by Misha Lepetic

“For the people are all in all.”
~ Herodotus III.80.

Last month I reviewed a small but representative selection of instances of Internet vigilantism. Whether we are talking about Cecil the Lion or Justine Sacco, the causes and the consequences may vary, but they share several characteristics, such as the speed with which events unfolded, and their very real-life consequences, such as ruined careers. But I elided the subtler mechanics of why these instances actually occur. Put another way, what gives rise to the mob in the first place? So, in a time-honored essayistic maneuver, I will revert to that quasi-mythical place Where All Things Began, aka ancient Greece.

The scene is ancient Persia, and our chronicler is the inimitable Herodotus. Having taken the throne in a coup, Darius debates the best form of government with the seven Persian nobles who were his co-conspirators. Considering how these things can go, it is a blessedly short discussion, with democracy, oligarchy and monarchy representing the three possibilities. The noble Otanes puts forward a lukewarm endorsement of democracy, but it's very much a straw man. He is more concerned with the shortcomings of monarchy than what might be the virtues of democracy. Another noble, Megabyzus, then speaks in support of oligarchy:

For there is nothing so void of understanding, nothing so full of wantonness, as the unwieldy rabble. It were folly not to be borne, for men, while seeking to escape the wantonness of a tyrant, to give themselves up to the wantonness of a rude unbridled mob. The tyrant, in all his doings, at least knows what is he about, but a mob is altogether devoid of knowledge; for how should there be any knowledge in a rabble, untaught, and with no natural sense of what is right and fit? It rushes wildly into state affairs with all the fury of a stream swollen in the winter, and confuses everything. Let the enemies of the Persians be ruled by democracies.

For his part, Darius acknowledges democracy and oligarchy, but it wouldn't be a spoiler to reveal that he ultimately settles on monarchy, with himself as the head of state. Thus Herodotus sets the stage for the war between the Greeks and the Persians. In a sense, the Histories can be viewed as a meandering meditation on the best form of government, whose merits are ultimately determined on the battlefield.

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by Madhu Kaza

“That girl won't leave any fruit on the trees,” a woman complains looking down from the roof of her home. In the orchard below the girl runs and –once she is in the clear — skips home hiding a guava in her dress. She stashes the fruit under a bunch of bananas in a covered bowl on the veranda. Then she pours some water into a dish that she carries across the yard and places next to a large earthen vessel from which she plucks three white kittens. The opening scene of Satyajit Ray's film Pather Panchali is one of stealing and feeding, mischief and care.

An old woman squats over a bowl of rice on the floor of the veranda. Small clumps of the rice which she mixes and squeezes into balls have fallen on the floor. She eats with her right hand, her wrinkled left hand pressed to the floor for support. Her emaciated face is toothless and her profile dramatic –a hooked nose, sunken cheeks and a sharp, jutting chin. We know she is frail, but hunched over in her white widow's sari, the severity of her features makes her look at times, at medium distance, not unlike a vulture. She eats with absorption and licks her fingers when she is done. The girl, Durga, sits behind the old woman watching her eat. When the old woman turns around and sees Durga she says, “I forgot to save some for you.” She uncovers the fruit bowl and reaches for a banana, discovering the guava that the girl has left for her. She examines the guava closely, beaming with delight.

A French filmmaker once walked out during a screening of Pather Panchali at Cannes and proclaimed, “I don't want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.”

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by Yohan J. John

What is a person? Does each of us have some fundamental essence? Is it the body? Is it the mind? Is it something else entirely? Versions of this question seem always to have animated human thought. In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, it seems as if one category of answer — the dualist idea that the essence of a person is an incorporeal soul that inhabits a material body — must be ruled out. But as it turns out, internalizing a non-dualist conception of the self is actually rather challenging for most people, including neuroscientists.

The scientific revolution is a story with two great themes: empowerment and disenchantment. While the tools of science and technology give humankind unprecedented power over the material world, the ideas that give rise to these tools seem to cast out the myriad souls and spirits that once haunted the world. Material objects are emptied of such animating principles — their properties are instead viewed as emerging from the laws of science that they must inexorably obey. In a sense this is how objects are defined: those things that do not possess agency. This scientific exorcism started in the skies and is gradually working its way closer and closer to ourselves. Physics began the process by dispensing with the Aristotelian idea that objects move by virtue of some innate source of motion. Chemistry soon cleared the alchemical spirits from the laboratory. And biology eventually banished 'vital forces'. Now the process is being put to work in humans. In seeking a materialist conception of the mind and the self, neuroscientists seem to be envisioning the end of the quest to fully naturalize and objectify the world. The human body may be the final frontier — the last haunted house.

