by Aditya Dev Sood

This standalone piece is part of a special series on Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. Links to earlier articles appear at the end of the article.

This past week I led a workshop on building pitchdecks, not only for our own startups but for a wider crew of entrepreneurs. I’d asked the assembled group to help me whiteboard out the essential information they thought should be included in a pitchdeck. One bullet point, nearly overlooked towards the end of the list, said: Competition and Competitive Advantage. At this point I asked the group whether they didn’t also want to talk about creating a new monopoly?

Folks seemed to shift uncomfortably in their seats… apparently not. Why not? I asked. Do you mean like a public sector company, someone said. Ah, ah, ah, no, I said, realizing that the term monopoly wasn’t an abstract concept in the Indian context, but a real and oppressive part of our not-so-distant past. Yes, perhaps I’m being a bit loose with the term monopoly — I don’t mean state-sanctioned and absolute monopoly — I mean the kind of market leadership, let’s say more than 50% market-share, that can resemble monopolistic dominance. Don’t you want that? Well, VCs want to know that the space is real, said one founder. We want to work in an area where there is a good chance of success, said another, and that means there will already be competitors.

But isn’t that a problem? I asked. If the area you’re working in can already be defined as a competitive landscape it isn’t really all that new. In which case, how innovative is your startup concept? Think of any major startup that you’re inspired by these days and you’ll see they’re all near monopolies: SpaceX, Tesla, Airbnb, Dropbox, Snapchat. Before they came along, no one was doing what they’re doing. Now that they exist, people will come along and try to emulate them, but they’ve actually created a new market, in which they’ll continue to enjoy dominance. In some sense, that’s the only way these kinds of valuations can even be justified, either economically or socially or even in terms of the public good. These startups have created fundamentally new value and new social-technological possibilities that never existed before.

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by Carl Pierer

Madam,

Thank you for opening my eyes concerning the question whether students should be beaten to study Maths up to the age of 18. Your well-argued and logically impeccable column in the Times establishes beyond reasonable doubt that no one needs to know any Maths further and above the mere basics. It is absolutely clear what those basics are, and they don't need further definition (obviously, knowing times tables is essential and needed, whereas being able to solve quadratic equations is far beyond basic).

Moreover, you successfully avoid the many times rehashed bad arguments in debates about education. Instead, you focus on the points that do indeed form the basis of any good and progressive line of argument. These are: (i) to think about reforms in terms of the education currently successful people have had, (ii) to do away with skepticism about inductive inferences, (iii) to consider a general education system in terms of highly talented and successful people, (iv) to not let yourself be confused by the subtleties of the subject matter as there really is just one thing at stake, (v) to insist that there is something wrong with the subject itself if the curriculum doesn't teach what is “useful”. Unfortunately, the brevity of your column prevented you from exploring the full force of your arguments. Allow me to do so on your behalf.

With one of your examples you solve two age-old problems in philosophy. You write: “The top western country [in the Pisa international league tables] is Liechtenstein. Know anyone who has changed the world who was educated in Liechtenstein? I don't either, but that is the European country we are hoping to emulate.” First off, this solves the problem of induction. The problem is that the inference from “All Swans I've observed so far are white” to “All swans are white” is not necessarily true, i.e. it's logically possible that “All swans I've observed so far are white” is true and “Not all swans are white” is true as well. But why do people wrack their brains over this? Your argument establishes that we merely need to assert the conclusion, isn't it just trivially true that since you don't know anyone who was educated in Liechtenstein and changed the world, there is nobody? At least 200 years of philosophy over and done with.

This conclusion is also a very important one, because obviously if Liechtenstein is doing well in the Pisa league tables and still there is no one who was educated there and changed the world, then the education in Liechtenstein cannot be that good. At least not as good as in Britain, where plenty of world-changing people were educated. Pisa league tables, your argument shows, are not a suitable means of measuring which educational system produces world-changing people. A general education is precisely about the upbringing of exceptional individuals and not the provision of basic numeracy and literacy. Since the Pisa examinations only manage to test the level of the latter, educational policy makers who are concerned with the questions that really matter should stop emulating countries that do well in the Pisa league tables.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

Observations and pictures from a visit in October 2014 to the Andean town of Cuenca and the surrounding area.

