Narrative Clarity and Dramatic Tension in “Greed” by C.K. Williams

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

In a lineated poem, the line-breaks are used to produce verbal or sonic emphasis, in addition to creating a structure that is arranged such that it is easy to parse and comprehend the poem. When line-length varies, emphasis shifts and dramatic tension or narrative effect is produced. Generally speaking, in a free-verse poem, line-length varies without a set pattern, and the variation depends on where the poet wants emphasis, but in his (free-verse) poem “Greed,” C.K. Williams uses a pattern to arrange the lines. He uses long lines (flush right-margin) that are alternated by short lines constituting five to eight syllables. The lines are enjambed and form remarkably long sentences. Such sentences may ordinarily be in danger of becoming unwieldy or out of control. Williams brings aesthetic order to the poem by using a typographical pattern and a pattern of sonic devices, thereby creating a piece that has narrative clarity as well as narrative impact or dramatic tension.
Typographically, Williams’ style of predictably continuing each long line till flush right margin and indenting each alternate line, establishes a pattern that helps the eye get accustomed to this arrangement and to parse the sentences with ease:

A much-beaten-upon-looking, bedraggled blackbird, not a starling, with
A mangled or tumorous claw,
an extra-evil air, comically malignant, like something from a folktale
meant to frighten you,
gimps his way over the picnic table to a cube of moist white cheese into
which he drives his beak.

There is a suspended syntax in this long sentence, but the words are strung together alliteratively and with the deft use of diction that creates sound patterns forming sonic clusters, making the sentence cohere and aiding comprehension. In the above stanza, “bedraggled black-bird,” “extra-evil” are alliterations. There is a sonic partnership or inter-play in diction such as “starling,” “mangled” and “malignant” or between “gimp” and “picnic” or “cheese” and “beak” or in the phrase” folktale/ meant to frighten you.” These patterns of sonic play establish a harmony which can be said to contribute to clarity in its cohesive effect. The pattern becomes more and more vivid as the poem continues:

Then a glister of licentious leering, a conspiratorial gleam, the cocked
brow of common avarice:
he works his yellow scissors deeper in, daring doubt, a politician with
his finger in the till,
a weapon maker’s finger in the politician, the slobber and the licking
and the champ and the click.

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Monday, April 20, 2015

The Dragon will never become the Eagle: China and Democracy

by Stephen T. Asma

ScreenHunter_1144 Apr. 18 15.47

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a founding Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, and in 2007 he lived and studied in Shanghai China. Asma also researched Asian philosophies in Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Laos. And in 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar, teaching philosophy in Beijing, China.

Recently my Chinese students in Beijing asked me why the U.S. media was so critical of China –always wagging a finger about human rights (forgetting about U.S. violations like NSA spying, drone bombing, Guantanamo, and so on). “Can't Americans see,” one student asked, “that our Chinese way is different but still successful?”

How successful is the Chinese government? Over the last three decades, the Communist Party has pulled hundreds of millions of people from poverty. It has done this partly through controversial but needful policies like the “one child rule.” Moreover, China's annual GDP growth has averaged 10%. China is the world's leading exporter, and second only to the U.S. in imports. Its unemployment rate is between 4 and 7 %, and its literacy rate is 95%. In short, the Party has been very successful, and is not going away anytime soon.

Ironically, the Chinese people already think of themselves as a democracy. But it is democracy “with Chinese characteristics.” China has seen itself as democratic, minzhu or “people driven,” since the 1911 revolution. Even Mao Zedong characterized the early People's Republic of China as a “new democracy” and a “people's democratic dictatorship.”

Surprising to many westerners, Chinese people do vote for their politicians, but it's a hierarchical electoral system. Local people directly elect the regional chapters of the “People's Congresses.” Then the People's Congresses elect the “National People's Congress” (the national legislator). Finally, the president and the State Council are elected by the National People's Congress. The voting is bottom-up, but nominations of candidates are usually top-down. This is precisely the sticking point for the recent “Occupy Central” movement in downtown Hong Kong. They want to reject the Chinese style of democracy (of top-down nominations) in favor of western style voting (at all levels). Beijing's approach, however, is not the reflection of some Orwellian fascist agenda, but an organic result of deep Chinese cultural commitments.

