A Weakness in the New Atheism

John D. Mullen’s review of Hitchens’ God is Not Great captures some of my frustrations with the new spirited and much needed defense of atheism. In Metapsychology Online Reviews:

There is a weak point that infects both Harris and Hitchens’ claims that religion is an important cause of human violence (indeed Harris claims that the survival of the human species requires the extinction of religion — or at least of Islam). The flaw is their failure to disentangle the religious from other potential social factors, e.g., nationalist, economic, cultural, educatioinal. Harris at least asks the question: Could the (terrorist) tactics of Palestinians warriors be a result of economic or political oppression rather than religious conviction? This is an extremely complex question of social/causal analysis. Harris’ answer is shockingly cavalier: No, you don’t see Christian Palestinians becoming suicide bombers. Does anyone believe there are no differences between Christian and Muslim Palestinians other than a (rather minor) disagreement on the status of a certain Nazarene? No economic, educational differences? No differences of group identification or empathy, no disparities of tribalist propensities?

This lack of a social-causal analysis comes up many times in Hitchens. For example he attributes a religious cause to female genital mutilation (223). This is almost certainly wrong. FGM occurs in tribal societies, where the worst evil to befall a male is for an offspring of another male to be unwittingly attributed to him. The difficulty of preventing this is heightened by polygyny, where there are more women to worry about and watch over. Thus women must be guaranteed virginal (and so unpregnant) at marriage and secluded afterwards (purdah). FGM is best understood as an element of this complex. It is required by no religion, has been practiced within or along side all three of the Abrahamic traditions and is more prevalent by far in the polygynous Muslim variations, particularly among less educated populations. (See Gary S. Becker A Treatise on the Family 2005)

Migration Turns Paris into the City of Music

Apparently, it’s not simply La Secte Phonetik. In the Globalist:

Paris, France is not even included in the list of the world’s 20 largest cities, but the argument for its status of capital of world music is a strong one. Not only is there a strong native tradition of the chanson in Paris, but the City of Lights has welcomed luminaries from all over the globe to make music there…

Like New York, Los Angeles and London, Paris’ music scene has benefited greatly from an influx of immigrants. Many musicians have come from Francophone Africa and the Middle East.

Whether sunny or moody, the economical melodies of Brazilian pop music bear some similarities to the classic French chanson.

For instance, France’s top rapper is MC Solaar, a Senegal-born artist who moved to Paris and has seen his albums dominate French charts for over a decade.

Prominent rai/rock musician Rachid Taha was born in Algeria, grew up in Lyon — and has recorded much of his best work in Paris. His 1991 album, Barbes, was named after an immigrant-dominated section of Paris.

Israel and Palestine In the Wake of Oslo’s Failure

Robert Blecher and Jeremy Pressman in the Boston Review:

Israel’s Palestinian leadership has articulated an increasingly oppositional voice ever since October 2000, when 12 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed during protests at the outset of the second uprising. More recently, Arab intellectuals have published several documents that question the Jewish nature of the state. Some proposals prescribe radical individual equality for Arabs and Jews, whereas others would preserve group rights. The document that attracted the most attention—and opprobrium—was the December 2006 report “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” The bulk of the report focuses on the quotidian sorts of discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens, but reaction centered on the document’s caustic characterization of Zionism, as well as its demand for the recognition of Palestinians as “the indigenous people of the homeland” who have a right to “complete equality in the State on a collective–national basis.”

Such ideological opposition is interpreted as a material threat by the Israeli security apparatus. The director of the domestic security service made headlines in March when he insisted that he would use means that are normally reserved for fighting illegal activity against “elements who wish to harm the character of the State of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, even if their activity is conducted through democratic means.”

Brad Spence’s airbrushed cloud of unknowing

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In the decade since he graduated from CalArts’ Art and Critical Studies program, L.A.-based artist Brad Spence has produced a half-dozen remarkable bodies of work, beginning with 1998’s “Philosophy Minor,” a striking series of skillfully airbrushed paintings on paper that — on further investigation — turned out to be appropriations of vintage mass-market paperback philosophy books with the text removed. The resulting pictures — ranging from midcentury Modernist abstract designs to a photo-realist bust of Socrates — were among the most enigmatic and refreshing visual statements to emerge from the sticky swamp of passive-aggressive eye candy that was L.A. painting in the ’90s.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Easy’s despair

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For two decades, Easy Rawlins has walked the streets of Los Angeles, and the city has given him everything: friends, family, two homes, three apartment buildings, a dog and any number of people willing to pay him to fix their broken lives. Yet something’s gone wrong. Two years after the riots, Watts smolders, Vietnam rages and Easy is losing it. He knows it. His friends know it. And, of course, Walter Mosley knows it.

