toward communism in America. Her second novel, The Fountainhead, published in 1943, was treasured by a small band of conservatives who applauded her attack upon collectivism and her bold defense of selfishness. It was also a bestseller that vaulted Rand to literary fame, and would become a successful film six years later.

More here.

Dan Sperber in Cognition and Culture invites social and cultural anthropologists to examine the issue:

The National Geographic Magazine reports: “On September 23, 2008, Dorothy, a female chimpanzee in her late 40s, died of congestive heart failure. A maternal and beloved figure, Dorothy had spent eight years at Cameroon's Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, which houses and rehabilitates chimps victimized by habitat loss and the illegal African bushmeat trade…. Szczupider, who had been a volunteer at the center, told me: 'Her presence, and loss, was palpable, and resonated throughout the group. The management at Sanaga-Yong opted to let Dorothy's chimpanzee family witness her burial, so that perhaps they would understand, in their own capacity, that Dorothy would not return. Some chimps displayed aggression while others barked in frustration. But perhaps the most stunning reaction was a recurring, almost tangible silence. If one knows chimpanzees, then one knows that [they] are not [usually] silent creatures.' “

There are other examples of what looks like animal grieving behaviour, the case of elephants being the best known (here is a relevant video). Marc Bekoff, in an article forthcoming in Emotion, Space and Society, reports observing grieving magpies (magpies are Corvids, a very intelligent family of birds): “One magpie had obviously been hit by a car and was lying dead on the side of the road. The four other magpies were standing around him. One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it, just as an elephant would nose the carcass of another elephant, and stepped back. Another magpie did the same thing. Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass, and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then, all four magpies stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off.”

These behaviours beg for an explanation.

Meera Lee Sethi in Inkling Magazine:

In the second section of Samuel Barber’s exquisitely mournful composition “Adagio for Strings,” the cellos, violas, and violins join together to build to a rising melodic climax, reaching a thrilling, almost keening peak of grief – and then sharply stop. There is a breathtaking silence that lasts several long seconds. Finally, after more than a few thudding heartbeats, the instruments resume their play with a series of soft chords that now seem painfully delicate, carrying the piece to its sighing, fading conclusion.

When you listen to “Adagio for Strings,” that brief pause two thirds of the way into the music is anything but empty; in fact, it fairly aches with woe. Of course classical composers, jazz musicians, and pop stars alike have always known the power of the pregnant pause. They carefully insert silence in between their notes, using it like a supple extra voice. It can be full of tension, humor, serenity, or dramatic finality, its character conditioned by the shape of the space it occupies. And now psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to unravel why, exactly, silence speaks so many volumes.

For example last year University of Arkansas researcher Elizabeth Margulis showed that people hear pauses in music very differently based on the specific context of the silence. Using listening tests to investigate people’s responses to silences contained within musical excerpts, she found that participants perceived changes in both the duration and the amount of tension in the acoustic void depending on the music around it. Margulis also asked participants to report whether they had experienced “a sensation of beats” during a musical silence and indeed some listeners reported hearing subtle differences in what they perceive as the meter of the very same silence—an astonishing, yet somehow intuitive finding. Silence, it seems, actually has a rhythm.

Fred Halliday in openDemocracy:

Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of, at least temporary, improvement in relations between Russia and the west, few may spare a thought for what it was that ended two decades ago. On two issues history has given its ultimate verdict: the cold war, the third and longest of the three chapters that made up the great global civil war of 1914-91, will not return; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as a multinational state and as a global ideological and strategic challenge to the west, is indeed dead. However, on a third component of this story – the worldwide communist movement – the verdict is, as yet, less clear.

Communism, embodying the ideology and the social aspirations underlying the Soviet challenge, and the worldwide echo that challenge evoked remains to be interred. But to bury communism can only be done on the basis of recognising what it represented, why millions of people struggled for, and believed in, this ideal and what it was they were struggling against. It can also only be done when the legacy of this ideology and movement is assessed and not simply forgotten, or conveniently, and in violation of all historical evidence, dismissed as an “illusion”.

Judging from the politics and intellectual debates of today, neither those who celebrate the end of communism, nor those who are now articulating a radical alternative, have carried out such an assessment: between (on one side) the still resilient complacency of market capitalism and an increasingly uncertain world of liberal democracy, and (on the other) the vacuous radicalisms that pose as a global alternative, the lessons of the communist past remain largely ignored. And so, as they say, they will be repeated.

