by Quinn O'Neill

Last Monday I posted a piece that compared two approaches to protecting the science curriculum from corruption by creationists. The first entailed promoting debate, providing facts and arguments, and appealing to reason, and the second, ridiculing and mocking religious people's beliefs in face-to-face interaction. For many moral people, the less hurtful choice is intuitive, but I argued for the more civil option based on its better evidentiary support and its less risky nature.

At the Reason Rally held last month in Washington, DC, Richard Dawkins advocated displays of contempt and ridicule for religion. It isn’t clear exactly what he had in mind. When he said “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” maybe he meant “Question them! Challenge them! Where appropriate!” As far as the effects of his actions are concerned, however, what he meant is less important than how it's received and put into practice. With the recent passing of an anti-evolution bill in Tennessee and Dawkins's association with Darwinism, I questioned what effects his increasingly hostile anti-theism might have on public attitudes toward evolution and anti-evolution bills.

Jerry Coyne at his blog Why Evolution is True responded to my piece. Coyne begins by defending Dawkins’s remarks, insisting that he meant for us to mock religious people’s ideas and not the people themselves. Coyne considers the distinction between people and their ideas to be important, but apparently only when it comes to theists. He accuses me of “dissing Dawkins” when I question his advocacy for contempt and ridicule.

If Coyne objects to ridiculing people, it didn’t stop him from portraying Robert Wright as an annoying and humorless “faitheist” in his response to Wright’s piece in The Atlantic. Coyne wrote:

“And it doesn’t help that he seems to totally lack a sense of humor. Once Wright sat next to me at a meeting in Mexico, determined to get me to admit that I had unfairly maligned him in my review of his book, The Evolution of God. I was so shaken by his relentlessness that I approached Dan Dennett afterwards and asked him for a hug.”

Coyne, who’s traumatized by insistent, yet undoubtedly civil, criticism of his own ideas nevertheless defends ridicule and mockery when dealing with religious people. I haven’t read Wright’s book, so I can’t comment on the accusation that Coyne misrepresented his views, but I will say that he misrepresented mine. He writes:

“If Quinn wouldn’t mind, I’d love her to give evidence for her statement that criticizing religious views is much less effective than coddling the faithful in bringing acceptance of evolution.”

I’d like Coyne to provide some evidence that I said this.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I don’t believe in gods. I believe in metaphors. Once upon a time, people all around the world had many gods, lots of metaphors for the experiences of their lives. And by sacrificing or praying to each god, they acknowledged the forces that shaped their existence. Gods of luck, of thunder, of death, of water, of fertility, of the sun, of air, and on and on and on, covering every nuance of human perception.

From the ancient Mediterranean, the Greek metaphors are most familiar to us today. Zeus represented the patriarchy, Apollo the sun, Aphrodite love, Artemis nature, Demeter the harvest, Hera envy, Athena wisdom, Hades death, Poseidon the seas, Aries war, and so on. Each one of them reflected the universal human values that people crave to control, understand, and express. In choosing a patron god, one could reflect themselves as they were or whom they wished to be. In fearing another god, one could find a mechanism for coping with life’s scary uncertainties and mournful inevitabilities. And through offerings to various gods, one could hope to raise into being the metaphors that might shape their destiny.

But a revolution was already brewing. Several related tribes of Middle Eastern herdsmen did something radical about 4,000 years ago. They came together and combined all of their metaphors into a single god. For them there would no longer be a pallet of distinct emotions. Instead, they would all be wrapped up into one glorious rainbow. These people would give their allegiance to a single, monotheistic metaphor, one god to define the full extent of the human experience.

It was a big change and a tall order. There were some hiccups. One side effect was that their god showed himself to be rather schizophrenic. At one minute he would be a kind and loving god. The next he would be full of wrath and vengeance. Very often, he would be silent, as if saying too many things at once were best countered by saying nothing at all.

But despite his inconsistencies, the new one god would endure. Because in its totality, this combination of all metaphors produced a new single metaphor: the vast unknown.

