by Bill Benzon

Talcott Parsons

I am going to continue the psycho-cultural argument I introduced in my previous 3DQ post, American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore. The core of my argument somes from an old article in which Talcott Parsons, one of the Grand Old Men of 20th century sociology, argues that life in Western nations generates a lot of aggressive impulses that cannot, however, be satisfied in any direct way. Rather those impulses must be redirected. Parsons was interested in how nationalist sentiment directed those impulses against external enemies, such as the Soviet Union, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, Iraqi and the Taliban. But Parsons also recognized the existence of internal enemies, such as African-Americans from slavery up through and including the present day.

In that post I pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s foreced Americans to redirect the aggressive impulses that had been absorbed in the Cold War. I argued that those impulses were focused, once again, on African Americans. Since then I’ve been reading danah boyd’s recent study of cyberculture, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). I was struck by her argument that teens spend so much time online because they’re physical lives are restricted in way that mine had not been.

That prompted me to write Escaping on a Raft in Cyberspace, in which I agued, in effect, that some of the aggressive impulses that had been directed toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War have now become directed at our own young, with the Internet serving as the “trigger” for that redirection. I reprise that argument in the first section of this post. I go through Parsons’ argument in the second section, this time a bit more carefully. I wrap up that section by arguing that the logic of our response to teens in cyberspace is the same as our response to the bombing of the world trade center. In both cases anxiety caused by a real danger is amplified by repressed aggression resulting in actions that are inappropriate to their ostensible cause. In the final section I ask how can we, as a society, better distinguish between real danger and projected fantasies.

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by Eric Byrd

A few years ago I found a copy of the 1990 English translation of Guido Ceronetti's The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine in a used bookstore's Humor section. Those are usually dead zones of joke books, cartoon compilations and political jesters, over which the eye skims. I had never before heard of Ceronetti, who on reading turned out to be my favorite kind of writer, an “admirable monster” like Baudelaire and Cioran, an anatomist who finds cheer in perfection of phrase, monstrous because he so elegantly exposes our monstrosities, and I have idly wondered, when drawn to my copy, hunting after a half-recalled aphorism, why the book had been put where it was, how this unclassifiable thing was so classified (a librarian, I think this way); and then, this week, while Googling for a cover image to insert into this column, I noticed that the dust jacket says, “Translated by Michael Moore.” Michael F. Moore is a prize-winning translator from the Italian, of Manzoni, Moravia, Levi and Eco. Sub-sub-Borgesian mystery solved.

“Admirable monster” – by contemporary lights, sure, but by others, simply a humanist. In the world Ceronetti evokes, and to which he truly belongs, painters slice and study cadavers and the philosopher reads by Caravaggian candlelight, a skull at his elbow; the comedian is a poet of venereal and urologic affliction, and the tragedian devises serial slaughters and eulogistic pomp; and all who are literate transcribe remedies. It is a tradition increasingly macabre, marginal, and self-conscious as a society begins to believe in perfectibility, to conceal or euphemize bodily horrors, becomes accustomed to surgery as a polite profession and adopts the taboo of mortuary secrecy. As we suffer less visibly and live longer and hope more and more to defeat death, “the curse of dragging about a corpse” – what Cioran identified as the “very theme” of The Silence of the Body – recedes as a mainstay of literature.

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by Josh Yarden

Translation has its limitations

how do you say…

we stumble, severely at times

We do not realize when we do not realize

understanding stands down

misunderstanding stands in

The translator pretends to be Superman

disguised as a reporter for the Daily Planet

able to leap tall constructs in a single bound

Translators transcend boundaries

across time and place

we have all sorts of advantages

Just one mysterious weakness

we are vulnerable to the substance of our planet

Kryptonite is a cryptic message

Once free of the burden of place

eternal outsiders are never stuck at home

odd ducks can swim in any lake or just fly away

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by Matt McKenna

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is a gorgeous and wry dramedy about a 90s-era movie star attempting to regain relevancy in a media landscape to which he can no longer relate. This description may make the film out to be yet another highfalutin take on upper-class midlife crises in the 21st century, and perhaps to some extent that is true. However, as tempting as it is to read Birdman as a trite story about a rich guy having a tough go at it, the film is best understood as a metaphor for Hillary Clinton's rise to fame as the wife of President Bill Clinton and her subsequent struggle to realize her political potential in the subsequent years.

