Last summer we were regaled with stories about a brash art-worldling who had been sticking diamonds on somebody else’s skull. We were also told that he hires people to do his work for him, collects art in bulk and shows it in hot venues. In short, he is just the kind of guy the popular press loves to hate, and defenders of the true Bohemian cross harrumph about in choral harmony while awaiting deliverance that never comes. Comparatively little notice was paid to the passing of another artist who trained assistants to realize his projects and who collected art in depth and showed it when asked. His name was Sol LeWitt.
Yet it was LeWitt who first took the heat for defying the old-guard belief that the visible trace of the artist’s hand was the ultimate criterion of aesthetic authenticity and value. Of course, László Moholy-Nagy had challenged that notion back in the 1920s by phoning in the design for an enamel painting to a factory that then made two versions in different sizes. In the ’60s LeWitt went further in legitimizing such practices by establishing the principle that art should be judged by the quality of the idea behind it. ‘Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution,’ he wrote.
About 7 percent of white people, though, actually show a distinct lack of racism on probing psychological tests, says psychologist Robert Livingston of Northwestern University. Recently Livingston and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin studied these people to find out why they’re not racist and, by implication, why the rest of us are. It turns out that the nonracists share a unique emotional style: They rarely form any negative associations, whether they’re thinking about meaningless symbols or real human beings.
In their experiment, the researchers tested people’s tendency to form positive and negative associations by showing them written Chinese characters followed quickly by pictures of “good” things—like baby seals, flowers, and waterfalls—or pictures of “bad” things, like mutilated faces, snarling dogs, and feces. (Previous research has showed that Chinese characters are meaningless and appear neutral to English speakers.) The researchers presumed that the characters would take on positive or negative traits depending on what images they were paired with. And indeed, most people liked the characters that were paired with good pictures and disliked those linked to bad images.
A select few, though, did not form negative associations with Chinese characters. They made positive links just as often as anybody else, but the negative images didn’t stick in their minds. They seemed not to pay as much attention to negative information as others did and were less likely to form negative associations between two things. “They have rose-colored filters,” Livingston says.
It turns out these people are generally the same people who show no prejudice on the implicit racism test.
Ten days after sparking controversy with comments on race and intelligence, James Watson today announced that he is retiring as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, New York. The decision appeared to be the result of negotiations between Watson and the lab’s Board of Trustees, which suspended him from the chancellor’s post last week. The 79-year-old Nobelist, who has led the lab in various capacities for nearly 40 years, will continue to live on the CSHL campus.
Watson was widely condemned after The Sunday Times quoted him on 14 October as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours–whereas all the testing says not really.” Watson subsequently apologized, but the damage had been done. London’s Science Museum canceled a talk he was supposed to give on 19 October; CSHL’s board issued a public statement rejecting Watson’s remarks and suspended him.
Watson cut short his tour of the United Kingdom, where he was traveling to promote his new book Avoid Boring People, and returned to Cold Spring Harbor to deal with the fallout. “I’m going home to try to save my job,” British press reports quoted him as saying before his departure. Board members were engaged in negotiations about his fate, a trustee told ScienceNOW.
The appearance of two new books of contemporary art allows us to pause and consider the power of New Kitsch. We needn’t pause that long, however, because true to the aesthetic of New Kitsch, each of those books takes no longer than two minutes to absorb. Given the time pressures and multiple distractions of contemporary life, two minutes may be all that a book on any subject can hope to obtain from a modestly attentive reader. When, after all, was the last time that anyone other than academics or students carved out time for a serious novel? While sharing the speakers’ platform at the New York Public Library with Günter Grass recently, Norman Mailer remarked that the people who trouble themselves even to write those novels will soon be regarded as eccentric as the authors of verse plays.
Extrapolating from Mailer’s prognosis, it won’t be long before all books will completely reveal themselves in less than the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee, but in the meantime, we have the contemporary art world—that charmed coalition of aesthetic social climbers—to bring us our quickie reads. Two recent entries stand out: one from Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, Shreveport, Louisiana), an artist who seems unafraid to try her hand at any two-dimensional medium, and the other by Charlie White (b. 1972, Philadelphia), a photographer first and last.
We must distinguish the New Kitsch sensibility of these two artists from that of the masters of Old Kitsch (formerly known simply as kitsch). Old Kitsch emphasized technique over content—or form over substance, if you will. It was characterized by excessive sentimentality and typified by once-respected, later passé (and now somewhat resurgent) painters such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Paul-Joseph Jamin. It was academic, simplistic and so 1890.
The New Kitsch is not sentimental. It is self-knowingly cool; but coolness, like sentimentality, is about showing off at the expense of perception and engagement.