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Monday Poem


Am I my brother’s keeper?
…………… —Genesis 4:9

Not Abel

At first I was able, then I was not Abel,
I’d walked with Cain. I was battered off my feet
—but before?

Before I became a name of biblical proportions
I just tended sheep, then suddenly
my lambs stood bleating as I lay bleeding

The world had changed. No longer Abel
I became a metaphor among metaphors,
a theological thing, the crux of a yarn
told and told again, whose blood
cried from dirt, from amongst my brother’s
cabbages and grains, seeping down through roots
while farmer Cain, my fratricidal brother,
sobbing, muttering, also became a mythic
meaningthing

Then I was not Abel, though Cain
was ever marked as Cain

…………………. —the stuff of me driven down
like a stake beneath a hammer, Cain and I became
characters of tales, companions, occupants of verses,
a breeze a minstrel’s breath disperses

……… echoes in a clamor
……… two coins in priestly purses

……… Abel the innocent
……… Cain the stuff of curses
.

by Jim Culleny
4/19/20

Brand ISIS: A Case of Extremism as Cultural Innovation

by Ahmed Humayun

Cezanne_cherriesA shepherd tending to well fed sheep on a lush green field, the blades of grass glistening in the sunlight. A bustling marketplace with stalls sparkling with multi-colored fruit and loaves of freshly baked bread. A father looking on affectionately as his young sons frolic in a playground.

These images are culled from the advertising campaign of a highly successful global brand, though likely not the one you have in mind: these are all high quality, high definition images found on pro-ISIS Twitter feeds, advertising life in the self-proclaimed Islamic state. That the brutality of ISIS – the beheadings, mass executions, child soldiering, and enslavement – has galvanized Western media attention is unsurprising but it comprises only one element of its vast propaganda campaign. No other violent extremist organization in the Muslim world has gone to such lengths to define and broadcast a new cultural expression, which amounts to a branded vision of violent extremism as a consumerist lifestyle choice under the ambit of a restored caliphate. Transfixed by the ghoulish atrocities, we overlook the subtle cunning of brand ISIS.

Cultural Innovation and Jack Daniels

According to cultural brand strategy, in mature markets competitors engage in ‘dog eat dog' competition based on incremental feature improvements that yield limited margins. [1] However, social disruptions create crises for incumbents, and present ideological opportunities for innovative niche brands to emerge and capture market share. Effective ideological innovation creates new cultural expressions that repurpose shared cultural content such as myths and cultural codes.

Consider the use of cultural strategy in the case of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey.[2] By the end of the first half of the 20th century in the United States, there were dozens of varieties of undistinguished whiskeys, none of them with leading market share. Among them was Jack Daniels. Yet the brand got ahead of its competitors and became a global brand through the deft, deliberate use of cultural strategy.

By the mid-1950s, the U.S. economy had undergone a major transition where traditional occupations of farming and small enterprise had been replaced by white collar professions in massive corporate bureaucracies. Whiskey in the United States is typically entangled with cultural associations of masculinity and class. At this time, virtually all whiskey brands including Jack Daniels touted their customers as successful status seeking, corporate climbing ‘organization men'. Yet by 1965, Jack Daniels had positioned itself as the embodiment of ‘rugged individualism'. It did this, for example, by emphasizing its traditional, pre-industrial methods of making whiskey, and associating the brand with stories from frontier mythology. By jettisoning cultural orthodoxy and advancing an innovative alternative ideology, Jack Daniel's crushed its competition and today ranks among the world's top global brands.

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If the DNA molecule is the book of life, it’s a very strange book indeed

by Yohan J. John

DNA_replication_split.svgThe DNA molecule is often described as the book of life, as a blueprint for constructing the organism, or as a program for computing the organism. These metaphors have become so pervasive that we often forget that they are metaphors. In this essay I'd like to take this class of metaphor —the life-as-information metaphor — seriously, and investigate what some recent findings in molecular biology look like when mapped onto the world of books, blueprints and programs. I'd like to run with the information metaphor, seeing how far it can take us. I think this will help us understand the limits of the metaphor, but more importantly, it can help us appreciate the richness and complexity of biological processes, and the sheer scale of the ongoing endeavor to understand the science of life. [In part I of this series I looked at the origins of information theory and computer science, and in part II I traced the history of genetics, up to the discovery of the genetic code. This essay continues the themes from those columns, but can be read as a standalone article.]

The discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule in the mid 20th century was the culmination of a quest to understand the nature of heredity that had begun a little over a century before. In the early 19th century, biologists began asking two intertwined questions about organisms: the question of heredity, and the question of development. How did hereditary traits pass from one generation to the next? And what biological, chemical and physical processes were involved in the development of the organism from an embryo? The first question was often described as a question of 'ultimate causes', and was closely linked to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin's theory depended on inheritance, but he could only provide speculative accounts of the physical basis of heredity. Many 19th century cell biologists were more interested in what they saw as the nuts and bots of biology, and preferred to investigate the question of development. They believed that only 'proximal causes' could be tested in a lab, and perhaps even witnessed under a microscope. Evolutionary theory by contrast seemed more like philosophy.

The two sorts of question 19th century biologists were interested in find their counterpart in two broad spheres of genetics research: transmission genetics, which studies how hereditary traits pass from one generation to the next, and developmental genetics, which studies how genes participate in the physical processes by which traits become manifest in cells and in organisms. The concept of the genotype is useful when thinking about transmission genetics: the genotype is the sum total of the genetic makeup of an organism, and in a sense represents all the potential hereditary traits that can become manifest. Nowadays the word 'genome' is used in a closely related way. When thinking about developmental genetics, the concept of the phenotype is central: it is the sum total of an organism's observable traits, which are not just a product of the genetic makeup, but are also influenced by the environment, and by the developmental process itself. Transmission genetics studies how the inheritance, reassembly and mutation of genetic material lead to the formation of a genotype, whereas developmental genetics studies how the potential latent in the genotype is actualized to give rise to the phenotype.

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Valley of the Saints

by Rafiq Kathwari

My friend Irfan and I drove a Gypsy with faulty brakes to Baba's shrine nestled in the Himalayan foothills. “You must go show your respect,” Mother had urged when I told her I was flying to Srinagar. “Say a prayer for your health and wealth.”

Her father, Sultan Bastal, a prosperous cashmere shawl merchant, who made Kashmir home after wheeling, dealing on the Silk Route, had married three times hoping for an heir, but his wives had proved barren. “Or, perhaps, it was him,” Mother said.

And so, Sultan Sahib, invoked his faith in Sufism, went on a haj to Baba's shrine. He wore a white turban, customary in his era; rode shot gun as his tonga-wallah drove their one horse buggy on a dirt road fringed by miles of poplars all the way from Srinagar to Tangmarg,

where the dirt road ended and a foot trail started, a journey in those days, Mother said, of at least three days in late summer when past winter's snow melts. Sultan Sahib and tonga-wallah rested often to give their horse a break from his uphill task. Glacial streams laughed

by the road. Sultan Sahib flung his arms wide in wonder at a view of a virgin valley diffused in light. Clouds flirted naked peaks on the horizon. He trekked a pine-scented forest to the thatched-roof shrine, where he tied a thread to carved wooden roses, and wept as he

prayed for a son, “O, Baba, beloved saint, make me a model of your mercy.” And 90 years later here we were, Irfan and I, parking our rusty jeep in an ersatz bus stop littered with rubbish. Baba Reshi, resting for five centuries under alabaster, preached Divinity lives in the

garden within and in the wasteland without. The first thing I saw was a bunker, an example of many bunkers in the Kashmir valley: bold white capitals on blue tarpaulin:
RESPECT ALL SUSPECT ALL.

A fascist credo packed with sad irony, baring a strategy of the world's most populous democracy —a lie I'm tired of hearing—to subvert teachings of saints who brought Sufism to Kashmir, Kashmir to Sufism. I strolled around the barbed wire, a tote slung over my

shoulder, grinned at a para-military, an Uzi slung over his shoulder, his belly prosperous.
“Namaste,” I said joining my hands. “Where from?” he asked. “Mumbai,” I lied. “And you?” I asked. “Allahabad,” he said. “O,” I said, “Where Ganges and Yamuna merge.” He nodded,

waved me through without rifling my tote, but asked, “Where friend from?” “A local,” I said, realizing at once I had pushed Irfan under the clichéd bus. O, Fuck. “Open
bag,” para-military barked. Irfan did as told. “Who you? Why here? Where going?”

