by Kathleen Goodwin

Few students of colonial history can deny the power of spoken and written language to subject and subdue a population. Zia Haider Rahman's “dazzling debut” of a novel, “In the Light of What We Know”, contrasts two South Asian characters who attended Oxford together as undergrads—a privileged Pakistani narrator who becomes an investment banker in London and his friend Zafar, an impoverished refugee of the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War turned Harvard educated international human rights lawyer. One of the central themes of the novel is the way language can exert power over individuals and groups, as well as entire nations. Spoken language is an obvious manifestation of the tension created by modern day neo-colonialism or the 1971 splintering of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan from Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. But Rahman also explores a parallelism in the way language—in the form of industry jargon, acronyms and other forms of coded phrasing— can create power structures with remarkable potency.

“In The Light of What We Know” skips around temporally but the narrative is centered around London in 2008, in the midst of the unfurling financial crisis. The nameless narrator is revealed to not only be a banker, but the head of the mortgage-backed securities unit of his (also unnamed) global investment bank and thus on the verge of losing his job as the public condemns him and his counterparts for the calamity that is taking place. Tellingly, Rahman's résumé includes a stint as a Wall Street investment banker prior to becoming a novelist. His purpose does not appear to be to crucify the financial sector, rather his novel explores the great irony of the financial crisis—the securities derived from residential mortgages, which when the American housing market collapsed became essentially worthless and set off the chain of events that have changed history forever, were vetted and encouraged by the entities that should have understood and prevented the systemic risk to global markets these securities posed. Rahman's narrator explains this as being a function of the incestuous and hierarchical relationship between the big banks and the ratings agencies and regulators. The narrator describes a financial club of sorts, headed by chummy Oxford classmates who maintain a revolving door hiring policy and most importantly—speak a financial language incomprehensible to the ignorant public. The critical point is the way these hidden power structures allowed the conditions preceding the financial crisis to occur. The ratings agencies and regulators were compliant with the investment banks while the rest of society was unaware of the huge gambles being sanctioned, which eventually proved to be detrimental to the stability of the global economy.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Starry night, a large starry night with infinite trees, is the background of what seems to be an architectural form— a balcony, bridge, courtyard with pillars? In the foreground, a sphere with a curve draped over it like an arm. This drawing has the expansiveness that suggests eternity (or waiting for what seems like an eternity) and monumentality, as well as intimacy, a sense of security. A birthday present from my teenage son, this abstract drawing is titled “colic.” The architectural form is a crib, the starry sky is the sleepless, endless night of shared anxiety between a mother and her colicky newborn.

I am handed this drawing on my return from an evening in New York City, my eyes still filled with the lambent and the monumental, with sorrows hidden under careful inscriptions; riches, anxiety, loneliness, poverty, and also a plentitude of heart, a sharing of burdens. My son’s drawing belongs in the series of photographs I have just taken of the city— of monumentality and intimacy: endless tunnel ceilings, vertiginous buildings, old trees, sparkle, strangers caught sharing a laugh as they contend with waiting in queue together. Wear this city like a jewel if you will, or a sensible shoe— carry it like a bouquet of nerves, or an empty envelope— New York is resplendent and humble, so high and mighty it gives you the cold shoulder, so electric it sings you into rebirth.

“Colic” is about birth, and the anxiety and excitement of growth. When I read New York into this drawing, I see the loftiness of empire— starry and sorry— the darkness of hierarchies, the bond of empathy. I see the struggle for meeting the definition of nationhood, the founding fathers are in the high rises, in the homeless, in the cogs and wheels, in the sobs and hiccups of the centuries.

But it is my birthday today and this drawing jolts me into the realization that the night sky is still full of uncertainty, mystery and hope— colic is still a good metaphor for life, that I still long for my own mother’s protective arms, that nothing is sweeter than to be remembered as an extended arm by my son.

by Yohan J. John

What is the mind? And what is its relationship with the body? Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have all attempted to bring their professional heft to bear on the “mind-body problem”, but consensus remains elusive. At best, mainstream academics and researchers share a metaphysical commitment: the belief that the seemingly immaterial mind emerges from ordinary matter, specifically the brain. This position — known as materialism or physicalism — has replaced mind-body dualism as the mainstream academic position on the mind-body problem. According to dualism, mind and matter are completely separate substances, and mind (or soul, or spirit) merely inhabits matter. Dualism is a problematic position because it doesn’t offer a clear explanation of how the immaterial mind can causally interact with the material body. How can the immaterial soul push the buttons in the body’s control room… if it doesn’t have hands?