Kyoto has failed in several ways, not just in its lack of success in slowing global warming, but also because it has stifled discussion of alternative policy approaches that could both combat climate change and adapt to its unavoidable consequences. As Kyoto became a litmus test of political correctness, those who were concerned about climate change, but sceptical of the top-down approach adopted by the protocol were sternly admonished that “Kyoto is the only game in town”. We are anxious that the same mistake is not repeated in the current round of negotiations.
Already, in the post-Kyoto discussions, we are witnessing that well-documented human response to failure, especially where political or emotional capital is involved, which is to insist on more of what is not working: in this case more stringent targets and timetables, involving more countries. The next round of negotiations needs to open up new approaches, not to close them down as Kyoto did.
Economic theory recognizes the futility of throwing good money after bad. In politics, however, sunk costs are often seen as political capital or as an investment of reputation and status. So we acknowledge that those advocating the Kyoto regime will be reluctant to embrace alternatives because it means admitting that their chosen climate policy has and will continue to fail. But the rational thing to do in the face of a bad investment is to cut your losses and try something different.
Oliver Kamm—“There goes liberty”—attacks Steven Rose for writing that hate speech ought to be banned because it violates the human rights of its victims. There are tricky debates to be had about what counts as a properly human right, but I don’t think there’s much mileage in forensically examining Rose on that point. Kamm’s point is that hate speech—unlike, say, racist violence—doesn’t harm its victims, strictly speaking. That’s a highly dubious proposition: being bombarded with the message that you are of lesser worth than others, are disgusting, repellent, vicious or stupid, may well cause you significant harms (and where genocidal crimes have taken place, it is often against the background of such messages being prevalent). But we can let that go as an instance of Kamm’s lack of imagination. What Kamm really has in his sights are restrictions on speech that are alleged to flow from the idea that we own one another respect, have duties of civility to our fellow citizens, and so forth. He’s surely wrong on this point, and for two reasons: first, in a a democracy of equal citizens it is important to see to it that the conditions are in place for people to participate as equals; second, no-one has any legitimate interest in the protection of hate speech, as such.*
Robert Frost once remarked that the poet E. A. Robinson “remained content with the old-fashioned way to be new,” and the same could be said of the intellectual figure Frost admired most as a student at Harvard, William James. Indeed, this willingness to be new in the most old-fashioned of ways no doubt continues to obscure James’s legacy for many modern readers. As with Robinson (and even more so with Frost), James’s modernity is too often lost in the fog of intellectual mannerisms that “read” as late-Victorian: his commitment to experience (as opposed to theory or a theoretical model of experience), his interest in addressing popular audiences, his fascination with and defense of varieties of religious experience, and perhaps above all, his strenuous individualism. Thankfully, James has long had his defenders who have, especially since the mid-1960s, steadily pointed to the singular modernity of the man and his work. Robert D. Richardson’s new intellectual biography is a welcome addition to this body of work. Full of insight and written with impressive command of the astonishingly wide range of materials that went into the peculiar and truly lifelong education of William James, Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism may well provide the best one-stop introduction to James’s life and work we now have. If Richardson’s volume lacks some of the added breadth of R.W.B. Lewis’s magisterial The Jameses, it makes up for that by providing unexpected depth in its tracking of the many sources that fed the Jamesian stream and by offering an impressively detailed account of the fascinating relationship between James’s decidedly unstable emotional life and the zig-zag development of his thought.
Naipaul is wide of the mark in his claim that most Indians today in the US ‘wish to shake India off’ and would rather ‘make cookies and shovel snow’ than deal with their Indian past. On the contrary: these are communities which often greatly admire Naipaul, share his roots in various sorts of neo-Hinduism, claim insistently that Islam is a worldwide threat, agitate over school textbooks in California which state that Hinduism is chaotically polytheistic, and wear surgical masks when they visit India and their relatives, who stir tea with their forefingers. For, ironically, ‘Indianness’ is the chief element in the cultural capital of such groups, as it is for Naipaul himself. On the distant other side, Protestantism beckons, but most Protestantism does not go together with cultural métissage; it is pretty much an all-or-nothing deal. Further, Indians living outside India have, it is well known, been rather racist when it comes to other people of colour, and the anti-black rhetoric that pervades Naipaul’s writings (including the first chapter of this book) is once again only symptomatic of a larger malaise that extends from East Africa to New Jersey. So, in the end, there is a reason why we should be grateful that Naipaul exists. With his clarity of expression and utter lack of self-awareness, he provides a window into a world and its prejudices: he is thus larger than himself. This book, like his others, should be read together with those of Munshi Rahman Khan for a deeper understanding of the Indian diaspora and its ways of looking, feeling and suffering.