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by Joy Icayan

Stepping inside the Marcos Museum in Batac, Ilocos feels like stepping into a different time capsule. The museum, which also houses the remains of the late dictator, resembles more a shrine for a person deemed half human, half god. The walls are decorated with framed notes, fragments of letters and Marcos’ personal history, intricately tied to the history of the country. Personal virtues and achievements are extolled, such as Marcos’ topping the bar exam. Everywhere one turns, there are pictures of Marcos the hero, sought after by ordinary folk—Marcos with peasants, Marcos with the arms of those outstretched, reaching out to him.

For every tear you shed, there will be victory, a plaque read.

On September 21, 1972, citing threats of communist insurgency and civil disobedience, then President Marcos declared Martial law, effectively suspending civil rights and what activists would then call ‘plunging the country into its darkest times’. What followed could not quite be described by the available statistics: 30,000 cases of human rights violations according to Commission of Human Rights, 21,000 documented cases by the nongovernmental organization Task Force Detainees of the Philippines. A country paralyzed by debt while its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia boomed economically. A country with its citizenship in constant mistrust of the government. The images and stories that haunt, haunt in their universality—a replica of a famous dissident’s cell in a museum in Quezon City—bunk beds and toilet cramped together, countless pictures of men and women in the streets being sprayed on by water cannons and tear gases, skeletons that still turn up in the most remote of regions, stories of friends, comrades dead, missing, families broken, the individual voices that speak of torture, loss.

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by Sarah Firisen

There once was a candidate, Mitt
Who was rich, smart, handsome and fit
No extremist here
Clearly not much to fear
The perfect choice you'd have to admit

He'd been governor of a blue state
Brought in health reform with a mandate
Moderate through and through
The job now seemed his due
After losing to McCain in '08

With just a few things in his way
There seemed no real cause for dismay
An inconvenient fact?
Then past words he'd redact
There's no principle he couldn't betray

He's backpeddled from past positions so hard
Finding beliefs to quickly discard
But while the sight's quite surreal
He still can't seal the deal
The easy way forward is barred

He can keep swinging hard to the right
He can denounce immigration with might
Change on Roe vs Wade
Play the healthcare charade
And pretend climate change is no plight

But it seems that the right won't comply
God has told them he's just not the guy
He's not Christian they say
To which god does he pray?
He's a faux conservative they all cry

So it's been a painful primary slog
A slow hike instead of a jog
But an end's now in sight
It's the last rounds of this fight
And now Mitt must escape from this bog

Yes the fun is about to begin
When much to the far right's chagrin
Romney turns on a dime
Wipes off the primary slime
And flip flops right back for the win

Easter

I should be devotional
in my mother’s way
standing at the mouth of a tomb
with its rolled stone
empty as the night sky between stars
empty as the space within atoms
because, they say, a man died
but beat death and would
bequeath immortality
to those who believe
death can be beat entirely
so that bodies may embrace in heaven
so that what was so finally scattered
when death came with its scythe
to slide between two lives
setting one adrift to sobs and cries
—so entirely that death would be shown a fool

to believe
against one’s belief
is one way
one dies
.

by Jim Culleny
4/8/12

by Liam Heneghan

Urban ecology, the environmental sciences youngest and most rambunctious cousin, is in a position to influence the design of the cities of the future. Its clout comes from its willingness to think big, to think about the ecology of entire cities as if they were just any other ecosystem. Urban ecologists call this big picture view the “ecology of the city”.

From this disciplinary perspective, Chicago is just another savannah, one where admittedly the commonest species is the human animal.

However, by taking this bird’s eye view of cities, is urban ecology losing sight of the bird-on-the-ground? I mean this quite literally. Is urban ecology losing it roots in natural history? Will the successful cultivation of relationships with decision makers, municipal authorities, city planners and other governmental powers-that-be, come at the expense of urban ecologists’ knowledge about birds, wildlife, beetles and the other creeping things inhabiting the city?

Are we (and I count myself in this troupe) urban ecologists, forgetting the world-fascination, the intense delight, that comes from direct encounters with nature in the city?