Materialism avoids this issue by denying the existence of two separate substances — mind is matter too, and is therefore perfectly capable of influencing the body. But having made this claim, many materialists promptly forget about the influence of the mind on the body. There seems to be a temptation to skip the difficult step of linking complex mental phenomena with neural processes. Many people think this step is just a matter of working out the details, and they readily replace mental terms like ‘intention’, ‘attitude’, or ‘mood’, with terms that seem more solid, like ‘pleasure chemical’, ‘depression gene’, or ‘empathy neuron’. But these concepts have thus far proved woefully inadequate for constructing a mechanistic theory of how the mind works. Rather than explaining the mind, this kind of premature reductionism seems to explain the mind away. While we work out the details of how exactly the brain gives rise to intentions, attitudes, and moods, we should not lose sight of the fact that these kinds of mental phenomena have measurable influences on the body.

Recent studies linking epigenetics, neuroscience and medicine reveal that subjective experience can have a profound impact on our physical and mental well-being. Mounting evidence is telling us something that was often neglected in the incomplete transition from dualism to materialism — that the mind is a crucial material force that influences the body, and by extension, the world outside the body.

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by Mara Jebsen

Good morning, Calamity Jane

–plenty disaster for breakfast again.

Staunching of blood. Stemming of tide. Not

enough Dutchboys with fingers in the dam. . .

Do Wake Up Calamity Jane. We are killing

even our favorites, again. Soldiers & small

flash-mouth boys. Pedestrian

death.—Plenty of martyr for our

coffers. or Coffins. Plenty…fodder for our

Martinis–I mean plenty…

Don't get muddled, Calamity Jane.

Terror's a river that rises again. Brace

for the hate that laps up the spine,

Stockpile dreams for a dryer time.

RANT FOR GAZA

Now is the summer of our discontent.
Banned bombs,
Made in America,
once again rain down mercilessly
on the world’s largest open-air prison.
Photos of Raggedy Ann dolls
pulled out from Gaza’s burning debris
makes steeliest men sob.

How do middle-class Muslim youth
from Seattle to Srinagar
manage, to the extent they do,
their blind rage,
their helplessness
at the most compelling moral issue
of our generation:
the organized ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians,
as well their land
by the Zionists,
aided by the most mighty democracy?

America,
you arm & enrich a colonial settler state,
inserted into Palestine
by Imperial design,
your cop on the beat in the Mid East
who assures the oil flows smoothly,
& despots keep the subjects quiet.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

One late summer afternoon two years ago, I saw a monarch butterfly casually fly across my office window in Amherst, Massachusetts. If I had not known what monarchs do, I would have only admired its beauty and then forgotten all about it. But since I'd seen a documentary on these butterflies the previous year – how this little creature, barely a few inches long and wide, makes a 2000-mile journey from Canada and US to certain forests in Mexico all by itself, traveling as much as 50 miles each day, navigating its way based on some unknown compass, and then returning back to its northern haunts in the space of multiple generations – since I knew these facts, that moment when I glimpsed the butterfly was suddenly full of wonder and meaning.

I mention this because many nature documentaries, or even short videos, have had a similar effect on me. I like the PBS Nature series the most (full videos available here). The species, habitats and themes vary –and not all the episodes are consistent – but there is always something unusual to learn and contemplate. Just a few random examples: how the male stork, after having made a long journey from Africa to a rooftop nest in a German village, reunites with its late-arriving partner (Earthflight); how a relatively small creature such as the honey badger could be so powerful, intelligent, and – this was the most striking for me – be gifted with a fearless attitude, so much that even lions know to stay away; or, how some astonishing friendships can be formed across species, as in the sanctuary where a goat, unfailingly and without any obvious benefit to itself, helps lead a blind, old horse on its daily graze every single day (Animal Odd Couples).

My Life as a Turkey

Today, though, I'll focus on a Nature episode that won the Emmy award for outstanding nature programming. First aired in November 2011, My Life as a Turkey (full video) skillfully recreates the year that that naturalist and wildlife artist Joe Hutto spent raising 16 wild turkey chicks all by himself, in a forest in Florida. (The qualifier “wild” distinguishes wild turkeys from their domesticated cousins that are consumed as food.)

Hutto isn't simply a passive observer. He takes on the role of an emotionally invested mother from the moment the turkeys are born until they are independent. As he writes in Illumination in the Flatwoods, the book on which the film is based: “Had I known what was in store—the difficult nature of the study and the time I was about to invest—I would have been hard pressed to justify such an intense involvement. But, fortunately, I naively allowed myself to blunder into a two-year commitment that was at once exhausting, often overwhelming, enlightening, and one of the most inspiring and satisfying experiences of my life.”

