by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Mandi (1983) – The Marketplace

Shyam Benegal's film Mandi or the The Marketplace has been largely understood as a black comedy satirizing middle-class morality. Set in a brothel,Mandi is a rollicking drama of excess. This establishment is faced with a sad decline as its patronage withers in the face of changing times. Middle-class morality is posed against the bordello, with the conflict being played out as the agenda of a hypocritical, desirous, yet authoritarian and morally adjudicating middle-class civil society. The alchemy of this sharply performative delineating breaks down at several points when the madam of the bordello Rukmini Bai retorts with the very same discourse that society uses to attack the establishment, thus exposing the ephemerality and absurdly unquestioned character of such narratives.

The characters are strong, differentially positioned entities with various roles to play within and without this market for women. Rukmini Bai, the madam of the bordello is probably one of the most nuanced characters played by women in Indian cinema. Shabana Azmi executes the role of a ruthless madam who wants the sex trade to flourish with a flavor that is almost schizophrenic[i]. The nature of her various alliances with men outside and women inside is a tension filled process alternating between dominance, negotiation and acquiescence.

She wields power in knowing and serving their secret desires while allying with them to serve her own. With the women or her girls, she is maternal and paternal at the same time[ii] while also ruthless in her understanding of their value as commodities. Her care and concern are instrumental in being able to maintain a household of service workers but she also considers them as her own children much in the manner of a capricious parent. Watch the scene where she negotiates the purchase of Phulmani[iii], playing concerned parent one moment and seasoned buyer the next. In the tone of stern parenthood, Bai seeks to break the virginal girl gently into sex work thus almost erasing her complicity, but the first few frames detailing the actual act of purchase ensure that the audience will not forget. The film further complicates this notion of functional and adoptive parenthood when focusing on the behavior of Mrs. Gupta, a member of respectable society and an associate in the movement for women's upliftment when we see her gently coercing her reluctant daughter into an arranged marriage[iv].

Read more »

by Thomas Rodham Wells

The material prosperity that capitalism has wrought is the product of technology as well as markets (and social norms and state institutions). Markets enhance the efficiency of allocation of resources, such as human labour, between competing projects, while technological innovations enhance the productivity of our use of those resources, the ability to produce more with less. As Keynes prophesied in his famous essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), the seemingly relentless trend of rising productivity promises to finally end the ‘economic problem': the struggle to overcome scarcity that has characterised the human condition since our beginning. Finally, we could turn as a society to considering what our enormous wealth can do for us, rather than what we must do to get it.

Yet this is not a time for complacency. Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism, or worse. The problem is this, how will ordinary people earn a claim on the material prosperity of the capitalist economy if that economy doesn't need our labour anymore?

The original industrial revolution was basically an energy revolution that replaced puny human brawn with fossil fuel powered machines that were orders of magnitude faster and stronger. Human workers were displaced into the new jobs created by this prosperity – some managing and servicing the machines that made actual things, but most into ‘services', producing intangible goods such as education by cognitive efforts that the machines couldn't yet reproduce. We are now living through a second industrial revolution that is replacing puny human brains with machine intelligence. Any kind of work that can be routinised can be translated into instructions for computers to follow, generally more cheaply and reliably than human employees can. That includes increasingly sophisticated cognitive labour like driving, legal discovery, medicine, and document translation. Even university lecturers are at risk of being replaced by technology, in the form of Massive Open Online Courses, while the digital cloning of actors promises to allow filmmakers to cheaply manufacture whatever cast they please.

Just like the original industrial revolution this will create large numbers of losers whose skills are no longer valued by the market. But this time it is not clear that new jobs will appear for these people to move into, for this time it seems that the machines will be able to follow us nearly anywhere we try to go, perhaps even including the management of corporations themselves. This time technological unemployment may become a permanent fact that we have to deal with by changing how capitalism works. Our birthright as humans – the ability to produce things by our labour that others find valuable – may become economically worthless.

Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

Some of my readers may recall from an earlier blog post or Justin Smith's review of my Philosophy: A Commonplace Book that for many years I have been collecting humorous quotes, epigrams, aphorisms, parodies, etc. that have some connection to Philosophy. The connection is sometimes that it is from a philosopher, or specifically about a philosophical topic–particularly ethics. Sometimes it is a joke that I see has a philosophical point behind or around or under it. Perhaps any great joke can be seen to be philosophical in some sense if one squints hard enough at it. But many of the quotes are just interesting and thought-provoking without being humorous.

Since publishing my book I have continued to mine for gems. One of the advantages to publishing an ebook is that it makes second editions easy and I intend to revise one of these days. But in the interim I provide a sampling of my sampling for your Monday morning amusement and edification.

If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying. … Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything.

Anonymous tweet

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Einstein

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a- half.

—————————

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Karl Kraus

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Hume

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

That's my friend Ramin Forghani from Iran, standing next to Maryam Namazie, carrying a placard outside the Law Society offices in London. He knows that what he is doing, and what he is about to say, could get him killed.

Imagine that you want to write your will according to sharia law, which in England you are perfectly entitled to do. You can go to your friendly neighbourhood Imam to discuss the matter, ask him to explain what is actual law, and what mere custom, talk about the various different interpretations available), and consider how best to apply them to your own family circumstances. This could be quite a long conversation; there are at least six main traditional schools of sharia jurisprudence, to say nothing of modernisers like Musawah who seek to accommodate Islamic practice to present-day principles of equality.

Or you can go to your solicitor, who handles all your ordinary legal business. And if that solicitor follows the guidance issued by the Law Society, he will simply tell you that sons inherit twice as much as daughters, adopted and illegitimate children do not inherit at all, neither do divorced spouses, and marital status is defined according to religious marriage and not according to the law of the land. Tough, by the way, on your orphaned grandkids; in the Law Society's version of sharia law “it is not possible to inherit under Sharia rules by a deceased relative.”

Read more »

First Love

I’m falling
for you
falling falling

the ground’s given way
I’m tumbling sprawling
space space —my mind

my heart, my heart
is in a parabolic arc
in a plane devoid of gravity and time

I float I float
I’m in a massless boat
sailing sailing

the truth of gravity is failing
the sadness of abrupt conclusions gone
I’ve come apart, I’m flailing
flailing

up is all around
it’s merged with down
if I weren’t so glad
I’d certainly be wailing
.

by Jim Culleny
5/2/14

by Katharine Blake McFarland

Jennifer Bornstein, Untitled, 2014. © Jennifer Bornstein

On a trip to New York to visit friends last month—a trip that coincided with the city's first beautiful spring weekend after a grueling, endless winter—I walked four miles uptown to see the Whitney Biennial exhibit. Mostly I found the show to be difficult and pedagogical, but there were a few standout pieces, works I will remember for their ability to open up some previously closed part of the heart. A pencil drawing by Elijah Burgher; a massive series of paintings by Keith Mayerson called My American Dream, which sets iconic images next to the personal moments of the painter's life; a kind of totem by Jimmie Durham called Choose Any Three, made of stacked wood pieces inscribed with names like Malcolm X, Annie Wauneka, and Kafka.

But one of the most unforgettable moments of the exhibit wasn't an installation. It was a conversation I overheard among young girls about an installation.

In a small dark room, a short film played on a loop. The film, Untitled by Jennifer Bornstein, features a group of naked women dancing. In true modern dance form, the women are barefoot, pushing and pulling their bodies across the barren backdrop, dragging and circling, arching and caving in. At one point, two of the dancers seem to be in struggle, gripping each other's bodies like wrestlers; other times, the movements are languid, more peaceful and maybe even sad. The dancers themselves are beautiful—capable bodies, confident movements, their long brown hair falling in front of their faces.

As I stood with my back to the wall, just about to leave, three little girls scurried into the room, full of secrets, followed by a bedraggled-looking father. They couldn't have been more than six or seven years old.

“Eeeewwww” the tallest girl whispered loudly.

“They're JUST NAKED!” gasped another, which prompted a general chorus of audible, enraptured disgust (that kind of disgust, so familiar to childhood, that prohibits the possibility of looking away).

