by Leanne Ogasawara

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was being asked to lead an emissary to Abyssinia.

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

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

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by Josh Yarden

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

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

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

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

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by Eric Byrd

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

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

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

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by Bill Benzon

Distant Reading and Embracing the Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Jonathan Kujawa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Photo by Ian Boyden

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

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

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

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

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

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Birds on a wire are made a melody

Synchronous

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

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

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

Jim Culleny
4/27/14

Birds on a wire by Leonard Cohen
.

by Jalees Rehman

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

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

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

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

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by Dwight Furrow

Destruction of the Buddhas 2001 Creative Commons License

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

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

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

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

Has the world lost another Shakespeare?

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

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

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by Tamuira Reid

Bucharest, Romania, 2009. Madonna gyrates her way across a brightly lit stage in front of 60,000 screaming fans. Suddenly she stops, looks sternly out into the crowd. “It has been brought to my attention … that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and gypsies in general in Eastern Europe,” she says. “It made me feel very sad. We don't believe in discrimination [where I come from] … we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.”

And then it happens. Nearly all of the 60,000 adoring fans turn into a huge jeering mass. They boo her.

But this doesn’t faze Madonna. She dusts off her thigh highs, clicks her heels and goes on with her show, resuming the usual bumping and grinding that has made her so famous. She did what she set out to do – to give a “shout out” to her gypsy peeps, seeing as she has recently become an admirer of several Gypsy dancers, even going as far as to invite them on her tour. Maybe the pop icon will inspire others to jump on the “Gypsies are cool” bandwagon (no pun intended).

First things first, Madonna: never call a Gypsy a gypsy.

_____

There are somewhere between 8-10 million Roma or Romani (derogatively referred to as “gypsy”, the lowercase “g” insinuating that it’s not a proper noun) currently living in Eastern Europe. It’s impossible to get an accurate count because of the number of Roma who are undocumented by governments that still refuse to claim them or to acknowledge their existence as anything other than outsider.

With the resurgence of hate crimes against the Roma throughout Eastern Europe, the Western World is starting to ask, “Who are these people exactly?” Even though the Roma have been persecuted and murdered in droves since well before WWII, it has taken the general global public decades to become interested.

Roma did not have proper representation in the EU until fairy recently and no one has been held accountable for them — they’ve been left to fend for themselves — and this lack of belonging only heightens their status as outsiders.

They have been forced from their homes, whether burned out, bombed out or physically dragged out, and have had no choice but to live in a parallel universe, existing on the periphery of a society that does not and will not claim them. They are travelers not driven by wanderlust, but driven out by hatred.

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by Madhu Kaza

After I heard the recent news that Gabriel García Márquez had died, and after I'd read the obituaries and tributes, and reminisced about my own early encounters with his fiction, I knew it was time to read another great 20^th century writer: and so this week I finally read Mercè Rodoreda's novel La plaça del Diamant. Rodoreda had become one of my favorite writers on the basis of a few short stories I'd read a couple of years ago in the collection My Christina. But I hadn't delved more deeply into her work. I knew that García Márquez had been a champion of her writing, and that a month after her own death in April, 1983 he wrote a moving tribute to her in the pages of the Spanish daily, El Pais.

In the piece titled, “Do you know who Mercè Rodoreda was?” García Márquez wrote of his grief at hearing the news of her death, not only because of his great admiration for her work, but also because outside of Spain her death had not been widely noted, and she hadn't received what he felt were her due honors. Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908 and began publishing at a young age. After the Spanish Civil War, when the Catalan language was banned in public and the culture harshly supressed, Rodoreda went into exile. For nearly twenty years, until 1957 she published nothing. In 1962 she published La plaça del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves by David Rosenthal in 1981), widely regarded as her masterpiece and a masterpiece of Catalan literature. García Márquez wrote of her as an “invisible woman who wrote tough, beautiful novels in splendid Catalan.” Reading Rodoreda's work for the first time was as dazzling for him as his first encounter with the work of Juan Rulfo. Of The Time of the Doves, he remarked, “In my view, it is the most beautiful novel that's been published in Spain after the Civil War.”