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History

before a beginning
is the end of a previous beginning

history’s a tangled skein
not a straight-laid thread

it’s full of knots of strands of varied weights
and counter-weights of light and lead

when teased apart we learn
who today has lost and who is winning

who is floating
who is falling

who is free, or who is hauling
someone else’s freight

who can move, or who is in the vice
of someone else’s sinning
.

Jim Culleny
8/3/14

by Brooks Riley

Personal experiences of art should not be foisted on others except in small doses, given that words can only provide semantic guideposts to such an experience. That’s why I never wanted to write a companion piece to my earlier one‚ Holding Albrecht. But recently I found myself longing to see Albrecht Dürer’s Paumgartner Altar again, which was nearly destroyed by an acid attack in 1988, removing it from view for over twenty years. After my earlier epiphany at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, holding and beholding the Dürer engravings up close in an empty room, with all the time in the world to delight in their intricate wit and daunting craftsmanship, I felt uneasy as I slouched over to the grandiose Alte Pinakothek, shouldering a dread of crowds, dread of the official museum-going experience, dread that my memory of Dürer’s paintings might have let me down.

It was one of those cold spells in May, some of which have names. Not the Eisheiligen of mid-May (five saint days of chill), and too soon for the Schafskälte of early June, this was just a no-name dreary day. I would be visiting old friends, not just the paintings themselves, but also the faces in those paintings. If you live in Germany, you see Dürer’s faces everywhere, the genetic variances of a Volk, still in circulation 500 years later. Just look at Oswolt Krel, a young businessman from Lindau. His eyes have darted to the left, his face a mask of worry over some transaction gone wrong. Is it 1499 or 2008?

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by Mara Naselli

Osip Mandelstam spent a lifetime moving from one place to another. His family moved often during his childhood; his exile, however, began after he recited to a gathering of friends a poem he had composed in the fall of 1933. The poem mocked Stalin and his totalitarian rule: “He forges decrees like horseshoes—decrees and decrees: / This one gets it in the balls, that one in the forehead, him right between the eyes. Whenever he’s got a victim, he glows like a broadchested / Georgian munching a raspberry.”

The following spring, Mandelstam was arrested and his apartment searched. The poem was not found and was probably never written down. After his arrest, Mandelstam went to prison for a time and he and his wife Nadezhda were condemned to move from one place to another. “It has been said that Soviet citizens do not need to build houses for themselves because they have the right to demand a free apartment from the state,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoir Hope Against Hope. “But whom does one demand it from?” Soviet propaganda boasted everyone deserved a place to live, but residency required permission, to which all kinds of coercion could be attached. Nadezhda writes,

Your permit to reside went with your accommodation and if you lost it you could never return to the city you had lived in. For many people their apartments turned out to be real traps. The clouds were already gathering, their friends and colleagues were being picked up one after another, or, as we used to say, the shells were falling nearer and nearer, but the possessors of permanent titles to apartments stayed put for the police to come and get them.

Soviet logic worked in two directions at once. A right to live meant a right to be traced, monitored, interrogated, moved. Nadezhda lived in twelve cities between the time of her husband’s arrest in 1934 and his death in 1938. “Every time we joined all the other people making the rounds of offices to get our bits of paper,” she writes, “we trembled in case we should be unlucky and be forced to move in some unknown direction for reasons not revealed to us.” Osip’s first city of exile was Cherdyn, where he was required to report to a bureaucratic office every three weeks. The reporting, the applications for permits, the constant threat of informants. The state forced on the Mandelstams and countless others a life of dislocation.

No wonder Osip Mandelstam loved Dante. When the police took him to prison in the middle of the night, he brought The Divine Comedy with him. When Nadezhda followed him, months later, she brought another copy in case the first had been lost or confiscated.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Enhancement is a hot topic in biomedical ethics, though the academic conversation is coloured by a surprisingly strong – even reactionary – conservatism. On the one hand it probably is a good thing to have some critical scrutiny of the techno utopians' claims. On the other hand, should we – can we? – distinguish between good 'treatment' and bad 'enhancement', as Michael Sandel has argued? Is there really a difference between glasses and laser eye surgery apart from semantics? Does the capability to 'hear' non-acoustically constitute some kind of infringement of the human telos? And if so, so what? I sometimes wonder whether these concerns amount to anything more than the insinuation of a conservative vision of the human condition that would be challenged in any other conversation in moral philosophy.