1. Surgeries in an Isuzu Truck

Since 1994, a small team of clinicians has been bringing elective surgeries to Ecuador's remotest towns or villages, places that have do not have hospitals in close proximity. From the city of Cuenca – Ecuador's third largest town, where they are based – the team drives a surgical truck to a distant village or town. Though a small country by area, the barrier of the Andes slices Ecuador into three distinct geographic regions: the Pacific coast in the west; the mountainous spine that runs through the middle; and the tremendously bio-diverse but also oil rich jungle expanse to the east, El Oriente, home to many indigenous tribes. Apart from a few major cities – Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca – towns and villages tend to be small and remote.

Each year the team goes on 12 surgical missions, roughly one per month. A trip lasts around 4 days: a day's drive to get to the place; 2 days to conduct 20-30 surgeries (sometimes more sometimes less); and then a day to return. Patients pay a nominal/reduced fee if they can: the surgeries are done irrespective of the patient's ability to pay. The clinicians belong to a foundation called Cinterandes (Centro Interandino de Desarollo – Center for Inter-Andean Development).

Amazingly, the very same Isuzu truck (see above) has been in use for more than 850 missions and has seen 7458 surgeries from 1994-2014! The truck itself is not very large; in fact, it cannot be, because it has to reach places that do not have good roads. The mobile surgery program has the lowest rates of infection in the country (see [1] for more details). Not a single patient has been lost. The cases to be operated on have to be carefully chosen. Because of the lack of major facilities nearby, only surgeries with a low risk of complication can be done. Hernias and removal of superficial tumors are the most common. Hernias can be debilitating, yet patients may simply choose to live with them for many years rather than visit a far-off urban hospital. For many, leaving work for a few days and traveling to get a health problem fixed is not an option.

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Dis Hate Taste Kiss

Mind is what the brain does.
…………………… —Marvin Minsky
.

………. imagine this:

this morning was so cold I thought, frostbite
and a vision (gloves) occurred

if I hadn’t thought cold
my hands may just as well have felt
they were in Aruba, and gloves absurd

………. then the wind hissed
.
.
being mindful is
the best way to miss frostbite
know bliss dis hate taste kiss
.

by Jim Culleny
2/13/14

by Charlie Huenemann

We all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too. Our words turn experiences into objects, qualities, and actions, and we can build these into a kind of structure, a tower reaching into the sky – but (again) towers can only go so far, and there are always negative spaces surrounding the structure and its beams. What is left unsaid speaks volumes.

We might resign ourselves to this fact – the inescapable limits of what's sayable – but in fact a great many minds have sought to construct the perfect language, one that carves reality at its joints and captures the grand shebang of human experience. Presumably God was speaking such a language when he spoke the world into being, and perhaps he taught this language to Adam. Or perhaps the perfect language need only be carefully constructed from given, atomic elements that reflect the most basic concepts a mind can have, with rules that keep it innocent from the goofy twisting and mashing that the accidents of history impart to our tongues. Or perhaps we can cook up a language that, like physics, captures the essence of phenomena and parses away every nonessential feature. The payoffs would be inestimable: we would have not only a language that could not possibly confuse, but a language – like that of Jonathan Swift's horsey Houyhnhnms – whose very grammar would preclude ever saying the thing which was not.

This was a hope that inspired the young Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. He recalled that, as a teenager studying Aristotle, he arrived at “this remarkable thought, namely that a kind of alphabet of human thoughts can be worked out and that everything can be discovered and judged by the comparison of the letters of this alphabet and an analysis of the words made from them.” Leibniz's fundamental idea was to identify radically atomic concepts and compose molecular sentences out of them, so that once we translated our thoughts into legitimate terms, we could see whether they were true, possibly true, or totally confused.