The Time of the Doves narrates the experiences of Natalia, a young shop assistant in Barcelona in the bleak years before, during and just after the Civil War. Natalia is neither ambitious, nor assertive. At the beginning of the novel she goes to a dance only because, as she says, “It was hard for me to say no if someone asks me to do something.” It almost seems that Natalia marries the carpenter Quimet for the same reason; at the dance he announces that by the end of the year she will be his wife, and shortly thereafter, with little resistance, Natalia breaks off her previous engagement and marries him.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

The Great North American Lime Shortage of 2014 has people panicked. As the heat of the summer looms, the national media is running frenzied articles, families are being ripped apart, bartenders are at each other's throats and lime hoarding is rampant. The causes of this terrible situation read like a list of contemporary American anxieties. Consumption (of limes) has risen dramatically since the 70s, and people have been living beyond their means, delaying the inevitable reckoning with citrus-fueled bacchanalias. Globalization and the destruction of lime farming in the U.S. now means that most limes here come from Mexico. And this production has been severely damaged by a combination of bad weather (probably caused by global warming), bacterial infection (no doubt drug resistant) and, of course, drug cartels[1], who are supposed to be hijacking supply.

When asked excessively metaphysical questions (“Is the world finite?”), the Buddha would not answer and instead told the story of a man shot with a poisoned arrow, who refused to have a doctor attend to him until he knew who his assailant was, why he had been shot, what kind of bow was used and which animal's feathers were used to make the arrow. Taking a similar pragmatic stance, we will not inquire further into the ultimate causes of the lime shortage and simply discuss coping mechanisms (or, if you prefer, routes to salvation). And to fortify ourselves we will remember that possibility emerges within constraints and it is hard to create anything interesting without them.

To replace the lime we must first know the lime and understand its particular role. At least to a first approximation, this rests on its utility as a source both of acidity and of fragrant citrus oils[2], and so these are the dimensions we will seek to replace.

Much of what makes citrus fruits distinctive (as opposed to just generically sour-sweet) comes from particular aromatic oils and the oil glands in the peel are especially rich sources of these. The classical citrus aromas result from compounds like limonene which, unsurprisingly, smells like lemons and is extracted for use in both fragrances and cleaning products. But the peels also contain piney and herbaceous oils, in line with the general observation that almost nothing has a simple aroma. A nice way to introduce yourself to these aromatic oils (if you haven't already) is to use a vegetable peeler to cut a swath of lemon rind and twist it, which breaks the glands and releases the oil. This is a deservedly popular garnish for cocktails. Note that by “peel” I just mean the superficial yellow part; the white pith that lies underneath is bitter and should be avoided (though as in marmalade, small amounts of this bitterness can nicely complement added sugar).

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by Kathleen Goodwin

In the spring of 2012, I spent four weeks in Delhi conducting interviews for my senior thesis, an analysis of the systematic massacre of 3,000 members of the Delhi Sikh community in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination by two Sikh members of her own security detail in 1984. While I had vaguely contemplated comparing the events of '84 to the pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, which entailed organized killing of over 1,000 Muslims, I found that every single interviewee was unable to discuss Delhi in '84 without an immediate comparison to Gujarat in '02. What is striking, as I comb through the transcripts of my interviews today, is the shared view of my interviewees that it was unlikely that Narendra Modi would manage to become Prime Minister of India. This list includes venerable political commentators including Madhu Kishwar, Hartosh Singh Bal, and Ashis Nandy, among others. And now as I click through the home pages of India's English language newspapers and weekly publications, there is an excess of articles already analyzing the effects of Modi's assuming the Prime Minister's office. The predictions of those in Western periodicals was most succinctly captured in Modi's inclusion on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014 that was published this week. Fareed Zakaria writes, “Narendra Modi, who — if the opinion polls are accurate — is poised to become India's next Prime Minister, and thus the world leader chosen by the largest electorate on the planet.”

Of course, Modi has not won yet, and stranger things have happened in politics than a last minute upset, but nearly all signs point to the May 16 announcement that the next Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy is a man who was unequivocally complicit, if not directly responsible, for mass murder of a minority group. This outcome was unfathomable to many acutely politically attuned (albeit left leaning) Indians just two years ago. What precisely has changed to allow the rise of Narendra Modi, whose taint from 2002 was thought to be crippling? The answer is that both circumstance and individual cunning have allowed Modi to exploit a deeply frustrated Indian populace. As Zakaria admits, Modi, “has a reputation for autocratic rule and a dark Hindu-nationalist streak. But those concerns are waning in a country desperate for change.”