“Girls,” whispered the father, “if you don't like it, let's move along.” The girls reacted to this suggestion by taking a seat on the front-most bench, closest to the screen, and continued their chorus. The father tried a different approach: “What do you find so gross about it?”

“Their vaginas!” said the tallest girl. At this, the father glanced around the room embarrassedly, caught my eye, and I smiled.

“What about them?” the father asked, turning back to the girls.

“They're hairy!”—and then, after a reflective pause, “They look like men pretending to be women.”

As I left the dark room and walked into the bright white hallways of the museum, I immediately thought of Barbie. Her impossible proportions, gravity-defying and devoid of muscle; her smooth, and (of course) hairless, plastic skin.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

A story was recently imported from France to America, and it has since become a national sensation. It is the story of inequality and the danger of capitalism run amok. It is a prophecy for social upheaval if this inequality isn't handled in a timely manner. It is, by all accounts, an important story. Of course, I'm referring to Paul Walker's penultimate film, Brick Mansions, a parkour action flick he co-stars with David Belle and RZA. A film this dense begs for analysis, and fortunately there's already a compendium on the market whose popularity is threatening to rival that of the film itself. This study-guide, written by French economist Thomas Piketty, is called Capital in the Twenty-First Century and is essential reading for any American attempting to explore the economic allusions within Brick Mansions.

Brick Mansions is an American remake of the 2004 French film, District B13. While the remake does Americanize its subject matter, the larger plot elements of the story remain intact: as crime in Detroit increases to horrifyingly high levels, the government erects walls around the city's most dangerous neighborhood, a large block of rundown high-rises known as Brick Mansions. Lino (David Belle) is a resident of Brick Mansions and parkour enthusiast who is interested in killing drug kingpin Tremaine (RZA) for kidnapping his girlfriend. Lino is joined in his quest by Damien Collier (Paul Walker), a naive cop sent into Brick Mansions to deactivate a rogue neutron bomb that found its way into the area. As to be expected in an action film, our heroes are ceaselessly bombarded by henchmen with terrible aim and a proclivity for standing near the edges of rooftops. As the duo battles their way through the parade of bad guys, Lino's parkour skills prove to be an invaluable resource as he deftly traverses terrain filled with just-out-of-reach ladders, windows, and objects from which he can perform flips and other incredible feats of jumping. Collier is less agile than his counterpart, but a deep-seated rage over the death of his father affords him superhuman tenacity and an exceptionally wry wit.

You'd be forgiven if you read the above description and came to the conclusion that Brick Mansions is nothing but a brainless action movie whose core audience's age tops out at fourteen. In fact, you'd still be forgiven if you watched the movie and came away with the very same conclusion. Because the film is so oblique, it is easy to miss the nuanced social and economic critiques amongst the plethora of kicks and fist-bumps. Thankfully, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an impressive work in and of itself, decodes Brick Mansions and provides viewers with the opportunity to understand this frequently difficult film.

Read more »

by Grace Boey

What is it like to be a bat? Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously posed this question in 1974. As he noted, the question is one that cannot be answered: no matter how many objective, scientific facts we may discover about a bat’s physiology or neurobiology, we can never access its subjective, personal experience. Phenomenal consciousness – or qualia – is a private, opaque matter. Nagel’s question (and lack of an answer) is one that almost all philosophy freshmen are acquainted with.

But long before I’d heard of Nagel – or the mind-body problem of philosophy – I’d already developed a few ideas of my own about bats. As a child, I’d been enchanted by the tale of Stellaluna, a baby fruit bat who is accidentally separated from her mother. My own mother would often read the book to me at bedtime; I’d fall asleep thinking about brave Stellaluna who befriends a group of baby birds, reluctantly learns to eat worms, and is taught to sleep the wrong way up. When Stellaluna and her mother are finally reunited, both are overjoyed – and the baby bat finally feels like she is someplace she belongs. According to the story, bats are capable of complex emotions, preferences and desires – just like us.