Nonetheless, thinking about enhancement can be fun, and even enlightening. As with good science fiction, imagining changes to the human condition pushes us to look more clearly at what we already have, and how we might use it better. Take moral enhancement. Is it possible to make humans morally better than we are now? What might that look like and are there any dystopian risks to look out for?

‘Morality' seems to comprise three distinct dimensions towards which an enhancement project could be directed: theoretical reason, practical reason, and self-command. It's important to note at the beginning that such a project doesn't depend on science fiction technologies – special IQ pills, brain implants, and so forth might be part of this in the future, but moral enhancement is an ancient project with a long and mixed track record of developing enhancement technologies, including formal education, role-modelling, parenting, physical exercise, religious rituals, nutritional supplements, philosophical 'leisure', judicial punishment, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and so on.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Like, Caesars, seated on couches, now remote controls in hand, watching people on couches watching:

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty one twenty two twenty three twenty four twenty five twenty six twenty seven twenty eight twenty nine thirty thirty one thirty two thirty three thirty four thirty five thirty six thirty seven thirty eight thirty nine forty forty one forty two forty three forty four forty five forty six forty seven forty eight forty nine fifty fifty one fifty two fifty three fifty four fifty five fifty six fifty seven fifty eight fifty nine sixty sixty one sixty two sixty three sixty four sixty five sixty six sixty seven sixty eight sixty nine seventy seventy one seventy two seventy three seventy four seventy five seventy six seventy seven seventy eight seventy nine eighty eight one eighty two eighty three eight four eighty five eighty six eight seven eighty eight eighty nine ninety ninety one ninety two ninety three ninety four ninety five ninety six ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine one hundred.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

In January of 2009, I was browsing through news networks when I came across a headline that read: “Indian call centre employee punished for harassing British woman”. Seeing that I was in the process of writing a dissertation on call centers around that time, my interest was piqued. The article reported that British Telecom (BT) had received a complaint from one of its customers saying that she had been receiving creepy messages from an employee at BT's call center. She had earlier called the customer centre in order to have an engineer sent to install a landline at her house and had subsequently been contacted by the agent who wanted to know where she lived and what she was doing for the day. The agent's name was reported as Hemant; the woman's identity was not disclosed. Hemant was reported to have subsequently begun sending her text messages on her phone, some of which are included in the article.

“Hello, Hemant this side with whom you spoke two hours ago regarding ur BT order. U must be thinking dat why I called u up second time without any reason of the call but to be honest I got attracted towards u and ur wonderful voice. Can I be ur friend?”

“As precious as u r to me, as precious only few can ever be, I know all friends r hard to choose but u r someone I never want to lose. Take care xxx.”

The woman is also reported as having complained: “The messages were inappropriate and very creepy. I felt as if I was being stalked.”

The messages are inappropriate in many ways. They transgress privacy, professionalism, and grammar all in one text. One wonders what manner of desire fuelled this transoceanic burst of sentiment. Did Hemant in his cubicle, attending to one British call after another find a moment of connection in the caller's “wonderful voice”? Did he see this as a way to bring nearer one of the many callers who were to him not even a face, but only a voice? Did she speak kindly to him and chat in a manner that assured him that she was ready and waiting for him to make a move? Was he egged on by colleagues who saw him flirting on the phone with a caller? Was it merely a dare? Did he, in the Lacanian sense, read beyond the phrase-ology of polite customer communication, in itself a complete economy of empty language gestures? Did he fill the emptiness with content of his own and break the symbolic understanding of customer-agent communication?

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by Carl Pierer

A key ingredient to the good life seems to be that we, for ourselves, choose our goals and commitments. Indeed, Immanuel Kant goes as far as to claim that this is a necessary prerequisite for actions to have any moral worth at all. Individual Autonomy is widely accepted as an ideal. Kantianism and Consequentialism, two of the major contemporary ethical theories, disagree on many an issue, but this they value equally. However, in a recent paper, Thomas Miles from Boston College used Soren Kierkegaard's criticism of the ethical life and applied it to the concept of individual autonomy. This essay will first reconstruct Kierkegaard's and Miles' four main arguments and second try to demonstrate that the most powerful of those – the guilt trap – presupposes a religious point of view.

Kierkegaard's Either/Or was published pseudonymously under the name of Victor Eremita in 1843. Eremita claims to have found the papers of the book, which are written by four different authors. These writings are by A (the aesthete), Johannes the Seducer, B or Judge William and a Jutland priest. A's papers together with The Seducer's Diary form the first (the aesthetic life view), William's letters together with the priest's sermon the second part (the ethical life view). According to Miles, it is in William's letters that we find one of the most eloquent and sophisticated expositions of an autonomous ethical life. Very roughly, it can be sketched as follows.