This dream – the creation of a characteristica universalis – became Leibniz's lifelong project. His earliest publication, “A Dissertation on the Art of Combinations” (1666), aimed to do for metaphysics and science what Euclid had done for geometry. Before long, Leibniz sought to make his perfect language susceptible to mechanized computation. Fundamentally, his idea was to attach atomic concepts to prime numbers, under the guiding metaphor that just as every natural number is the product of primes, so too should every complex concept be the product of atomic concepts.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Some countries are assholes. They trample on international norms about human rights, maritime boundaries, climate change conventions, and so on. They repeatedly make and break promises and then complain indignantly and even violently if they are challenged for it. They bully weaker countries shamelessly to get their way, all the while declaring their commitment to the highest ideals of international peace and justice.

You know the kind of country I'm talking about. The kind that believes in its own moral exceptionalism: Not only does it not feel bound by the ordinary rules; it even demands that other countries acknowledge its moral right to set its interests above their own or the international peace. Take Russia. Its behaviour in Ukraine (and elsewhere in recent years) is classic assholism and is systematic and comprehensive enough to warrant the conclusion that Russia is a true asshole nation. I'm sure you can think of others.

I

The term “asshole nation” is inspired by Aaron James's neat little book Assholes: A Theory in which he defines the asshole individual as someone who in interpersonal or cooperative relations,

1. allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically;

2. does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and

3. is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people. (p.5)

James' theory is directed at the anti-social behaviour of individuals. It covers much of the same ground that organizational psychologists have mapped as the ‘dark triad' of anti-social personality types – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sub-clinical psychopathy – which will be unfortunately familiar to most people who have worked in any large organization. But James adds two things. First, his account is a thoroughly moral one: the asshole is morally repugnant because of his fundamental lack of respect for the moral status of those he interacts with: He doesn't register other people as morally real. Second, because James' account starts from the moral requirements of participation in cooperative relations rather than from human psychology it is more general than that produced by organisational psychologists. I believe it can also be helpfully applied to non-human agents, such as countries.

Just as some individuals seem to think that every day is their birthday and they deserve special consideration from everyone else – and a general exemption from rules intended for the general benefit which happen to be inconvenient to them, like using their phone in the movie theatre or speeding through school zones when they're running late – so some countries seem to think that their sovereignty is more important than the sovereignty of other nations.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Walking down from the cathedral, our feet hurt from the rocky Andalusian pavement that bites into your soles with every step. When a café appeared in the middle of the piazza we stopped to rest and fortify ourselves with a thimble of fino.

The slow and regular tapping we heard seemed to be coming from an intersecting alleyway. Then two young boys came into view practicing an elaborate ritual.

The grim-faced lad in back seemed to be in charge as he pounded a wooden stick on the pavement. His friend strode ahead as solemn as a deacon in time to the beat, balancing a chair smothered in carnations atop his head. Every fifth tap he would stop to kneel on the cobbled street and then hold the pose for two counts before continuing forward.

It wasn’t until they stopped to buy a pack of gum that I saw it wasn't Jesus lashed to the cross, but a G. I. Joe action figure.

I caught the boy’s eye, smiled and asked if we could take his picture. He stood still and stoic then moved on to follow the demand of his friend’s stick.

I remembered what a fervent little believer I’d been as a girl, walking in stately procession with other maidens in church, intoning a litany of praises to the Virgin Mary during her holy month of May. One lucky student (never me) was chosen to crown Her statue with a wreath of roses. It was like a religious beauty pageant where the winner was always the same: the mother of Jesus.

What was the intention of those two little boys in Arcos, I wondered? Not surprisingly, this is the town where penitents crawl on hands and knees up to the cathedral to atone for their sins. Perhaps the boys didn’t consciously know why they were doing what they were doing. Perhaps they were instinctively following the impulses to art-making that Catholicism has inspired for centuries: to render the beauty of martyrdom, to reach for perfection, and that only through suffering can we hope to achieve salvation – ideas I had forsworn but, truth be told, never completely abandoned.