Stellaluna is a wonderful children’s tale. But, as a scientific description of bat psychology, the text is clearly lacking. It is questionable whether bats are capable of possessing mental states such as ‘bravery’, ‘love’ or ‘belonging’, or whether they are capable of establishing ‘friendships’. The text commits what scientists refer to as ‘anthropomorphism’ – the act of assigning human-like qualities to non-human animals. Among scientists, anthropomorphism has become somewhat of a dirty word.

It is certainly unwise to blanketly assume that non-human animals have inner mental lives identical to those of humans. Yet it also seems unlikely that non-human animals have no mentality at all. If excessive anthropomorphism is a sin, then so is excessive anthropocentrism. In all likelihood, the truth about non-human animal minds lies somewhere in between. What, then, is the ‘correct’ way to interpret animal behaviour? This question comes with significant stakes, since how we relate to non-human animals is guided by what we believe about their minds. Unfortunately, the task of animal psychology is rife with methodological and philosophical difficulties. It would certainly be responsible for us to gather as much accurate, relevant scientific data as we can – but as Nagel has pointed out, the best we can do from there is still to guess.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

“”If you want to to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.” ― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

It was every Medieval person's greatest aspiration. For, of course, finding Prester John would bring about the most glorious-not to mention grandiose– conclusion to the Crusades. In their rich imaginations, the Medievals believed that this would culminate in the return of Jerusalem from “the Moors” and the making way for the Second Coming–and the Kingdom of Heaven.

No small undertaking, the search for the Prester was just as mind-bogglingly quixotic as the other European obsessions, like for Eldorado and Atlantis and the Grail. And, like the search for the Holy Grail, this sone had the added imperative and will to power borne of religion.

I imagine my favorite Portuguese fidalgo not taking the news well. But maybe Pêro da Covilhã was no real fidalgo anyway–of humble birth, it was his wit and skill with languages that had brought him this far up the aristocratic ladder in Lisbon. Called to court in 1487, he arrived to a room full of Jesuits.

Not the bloody Jesuits, he must have thought, Anything but them.

His despair must have only deepened when he heard what the king had in mind for him.

He was being asked to lead an emissary to Abyssinia.

As he struggled to recall where Abyssinia even was located, one of the council map-makers probably appeared and unfurled a large map of the known world; one with Jerusalem lying smack in the middle. As they explained the route he was to take, a Jesuit confidante and adviser to the viceroy explained that it was the Court of the King of Abyssinia at which they believed the legendary Prester John resided.

Prester John? Not this Catholic nonsense again? Pêro da Covilhã must have struggled to keep his disbelief from showing on his face over what they were asking of him.

Read more »

by Josh Yarden

Actor Clayton Moore, TV's Lone Ranger, rides to the rescue circa 1955. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Some people like the idea that education is the great leveler of the playing field. They believe, or at least they repeat the slogan that everyone can attain the American dream if they work hard enough in school. The truth tells a different story: A great education puts you ahead of the game, but that advantage is for a select few, not for everyone. The World Series and The Superbowl may be played on level fields, but most people, even those who try their very hardest, never have an opportunity to attend the game.

If you want to examine social inequality in America, the easiest place to begin is by taking a look at the socio-economic stratification of our schools. We have several parallel educational systems. Among them are elite private schools funded by foundations and private citizens, well-funded public schools in communities with relatively affluent populations, some high quality magnet public schools that do not offer open access to all students, more schools that are funded below desired levels, and many crowded under-resourced public schools. A more detailed look at the nature of poverty points toward particular issues such as homelessness, absenteeism, illness, the low educational levels of parents and substance abuse, among others. Politicized issues such as vouchers, school choice and test scores create a lot of noise that drowns out some of the most important signals communities are sending about the real issues that impact the quality of American education.