“What I have said to you so often I say once more, or rather shout it to you: either/or; aut/aut.” The ethical life is all about choosing. By choosing and committing to a certain path of life, the ethical person takes responsibility for herself. By “choosing oneself”, she accepts her past and will identify with her present and future actions. Accepting something that connects past, present and future events gives herself continuity in time. Since commitment to duty and responsibility for herself, the ultimate aspiration of the ethical life, can be achieved autonomously, she is independent of the world. “Therefore, the truly ethical person has an inner serenity and sense of security, for he does not have duty outside himself but within himself”, Judge William writes. Miles identifies four main arguments against this position in Kierkegaard's authorship. He calls them: the guilt trap, the self-mastery argument, the problem of meaning and the loss of self.

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by Grace Boey

When Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1955, the novel generated an enormous amount of controversy. Narrated by Humbert Humbert, a fictional literature professor in his late thirties, the tragicomedy depicts his obsessive sexual relationship with 12-year-old Dolores Haze—the eponymous Lolita.

60 years down the road, the book remains as controversial as ever. A large part of this seems to be that Lolita, despite our moral condemnation of child sex, somehow manages to elicit the reader’s sympathy for its pedophilic ‘protagonist’ (who is, possibly, more accurately described as a hebephile). Beyond our contempt for Humbert, there is also disgust with ourselves. How dare we even think of sympathizing with such a pervert? Surely by doing so we inch closer to condoning sex with children.

Such confusion reflects unresolved thoughts and feelings about sexual deviation in general. What does it mean to sympathize with perversion? Where, exactly, lies the wrong in what many of us think of as sexual deviance—such as pedophilia, zoophilia, homosexuality, and various other unusual forms of sexuality? What specifically is it that’s so outrageous about the affair between Humbert and Dolores? To answer such questions, we must delve into the field of sexual ethics.

Sex: the moral minefield

Why is the ethics of sex even a thing? For one, sex is a significant act which plays a big part in an individual’s life. How someone practices (or doesn’t practice) sex is intertwined with their emotions, relationships, expression and identity. Moreover, sex is an act involving our own bodies that we either wish to participate in, or don’t. In deontological terms or rights-speak, there are important rights and potential violations surrounding sex. From a consequentialist perspective, there is the potential for both great harm and utility to arise from sex. All this makes sex something we should tread around pretty carefully.

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by Liam Heneghan

In the early 1980s wanting to be a naturalist — a coleopterist, in particular, that most Darwin-like of naturalists — I spent a couple of summer months in Killarney National Park, in Ireland, making a collection of chrysomelid beetles. This was the first of many such collecting trips, part of a series of increasingly violent engagements with the natural world that served as stepping stones that link my life as an Irish teen to the one I live now in Chicago. All of them involved the killing of animals or plants for the sake of science.

The Chrysomelidae had been offered up to me by Dr Jimmy O’Connor, an entomology curator at Ireland’s Natural History Museum (The Dead Zoo, as it was called in Dublin). Apparently, the Irish representatives of this group were poorly known, not having been taxonomically revised since early in the 20th Century. Chrysomelid beetles include a number of notorious pests such as Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado Potato beetle, but for the most part these insects go about their business without causing us much bother. They are remarkably pretty though, many of them possessing metallic elytra (the sclerotized outer-wing of the beetle) and when you train your eye to notice them you see them as a marvel of shimmer and vivid color. Some of them, the flea-beetles, have greatly enlarged hind-leg femora, so that when disturbed they erupt into action and spring away from you like a glorious idea that thought you had but now cannot seem to fully recall.

Collecting them is easy enough. Using a sweep net, I thrashed my way across the grassier spots in the National Park; in other locations I’d search the under-leaves of shrubs and low hanging plants, catching them on the tip of a wetted paintbrush.

The issue of killing them was quite another matter. After all, I wanted to collect them because I had conceived a liking for them, and was concerned that if neglected, we, the scientific community, would not know, ironically, if these animals needed more vigorous protection. I loved them enough I suppose to want them dead; a couple of specimens of each species at the very least. I was the Noah of death and my ark was a killing jar.

However, when one sees glamorous creatures such as these looking up at you, as it were, from the bottom of the net, the ethical calculation concerning their dispatch is not an easy one to make. Should these few glimmering Isaacs be sacrificed so that others of their kind might flourish. Or perhaps more proximately, since the question of how data might be used is always somewhat further down the road, should they die so that the storehouse of my knowledge could grow?

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