The first time John Haffenden saw William Empson he was reading his poetry not very aloud in Trinity College, Dublin. A “woman cried out with exasperation from the back of the hall, ‘Speak up, you silly old fool’”. For some who then cringed, the embarrassment was later relieved by discovering that the woman was the poet’s wife, Hetta, eventually Lady, Empson. (Others may have curled further in on themselves when they realized they had been admitted without warning into the family circle and its lively ways.) Her bravura intimacy at this moment, her carelessness of what other people thought, shared in his own cordially unbuttoned manner amid the “farcically rigid convention” of academic exchange. For Empson usually required no encouragement to speak up. He had been answering the call “to speak up against the dead weight of the fashions of two generations” since his Winchester College days when, as Haffenden puts it, he was “not loth to blazon his opinions” in the school debating society, impelled by “a natural scepticism . . . to speak up for unorthodoxy and subversion”.
Watson talks in sputters and clicks, and delights in being outrageous, as I discovered when I visited him in Cold Springs Harbor for my book, “Masterminds: Genius, DNA and Quest to Rewrite Life.” Ushered into an office where his Nobel prize hung close by a girly calendar featuring a buxom woman that looked more appropriate for a mechanics shop, he was soon informing me that some people are born with less intelligence than others – and that those people should have their genes altered, if such a thing becomes possible. At the same meeting he called surreal painter Salvador Dali (he painted “Homage to Watson and Crick” in 1963) a fascist, denigrated women scientists as being more “difficult” than men and refused yet again to acknowledge that a long dead geneticist named Rosalind Franklin made a crucial discovery leading to Watson and Crick’s famous discovery.
Anyone who has worked with him has a Watson story about his imperiousness. Yet he also was a major player in a number of scientific efforts over the decades, not the least of which was his crucial backing of the Human Genome Project in the early 1990s. He was appointed as the first head of the project in 1990 – only to be fired in 1992 after he insulted then director of the National Institutes of Health, Bernadine Healy, and refused to follow her directions and those of Congress.
People have a propensity to be optimistic, expecting to live longer and be healthier than the population average. Elizabeth Phelps and her colleagues from New York University ran into this so-called ‘optimism bias’ when they set out to investigate what happens when people imagine emotional events in the past and future. They had volunteers think about events such as winning an award, or the end of a romantic relationship, and at the same time they scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. But the researchers hit on a problem. The volunteers were not good at imagining bad things happening to them. They would even turn relatively neutral events, such as getting a haircut, into positive things. So the team changed their focus: they decided to look at the brain areas involved in the optimism bias instead. The group asked people to imagine positive and negative events that had either happened in the past or might happen in the future. Then, the volunteers rated their levels of optimism (as a general personality trait) using a standard psychological test.
Imagining positive events in the future was accompanied by activity in two areas of the brain that usually regulate how emotion affects memory and decisions: the amygdala, buried deep within the brain, and the front portion of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which sits just behind the eyes. Conversely, activation in both these areas dropped below average when the volunteers thought about future negative events. The more optimistic people considered themselves to be, the greater the activity in the ACC.
In February, 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson rhapsodized about young America, “the country of the Future,” as “a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” That May, Samuel F. B. Morse telegraphed the message “What hath God wrought,” from Washington to Baltimore, overthrowing, in one electric instant, the “tyranny of distance.” The next month, a railroad from Boston reached Emerson’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts. Less than a year later, in the spring of 1845, by which time the Boston railroad had snaked its way to Fitchburg, forty miles west, and telegraph wires had begun to stretch across the continent like so many Lilliputian ropes over Gulliver, Emerson’s eccentric friend, the twenty-seven-year-old Henry David Thoreau, dug a cellar at the site of a woodchuck’s burrow on a patch of land Emerson owned, on Walden Pond, about a mile and a half outside town. (Thoreau had lived in Emerson’s house, as his handyman.) He borrowed an axe, and hewed framing timbers out of white pine. “We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation,” Thoreau later wrote, from the ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin he built over that cellar, at a cost of twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents.
At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, only about half of the population of that country knew French, and bilingualism was common. France continued to accommodate a myriad of tongues right through the 19th century: Flemish, Provençal, Gascon, Catalan, Basque, and so on, and many dialects and patois, as well as extraordinary variation in spoken language within regions. The diversity wasn’t merely lingual: A variety of pre-Christian religious beliefs and superstitions, worldviews and ways of life flourished simultaneously in the more provincial countryside beyond Paris. Even the legal order varied greatly: In addition to the difference between regions influenced by customary law — essentially northern France — and Roman law, a variety of local systems of justice survived intact, each system bringing along with it a strong sense of belonging to one of the myriad petites patries of the hexagon.
Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000.
A visit to the “news” section of freedomship.com reveals a more sluggish pace. The most recent messages date from more than two years ago, forlornly explaining how “scam operations” are slowing things down but that “[t]hings are happening, and they are moving fast.” Meanwhile, the ship is not yet finished. Indeed, it is not yet started. Despite this, Freedom Ship International Inc. has been startlingly successful in raising publicity for this “floating city.” Much credulous journalistic cooing over “the biggest vessel in history,” with its “hospitals, banks, sports centres, parks, theaters and nightclubs,” not to mention its airport, has ignored the vessel’s stubborn nonexistence.
Freedom Ship’s website claims that the vessel has not been conceived as a locus for tax avoidance, pointing out that as it will sail under a flag of convenience, residents may still be liable for taxes in their home countries. Nonetheless, whatever the ultimate tax status of those whom we will charitably presume might one day set sail, much of the interest in Freedom Ship has revolved precisely around its perceived status as a tax haven.
Bishop revives the idea advanced by William James more than a century ago of following one’s passions in religion when intellectual issues cannot be decided. Bishop offers a sophisticated statement of the conditions necessary for a responsible act of “taking as true” some claim for which evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, and in the course of so doing not only engages some recent interpretations of faith in James’s famous “The Will to Believe,” but also clarifies recent advocacy of the view that belief in the existence of God can be properly basic. He describes the book as arising out of an attempt to examine alternative concepts of God to the classical one in which God is considered to be the “supernatural, omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent Creator ex nihilo” — the omniGod” (p. ix). Although he keeps classical theism in view, Bishop attempts to set out conditions for embracing virtually any theistic stance. His frequent reference to evangelical Christian faith, which requires putting faith in God as revealed in Jesus the Christ, suggests that he expects this version of theism to be familiar to his readers. Evangelical Christianity arouses strong passions — for and against — and it is often presented by adherents as something one might “believe by faith,” so it serves Bishop’s objectives. I will return to this topic.
One of the merits of Bishop’s work is his drawing attention to the felt difference in human experience between such broadly cognitive-affective states as taking a claim to be true in practical reasoning, and other related states of mind such as believing a claim, trusting it, and accepting it (35-41). His discussion of the limited circumstances under which we can generate beliefs lends credence to the view that a central concept in understanding religious commitments is holding claims as true, rather than believing them. Bishop’s phenomenological analysis of human acts belonging to religion adds to the knowledge of ourselves as unique, natural agents. Bishop is not the first to draw attention to important distinctions embedded in facile uses of such terms as ‘faith’ and ‘believe’, but his remarks strike me as especially insightful. The title of the book might lead one to expect an articulation of religion using these overused terms, but he does so without them. “Believing by faith” is not an effort expended in order to “make oneself believe” some claim for which the evidence is inconclusive, but consists of taking a claim to be true for practical purposes. This is the fideism that Bishop defends for those he describes as “reflective believers,” that is, people who are interested in justifying their religious acts.
Roughly 251 million years ago, an estimated 70 percent of land plants and animals died, along with 84 percent of ocean organisms—an event known as the end Permian extinction. The cause is unknown but it is known that this period was also an extremely warm one. A new analysis of the temperature and fossil records over the past 520 million years reveals that the end of the Permian is not alone in this association: global warming is consistently associated with planetwide die-offs.
“There have been three major greenhouse phases in the time period we analyzed and the peaks in temperature of each coincide with mass extinctions,” says ecologist Peter Mayhew of the University of York in England, who led the research examining the fossil and temperature records. “The fossil record and temperature data sets already existed but nobody had looked at the relationships between them.”
Pairing these data—the relative number of different shallow sea organisms extant during a given time period and the record of temperature encased in the varying levels of oxygen isotopes in their shells over 10 million year intervals—reveals that eras with relatively high concentrations of greenhouse gases bode ill for the number of species on Earth. “The rule appears to be that greenhouse worlds adversely affect biodiversity,” Mayhew says.
I’ve never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy and death. But Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches’ brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned, right-wing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism.
A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week’s website, feminists and particularly the women’s studies professors among them, have developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalists. Hence, as anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation’s campuses this week, students are urged to stage “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”
Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the term “Islamo-Fascism,” which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn’t go off for me until I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining for the repeal of women’s suffrage. “If we took away women’s right to vote,” she said wistfully, “We’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream; it’s a personal fantasy of mine.”