There seems to be an insatiable desire in some corners of American society to discover the silver bullet. We want a hero to ride into town on a white horse, clean up corruption and… Hi-Yo Silver! Away!… then leave us alone. We don't like paying taxes, and we don't like it when public officials spend our money on someone else's issue. But decades of reform initiatives have proven time and again that there are no silver bullets.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

“Called the ‘real origin' of Zola's Nana“! What 1950s drugstore customer, twirling the rack of paperbooks,
could resist that pitch? I will assume most contemporary readers are like me, and know the Goncourt brothers best by reading or rumor of their incomparable Journal. In the Journal their novels figure as neglected masterworks pillaged for themes, plots and argot by a generation of younger and more celebrated novelists – pillaged most shamelessly by Zola, who they frankly call a plagiarist. Their rancor and wounded pride made me curious, and when a copy of Germinie Lacerteux (1864) serendipitously surfaced in a dollar bin, I grabbed for it.

It's a failure, at least on the terms the Goncourts set forth in their polemical preface: they wanted to admit the lower classes into literature, via a new, scientific kind of social novel. (They diligently scouted slums and toured hospitals, between art auctions and literary dinners.) The problem is that Germinie – a lady's maid based on the Goncourts' own Rose, an irreproachable retainer of twenty-five years posthumously revealed to have stolen money and wine to fund secret sprees and support a rogue's gallery of gigolos – is dead on the page. On Germinie, the narration sounds here like a detective baldly noting the comings and goings of a mark under surveillance, there like a smug psychologist, righteous with phrenology or eugenics, composing a floridly prejudiced case history of some helpless imbecile. The Goncourts seem content to pass along maxims of human perversity, while remaining uninterested by, or incapable of, the portrayal of humans behaving perversely. They maintain a fastidious distance from scenes, from characters interacting; so much is distantly summarized; and their descriptions frequently become declamations. For all the verbosity lavished on her, Germinie is in the end hardly more vivid that her original, sketched in the Journal.

And yet Germinie Lacerteux has its pleasures, and the Goncourts their strengths. They have a genius for little misanthropic cartoons. Germinie gives everything for the sake of her lover Jupillon, an androgynous momma's boy, prole dandy and tavern idol. Jupillon is no more complex a character than Germinie, but he twitches with vile animation when touched with the Goncourts' galvanic disdain. I enjoyed reading about him. A glovemaker's boy who works in the shop window, he preens and pouts while on view; in the music halls, where he's petted and plied with drinks by fishwives and shawl-menders and depilatresses, Jopillon flaunts his “dubious elegances – hair parted in the middle, locks over his temples, wide-open shirt collars revealing his whole neck,” his sexless features “barely penciled with two moustache-strokes.” Through Jupillon – a prince, a promise of happiness to sad crones “still unused in their innermost depths, who had never been loved” – the Goncourts evoke the drabness and melancholy of the milieu through which he moves (according to his mother) “like a gentleman.”

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Distant Reading and Embracing the Other

As far as I can tell, digital criticism is the only game that's producing anything really new in literary criticism. We've got data mining studies that examine 1000s of texts at once. Charts and diagrams are necessary to present results and so have become central objects of thought. And some investigators have all but begun to ask: What IS computation, anyhow? When a died-in-the-wool humanist asks that question, not out of romantic Luddite opposition, but in genuine interest and open-ended curiosity, THAT's going to lead somewhere.

While humanistic computing goes back to the early 1950s when Roberto Busa convinced IBM to fund his work on Thomas Aquinas – the Index Thomisticus came to the web in 2005 – literary computing has been a backroom operation until quite recently. Franco Moretti, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford and proprietor of its Literary Lab, is the most prominent proponent of moving humanistic computing to the front office. A recent New York Times article, Distant Reading, informs us

…the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti's approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

Traditional literary study is confined to a small body of esteemed works, the so-called canon. Distant reading is the only way to cover all of literature.

But Moretti has been also investigating drama, play by play, by creating diagrams depicting relations among the characters, such as this diagram of Hamlet:

The diagram gives a very abstracted view of the play and so is “distant” in one sense. But it also requires Moretti to attend quite closely to the play, as he sketches the diagrams himself and so must be “close” to the play.

His most recent pamphlet, “Operationalizing”: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory (December 2013, PDF), discusses that work and concludes by observing: “Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit” (p. 9).