In Birdman, Michael Keaton plays Riggin Thompson, a Hollywood actor who may have some talent but has hitherto squandered it by performing in mass-market drivel, particularly in his career-defining role as a superhero wearing a bird costume. (The parallels to Keaton's own career-defining role as a superhero in Tim Burton's 1990s Batman films is an interesting footnote, however coincidental and irrelevant to the discussion at hand.) While apparently lucrative for Riggin, the fictional Birdman franchise typecasts him as an action movie buffoon rather than the impassioned, serious actor he sees himself as. To prove to his fans (and dare I say–himself?) that he is indeed a real actor with real creative talent, Riggin stages a Broadway rendition of Raymond Carver's short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Riggin hopes that the intellectual nature of the story and the nuanced performances its stage adaptation requires will finally help him escape from behind the long shadow cast by the Birdman films.

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Until 25th January, 2015

by Sue Hubbard

Some years ago I was commissioned by the Royal Academy magazine to write ‘a feminist appraisal' of Allen Jones' work. As an RA, Jones had the privilege of reading the piece before it went to press. Although he's referred to himself as a feminist on a number of occasions he seemed uncomfortable with this perspective. He vetoed the article and it was never published. I decided, therefore, to take the opportunity to revisit the work of this 77 year old pop artist to see if my response was any different a number of years on.

As I walked through the Royal Academy I remembered how the Viennese painter, Oscar Kokoschka, returned from the First World War to find that his lover Alma Mahler had married the founder of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius. To deal with his unrequited passion Kokoschka ordered the doll-maker Hermine Moos to make an exact, life-size replica of his ex. When the mannequin finally arrived, Kokoschka was horrified to find that, far from being life-like, it had furry limbs. Yet despite the doll's hirsute appearance they made trips to the opera, took long carriage rides and, it was said, had intimate rendezvous. Eventually Kokoschka threw a champagne party and afterwards wrote: “When dawn broke – I was quite drunk, as was everyone else – I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.”

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by Gerald Dworkin

I have been thinking and writing about lying and deception for a number of years. Readers with a long memory may recall these two blog posts written for 3QD when I first started my thinking on the topic:

Lying Around — Part I

Lying Around — Part II

Along the way I have encountered many passages in my rather eclectic reading that bore on the topic. Some of them were aphoristic or humorous. Some were real cases in which people decided to lie or not. Some were literary or philosophical. All were attempts to say something interesting and true about when we must be honest and when we should not.

Facts are for people who lack the imagination to create their own truth.

—Anon

Every lie must beget seven more lies if it is to resemble the truth and adopt truths aura.

—Martin Luther

When the philosopher Henry Sidgwick started teaching at Cambridge in the 19th century every Fellow had to subscribe to the the 29 articles of the Anglican Church. He no longer accepted these beliefs. Since he did not want to sign this “best-motivated perjury” he wrote to John Stuart Mill for advice. MIll did not offer any but advised him to turn to the larger question of what utilitarian exceptions there were to the rule that we should tell the truth. See what you get when you ask a philosopher for some moral advice?

*

Dan Ariely Is a psychologist who has written a very interesting book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty which is more about when we cheat than when we lie–although there is a lot of lying going on in his experiments. He also writes about his experience recovering from terrible burns over most of his body. One of his stories concerns a procedure he had to undergo which involved putting pins into his fingers to support them while skin grew back. The procedure will take place two weeks later and, in fact, will be very painful. When he asks about how painful the nurses lie and say that the current removal of burned skin is the hard part. The procedure will be a snap.