The overwhelming majority of neuroscientists will claim that they have no need for Cartesian dualism — they do not believe in an immaterial soul, and hold that mental phenomena are simply consequences of complex (and thus far poorly understood) physical processes. Words like 'soul' and 'spirit' can seem like relics of the supernaturalist adolescence of our species, so removing them from our lexicon can give the impression that we are no-nonsense materialists. But dualism, properly considered, is not a position about supernatural souls per se, but about perceiving a separation between the body and a qualitatively different something else. Mainstream scientists and philosophers call this something the mind or consciousness. In the humanities the word 'subjectivity' is also deployed. These ostensibly modern concepts occupy much the same role as the soul once did in European thought; they denote a self — that with which a person identifies. To be a true non-dualist, then, is to conceive of the self as a physical process that is not qualitatively different from any other biological process.

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COLLECTING FIREFLIES

I’m afraid
I don’t understand
the death part of life
although at my age
you might think I might,
and not necessarily
the last death-part
but the everyday bits of it
that constantly intrude
The only thing I can think
to make sense of it
is that its shadow
over each tenderness
makes each tenderness
more rich and poignant,
as if tenderness were
the only point of light
in this camera obscura,
which is the room
in which we spend lives
netting such points
like children
in a dark field in summer
collecting fireflies

by Jim Culleny
9/2/15

by Lisa Lieberman

I've read countless analyses of Roman Polanski's neo-noir masterpiece, but I'd never considered the subliminal effect of the film's title until I read an offhand remark of Yunte Huang's in his book about Charlie Chan. “Chinatown serves as the symbol for the crime-ridden, dark side of the city of Angles,” he writes. “In Chinatown, the title merely hovers in the background like a black cloud.”

Gambling, opium dens, white slavery and perverse sexual acts were long associated with the Chinese quarters of American cities in the popular imagination, fueling the anti-immigration sentiment that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Sinister Chinese characters were staples of pulp fiction in the early twentieth century. The adventures of Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu would be filmed repeatedly by Hollywood from the silent era onwards, the villain always played by a white actor in yellowface. Borls Karloff's 1932 incarnation is the most notorious of the lot, and not only on account of the egregious line that provoked a protest from the Chinese government: “Kill the white men and take their women!”

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Haiku

As I fling my arms
Wide to greet dad at Heathrow
He extends his hand

By Rafiq Kathwari whose new collection, ‘In Another Country’ is now available at DoirePress.com

by Mara Naselli

Around 1860, shortly after the James family returned from Europe to Newport for William’s painting apprenticeship, Edward Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s son), came for a visit. He experienced firsthand the vigor of a Jamesian family debate over dinner, hands gesticulating and brandishing dinner knives: “Don’t be disturbed, Edward,” Emerson recalls Mrs. James saying with a laugh. “They won’t stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.”

The freethinking Henry James, Sr., raised his children to debate and explore. Their education (though not equally distributed among the five children), was wide ranging and itinerant, rich with art, travel, and theater. “Mr. James’s deepest desire was what his sons and daughter should be,” writes Emerson. “Their works would follow from what they were.” Of the five, William and Henry became monumental forces in American letters. Henry’s novels, stories, and criticism developed the standards by which many now evaluate the modern novel. William threw himself into painting, then natural history, then medicine, and finally became a founding architect of modern psychology and American pragmatism. William’s work strongly shaped Henry’s art, but just how the currents of their separate but intimate intellectual lives interwhirled and eventually eddied out in different directions is another story. In the fleet, beautiful little book Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between William and Henry James, J. C. Hallman immerses himself in the complete extant correspondence of the James brothers to tell a new tale. As Hallman follows the affection, thinking, diction, and metaphors shared between the two brothers in their letters, we see just how much William’s investigations into consciousness and his philosophical preoccupations infused Henry’s approach to literature. “William is the pragmatist,” writes the scholar Richard Hocks. “Henry, so to speak, is the pragmatism.”

If the extent of William’s influence on Henry is remarkable, even more remarkable is the fact William failed to recognize his own influence in his brother’s art.

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by Maniza Naqvi

One out of every one hundred and nine persons worldwide is a displaced person. Inside or outside their home countries, for a whole host of reasons, displaced. But the idea that the hosts are charitable by allowing refuge is misplaced. Refugees are loot–they are treasure. They are labor. They are the spoils of war.

In Macedonia, it shoud be considered a homecoming of sorts—though the refugees are only passing through on their way further north hoping to reach Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. This flush of people into Macedonia are coming from exactly the lands invaded and occupied by Alexander and his armies from 336 BC to 325 BC. The great conquering invader that Generals and occupiers are fond of quoting. Today some of the refugees entering Alexander's home land must surely bear his armies DNA.