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Night-Plane

by Mara Jebsen

Boeing-747-400-002

I cross the country.

Beneath me
Towns crackle, bullet holes bleeding light.
Yellow, hard, a bright-mustard honey.
There are bees and bees in the skull in the sky.
Amnesia, I think, is the white air inside
an airplane. And fears, I expect, are bizarre
infant-plants that grow without sun
in the very wee hours. To share
these wee hours with suited up-bodies,
— odd, erect, banal—
is a warm thing. I can’t find my worry.
My mother’s ______, my brother’s
______, No. These
Are in the ground, steaming up, up, up.
We go fast, some empty-headed angels.

The Perils of Majoritarianism

By Namit Arora

(On the ethnic history and politics of Sri Lanka and a review of Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War. A shorter version appeared in the Times Literary Supplement earlier this month. Below is the original long version—the directors cut.)
___________________________________________________

DividedIslandFew places in the world, of similar size, offer a more bracing human spectacle than the beautiful island of Sri Lanka. It abounds in deep history and cultural diversity, ancient cities and sublime art, ingenuity and human folly, wars and lately, even genocide. It has produced a medley of identities based on language (Sinhala, Tamil, English, many creoles), religion (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, animism), and geographic origin (Indian, Malaysian, European, Arab, indigenous), alongside divisions of caste and class. Rare for a country its size are the many divergent accounts of itself, fused at the hip with the politics of ethnic identities—a taste of which I got during my month-long travel on the island in early 2014.

The Sri Lankan experience has been more traumatic lately, owing to its 26-year civil war that ended with genocide in 2009. The countrys three main ethnic groups—Sinhalese (75 percent), Tamil (18 percent), and Muslim (7 percent)—now live with deep distrust of each other. One way to understand Sri Lankan society and its colossal tragedy is to study the causes and events that led to the civil war. What historical currents preceded it? Did they perhaps make the war inevitable? What was at stake for those who waged it? What has been its human toll and impact on civic life? In his brave and insightful work of journalism, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, Samanth Subramanian attempts to answer such questions while bearing witness to many of its tragedies.

A Brief Social History of Sri Lanka

Around two-and-a-half millennia ago, waves of migrants from the Indian subcontinent overwhelmed the island’s indigenous hunter-gatherers, the Veddah (a few descendants still survive). Migrants arriving from modern day Bengal, speakers of Prakrit—an Indo-European language that evolved into Sinhala—intermixed with indigenous islanders to later become the Sinhalese. Other migrants from southern India, speakers of Tamil and other Dravidian languages and belonging mostly to the Saivite sect, also intermixed with the islanders to later become the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Which group of migrants arrived first, a question hotly pursued by the nationalists, lacks scholarly resolution. Both groups established themselves in different parts of the island: the Sinhalese in the center, south, and west, the Tamils in the north and east.

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Monday, April 13, 2015

The Spectre of History: Thoughts on an Islamic Reformation

by Ali Minai

KoranThe call for an “Islamic reformation” is ringing out across the world in response to the rise of jihadi militant groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, asking “Where is the Muslim Luther“? In the many opinion pieces and outright prescriptions gracing the pages of magazines, newspapers and blogs, one hears a clear message of “reform or die!” Given the menace posed by Muslim militant groups, this is neither surprising nor unreasonable. But is it really useful to think in terms of reforming the religion of Islam?

This article argues that seeking a religious reformation in Islam is neither feasible nor especially useful as a strategy for countering the current rise of Islamic militancy. While this militancy undoubtedly draws upon Islamic beliefs, groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda are emergent products of an underlying societal attitude, and until that attitude changes, such groups will continue to arise. Of course, it is critical to fight today's particular militants with every available tactic, but it is even more important to understand why such groups emerge and persist in Muslim societies today, and how this dynamic can be changed.