G. I. Joe as a stand-in for Jesus might be laughably kitsch-y, but those boys were not being ironic. They were practicing atonement or spiritual discipline or reverence – who knows what they had in mind—but their seriousness of purpose was exactly what I had come to Spain to find.

Photo by the author

Postcard From Spain is an ongoing series of images and text on 3QuarksDaily by Randolyn Zinn. Click below for the first installments and feel free to engage with me in the comments section below. Hasta pronto!

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/10/postcard-from-spain.html

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/12/postcard-from-spain-2-by-randolyn-zinn.html

by Michael Lopresto

We, as members of an affluent society, have a moral obligation to help those who are far worse off than we are. To establish this moral obligation, I'll use Peter Singer's Life Saving Analogy from his seminal (1972) paper “Famine, Affluence and Morality” – an argument that strongly influenced my thinking when I first read it as an undergraduate (more years ago than I care to remember), and still strongly influences me today. It sparked off a movement known today by the name Effective Altruism.

The Life Saving Analogy asks us to imagine walking past a pond, where we happen to see a child drowning. We can safely and easily save the life of the child, but in the process would ruin our new pair of shoes, which cost, say, $300. We all judge that it would be wrong not to save the life of the child, and that the cost of the shoes doesn't have any moral significance in comparison. And yet – and this is the analogy – we are in a position right now where we could save someone's life for exactly the same cost, who would otherwise die of poverty-related illness. The only difference is that we can't directly see the person we would save; but this fact alone makes no moral difference. Therefore, we have a moral obligation to give money to those who would die of poverty-related illness, and to alleviate poverty-related suffering, because our money would actually make a difference – that's the effective part of effective altruism – and because our lives would not be any worse off in any significant sense.

So the view is that we as affluent people have a moral obligation to donate a percentage of our income to charities that have been proven to be highly effective, since it's inconsistent to accept that we ought to save the drowning child in front of us, but not save a person who's far away, when it's within our ability to do so. I'll quickly rebut three common objections to the effective altruist view.

1. The first objection is that donations to charity can't make the different that people would like them to, because charities invariably have massive overheads and administrative fees that prevent your money getting to those who need it. However, the problem with this objection is that there are non-profit organisations like Give Well that analyse a huge number of charities for their efficiency and effectiveness. For example, Give Well have shown that if you donate $10 to the Against Malaria Foundation, at least $7 goes to those who need it, and if you donate $10 to Give Directly, $9.10 goes to those who need it. This money makes a huge difference to those living in extreme poverty, on less $1.25 per day.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

This is new dispatch from the frontlines of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. Links to earlier dispatches appear at the end of this stand-alone piece.

On Saturday we went to see Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party take his oath of office as Chief Minister of the state of Delhi. We rode the metro out to Ramlila Maidan, Delhi’s traditional center for agitations and large public ceremonies. I was with Namit Arora and Usha Alexander, also sometime correspondents of 3QD, along with another friend of theirs, Pran Kurup, who had had a role in the online campaign. It was a bright winter’s day and a festive scene at the maidan, where volunteers were giving out stickers, banners and those trademark hats which we also put on. Kejriwal spoke about inclusion and participation and about his plans of making Delhi a city free from corruption. If anyone asks you for a bribe, he began smiling at his trademark line, never say no, setting kar dena, put your phone recorder on and record the official demanding a bribe. And then report him to us so we can begin disciplinary action.