Europe is receiving a life prolonging gift, a transfusion of life. Youth. Refugees. It is a historic life saving moment. Able bodied young people. Educated young families made up of skilled workers, including doctors, engineers and teachers of childbearing years—with many young children. Almost every single country in Europe has negligible population growth rates, many have negative rates, including the economic and human rights engine (and major weapons manufacturer and exporter), Germany.

A little structural adjustment in demography? Yes. Going from being in the red and grey to black. What a gift.

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by Grace Boey

Want to do some good in the world? There’s a good chance that (like me) you’d at least like to try. So what should you do?

There’s a bunch of reasons that might affect your answer to this question. Should you donate money, or should you volunteer time? Should you start a career in social work? What social cause resonates with you? Do you care more about animals, or army vets? How much time do various causes commit you to, and how much time do you have after meeting work and family obligations? These are common concerns that influence our charitable choices, whether we’re conscious of them or not.

Effective altruism, a growing social movement associated with philosopher Peter Singer, hopes to bring this decision-making process to the forefront of our consciousness. To be more precise: followers of the movement seek to act in the way that brings about the greatest measurable impact, given the resources they have. Effective altruism concerns itself not just with doing good, but finding the best way to do so. And according to (some) effective altruists, the best way for most people to do good is ‘earning to give’, which is exactly what it sounds like: earning lots of money, then giving it away to charity. And not just any charity—in order to maximise good, effective altruists seek to donate to the most cost-effective foundations out there.

Sounds promising? … Maybe.

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by Paul Braterman

What is the purpose of this examination?

We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and that is all.

Dayton Courthouse today

Inherit the Wind, the prism through which the public sees the Scopes Trial, is a travesty. William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted Scopes, was neither a buffoon nor a biblical literalist but moved by deep concerns that continue to merit attention. He did not protest at the leniency of Scopes's punishment, but offered to pay the fine out of his own pocket. Nor did he collapse in defeat at the end of the trial, but drove hundreds of miles, and delivered two major speeches, before dying in his sleep a week later. Scopes, on trial for the crime of teaching evolution in Tennessee state school, was never at risk of prison. He was no martyr, but a willing participant in a test case, actively sought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and his subsequent career was as geologist, not school teacher. He was found guilty, quite understandably given the wording of the law. On appeal, his conviction was quashed on a technicality, bypassing the need to rule on the deeper issues, much to the dismay of his supporters. Worse; on what we would now regard as the crucial issue, whether the law against teaching evolution in State schools violated the constitutional separation of Church and State, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that

We are not able to see how the prohibition of teaching the theory that man has descended from a lower order of animals gives preference to any religious establishment or mode of worship.

The law prohibiting the teaching of evolution affected textbooks for a while, but its impact was fading within a decade. However, it was not repealed until 1967, when Soviet accomplishments in space were forcing Americans to examine the state of US science education. A similar law, passed in Arkansas through citizens' initiative, survived until 1968, when in Epperson v Arkansas, the US Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition on teaching evolution was based on religion and therefore unconstitutional. As for the doctrine that creationism itself is religion, not science, and therefore should not be taught in public schools, that was not established in the US courts until McLean v Arkansas,1982 and at Supreme Court level Edwards v Aguillard, 1987, Justice Scalia dissenting.

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by Charlie Huenemann

There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write magical incantations into the (now lost) play Love’s Labours Won. (It’s not really magic, of course, but some quantum dynamical dimension of psychic energy… well, whatever.) When the play is then performed in the Globe Theater and the psychic words are spoken, a transgalactic portal will open up, through which an entire population of witches – really, in fact, members of an alien species known as the Carrionites – will march through and take over the world. Luckily, the Doctor is wise to the plans, and he and Martha improvise a counter-spell on the spot and disaster is thereby averted.

It’s crucial to the plot that the witchy words be spoken in the Globe, because the witches had previously forced its architect to frame the theater according to magical dimensions: fourteen symmetrical walls into which some sort of string-theoretic alchemical pentagram might be interpolated, or something like that. The point is, the layout of the place is critical for the magic to do its work.

I have recently been reading Frances Yates’ classic work of history, The Art of Memory (1966), which suggests that this latter point may not be so far fetched. Yates was a formidable scholar of the European renaissance, and her rich book details a strain of magical thinking about how the art of memory can bring a soul into harmony with the deep nature of things.

The art of memory goes way back. Ancient authors like Simonides, Quintilian, and Cicero recommend using vivid images to help recall anything from lists of names to long passages from speeches. Images drawn from mythology, or the zodiac, or well-known public monuments like the Parthenon might all be employed creatively as mnemonic devices.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

On a plane ride to Mumbai last week, I bought oatmeal cookies. For a fleeting second, I thought about sharing them with my surly co-passenger, who had been looking straight ahead ever since occupying the middle seat right next to my windowed one. If I had a middle seat, I might be surly too. I thought the cookies would help. But then the thought remained just that, fleeting. In the sum total of a minute, I played in my head the awkwardness of first contact, the shaking of head by my equally awkward interlocutor, and then my consequent retreat into the “I told you so” shell. Having successfully pre-empted my unnecessary state of embarrassment in the world, I proceeded therefore to not offer him a cookie. And there in that one stroke, I become part of a world full of strangers shedding candy.