If such an examination is to take place the profession must, as Willard McCarty asserted in his 2013 Busa Award Lecture (see below), embrace the Otherness of computing:

I want to grab on to the fear this Otherness provokes and reach through it to the otherness of the techno-scientific tradition from which computing comes. I want to recognize and identify this fear of Otherness, that is the uncanny, as for example, Sigmund Freud, Stanley Cavel, and Masahiro Mori have identified it, to argue that this Otherness is to be sought out and cultivated, not concealed, avoided, or overcome. That it's sharp opposition to our somnolence of mind is true friendship.

In a way it is odd that we, or at least the humanists among us, should regard the computer as Other, for it is entirely a creature of our imagination and craft. We made it. And in our own image.

Can the profession even imagine much less embark on such a journey?

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

A few months ago I wrote about one of my favorite results in math: Ramsey's Theorem. It tells us that when we look at things at a large enough scale complete chaos is impossible. That is, if we look hard enough we inevitably find patterns. Call it the Conspiracy Theory Theorem.

Ramsey's theorem launched an entire field of mathematics which answers questions of the form “In such-and-such a setting, what kind of structure do we find if we look on a large enough scale?”. Or you might instead ask: “In such-and-such a setting, if I want to avoid a certain structure on large scales, what do I have to do?”. Of course, it's usually easier to ask the question than to find the answer [1].

A famous recent example is the Green-Tao Theorem. In 2004 Ben Green and Terence Tao proved that within the prime numbers you can find arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The prime numbers are the ones which can only be evenly divided by one and themselves (and so have to do with multiplication/division). They are rather randomly distributed amongst all the numbers, but the Green-Tao theorem says that if you look for the right kind of structure (sequences of numbers given by addition) and at a large enough scale, then you can't avoid finding it. It is a striking result which was among the reasons Dr. Tao earned the Fields medal in 2006 and has put Dr. Green in the running for a Fields medal this year [2].

When reading up on Ramsey's Theorem I discovered a delightful book edited by Alexander Soifer entitled “Ramsey Theory: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow“. It mixes the history and mathematics of Ramsey theory and covers everything from pre-Ramsey Ramsey theory up to the current state of the art.

From this book I learned of an irresistible 60+ year old question called the Hadwiger-Nelson problem. It's easy to state:

If you want to color the points of the Euclidean plane in such a way as to guarantee that there are never two points of the same color which are exactly one unit apart, how many colors do you need?

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Photo by Ian Boyden

When you listen as keenly for humanity’s pulse as Sam Hamill does, you “fall into the place where everything is music”— in Rumi’s words. This is the music where all cultures meet, where the spirit finds its truest articulation: a place impossible even to imagine in our present global reality defined by the fractures of an ever-deepening mistrust between people. Through his poetry, translation, teaching, editing and publishing, Sam confronts the weaponry of power-hungry systems. He describes his practice as “serving in the temple of poetry”— the only place, perhaps, where all human languages have an equal chance to grow and blossom because they all have an equal claim on poetry and on ennobling humanity. I recently spoke with Sam Hamill via email:

Shadab: On the eleventh anniversary of “poets against war,” arguably the most impressive anti-war movement since Vietnam, what are your thoughts as the founder and the leading voice of the movement?

Sam: Little has changed. We have fewer civil rights, and we’ve spread the death machine ever more widely, and this has clearly become war-without-end. The US government is the largest and most successful terrorist organization in the world, threatening all peoples everywhere. My on-line anthology, Poets Against the War, collected 30,000 poems by 26,000 poets protesting the attack on Iraq. That is the largest single-theme anthology in all of history. Did it stop the invasion? No. Of course not. But it became a part of the history of that criminal war and its extension into other countries.

Shadab: What drew you to translation? Being among the best known and prolific literary translators, what do you find most rewarding about the process and the product?

Sam: I grew up reading Greek and Roman myths and tales and then reading Rexroth and others on Zen, reading the Spanish poets, the Harvard Classics, etc, it was natural that I’d want to know more. My Zen practice drew me into the world of Asian classics.