The holacratic revolution is taking so many shapes and forms all over the world, whereby new services, new forms of decision making, new kinds of patterns of interaction and financial flow are coming about. This is its first and most memorable articulation in India. No complex audio-visual equipment, no CCTV required, just a record function already included in just about every smart and feature phone on the market and in the pocket of every second citizen of Delhi. The extortionary optic of the state is suddenly subverted, power is distributed everywhere and to everyone with the means to participate in the network. It is a powerful and true instantiation of the change the Aam Aadmi Party wants to bring about, but it is surely only the very first and initial step. And yet, the solution envisioned by Kejriwal to report such incidences of citizen extortion, a hotline number, seems in no way related to the much higher sophistication of a digital recorder situated on mobile OS. Shouldn’t that digital just go into an app somehow, time and location stamped, with some metadata concerning the identity of the officer being reported on? Shouldn’t this be the very first app that this administration puts into production?

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

In today's world, no matter what you do, success seems to depend on how you project and market your ‘brand'. Surrounded constantly by advertisements, full of startling images and clever one-liners, it is only natural that most of us adopt the same vocabulary; painstakingly, we hone our physical and digital selves to come as close as possible to magazine perfection. When we practice our elevator pitches, we cast around for the catchiest phrases – those that will have the maximum staying power. As a theoretical physicist, I find myself quite at odds with this social phenomenon. When asked to describe the work that obsesses my thoughts, I have often caught myself searching for the mildest words I could possibly use in a given context. For instance, when I talk about the 10 dimensional space-time mandated by superstring theory, I will never refer to the invisible (or unfamiliar) six as ‘higher' dimensions, but instead by the physicists' preferred term of ‘extra' dimensions.

At first, it might seem like I am merely splitting hairs, but if you think about it, the word ‘higher' carries connotations of hierarchy – as if there are some dimensions that are more exalted than others. ‘Extra' sounds – to me, at least – far more down to earth. It is a matter-of-fact way of referring to something that is left over – in this case, from the visible world.

It was an unconscious reflex, this definite preference for one term over the other, but even as I first became aware of it, I knew instantly why it was so important to me. The ideas I deal with are so far removed from every day experience, that they can quite easily be made to sound fantastic. It takes very little skill to package them as exotic, almost mystical, phenomena bordering on the supernatural. But these ideas are worthy of more. They deserve to get attention not for their sensational packaging, but for the depth and beauty of what lies within.

And so, with that long preamble, let me now introduce you to these extra dimensions.

Superstring theory has been called the holy grail of physics, because it performs the theorist's ultimate objective of reducing the multiplicity of phenomena in this vast universe down to a single cause. The rich diversity of matter and forces we perceive, are merely the manifestations of the range of motion of quivering, fluttering, infinitesimal strings. The modes of oscillation of a string appear to us as distinct particles, and the gymnastics strings perform, as they split and recombine, are interpreted by us as particle interactions. Since string theory reduces all we know to a common origin, it also – as a corollary – unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, two theories that were wildly successful on their own, but had been thought for decades to have ‘irreconcilable differences'. The price string theory demands in return for executing this coup, is that it must live in ten dimensions. The mathematics is simply inconsistent otherwise.

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by Ruchira Paul

India's art heritage dates back several thousand years. Through the ages Indian art was for the most part figurative and highly stylized. Think of the Tanjore bronzes, the Buddhist cave paintings, the stylish Mughal and Rajput miniatures. Regional folk art, murals and fabric designs too bore distinctive distortions and motifs that identified geographic locations and specific traditions. It was not until the Victorian era that decorative realistic art (I think of it as calendar art) became popular among the art aficionados of India. In the early part of the 20th century, a group of artists in Santiniketan (the university founded by Tagore) and Calcutta began to break away from that developing trend of photographic realism. Trained in western methods, they looked eastward to draw inspiration from Buddhist, Mughal and Japanese paintings. The European style that influenced them most was that of the 19th century impressionists. The movement, loosely known as the “Bengal School,” ushered in the era of Indian contemporary art of the last century. The focus was on rural and urban scenes, mythology and politics. The result was a vibrant homegrown art movement which continues to thrive.