As children, my friends and I were taught to share food. Every morning, we set off from home groggy-eyed and heavy-footed with our variously colored backpacks stuffed with notebooks, pencils, and lunch bags with food, water, and sometimes, a lonely apple or banana. So armored, we set off to face the universe.By the time lunch-time came around, we were all in states of feverish excitement, trying to anticipate our own and others' lunch choices. Some of us were the steady kinds, bringing rice, vegetables, and dal. The others brought home and regional specificities; idlis and dosas, parathas, curd rice and lemon rice, gossamer thin rotis, once crisp puris but now soggy with the long wait for lunchtime, chutneys of various persuasions (coconut and mint and tomato), and those objects of much desire, bread rolls stuffed with spicy potato curry. The trendier homes sent sandwiches. In an age where our collective imagination was colonized by a rural Enid Blyton-esque England of wafer thin cucumber sandwiches and strawberry jam scones, this was definitely cosmopolitan. Small matter that I did not think jam was all that great. I nevertheless begged my hapless mother who was up at the crack of dawn to knead dough for the wonderful potato parathas I carried, to instead make me every other thing the other children brought. She did no such thing. So I scoffed down their sandwiches, and others ate my idlis and parathas.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The internet has made it easier than ever to speak to others. It has empowered individuals, allowing us to publish our opinions without convincing a publishing company of their commercial value; to find and share others' views on matters we concern ourselves with without the fuss of photocopying and mailing newspaper clippings; and to respond to those views without the limitations of a newspaper letter page. In this sense the internet has been a great boon to the freedom of speech.

Yet that very ease of communication has brought problems of its own that may actually limit the freedom part of free speech, the ability to speak our mind to those we wish without fear of reprisal.

I

The first problem is that what was once a difficult endeavour – to bring our words to the attention of others – is becoming difficult to avoid. An increasing amount of speech and its proxies, such as the expression of preferences, is subject to automatic publication to the world. If not by us, if we are very careful with all our privacy settings, then by the devices and apps of those we talk to. It is becoming hard to guarantee a private conversation.

That matters because the way one expresses oneself in conversation, to specific people, is not how one sets out one's thoughts to the world, when one is trying to reach and impress strangers with one's ideas. The old difference between speech and publication, and all the pains publication required, respected that distinction.

Speech is extemporary. It is often part of an ongoing relationship in which the parties know each other and have a common knowledge and context to relate to. It may be experimental in style and content, especially between people who know each other well, reflecting not your settled views but ideas you are curious about and phrasings your want to try out. There are often bad jokes and failed lines of reasoning and backtrackings, and this is normal and forgivable because everyone understands that conversation is dialectical, an attempt to make progress together. In persuading another it is normal to reach for the ad hominem approach, to adapt your arguments to the capacities, inclinations, and beliefs of those one is talking to.

Publication in contrast is – or was – a distinct and daunting undertaking, requiring much diligence and prudence in framing a particular expression of your ideas that may stand the test of the scrutiny of all sorts of readers without your being able to step in to explain what you meant.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Friends have been talking about Michael J. Lewis' recent article, How Art Became Irrelevant. An art historian at Williams College, Lewis is basically stating what we all have come to suspect: that museums have become the bread and circuses of our day.

Arguing that that there has been a collective disengagement with the fine arts in our society, he says that young people no longer care or have an emotional response to the art works themselves. And that is a worry.

Like many people, I have wondered about the pretty significant changes seen in art museums over the past twenty years. I'm pretty sure that no one passing the mob in the room where the Mona Lisa is hanging in the Louvre could fail to wonder if the picture itself is in any real way relevant to the experience of “seeing the Mona Lisa.” Especially fresh in my mind was something that recently happened to me at the Uffizi. Standing in front of Botticelli's Venus on a very crowded summer weekend, an American family of five stepped up right in front of the painting and posed while someone else took multiple versions of their picture. It was a rather long process involving corralling the kids and then the posed shots. It was bizarre.

In LA, it is said that people go to the Getty but they don't look at the art. The Getty is putting on more photography exhibitions and flashy blockbuster shows now, maybe to address the financial implications of this (though you would think of all museums the Getty with its massive budget could do its own thing as directed by its own particular history and the endowment).It's actually not at all clear whether it is the commodification and privatization of museums (museums' disturbing transformation) that has affected these changes in museum-goers that Lewis describes or whether their lack of care is what is driving the transformation of museums into entertainment hubs. I have no idea.

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