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by Ahmed Humayun

The causes of contemporary militancy in Muslim majority societies are many and complex, but one of the important factors is a virulent ideology that glorifies violence as a means to achieve political and religious ends. This ideology draws upon various historical inspirations—some Islamic and some Western, some local and some global—and can boast intellectuals, activists, and propagandists operating across different Muslim cultures and languages.

My concern here is not in tracing out the intellectual history of militant ideology. Nor am I seeking to precisely determine the importance that can be placed on ideology relative to other factors—a partial list of which might include a particular interpretation of Islamic doctrines about just war, the colonial legacy, the repression and failures of the authoritarian modern state, the consequences of the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran and the corresponding Sunni reaction in Saudi Arabia, Western alliances with authoritarian Muslim states or occupations of Muslim lands, and the systemic tendency of a wide range of states to utilize militant groups as proxies to advance their narrow interests. I am interested instead in exploring some of the consequences of militant ideology for Muslim societies today.

There is a tendency in the West to primarily view the activities of militant Islamist groups from the perspective of the danger that they pose to Western homelands. This is natural as a matter of pragmatic policy and national interest. Cataclysmic events like 9/11 in the United States or 7/7 in Britain have underscored the fact that the element of anti-Westernism in militant ideology is deeply ingrained. And yet it is clear that the greatest danger of militant ideology is posed to Muslims living in Muslim majority societies. This can be seen in the endless, gruesome wave of violence that has yielded enormous death tolls in recent years, mostly civilian, in countries as varied as Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen, and many other places besides. (In Pakistan alone, militant violence may have claimed as many as forty to fifty thousand lives since September 11^th).

As the drawdown of Western military forces from Muslim lands proceeds—Iraq having been vacated, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan imminent—the level of danger seems greater than ever. Militant groups show no signs of disbanding once Western military forces depart (though that departure may weaken the force of some militant arguments, and is therefore a positive development). Instead, militant ideas that emphasize the use of slaughter to advance political and religious change, and that target minorities and Muslims deemed beyond the pale of Islam—that is, the overwhelming majority of them—is on the rise. Militant ideology can boast many more factions today than it did on September 11^th, with hundreds of them fueling sustained campaigns of terrorism and insurgency, and a general resistance to state authority, across the Middle East and South Asia.

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by Yohan J. John

No one knows exactly how life began, but a pivotal chapter in the story was the formation of the first single-celled organism — the common ancestor to every living thing on the planet. I like to think of the birth of life as the creation of the first boundary — the cell membrane. That first cell membrane enclosed a drop of the primordial soup, creating a separation between inside and outside, and between life and non-life. Through this act of individuation the cell could become a controlled environment: a chemical safe zone for the sensitive molecular machinery needed to maintain integrity and facilitate replication. The game of life consists in large part of perpetuating the difference between inside and outside for as long as possible. Death, then, is the dissolution of difference. But the paradox at the heart of life is that the inside cannot survive without the outside. The cell requires raw materials — nutrients and energy — to sustain itself and to reproduce, and these must be sought outside the safe zone, in the wild and unpredictable outside world.

The cell membrane has a dichotomous role. It must preserve the cell’s identity as an entity that is distinct from everything outside it, but it must not be an impenetrable wall. It must be a gateway through which the cell can absorb raw material and eject waste, but it cannot allow the inside to become inundated by the outside. It fulfills this challenge by being selectively permeable, carefully overseeing the traffic between the inside and the outside. The cell membrane must also be flexible, because it serves the roles of locomotion and consumption. In a single-celled organism, the cell membrane is therefore a primitive sense organ, a transportation system and a digestive system, all rolled into one.

The birth of life was a moment of cleaving: when the first cell membrane enveloped its drop of primordial ooze, it cleaved the inside from the outside, but it also became the conduit through which the inside could cleave to the outside. Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings, of doors and passageways, the cell membrane is a sentry looking in two directions simultaneously. Given its role in cellular transaction, transition and transformation, the cell membrane’s function might even be described as a precursor to intelligence.

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