***

Urban ecology is not the first discipline to encounter the tensions accompanying distinctions between the bird’s-eye view and the bird-on-the-ground view of the city. An instructive example found in the work of Michel deCerteau (1925-1986) who makes of this tension a theory of the everyday interactions of people who both conform to and resist the strictures of the culture to which they belong.

In their entry on deCerteau the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as “a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, [who] was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America.”[1] To describe him as peripatetic is apropos in two senses as the adjective describes a follower of Aristotle, and also signifies one who moves about quite a bit. Etymologically it comes from the Greek patein which is to tread. Followers of Aristotle are referred to as Peripatetics, though the term refers not to a supposed habit of wandering in the Lyceum after the lecturing Aristotle, but to the practice of teaching in a colonnade (a peripatos). Whatever about the Aristotelian influences on his work, deCerteau, a Jesuit priest, was certainly a wanderer both intellectually and physically having taught in many places and written on history, mysticism, everyday life, spiritual life, literary history and so on.

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by Edward B. Rackley

Why didn’t the momentum and exuberance of last year’s “Arab Spring” extend to African countries south of the Sahel? Sub-Saharan populations, many immediate neighbors of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, followed the drama with fascination and some envy. When we spoke, I was surprised how few colleagues and friends in sub-Saharan Africa were optimistic about a counterpoint “African Spring.” They claimed their societies “weren’t ready” to rally widespread discontent towards a political tipping point.

Historically, my friends were wrong—SSA has much experience with successful opposition movements, from colonialism to apartheid. But I took their resignation to mean that social fragmentation had secured the upper hand, proof that poverty and cynical governance were not just misanthropic but bitterly divisive as well. The process of overcoming deep social, generational and political divisions, with their common denominator of skepticism and self-interest, cannot simply be ignited like the proverbial box of tinder.

Internet connectivity was clearly an enabler for the Arab Spring, and SSA still lacks reliable connectivity and familiarity with social media. But coastal North African countries are different from their southern neighbors in infinite other ways as well. Despite non-western culture, values and religious beliefs, North Africa’s Mediterranean exposure imposes a definite political and economic orientation towards Europe, for ill or good. Solidarity in any form—security, economic, ideological—is almost non-existent between countries divided by the Sahel. Few North African countries look south for constructive economic or political opportunity. Exploitation of less developed southern countries (human trafficking, resource predation) is more the norm.

I’ve written here before about the Nile Basin Initiative, an internationally-funded effort to negotiate equitable use rights for the countries of the great river, killed by mutual mistrust in 2010. The late Colonel Gaddafi led Pan-Africanism, the only other north-south unification effort. His utopianism managed to defy open ridicule thanks to his hefty wallet, but never commanded serious attention. In hindsight it proved far more effective at ensconcing the dinosaur club of out-of-touch leaders, like Gaddafi himself, for decades. This retrograde model of leadership, widely practiced among newcomers to power, is arguably the continent’s greatest impediment to modernity.

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by Misha Lepetic

Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
~ John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”

Received wisdom relies on simple categories to survive and persist. In this sense, certain numbers are repeated until they are virtually canonical. If we could come up with a taxonomy of success for statistics, we might consider the convenience of numbers that freeze flows of population, money or goods into easily retained averages, devoid of the nuances of space or time. I may, for example, agree with the statement that “500 people arrive in Mumbai every day” if whoever responsible for this statement could point me to the set from which this average was derived – was this from 2000 to 2008? Or maybe it was from 1997 to 2011? Let’s consider other aspects that the datum is implying: Are these people migrants who are truly moving to the city, or are they on a long, seasonal loop that takes them back to their villages, or, even more inconveniently, other cities? And could someone please tell me where the city of Mumbai begins (or ends)? Inconvenient truths are both temporal and geographical, but when we are attempting to impress our audience we tend not to speak in graphs but in talking points. This is the peril of a successful statistic.