In fact the removal proves to be extremely painful. Ariely, looking back, is grateful that they lied to him. He believes he would have had two weeks of agonizing anticipation which would have been both terrible in itself and would have possibly damaged his immune system. He does not comment on the fact that this deception can only be used once!

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Humans have existed for a brief time no matter how you count
the eons. Ten thousand years ago there were perhaps some three million humans on earth. Today there are seven billion. It was only in the last century that population growth seemed unbounded, but in reality the average rate of population growth per year in the twentieth century was only a few percent. Quite frankly overpopulation is a myth. It is a dangerous idea that is demonstrably wrong. In developed countries it is actually population decline that presents social and economic challenges. In some underdeveloped nations the population is indeed growing extremely rapidly, however, the situation is ameliorated by humanist efforts such as education (particularly for women), access to contraceptives, and general economic and social empowerment of the population. Overpopulation isn't a problem, but even if it was, the solution would be to give people, particularly women, choices about their own destiny.

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In the Middle of a Cycle
.
everything comes in waves
— some of which break like 70 footers at Portugal’s
Nazaré

.… “Invest in a good surfboard”
she said as if she’d already read
the morning edition of tea leaves, coffee grounds,
or whatever her most knowledgeable herb

my father, late in life,
during his period of popping nitros,
having sludged his lungs with tar
having bequeathed his heart limited breathing
—back then my father said, “I think life comes in cycles,”
which I never expected from he-who-
never-revealed-to-me-a-metaphorical-side
at least not in showy ways as far as I recall

he was more boots on the ground
then —a man who knew work

I have a drawing of the last time I saw him
standing behind the open door of his Buick
saying goodbye forever (as it turned out)
I drew it from a photo

….. a minute later in another
….. he’s holding Leah

….. heading back to NJ, Peg drove him
….. straight to a hospital bed

from there a short hop, skip and a jump to heart failure
found him in a thicket of hoses and other paraphernalia
tended by a surgeon, only to come fully breathless,
without baggage, to no avail

I cried —I sobbed really, core-of-earth-sobs
full of magma and white hot stone
looking for a mountain to blow apart, but
soon became centered in another spot

lost

in the middle of a cycle

.

by Jim Culleny
12/1/14

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The title of this post might look peculiar. People frequently think of politics as a winner-take-all clash between conflicting interests, something akin to a football game, where the sole aim is to win, and the only rule is to not get caught cheating. Indeed, in a democracy, politics often feels like a game. There are teams, game plans, coaches, trainers, and winners and losers. Further, as citizens we are inundated with appeals from parties and lobbies designed to get us to pick sides and root. We root and cheer by means of votes.

So the idea of an “ethics of citizenship” may seem odd — something on the order of an “ethics of cheerleading.” However, there's a crucial sense in which democratic politics is not a football game, and citizenship is not akin to cheering for a politician or policy. This difference accounts for the fact that our activities as democratic citizens are indeed morally assessable.

Democracy is a philosophical response to an age-old problem: How can there be political rule among individuals who are by nature free and morally equal? Political rule is always coercive; the state forces individuals to do things that they otherwise would not do. But if we are naturally free and morally equal, no one is subordinate, and no one is anyone's boss. Political rule, then, seems inconsistent with the freedom and equality of all. That is, it seems that wherever there is a state, there is an unacceptable violation of individual freedom and equality.

Democracy is the attempt to resolve this tension, to reconcile political rule with the freedom and moral equality of each citizen. The contours of this reconciliation should be familiar: In a democracy, the will of the state is in some sense the will of the people. We must obey the law because, in a democracy, laws are in some sense self-imposed. And so the identification of the political will with the popular will renders the state's rule consistent with the freedom and moral equality of each citizen. Problem solved, right?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Several weeks ago Alexander Grothendieck passed away. It is hardly possible to overstate his influence on twentieth (and twenty-first!) century mathematics. With the help of others he rebuilt vast amounts of mathematics from the ground up. He had a vision that still seems futuristic many decades later [1]. I compare it to Braque, Picasso, and company blowing up the art world with their entirely new vision of what art could be. In Grothendieck's case you'll have it about right if you imagine him as a visiting scholar from an alien civilization whose mathematics is to ours as ours is to one of those Amazonian tribes who can only count to three.