Proponents of “Islamic reformation” have often invoked the Protestant Reformation in 16th century Europe as an example of the radical change that's needed in Islam today. But as perceptive commentators have pointed out, this argument is fatally flawed: An illiberal and puritanical movement directed at a specific institution – the Roman Catholic Church – is a poor model for reforming an illiberal and puritanical system with no institutionalized clergy. Ultimately, the possibilities for change in Islam are constrained by its historical nature. More than an organized religion, it is a normative ideology defined implicitly by the attitudes of believers towards sacred texts and personages. Unlike Christianity, which is mainly about doctrine, Islam is mostly about history – past and future, personal and universal.

Through its first three centuries, Christianity was a faith without temporal power. This is reflected in the New Testament, which focuses almost entirely on spiritual, ethical and doctrinal matters. When Christianity finally achieved power under Constantine, it necessarily institutionalized a distinction, though not yet a separation, between Church and State – a recognition that God had His domain and Caesar had his, albeit with God's sanction. Notwithstanding the active participation of the Church in politics for centuries thereafter, the formal aim of Christianity has always been to shape souls, with personal Redemption and Salvation as core ideas. In contrast, Islam acquired temporal power during its earliest period, and developed a strong vision of itself, not only as the basis of individual piety, but also as the shaper of history and an organizer of societies.

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To trim their sail to every wind that blows

by Carl Pierer

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Introduction

The standard case of epistemic peer disagreement has two people going regularly to a café, where they regularly drink and eat. Sometimes A has to pay more, sometimes B. Often, they disagree about who has to pay how much – sometimes A gets it right, sometimes B. This time, A calculates that she has to pay £14, while B thinks A has to pay £12. Both are equally smart, they have access to the same information and because of the stipulated regularity, neither of them is particularly likely to get it right on this occasion. They are so called epistemic peers on this question. What should A do now, in light of the further information that B disagrees with her sum of £14?

Suggestions for what ought to be done when disagreement arises between epistemic peers (EPs) fall either under conformism (backing off the initial confidence) or non-conformism (remaining unmoved). I am not aware that anybody suggested opportunism (losing confidence altogether and taking the opponent's view). All three positions work with the following definition:

Epistemic Peers: A&B are EPs iff:

(i) A&B are cognitive equals (equally smart, diligent, thorough, etc.)

(ii) A&B have access to the same evidence. Whether or not this just means same amount of evidence or exactly the same evidence is disputed, but irrelevant for the present discussion.

(iii) There is no reason to suppose that one of them is particularly apt to figure out the right response in D.

Call such a disagreement between EPs an epistemic-peer disagreement (EPD).

In this essay I will argue that, without a telos in relation to which we hold and modify our views, opportunism cannot be ruled out. First, I outline the arguments for conformism and suggest these cannot exclude opportunism. Second, I present the non-conformist argument, thereby illustrating that an analogous argument supports opportunism. Third, I suggest that only with an agreed telos for our views can opportunism be rejected.

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The Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism

by Michael Lopresto

Charles_Darwin_01Moral realism is the view that there are moral truths irrespective of what anyone thinks about those truths. In other words, moral truths are mind-independent—a condition that is often taken to characterise any form of realism, be it scientific realism, mathematical realism or even aesthetic realism. So according to the moral realist, the Holocaust still be objectively morally wrong even if we were all brainwashed into believing it was morally right. Equally for scientific realism, if a true scientific theory posited the existence of quarks, quarks would still exist even if we all believed that quarks did not exist. And so on for every other form of realism.

Moral realism is sometimes challenged on scientific grounds, namely that we can't fit value into a scientific world view. I've addressed this concern before, as part of a distinctively philosophical project often described as reconciling the manifest image with the scientific image. However, moral realism has recently come under a new sort of attack on scientific grounds, put most forcefully and ingeniously by Sharon Street. The argument begins from the empirical premise that evolutionary forces have influenced our moral beliefs, something that is plainly true, to a sceptical conclusion that our moral beliefs are unjustified. So the argument is essentially that since moral beliefs were not caused by moral facts, we have no reason to think that our moral beliefs could be true.

Firstly, some clarifications are in order. What distinguishes the evolutionary debunker from other anti-realists is that she is not trying to show that there are no moral facts, but rather that there is no moral knowledge. Furthermore, what distinguishes the evolutionary debunker is that her premises are empirical, and that such empirical premises entail that our moral beliefs have a highly suspect origin. So this is an epistemological argument for moral scepticism. However, this may also be taken as a reductio of moral realism, since moral realism would be rather useless indeed if no moral facts could ever be known.