Read more »

Birds on a wire are made a melody

Synchronous

the universe is synchronous
its beauties overlap
tunes are made of birds on wires
Leonard Cohen taught us that
and now another gives this song to us

nature plays its songs for us
its riffs are made of days
its melodies are made of suns and moons,
of particles and waves
that are each, but synchronous

all her songs belong to us
each is ours to keep
the ruthless ones of hearts on fire
the ones sublime and deep
the ones both right and wrong for us
.

Jim Culleny
4/27/14

Birds on a wire by Leonard Cohen
.

by Jalees Rehman

A book is a mirror: if a fool looks in, do not expect an apostle to look out.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Reading literary fiction can be highly pleasurable, but does it also make you a better person? Conventional wisdom and intuition lead us to believe that reading can indeed improve us. However, as the philosopher Emrys Westacott has recently pointed out in his essay for 3Quarksdaily, we may overestimate the capacity of literary fiction to foster moral improvement. A slew of scientific studies have taken on the task of studying the impact of literary fiction on our emotions and thoughts. Some of the recent research has centered on the question of whether literary fiction can increase empathy. In 2013, Bal and Veltkamp published a paper in the journal PLOS One showing that subjects who read excerpts from literary texts scored higher on an empathy scale than those who had read a nonfiction text. This increase in empathy was predominantly found in the participants who felt “transported” (emotionally and cognitively involved) into the literary narrative. Another 2013 study published in the journal Science by Kidd and Castano suggested that reading literary fiction texts increased the ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and emotions of other humans when compared to reading either non-fiction or popular fiction texts.

Scientific assessments of how fiction affects empathy are fraught with difficulties and critics raise many legitimate questions. Do “empathy scales” used in psychology studies truly capture the psychological phenomenon of “empathy”? How long does the effect of reading literary fiction last and does it translate into meaningful shifts in behavior? How does one select appropriate literary fiction texts and control texts, and conduct such studies in a heterogeneous group of participants who probably have very diverse literary tastes? Kidd and Castano, for example, used an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht as a literary fiction text because the book was a finalist for the National Book Award, whereas an excerpt of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was used as a ‘popular fiction' text even though it was long-listed for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction.

The recent study “Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction” led by the psychology researcher Dan Johnson from Washington and Lee University took a somewhat different approach. Instead of assessing global changes in empathy, Johnson and colleagues focused on a more specific question. Could the reading of a fictional narrative change the perception of racial stereotypes?

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

Destruction of the Buddhas 2001 Creative Commons License

The pages of Aeon contained one of the most dispiriting articles I have ever read. The author, a budding screenwriter, falls in with advocates of the Effective Altruism movement. They proceed to half-persuade him to give up his artistic pursuit because it is not as useful to society as finding a “real job” and donating his salary to charity. He then poses the question which for him is existential:

Is your self-expression more important than human lives and suffering? Would you rather contribute to the culture of rich societies than work to reduce the suffering of the poor, or of future generations? Is it not arbitrary to fill the world with your own personal spin on things, simply because it's yours?

In the end, he is not sure if the arts are where he wants to be:

“For now, that will have to be my justification. I'm not ready to give up writing. I'm not ready to take up some high-paid job that I'd hate in order to reduce the world's suffering. Maybe that will change. For now, call me Net-Positive Man. “

Has the world lost another Shakespeare?

Effective Altruism is a movement devoted to the utilitarian notion that we are morally required to maximize the good we do in the world. According to this view, in our choice of careers and activities we should use empirical evidence and cost-effectiveness calculations to determine what will do the most good by reducing suffering. Thus, for someone with artistic talent they are obligated to sell their talents to the highest bidder and then contribute the bulk of their earnings to the most effective charities. Only in rare cases where a work of art directly contributes to reducing suffering (or perhaps to producing propaganda for Effective Altruism) would it be justified to devote time and energy to artistic production. It is not enough for a person to do more good than harm; you must make yourself irreplaceable by producing more good than someone else could have produced in your place.

I find this dispiriting because the vision of human life embodied in the Effective Altruism movement is profoundly ugly and dehumanizing.

Read more »