Grothendieck in the 50's. Photo by Paul Halmos.

Grothendieck's life was as interesting as his mathematics. It's bound to be turned into one of those movies made to win Oscars [2]. His parents were anarchist political activists and artists, he moved to France as a refugee of Germany in 1938, and for most of his life was legally stateless and traveled with a Nansen passport. Grothendieck was at the peak of his public mathematical life during the 50's and 60's, receiving the Fields medal in 1966. Starting in the 70's he withdrew from the mathematical community and, ultimately, his family and friends as well.

For the last two decades he lived in a village in the south of France and only a very few people knew where he was. Grothendieck issued a letter in 2010 insisting that his work not be published and any existing publications be withdrawn from libraries. He was so isolated that it wasn't immediately clear to many in the math community if he was still alive and, if so, if he was the one who had written the letter.

Since that request seems to no longer be in force we should now have the chance to learn what did with himself for the past thirty years. There are rumors of tens to hundreds of thousands of pages of mathematics and political and philosophical writings. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had idle fantasies of running into Grothendieck at a cafe in France and getting on like gangbusters over espresso while hearing all about what he'd been up to [3].

Grothendieck's tools, language, and point of view are now ubiquitous across a broad spectrum of contemporary mathematics. They are certainly part of the everyday lexicon and mode of thought in my area of research (representation theory). Grothendieck reconsidered such fundamental questions as what is a “point” (there's a lot more to say than you might think!). For an excellent overview of Grothendieck's work I recommend Steve Landsburg's recent essay. It was linked to here on 3QD, but you may have missed it in the shuffle.

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by Tamuira Reid

I like going back to California. I pack my bag days in advance. Organize plane tickets. Make plans with friends to meet at various restaurants. I am going home.

Home is where my family is. Mom. Sisters. An eccentric artist father who paints pictures in the woods. The Pacific Ocean full of sparkling promise. The ex-boyfriends, strip malls, the “first time” for everything. A taqueria on every corner. A golden retriever on every block. A grandmother who is dying.

I haven't packed my bag yet. I keep looking at it like it might disappear if I stare long enough. Just evaporate into the air. I close my eyes and concentrate. But when I open them, it's still there.

Packing is a process for me, one that I usually enjoy. Underwear and socks go in first, then jeans rolled up like newspaper to allow more room for t-shirts and sweaters. Pills, tampax, earplugs, sunglasses. ID. Pictures to prove my life is good in New York. Pictures to prove I am not depressed.

The bag stares at me from the closet. I turn up the radio and lay on my back.

Jet Blue. Row 16. Seat A. Is that aisle or window? In front of or behind the wing? Are in-flight movies still only $5?

She says she's scared to sleep, that what if she fell asleep forever? I don't want her to shut her eyes anymore.

California will be warm. Blue skies and a light, salty breeze. Bonfires on the beach. Kids still tearing down streets on skateboards. 72 degrees. Light winds.

I have to be at JFK in two hours. Maybe the lines will wrap around the terminal like reels of gauze and I won't get to board. “Sorry Miss Reid, but your plane has left.” Elvis has left the building.

I roll my jeans and unroll them. Stack all my underwear. Restack. Smoke another cigarette and turn the radio off.

I'll try to make it till you get here.

None of my socks match. Row 16. There's a big yellow stain on my favorite t-shirt, the one I spilled a fried egg on and forgot to wash. I should call a friend to tell her I'm coming home. See if she wants to meet me for coffee. See if her life is so much better than mine.

I pray for another day.

The cabin is full. The woman sitting next to me has a warm, worn face. A pretty gold cross dangles over the valley of her throat.