So let's examine the premise that the origins of a belief could undermine its justification. In good cases of belief formation, our beliefs are often caused by the things that they are about. For example, I currently believe that there are about three dozen books in front of me. This belief is caused by my perception of the books themselves, and as far as I know, my perceptual faculties are working pretty well. But consider a case where I take a hallucinogenic drug and start hallucinating books in front of me without even knowing it. I would have the exact same belief, that there about three dozen books in front of me, but rather than being caused by the books themselves, the belief is caused by the drug. Therefore, the belief is not justified because it's not caused in the right way, even if the belief is true just by chance.

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Playing House

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Blog1Anthropologists are supposed to be masters of the art of the rooting and uprooting. I learned very early on in my graduate school career the art of attaching, but never too much. Never owning a place, always on the move, and becoming excellent at thrift store shopping for furniture were some of the skills I carried with me into adulthood. These things I only realized recently when I experienced intense panic as I stood in my adult living room looking around at all the “good” furniture I owned, things that were too solid to find takers on Craigslist.

Nevertheless, some of my most striking memories of “im”permanence are of the housed I inhabited, especially during the time I conducted fieldwork in the city of Pune. Over the course of a year and a half, I moved three times across four houses. For the first three months, I was a paying guest at the house of a friend. She had a beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. While the location was hardly convenient, the pleasure of her company and the promise of good food kept me rooted to the place. I had a lovely first floor room with its own bathroom, a bed, and a carved wooden desk. Her two dogs were an added joy. She had glass baubles in the windows, classical music wafting out of her room in the mornings, and a kitchen stuffed with interesting chutneys and condiments. Eclectic crystal and glassware dotted the cupboard in her dining room, and we spent many evenings conjuring cocktails and sipping wine.

The house was my respite from the frustrations of fieldwork, and its objects were sources of contemplation when the city offered none. Even the light filtering through its corner windows seemed imbued with its own enchantments and possibilities. It smelled of a delightful comfort.

It was, of course, too good to last.

After three months, I commenced nighttime work at a place far away from her home and it was time for me to find a new place. She came to my rescue however, and suggested that I meet her sister who lived in another part of the city and had a studio apartment to rent. The catch was that I would have to fend for myself for two months before the current tenants were ready to leave.

The two houses I inhabited for the two months that I was ungrounded were remarkable in the ways that they evoked emotions that can only be said to be in opposite quadrants of the affective pantheon.

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Do we really value thinking for oneself?

by Emrys Westacott

Why do we choose to do what we think is right even when it goes against our inclinations or interests? This is one of the oldest and toughest questions in moral psychology. Knowing the good clearly does not entail that we will do the good. So what carries us from the former to the latter? Imgres

One philosopher who wrestled with this question long and hard was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He considered it profoundly mysterious that we often choose to do overrid our interests or desires and do our duty purely because we consider ourselves dutybound. (Nietzsche expresses a similar sense of wonder when he asks, “How did nature manage to breed an animal with the right to make promises?”) Kant's explanation is that we are moved by what he calls moral feeling.[1] And he identifies two main kinds of moral feeling: respect for morality, and disgust for what is contrary to morality. Discussing these in his lectures on ethics, he says that you cannot make yourself or anyone else have these feelings. But you can inculcate them, or something that will serve the same purpose, in a child through proper training. The following passage is especially noteworthy:

We should instill an immediate abhorrence for an action from early youth onwards . . . we must represent an action, not as forbidden or harmful, but as inwardly abhorrent in itself. For example, a child who tells lies must not be punished, but shamed; we must cultivate an abhorrence, a contempt for this act, and by frequent repetition we can arouse in him such an abhorrence of the vice as becomes ahabitus with him.[2]

I imagine this bit of moral pedagogy will strike many readers as morally suspect. But why?

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THE FERMI PARADOX, MASS EFFECT, AND TRANSHUMANISM

by Charlie Huenemann

Mass_effect-t2

The Fermi Paradox

The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is just the way such conversations go – the discussion turned to the possibility of faster-than-light space travel and the probability of life cropping up elsewhere in the galaxy. Fermi had a hunch that life shouldn’t be all that rare – it should be common, really – and that there was at least a ten percent “miracle chance” that supraluminal travel should prove possible. This led him to raise an exasperated question that drew laughter from the others: “Where is everybody?