Hamid Dabashi at CNN:

November 4 is the 30th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis, a turning point in Iranian history, in the geopolitics of the region and in the troubled history of U.S.-Iran relations.

On that day, militants, many of them students, invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking about 70 Americans as hostages in a drama that would last 444 days.

I am one of the last Iranian students who peacefully walked into the United States embassy in Tehran. I went there in July 1976 with a recently acquired Iranian passport and an even more recently obtained acceptance letter from the University of Pennsylvania, and an I-20 form, as we called it then. Then a 25-year-old, I applied for a visa, received one and boarded a plane to Philadelphia.

In just about a second and a half, the way time flies these days, I will turn 60, and I will have a claim over Philadelphia and New York as my successive hometowns more than I do over the cities in which I was born and received my college education, Ahvaz and Tehran.

More here.

David Cole in the New York Review of Books:

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors—Russia and Belarus.

Even so, the imprisoned make up only two thirds of one percent of the nation's general population. And most of those imprisoned are poor and uneducated, disproportionately drawn from the margins of society. For the vast majority of us, in other words, the idea that we might find ourselves in jail or prison is simply not a genuine concern.

For one group in particular, however, these figures have concrete and deep-rooted implications—African-Americans, especially young black men, and especially poor young black men. African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites—a disparity that dwarfs other racial disparities. (Black–white disparities in unemployment, for example, are 2–1; in nonmarital childbirth, 3–1; in infant mortality, 2–1; and in net worth, 1–5^[1]).

In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population, and that population has skyrocketed. The disparities are greatest where race and class intersect—nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five. And the incarceration rate for this group—black male high school dropouts—is nearly fifty times the national average.^[2]

More here.

After communism came the vile capitalism,” Gabriel, my guide on a communist walking tour of Budapest, said. Vile? “Oh, it’s just an expression” he told me. “But for millions of Hungarians it has not been a good 20 years, most of us don’t feel like celebrating.” Friday, 23rd October marked two decades of Hungarian independence from Soviet rule, and was also the anniversary of the 1956 revolution. And even if Gabriel was reluctant to reminisce (“I just want it to be passed”), the country’s public life is strikingly forward about looking backwards. Hungary’s public arraignment of its 20th-century crimes—a trial put on for tourists, as much as citizens—marks it out from most of Europe. Measured by the number of museums, Spain seems largely in denial that it had a civil war, let alone 36 years of Franco, and Britain’s accounting of its empire is still woefully inadequate. In Hungary, however, the willingness to acknowledge the recent past is nowhere more evident than in Memento Park, a home for dead statues and an epic artistic achievement. Most former Soviet bloc countries demolished their communist relics or let them rot. In 1993, the Hungarian government decided to put their totems to Marx, Engels, Lenin and friends on display on the outskirts of Budapest. They loom noiselessly amid dusty scrubland, disconnected from the people over whom they once held sway. If you’ve ever wondered what a socialist realist Disneyland would be like, this is the quickest way of finding out.

more from Dan Hancox at Prospect Magazine here.

Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually. (Seventeen billion goes to food and another twelve billion to veterinary bills.) Despite the recession, pet-related expenditures this year are expected to increase five per cent over 2008, in part owing to outlays on luxury items like avian manicures and canine bath spritz. “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. (Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family. Americans also love to eat animals.

more from Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker here.

What are you, really? To the rest of the world you appear as a particular human being, a publicly observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt about their inner lives. One of the enduring questions of philosophy is whether there really is such a thing as the self, and if so, what it is. Descartes famously thought that it was the thing of whose existence he could be most certain, even if he doubted the existence of the physical world and therefore of the human being called René Descartes – because in thinking, he was immediately aware of his own existence as the subject of his thought. Others have argued that this idea of the self is an illusion, due to a misunderstanding of how the word ‘I’ functions: in fact it refers to the human being who utters it, and it is you the publicly observable human being, and not anything else, that is the subject of all your experiences, thoughts and feelings. Galen Strawson’s book Selves, a work of shameless metaphysics, argues that selves exist and that they are not human beings.

more from Thomas Nagel at the LRB here.