By the same token, “255 people born every minute” is a nice, smooth number, and not difficult to remember for those uncomfortable moments when the cocktail party conversation needs a nudge. The lazy acceptance of such a statement demonstrates our contentedness with the notion that this is something that is happening consistently, not unlike the comfort we get from looking at a flowing stream: every time we go back to the stream, there it is, still flowing. In a Heraclitean sense, if I dip my toe into that stream of newborns today, they will certainly be different than yesterday’s stream, but it will still be 255. This is comforting. Until, of course, it becomes 256, or 325. But we will have to wait to be told that, too.

Was the seven-billionth person born in Manila on October 31^st, 2011? Absolutely – if you are the parents of Danica May Camacho. Declared so by the United Nations, the organization did her the further favour of swooping down on her delivery room, scholarships in hand for the lucky newborn, like an international development version of Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. (Danica’s parents may want to take heed of the experience of Adnan Nević, the title-holder of Six-Billionth Person of this particular celebrity circuit, whose cradling by Kofi Annan at his birth hasn’t exactly led to a silver spoon in his mouth). But for those paying attention to the vagaries of demographic estimation,

Even the best individual government censuses have a margin of error of at least 1 percent, said [Gerhard Heilig, chief of the population estimates and projections section of the United Nations Population Division], which would translate in the global aggregation to “a window of uncertainty of six months before or six months after Oct. 31.” An error margin of even as little as 2 percent would mean that Monday’s estimate of seven billion actually was 56 million off (which is more people than were counted in South Africa).

By the same token, I am wholly prepared to believe the notion that, “as of 2008, 50% of the global population lives in cities,” if the United Nations could only define for me what constitutes a city (or was that fateful moment set to happen in 2005, as reported in 2005?). Is the city defined as its urban core, or does it involve the surrounding metropolitan area? Richard Saul Wurman famously defined Tokyo in (at least) six different ways, including boundaries determined by postal delivery, utility service, administrative districts, or population density, among other measures that, our intuition tells us, ought to line up together somehow, but instead lead to radically different geographic delineations. At least we can agree that Tokyo is a proper city – a mega-city, even. Ought we then define a “city” by the density of its population? In that case, Tokyo ranks only 50^th, and Mumbai reigns supreme – at least by some measures. But at what point does a city stop being a city?

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by Quinn O'Neill

At the Reason Rally held recently in Washington, Richard Dawkins made a rather provocative suggestion. He encouraged the crowd to ridicule and mock religious people for their beliefs.

Exactly how far he’d have his followers go with their ridicule isn’t clear. Jerry Coyne of the blog “Why Evolution is True” presumably considers Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion to exemplify the approach that Dawkins is advocating. He offers the converts' corner of Dawkins’ website as evidence of the approach’s effectiveness. It’s a collection of anecdotes from atheist converts who most commonly credit The God Delusion.

The book certainly can be credited for many conversions to atheism, but I think it constitutes an appeal to reason more so than an example of ridicule. In any case, what Dawkins advocated at the Reason Rally goes beyond what he’s done with any of his books. Ridicule can take many different forms, including well-crafted satire and cartoons like South Park, but Dawkins is suggesting that we make fun of people face-to-face. “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” he instructs.

Ridicule can be an effective tactic, but it’s risky. J. Michael Waller makes this clear in a White Paper for the Institute of World Politics, in which he endorses ridicule as a tactic in the “war on terrorism”. Distinguishing ridicule from humor, he says:

Laughing at someone – ridicule – is another matter. It is the use of humor at someone else’s expense. It is a zero-sum game destructive to one of the parties involved. Like a gun, it is a dangerous weapon. Even in trained hands, it can misfire. Used carelessly or indiscriminately, ridicule can create enemies were there were none, and deepen hostilities among the very peoples whom the user seeks to win over.

Robert Wright, in a piece in The Atlantic, questions what effect Dawkins’ advocacy of such a hostile approach might have on support for anti-evolution bills like the one recently passed in Tennessee. It’s a good question. It is a well-established marketing tactic to associate what you’d like to sell to people – be it a product or an opinion – with the values of the target group. Being a well-known advocate for evolution, Dawkins’ advocacy of hostile anti-theism may have an undesired effect. For some people, he may be reinforcing an association between evolution and a threat to something that they value. From a marketing perspective, this would be an obvious blunder. It’s like reminding people that Coke promotes tooth decay when you actually want them to buy Coke.