Thus the Fermi paradox: in all this space, and all this time, there should be plenty of advanced alien civilizations – but we haven’t heard from any of them. How come?

The most conservative resolution of the paradox is to claim that the universe is in fact SO very big and SO very old that not only has intelligent life evolved all over the place, but the spaces and times separating them from one another are SO very vast that they can never be crossed. It would be like two children in Cuba and China releasing their balloons at the same time and expecting them to bump into each other.

But there are other possible and more tantalizing resolutions to the paradox. Maybe the aliens have checked us out already and decided to put us in galactic time-out; maybe they already walk among us; maybe tomorrow we will indeed make contact; maybe alien governments always decide to cut funding for alien NASA programs; maybe in fact we live in an alien-created virtual reality – and so on, down the long line of fantastic sci-fi literature. But I would like to focus on one resolution that, whether likely or not, raises in my mind some interesting philosophical questions. Maybe, by the time any civilization reaches the point at which they can reach out to other planets, they also have developed super-intelligent machines, and that is when all hell breaks lose.

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Monday, April 6, 2015

An Atheist Considers God’s Plan

by Akim Reinhardt

Oprah quote“It's all part of God's plan.”

That's bad enough. But I go a little nuts whenever someone says: “Everything happens for a reason.”

After all, if you actually believe that we're all just mortal puppets dancing on a divine string, then there's really no point in us having an adult conversation about cause and effect.

But unlike God's plan, “Everything happens for a reason” does not suggest a deep detachment from reality, which is precisely what makes it far more exasperating than assertions of, say, childhood leukemia being an important cog in God's grand machinations.

Rather than embracing wild delusion or concocting a fantastic blend of paternal benevolence and cruelty, “everything happens for a reason” suggests a far murkier and depressing version of surrendering reality. Like the “God's plan” adage, it indicates the speaker just can't live up to the horrors of life, and is wont to soothe oneself with the balm of inevitability. But it also leads me to suspect that while the speaker is sane enough to dismiss sadistically intricate divine plans, s/he has been reduced to hiding behind the gauze of unstated and unknowable “reasons.”

Everything happens for a reason.

In other words, even the worst of it can be justified, even if we don't know how.

To say childhood leukemia is part of God's plan is to give that reason a name. Specifically, God's plan is how one justifies the horror. That's pretty awful.

But to say childhood leukemia happens for a vague, unnamed reason is to accept that it's justified in some way, but to not know what the justification is. That seems even worse.

Both proverbs, to my mind, are patently dishonest sentiments. But while I can easily dismiss the former as delusion in the face of pain, the latter reveals just enough self-awareness to anger me.

God's plan is the refuge of those who, unable to face up to harsh realities, opt for fantasy. But to recognize that childhood-leukemia-as-God's-plan is a form of lunacy, yet hide your own weak-kneed desperation behind claims of “reason,” is really insulting. It's one thing to dismiss rational thought altogether when attempting to face life's horrors. It's quite another to bastardize and mangle rational thought to create a shield against life's horrors.

Or so it seemed to me when I first considered these aphorisms.

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Pygmalion and Supersymmetry

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

6a019b00fed410970b01bb081709cc970d-500wiSome myths seep so deep into popular culture, that even those who are not aware of the origins of a legend, know the story. Few of us have read Ovid's original account of the Cypriot sculptor, Pygmalion, who carved a beautiful woman out of ivory, and proceeded to fall so deeply in love with Galatea, as he called her, that the goddess Aphrodite took pity on him and breathed life into the statue. But, even in our ignorance of Greek classics, the basic motifs of this story are familiar from countless retellings through the ages. Whether it is a fairy tale like Pinnochio, or – in a more contemporary twist – a play by George Bernard Shaw, the theme remains the same: can you fall so completely in love with your own creation, that you blur the boundaries of reality? Can you make something come alive, just by wanting it badly enough?