Shown here are ten modern Indian artists whose works span the decades from the 1930s to the present. Some of them are widely known, others not so much. This is a visual tour and not a conventional blog post. My commentary and analysis are sparse (not that I know very much more). Readers can follow the link to an artist's biography from his or her name. The choice of artists and art work is my own. Except for one, I have had the privilege of seeing the original work of all of the artists featured.

(Be sure to click on a photo to see its pop up image)

1. As a personal tribute, Abani Sen is my first pick in the line up of artists. He was my art teacher who taught me to draw and to look at light and shadow with a discerning eye. He belonged to the Bengal School and used ink, water color and oil with equal facility. A very fine artist and a dedicated popular teacher, he was well reputed within the informed art circle of Delhi and Calcutta but not so much in the art market.

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The Slim Hope of Ponce de León
.

best of all seeming impossibilities,
of all the unlikelihoods at the heart of utopias,

is the slim hope of Ponce de León

(the golden nut of Eden’s tree
to hoard and hold and keep alive,
like the fire-tenders of prehistory,
an ember no matter how small
of coals hot and red of passion,
a mind transparent as the whirr
of hummingbird wings,
firm as tenon in mortise,
expansive as a new thought balloon,
determined and fearless
as a road-crossing tortoise
at the pinnacle of noon)

—the will to keep lit a lasting blaze
of moments that were hourless
dayless monthless yearless
and clear of haze
.

by Jim Culleny
2/7/15

by Matt McKenna

American Sniper has been both a wildly successful and wildly controversial film. While moviegoers have made the film the highest grossing war movie of all time, cultural critics have alternatively lauded and criticized the film for what they see as either a stirring depiction of a soldier's travails or a galling piece of jingoistic propaganda. Neither interpretation, however, hits upon the real takeaway of American Sniper, which is that unprovoked shark attacks off the Pacific coast are becoming a more prevalent threat for surfers, swimmers, and regular folks just trying to enjoy the water. It may seem counter-intuitive that a war film set in the desert could comment on shark attacks in the ocean, but then again, the actual Iraq war was sort of counter-intuitive too.

On its most literal level, American Sniper is a film about Chris Kyle, a real-life sniper and Navy SEAL. Kyle, portrayed by a beefed up Bradley Cooper, is enraged by the terrorist attacks he witnesses on television and subsequently decides to join the American Navy at thirty years old. Despite his advanced age, Kyle quickly becomes the “most lethal sniper in U.S. military history,” and the passionate debates about the film have centered around the depiction of how his transition from concerned, freedom-loving American to red-white-and-blue killing machine is depicted. For many right-leaning commentators, the film realistically describes the struggles of an honorable soldier putting himself in harm's way for his comrades and country. For many left-leaning commentators, the film is an overt piece of propaganda, a nuance-less film that refuses to acknowledge that there are regular people living in Iraq, people who don't necessarily spend their days fantasizing about blowing up Apache helicopters with RPGs.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

In the past few weeks I have heard and read a number of impassioned responses to Clint Eastwood's “American Sniper”, a film based on the memoir of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL with the highest number of confirmed sniper kills in U.S. history. A common assertion that amateur and professional reviewers are arguing is if the film glorifies an unjust war. This focus of the debate is puzzling because I believe that few Americans are clinging to the notion that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade and a half have been morally justified, or even logical. Yet, the “War on Terror” continues to be divisive—one of the points of tension is the way most civilians view the armed forces who fought and continue to fight in the name of American interests overseas. What the U.S. still has the ability to constructively consider is how to reconcile this war and the men and women who are fighting it with an American society that is sharply divided in its opinions. This is largely because the armed forces make up such a small percentage of the population that the majority of Americans are far enough removed to think of them in absolute terms, rather than as actual people. As James Fallows writes in his piece in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, “Among older Baby Boomers, those born before 1955, at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. Of Americans born since 1980, the Millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience.” This is a barrier that it is necessary to address before Americans can intelligently debate the role the U.S. will have in Iraq and Syria in the coming months, specifically how American forces should be engaging with the Islamic State, or any other extremist groups, from the air or on the ground.