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by Madhu Kaza

“Before it happened, it had happened and happened.” Anyone paying attention to recent events, specifically the failure of two grand juries to bring indictments for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner will readily make sense of this line from Claudia Rankine's new book Citizen. In moments of crisis when we as a nation are explicitly confronted with the state-sanctioned, legal & cultural violence inflicted against black people in America, we recognize a long chain of such violence reaching back to the very foundational chains of this nation.

In Citizen Claudia Rankine not only memorializes key eruptions of racial violence in recent American life, she also documents the ongoing, ordinary, subtle (& seemingly innocuous) experiences that characterize the racism of everyday life; Rankine suggests that the racialized violence of daily life is also what happened before it (the moment of social crisis) happened.

Although Citizen is Rankine's fifth book, in many ways it is a follow up to her 2004 collection Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Both books are subtitled An American Lyric and both use language in innovative ways to convey deeply subjective experience while also documenting larger cultural and political situations. While Citizen might focus on black bodies, Rankine suggests that the positioning of the black body in our culture has to do with all of us, with the very construction of the culture itself. Rankine refers to artist Glenn Ligon's work, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), who appropriated the line from Zora Neale Hurston, to show how the psychological, affective experience of race is always already in relation to the sharp, white background of American racism. This, too, is the American lyric.

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by Jalees Rehman

In the summer of 2010, over 20 million people were affected by the summer floods in Pakistan. Millions lost access to shelter and clean water, and became dependent on aid in the form of food, drinking water, tents, clothes and medical supplies in order to survive this humanitarian disaster. It is estimated that at least $1.5 billion to $2 billion were provided as aid by governments, NGOs, charity organizations and private individuals from all around the world, and helped contain the devastating impact on the people of Pakistan. These floods crippled a flailing country that continues to grapple with problems of widespread corruption, illiteracy and poverty.

The 2011 World Disaster Report (PDF) states:

In the summer of 2010, giant floods devastated parts of Pakistan, affecting more than 20 million people. The flooding started on 22 July in the province of Balochistan, next reaching Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then flowing down to Punjab, the Pakistan ‘breadbasket'. The floods eventually reached Sindh, where planned evacuations by the government of Pakistan saved millions of people.

However, severe damage to habitat and infrastructure could not be avoided and, by 14 August, the World Bank estimated that crops worth US$ 1 billion had been destroyed, threatening to halve the country's growth (Batty and Shah, 2010). The floods submerged some 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of Pakistan's most fertile croplands – in a country where farming is key to the economy. The waters also killed more than 200,000 head of livestock and swept away large quantities of stored commodities that usually fed millions of people throughout the year.

The 2010 floods were among the worst that Pakistan has experienced in recent decades. Sadly, the country is prone to recurrent flooding which means that in any given year, Pakistani farmers hope and pray that the floods will not be as bad as those in 2010. It would be natural to assume that recurring flood disasters force Pakistani farmers to give up farming and migrate to the cities in order to make ends meet. But a recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change by Valerie Mueller at the International Food Policy Research Institute has identified the actual driver of migration among rural Pakistanis: Heat.

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by Misha Lepetic

“A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, if that's what you wanted.”
~ New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler

About a dozen or so years ago, I had the instructive misfortune to be called for Manhattan grand jury duty. To this day, though, it has armed me with plenty of anecdotes for any sort of “that's the way the system works” conversation. Once you see how the sausage of justice gets made in the courtroom, you can never really unsee it, and that's not a bad thing. The grand jury process – and its failures and possible remedies – is obviously central to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, but in my opinion hasn't received nearly enough attention. Let me draw on some of my own experiences to illustrate why this is the case, and argue why any meaningful response to Brown, Garner and others must, at least for a start, be sited within the phenomenon of grand jury.

As context, New York City is one of the few cities that maintains continuously impaneled grand juries to maintain the flow of indictments that feeds the criminal justice system. When I served, there were four such juries, two of which were dedicated exclusively to drug cases. Fortunately, I was selected for one of the other two; after all, variety is the spice of life. During our month-long tenure of afternoon-shift service, we heard 94 cases, and we returned indictments, if I'm not mistaken, for 91 of those. For this service we were compensated $40 per day, which, in a fit of self-serving civil disobedience, I refused to report on my income tax return.