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Or, Reading is Bad

Or, A Tale of Two Storytellers.

My Philadelphia childhood was marked by the image of my mother under lamplight, bent over a book, studying to become a folklorist. She was always studying children's games and rhymes and reading weighty, scary, assigned-tomes like “The Sex Lives of Savages”. She came to folklore through this fascination she'd developed with the voice of a man she met in Benin, West Africa in her late twenties. His name was Nondichao and he was a skeletal tall old griot before whom she'd place a boxy tape recorder time and again over the course of decades. I remember his grainy French-African voice very well, as if it runs through my dreams without my knowing. With a gravelly lilt Nondichao told her, over many a sweaty bottle of Fanta, and all from memory, the bloody and amazing histories of the kingdom of Dahomey as they had been relayed to him by a series of griots, all now dead. In the meantime I played with the village children chasing hoops and petting goats, and we all were recorded in the background static.

She came to that fascination–with his storytelling–because she was a storyteller herself, and had worked for a friend's children's theater group in Connecticut called Oddfellows Playhouse. And that fascination started from an even more direct seed–she'd been a devoted theatre-person. She'd been the kind of older sister who is constantly organizing her siblings into little backyard productions, who grows up into a theatre major…

So for me there's always been this narrative that explains how one could get from theatre to storytelling to folklore to history (and perhaps back again) all by following a fascination with the human voice.

Of course my mother has a lovely, expressive speaking voice. But in retrospect I see that that voice is partially responsible for the fact that I nearly failed second grade. When we left Benin I was six and she was thirty; and by the time I was eight, despite the best efforts of the Philadelphia public school system, I still couldn't read.

So I often thank my stars that I wasn't born in our current era of over-diagnostic tendency, as I'm sure I'd have been shunted off into various sad special rooms and my life might have gone quite differently. But my academic problem was pretty basic. I didn't have a disability. I preferred to be read to.

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Knot

maybe you think I do not know
maybe you think I could not be
maybe I am not where I go
maybe you are not here with me
.
perhaps the moon is nothing old
perhaps the sun is never new
perhaps all stories have been told
perhaps there is no being through

it could be everything is here
it could be everything is near
it could be heaven is not far
it could be now just where we are

perhaps all maybes will be done
maybe all should-bes might be too
it could be everything is one
beyond the shadow of we two
.

by Jim Culleny
3/24/12

by Rishidev Chaudhuri and Jason Merrill

C.P. Snow famously said that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read Shakespeare. Whatever the particular merits of this comparison, it does speak to the centrality of the idea of entropy (and its increase) to the physical sciences. Entropy is one of the most important and fundamental physical concepts and, because of its generality, is frequently encountered outside physics. The pop conception of entropy is as a measure of the disorder in a system. This characterization is not so much false as misleading (especially if we think of order and information as being similar). What follows is a brief explanation of entropy, highlighting its origin in the particular ways we describe the world, and an explanation of why it tends to increase. We've made some simplifying assumptions, but they leave the spirit of things unchanged.

The fundamental distinction that gives rise to entropy is the separation between different levels of description. Small systems, systems with only a few components, can be described by giving the state of each of their components. For a large system, say a gas with billions of molecules, describing the state of each molecule is impossible, both because it would be tedious and because we don't know the state of each molecule. And, as we'll point out again later, for many purposes knowing the exact state of the system isn't useful. In theory we can predict how a system evolves by knowing its exact state, but in practice this is much too complicated to do unless the system is very small. So we instead build probabilistic predictions taking into account only a few parameters of the system, which gives us a coarser but more relevant level of description, and we seek to describe changes in the world at this level.

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LOST IN TRANSLATION

“Dye,” Mother says
touching her silver hair.

Harry the shrink strokes his gray beard,
“I'm proud of it.”

“Operation Doctor Sahib,”
she points to the mole on her nose.