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by Tara* Kaushal

Thoughts on the breath and depth of knowledge in the information age.

Last year, I finally completed my Master's in Literature. I'd started way back in 2006 but, midway, I became the editor of a magazine, and I never found the time to take my second-year exams. Not that I had much time when the exams dawned in April, my last chance to retain my (great) first-year score. Perhaps I shouldn't be admitting this but, considering I read the syllabus four days before they started, I did an MA-by-Wiki and by watching the movies made on the books I should have read.

Finish I did, and fabulously. And, while part of me is proud of my genius and is jumping for joy at having worked the system, this has also been bothering the jigyasu* in me no end. While I recognise awareness is not held in degrees or determined by exams, I wonder what knowledge, general and specific, means today.

GK: Who's To Say?

It brings me to a nugget of an idea that has stayed with me for years from, of all things, Bridget Jones's Diary (probably book). Bridget justifies not knowing a piece of common information by presenting a counterpoint—when there is so much information available to us, what is ‘general knowledge' anymore? I am reminded of this often: at a random get-together just the other day, two friends of mine met for the first time. X, an activist, started raging against Monsanto.
“What's Monsanto?” asked Y-the-fashion-writer.
“You don't know Monsanto?!” he replied aghast. It was a bit tense and judgemental, but the evening moved on.
Later that night, he decided to show us a video that he had recently chanced upon on YouTube. It was a homemade vid of a white girl rapping. “It's so cool,” X said awestruck, “the way she's talking-singing so fast…”
“Erm, yeah, that's what rap is,” said Y, “and this is not even good!”
And he said (I kid you not): “Rap?! What's that?”

In line with the criticisms of IQ tests, one must ask who determines general knowledge? What is relevant to whom? Today, when ‘do research' means ‘Google it', when we're bombarded with more information than we ever have been before, when our short-term memories are suffering from the lack of micro-moments, where does the Lowest Common Denominator of information lie?

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by Bill Benzon

This post, which will be brief as my posts go, consists of three parts. The second is a letter that my friend and colleague, Charlie Keil, has sent to the Vatican where he hopes it will come to the attention of Pope Francis. He urges us to send the letter as well. Charlie tells me that the second part of the letter, in which he speaks for the creativity of children, is the heart of the appeal. The first part, urging a peace process, is necessary for the second to flourish.

I’ve placed some contextual information before and after Keil’s letter and, as you can see, I’ve larded the post with photographs of children.

The Roman Catholic Church is a Remarkable Institution

It must be one of the oldest corporate bodies in existence and, of course, it precedes the existence of the nation state, a corporate form that now dominates world affairs. Other religions are older than Christianity, Judaism of course, but also Hinduism and Buddhism and others. But none of them are organized in the way that the Roman Catholic Church is.

The Roman Catholic Church is organized as a hierarchy that extends from the top, the Papal See in the Vatican, throughout the world to individual parishes, with various levels of organization in between. Other forms of Christianity have a similar organization, but not all of them. Most religions aren’t like that at all. They operate at the local and perhaps regional level, but without world-wide coordination on matters of doctrine.

There is an obvious sense in which the Catholic Church is the foundation of Western Civilization. Before Far West Asia, so to speak, had come to think of itself as Europe, it thought of itself as Christendom. The European nations didn’t exist. What existed was a bunch of Germanic tribes, cities, medieval fiefdoms, and regional empires.

And the Catholic Church. It preserved the books of the ancient world. And its liturgical music, descended from the chants of Jewish ritual, created states of mind conducive to contemplation and thought. It is in that context that Europe began to form itself and become the West.

Maybe the Catholic Church can now help the world to move out beyond its dependence on the nation-state as the organizational backbone of world affairs. It was there before the nations arose. Perhaps it will remain when nations have become obsolete. The job now is more modest, to bring the nations to embrace peace.

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