Keep in mind that the purpose of the jury is two-fold: to establish that a crime was committed, and that the person under indictment had some involvement with said crime. This involves the mapping of an often messy reality onto the abstract but finely delineated nature of criminal statutes. To achieve this, the prosecutor – almost always a fresh-faced Assistant District Attorney (ADA) seemingly just out of the bar exam – would present just enough facts to the jury to ensure probable cause for both the crime and the person charged with said crime. The evidence may include testimony from officers, experts or other witnesses, and it ought to be noted that probable cause is a much lower standard of proof than what petit juries encounter in trials, which is the beloved “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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by Kathleen Goodwin

I struggle to organize my thoughts when it comes to the discourse on race in the United States as catalytic events are playing out in real time each day. I am also struggling to keep up with the tidal wave of articles, tweets, statuses, and photos that my social networks are posting about Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other victims of a deeply unequal America. And like every white person, I feel the need to qualify my analysis of these events by positing that as a white person I cannot possibly fully understand the experiences of people of color in this country. As a consequence of recent events, I have been reflecting on the real and imagined boundaries that separate Americans. Nowhere has this been more apparent for me than in my life in New York City where South Asian men drive the cabs I take, Hispanic women answer the phone in my doctor's office, East Asian women paint my nails, and black men guard the doors at my office. Yet, the people I work for and with are overwhelmingly white and usually male. New York is a diverse city, to be sure, but it seems that interaction between different races and ethnic groups is at most transactional and brief. It appears that most of us are still working for white men directly or indirectly and those who control our government continue to be predominantly white. Only fifteen black executives have ever been CEO of a Fortune 500 company and Obama was the fifth black senator in U.S. history before being elected the first black president.

Linda Chavers, a black woman who teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, authored a piece on damemagazine.com with a few lines that encapsulated this problem. Chavers attended one of Missouri Governor Jay Nixon's press conferences in August in the aftermath of Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson. She writes that she realized while listening to him speak:

“This man has never dealt with a Black person in his life. I'm sure he's existed among Black people: The people who clicked his ticket on the train, put his items into the grocery bag, panhandlers on the street as he as his driver waited for the light to change. I remember thinking, He has never had anyone like me in his life in a position of authority, in a position higher than his.”

Chavers' realization targets the crux of many of the issues with diversity and white privilege in the U.S.— the lives of black Americans and other minorities, are parallel but rarely intertwined on a meaningful level with lives of white Americans. And different races may exist simultaneously with the diminishing white majority, but white people still hold most positions of power and control most decision making.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

As I put my wildly colicky baby to bed, I would unclench his tiny fists, and hold each finger, one by one, listing names of desserts in Urdu: gulaab jamun, halva, russ malai, jalebi, burfi. Adam was taught names in a garden; I taught my son names that likely came from the Mughal royal kitchens; names of syrupy, milky, cardamom-scented delicacies which suggested an ecstatic mix of cultures (not unlike Urdu itself which I like to think of as a sweet and sometimes sharp concoction of separate sensibilities); for example, “Laddu” has something of the Indic, “Halva” Arabic, “Gulaab Jamun,” Persian, “Zardah,” Turkish; each dessert distinct not only in appearance and taste but the type of occasion it is associated with, and most importantly, in its verbal flavor. Barely audible over my bawling newborn, I gave myself up to the slow, sustained incantation of the dessert menu.

Postnatal sleep-deprivation is a godforsaken place but the fogginess it causes can also bring clarity; the sound of dessert names became a bridge for me to cross over to my own childhood in order to find something to comfort my child. Words offered themselves as the cradle we both needed. As I rocked him and chanted, I conjured every sensory detail I wanted to pass on, each scent and shape. I pictured the delights— rectangular pieces of silvery burfi, halva garnished with blanched almonds, laddu with roasted melon seeds, orange spirals of jalebi.

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