The 10th Easy Rawlins novel is unlike any we’ve read. “I lit a Camel,” Easy tells us early in the book, “thought about the taste of sour mash . . . and climbed out of the car like Bela Lugosi from his coffin.” Gone is the man once happy to own a home with an avocado tree in his frontyard. Gone is the man content to nurse a drink and a smoke in a bar like Joppy’s. Gone is the man whose dalliances in bed were his most reliable and consistent solace. Still the tough-minded, tough-hearted private detective of earlier novels, the Easy of “Blonde Faith” is haunted and more vulnerable, trying to atone for his mistakes, find love and acceptance and make it through to the next day.

more from the LA Times here.

clive james weighs in on Roth

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“Exit Ghost.” Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes — Kafka, of course, is one of them — have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of “The Ghost Writer”), you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.

more from the NY Times here.

Carbophobia

From The New York Times:

Calories Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does not accept conventional wisdom. In “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” he says what he wants is a fair hearing and rigorous testing for ideas that might seem shocking.

Yet much of what Taubes relates will be eye-opening to those who have not closely followed the science, or lack of science, in this area. (Disclosure: At one point he approvingly cites my articles on the lack of evidence that a high-fiber diet protects against colon cancer.) For example, he tells the amazing story of how the idea of a connection between dietary fat, cholesterol and heart disease got going and took on a life of its own, despite the minimal connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol for most people. He does not mince words. “From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day.” The story is similar for salt and high blood pressure, and for dietary fiber and cancer.

More here.

Sadequain’s cacti

From Himal Southasian:

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When you walk into the enormous central hall of the Lahore Museum, your eye is quickly drawn to the two rows of miniature paintings displayed along the walls on either side. Women on horseback playing polo; Radha and Krishna consorting under a mango tree. You approach the glass cases to observe the minute details of individual strands of hair, of eyelashes, of fingernails. Perchance, you look up.

And you are transposed. Telescoped from the micro to the macro! There, 11 metres in the air, are the sparkling stars, the whirling planets, the spiralling galaxies, all beaming directly at you. A viewer may not be able to immediately recognise the intricate Kufic calligraphy, the use of the letter noon as a design element, but the dynamism of the geometric shapes, the bold and energetic lines, the feverish cross-hatching, will intrigue and engage any imagination. This is a mammoth, 29×7.8-metre oil painting by the famed Pakistani artist Sadequain, rendered in a genre called ‘calligraphic cubism’, spanning the entire ceiling of the entrance hall. If your vision is sharp and you know Urdu, you will read the line of a poem by Mohammad Iqbal painted on one panel: Sitaaro’n ke aage jaha’n aur bhi hai – Beyond the stars there are still other worlds. Standing there, humbled by the celestial orbs, another poet’s lines echo through this writer’s mind: Aur bhi dukh hai’n zamaane me’n mohabbat ke sivaa/ raahate’n aur bhi hai’n vasl ki raahat ke sivaa. These are Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s immortal words: There are sorrows in this world other than those of love/ joys, other than those of union with one’s beloved.

More here.

the best selling author in the world

Lindsay Duguid in TLS:

Christie_2 Between 1920, when she was thirty, and her death in 1976, Agatha Christie published seventy-one full-length murder mysteries. She also brought out five collections of stories, two volumes of poetry, a number of successful West End plays and a couple of autobiographies; five non-crime novels by her appeared under the name of Mary Westmacott. In some years there were several publications; between 1939 and 1946 there were nineteen. By 1950, she had sold a total of 50 million books and she is still the bestselling author in the world. It seems reasonable to wonder where it all came from.

Laura Thompson has been given full access to the unpublished letters, papers and notebooks kept at Greenway, the house in Devon that Christie purchased in 1938 and later turned into a family trust to avoid tax. There Thompson discovered a lifetime’s worth of old exercise books, scraps of paper, receipts, banker’s orders, souvenir menus and family albums. She also discovered that Christie, who never dated a letter, falsified the details of her life in her memoirs and lied about her age on her marriage certificate. But in any case Thompson’s biographical method is not organization but evocation; rather than order the material into a chronological narrative, she wants us to know what her Agatha feels and offers novelistic insights into her state of mind. “Her life, on the surface, was as grey and dreary as a prison exercise yard, her mind a prey to a daily succession of torments” is how she describes Christie’s reaction to her divorce from her husband Archie sometime in 1927, an important event in Christie’s life, the facts of which remain uncertain.

More here.

Friday, October 5, 2007

Man and God (and God’s Sick Punch Lines)

Charles McGrath in the New York Times:

Mcgr1190Shalom Auslander ends “Foreskin’s Lament,” his memoir of growing up in, and eventually breaking away from, the Orthodox Jewish community here, not with an acknowledgments page but with a list of people God might consider punishing instead of the author’s family. Mr. Auslander is no longer observant, but he is still a believer, and he believes in a wrathful, vengeful God who takes things personally and is not at all pleased when someone leaves the fold and writes an angry and very funny book about it.

“The people who raised me will say I am not religious,” he writes. “They are mistaken.” He adds: “I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably.”

More here.

Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive

Garance Franke-Ruta, J. Goodrich, Chris Hayes, Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti and Katha Pollitt, discuss Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive in this weeks TPM Cafe Book Club. Pollitt:

Most of the controversy around Learning to Drive has been around the title story and especially its followup, “Webstalker,’ which are about a painful breakup and its aftermath. As in the other essays, I aimed to put close together sadness and comedy, high diction and low, the romantic and the reflective. It’s not for me to say if I achieved those effects– but that was the idea. What has really floored me, I must say, is that the book is controversial. I thought I was writing about experiences that are shared by many, if not indeed most people, including men. Who doesn’t have areas of incompetence and fear — mechanical stuff for me, maybe foreign languages, or I dunno, cooking, for you? Who hasn’t been hurt in love? And not just young people, either, thank you very much.

This, as I see it, is the pass to which we have come. Women can write about shooting heroin and being sex workers and spending years zoned out on prozac and having nervous breakdowns and hating other women and lord knows what else and that’s okay by feminism, as indeed it should be. But writing that you didn’t learn to drive for years and years out of technophobia and overreliance on men? Loving a man unwisely and feeling terrible for more than a long weekend when he left? Writing about how another person really got to you and how you even, OMG, googled him and the other women in his life rather a lot for a while, which is basically all that happens in “Webstalker”? Oh, that is so unfeminist–and from a longtime feminist political columnist too! That really undermines all our progress. Now we’ll never get the ERA.

Typographical Art

Via Andrew Sullivan, who via ifbook, who via Information Aesthetics, who via Jason Kottke, Justin Quinn:

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The distance between reading and seeing has been an ongoing interest for me. Since 1998 I have been exploring this space through the use of letterforms, and have used the letter E as my primary starting point for the last two years. Since E is often found at the top of vision charts, I questioned what I saw as a familiar hierarchy. Was this letter more important than other letters? E is, after all, the most commonly used letter in the English language, it denotes a natural number (2.71828), and has a visual presence that interests me greatly. In my research E has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet. It now replaces the other letters and becomes a universal letter (or Letter), and a string of Es now becomes a generic language (or Language). This substitution denies written words their use as legible signifiers, allowing language to become a vacant parallel Language— a basis for visual manufacture.

After months of compiling Es into abstract compositions through various systemic arrangements, I started recognizing my studio time as a quasi-monastic experience. There was something sublime about both the compositions that I was making and the solitude in which they were made. It was as if I were translating some great text like a subliterate medieval scribe would have years ago—with no direct understanding of the source material. The next logical step was to find a source. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, a story rich in theology, philosophy, and psychosis provides me with a roadmap for my work, but also with a series of underlying narratives. My drawings, prints, and collages continue to speak of language and the transferal of information, but now as a conduit to Melville’s sublime narratives.

See here for more.

University Inc.

In the NYT, Andrew Delbanco:

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Universities create jobs, develop new therapies and technologies and train America’s young people for the modern knowledge economy. All this is true. But comparable claims could be made for a pharmaceutical company. What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?

There is more and more reason to think: less and less. Driven by big science and global competition, our top universities compete for “market share” and “brand-name positioning,” employ teams of consultants and lobbyists and furnish their campuses with luxuries in order to attract paying “customers” — a word increasingly used as a synonym for students. Since 1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act permitting patents on discoveries made with public funds, universities and faculty members have been raking in royalties from technologies developed with the help of government grants. More recently, universities have been expanding into adjacent neighborhoods (Harvard into Allston, Columbia into Harlem, Penn into an undeveloped tract near its current campus) and establishing satellite campuses abroad. Yale has announced the acquisition of an entirely new research campus outside New Haven —from, as it happens, a pharmaceutical company.

How are college students treated in this brave new academic world?

A Look at Blackwater, from Iraq to New Orleans

Chris Hedges in Truthdig:

One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.

And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

albino town?

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It’s like something out of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once upon a time in northeastern Argentina there was a village of grape and almond farmers and goat breeders. This place, called Aicuña, also known as “the town of the Ormeños,” or later “the mysterious albino town,” remained isolated for more than three centuries, two hundred and fifty years longer than García Márquez’s Macondo. Inbreeding was punished in Macondo by the birth of a boy with a pig’s tail. In Aicuña, say some vicious people in neighboring villages, the punishment is colorless children. Forty-six of them, to be precise, in little more than a century.

However, it seems that Aicuña’s isolation has something to do with those same villages that now spread rumors about its strangeness. Some say that the animosity and subsequent estrangement all began with a disagreement over property. Who owned what land. Or who wanted to take over what land. But that is another story—another taboo—which almost no one here wants to talk about.

more from VQR here.

children, elephants, art

Supervertmarlaolmstead

When people look at abstract paintings and say, “My kid could do that,” they’re right—up to a point. Given the right materials and a little bit of coaching, any kid—or elephant or chimpanzee—can produce something that looks like art, or at least something that looks like Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s, artists like de Kooning and Pollock proposed a radically new way of thinking about painting: as the direct trace of the artist’s physical engagement with the materials. Harold Rosenberg, the critic who first coined the term “action painting,” put it like this: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” The Ab-Exers were great formal innovators, but even more important than Pollock’s drips or de Kooning’s arabesques was their revolutionary insight that a painting can represent nothing other than the process of its own creation.

more from Slate here.

greekettes

Greekzon

Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West. Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public she was announcing that she was anybody’s.

more from the TLS here.