After a two year pause, the LHC is turning on again. Once more, beams of protons will run circles around the giant ring, miles under Geneva, speeding up with each lap, until they are made to collide head-on, unleashing energies to rival those that prevailed seconds after the Big Bang. In the earlier run, when the Higgs boson was discovered, the LHC attained collision energies in the 7 – 8 TeV range. This time, the goal is to reach the 13 – 14 TeV range, and explore realms that have never before been accessible. Couched within the excitement of probing the unknown, are our desires for what we want to see emerge from the data. There are several theories we would like to see proved, but if I had to choose a single contender, I'd vote for supersymmetry (SUSY; pronounced Susie) – as would many others. There are, of course some dissenting voices in the crowd; those who say we have already hung on to the hope of supersymmetry for too long, that some experimental evidence of it should have turned up by now, if the theory was correct. These critics level the allegation that supersymmetry is in fact just a theoretical construction, but that some of us are so enamored of its beauty, and so keen to see this mathematical model ‘come to life', that we have lost touch with reality.

The fact that most physicists do tend to wax lyrical about this theory, is indisputable. “I love supersymmetry. It is a very canonical theory”, says Fabiola Gianotti, the soon to be Director General of CERN. Peter Higgs, after whom the famous boson was named, has declared himself “a fan” and Stephen Hawking, one of the most recognizable icons of our time, says we might see traces of supersymmetry at the LHC, if we're lucky, and that “the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles revolutionize our understanding of the universe.” In short, so many physicists want so desperately to see this theory realized, that one could perhaps be excused for wondering if we are contemporary Pygmalions, and SUSY our Galatea. Are we trying to bring it into being by sheer force of will?

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Rosemary tea, miso butter, and other kitchen snippets

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

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As I grow older and worldlier, and as the world itself grows more worldly, an increasingly wide range of ingredients and techniques and flavors take up residence in my kitchen. The flavors of my childhood were primarily those of the subcontinent, dominated by the Indian Ocean cities of Calcutta, Colombo and Bombay, and by European food mediated through England, Calcutta and the colonial mixing. And it is sobering to contemplate that there was a point when soy sauce didn’t consistently inhabit my kitchen (a few years in a vegetarian co-op in Massachusetts and a semester in Japan changed that), or to remember that fish sauce and various vinegars didn’t always occupy prominent roles in my culinary imagination. I’ve always known about chilies, of course; I imagine that growing up in another culinary tradition and discovering chilies must be like discovering some fundamental metaphysical truth about the world, perhaps one that you’d always known must exist, perhaps one that must exist in all possible worlds.

Some will lament the loss of local particularity that goes with such increasing cosmopolitanism, and that is indeed worth a mournful moment of silence. But, inevitably, these world-traveling ingredients strike up conversations and more in the pantry (I discovered the herring passionately intertwined with the curry leaves one long lazy afternoon), and spark improbable but delightful culinary revelations.

The combination of fermented soy beans and butter is a revelation. It is not traditional and, depending on the vividness of your imagination, might seem transgressive. At the least, the cultures that love them are separate, with soy sauce, miso and the fermented bean pastes concentrated in East Asia, and butter spread through the rest of the world with a special concentration in parts of Europe and India[1]. They are also distinctive and easily identifiable as foundational elements of their associated cuisines: “butter” and “soy” are almost caricatures of how one might describe, say, the opposition between French and Chinese food.

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Give The Pentagon Budget To The People: A Wish That One Day Will Be Fulfilled

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

ImagesEvery now and then I think of something crazy.

Like why don't we taxpayers sue Walmart for the $6.2 billion we have to supply to their workers in foodstamps and other help because Walmart doesn't pay its employees enough to live on?

Or why doesn't Obama, instead of paying out unemployment insurance, use that money to give to the unemployed some well-paid government jobs — to say, fix our crumbling infrastructure (bridges, roads, energy grid, etc.) or install solar panels on all our buildings to make us less dependent on oil?

Or why don't we as a country get rid of student debt by simply writing it off? And then find the money for free college education for everyone who want to go to college.

Where would we find that money to pay for free college for all Americans?

Well, by means of my latest foray into wish-fulfillment thinking: why don't we take the entire Pentagon budget that gets spent on new weaponry and divert it to pay for college educations for everyone or for free pre-K education to kids or something equally worthwhile?

Or why don't we reduce the entire Pentagon budget by 80% and use that money for socially useful purposes?

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