“God’s gift,” he says. She shows him
her ulna, fractured in a recent fall.

“Make it as it was.”
Harry the shrink shows his bruised wrist,

“Fell off the bike when I was young.”
She removes her slip-ons: Girl’s feet,

Red polish chipped at cuticles.
“Slice off my bunions.”

Harry the shrink removes his socks: Big
misshapen toes.

Mother glares at me,
her fifth child, reclined

as usual on the couch, translating
Kashmiri, Mother Tongue.

“What does this decrepit man know,
she says, “My life is ahead of me.”

For my mother, Maryam, on her 90^th
3 March 2012
Hebrew Home for the Aged, Riverdale, NY
Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3Quarks Daily

by Jen Paton

This American Life, the American radio program, has posted an episode called “Retraction”, which retracts performer Mike Daisey's story on Foxconn – adapted from his stage series, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Daisey, since the TAL story ran in January, has become one of the most visible critics of Apple. But it turns out that the most memorable stories in the piece- about a man with a subcontracted-factory-injured hand touching an Ipad screen with wonder, and a girl employee telling him Daisey was thirteen – were untrue, at least to TAL's level of comfort. When interviewed about all this in the “Retraction” piece, Daisey sounds abashed, and half-heartedly apologies to Ira Glass for allowing something that merely met the standard of truth for theater onto a journalistic program. Daisey tells Glass, “I really do believe stories should be subordinate to the truth….everything that is in this monologue is built out of the truth I took.” On his Web site (http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/), Daisey writes that he “uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell [the] story, and I believe [I do] so with integrity.”

Seemingly all of a sudden we (some of us, many of us) can instantly share our built truths, our ideas, our revolutions. Polish writer Piotr Czerski recently published a manifesto on “us”, the Web literate generation (he is three years older than me). Admitting that he uses “we” as a convenience, he describes us as communicating on a level “more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.” This seems a bit grandiose – volume does not equal efficiency, intensity does not equal clarity – but Czerski raises many interesting points. I am most interested in his discussion of how we use the Web to find things out, to weigh the evidence, to triangulate at truth. He writes that: “we have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible.” While I agree more or less with his description of how to arrive at “the truth,” I'm not sure if the Web really makes “us” better at finding it.

I'm not sure we are so good at assessing credibility – the credibility of others, or perhaps worse, our own.

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Breeze

I dreamt I was
dreaming in Chinese
so didn’t understand my dream
though it’s calligraphy was clear
as the brushed strokes of breeze.

the characters Lao Tzu
climbed behind closed eyes

but said as little as they could
mounting nothing hill

obliquely vanishing
between two skies
.

I came upon a Buddha
sitting circular and

wise as a pictograph
without a word

silently
loquacious

mutely musical
—unheard as a muzzled
mourning dove
.

in this dream
I’m free of words & guile
as Buddha’s smile

.

by Jim Culleny
3/16/12

by James McGirk

Reviewing Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men in The New York Times, Douglas Coupland proposes, “what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word let’s call it Translit.” Translit reflects “an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once—a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet.” Artists are responding to this, Coupland says, by mashing together time and place, an effect “not unlike watching a TV show that’s simultaneously happening on multiple channels, a story filmed in different eras using differing technologies, but which taken together tell the same story.

As a strategy this is not new. This new genre sounds a lot like Moby Dick, minus the throbbing heartbeat of Captain Ahab pursuing his white whale, or the multi-faceted storytelling of a Thousand-and-One Nights. Every novel is a soup of partially digested hanks of literary matter. A typical chapter is a hybrid of drama, description and transcribed speech. This soupiness is the reason why novels have defied easy categorization into genre since they evolved from the golden triad of Greek drama, tragedy and comedy.

Nailing down a new genre and coining a new term to slot into the canon is harmless fun. What is disturbing about this “Translit,” however, is Coupland's suggestion that it is an effective strategy for dealing with, “interconnectivity across time and space, just as interconnectedness defines the here and now.” The spacey refraction that Coupland is so impressed with is a feint and one that contemporary literature would do well to expose.

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