by Justin E. H. Smith

[For the first installment in this series, go here.]

The idea that there is a hierarchy or ladder of world cultures, with European culture at the top (often promoted to the status of 'civilization'), was a cornerstone of most Enlightenment philosophy. It was rejected in the era by a handful of counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder, but it continued to reign in the burgeoning discipline of anthropology until the early-20th-century innovations of Franz Boas and others. It was only definitively displaced from anthropology in the decade or so after World War II. In philosophy today, by contrast, though everyone officially abjures the ladder model of human cultures, it continues to determine much of our reasoning about what counts as philosophy and what does not.

It is worth pointing out that all societies that have produced anything that we are able to easily recognize as philosophy are ladder societies. We might in fact argue, if not here, that philosophy as a discrete domain of activity in a society is itself a side-effect of inequality. The overwhelming authority of the church in medieval Europe, the caste system in ancient India, the control of intellectual life by the mandarin class in ancient China (meritocratically produced by the Confucian examination system, but still elite) present themselves as three compelling examples of the sort of social nexus that has left us with significant philosophical works. The fact that philosophy always comes from the top rungs of ladder societies could have something to do with the difficulty, in spite of our best intentions, of de-Eurocentrizing the current academic discipline of philosophy: New York, London, and the idyllic campuses that are an easy commute from these metropolises are the true locus of philosophy today, in just the same way that royal courts were in ancient India. It is as hard for us to think of the intellectual activity of, say, some village sage in postcolonial, third-worldified India as 'philosophy', as it would have been for a high-caste member of the literate elite to think of the folk beliefs of some forest-dwelling ādivāsī in this way.

When philosophers try to get away from the ladder, as most agree for political reasons it is necessary to do, what they usually end up with is the museum, or perhaps, with apologies to André Malraux, the imaginary museum of philosophical multiculturalism. As the Soviets once did with the traditional costumes of their empire's ethnic minorities, those who aim to promote non-Western philosophy usually end up putting the Chinese and the Indians, and sometimes a slapped-together group they dub 'Africans' as well, in entirely separate, non-overlapping display cases, as if their philosophical traditions were just so many traditional costumes or pieces of pottery.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Two recent events, the removal of an essay on the many tellings of the Indian epic the Ramayana from the curriculum of Delhi University and the firebombing of a French newspaper for printing a cartoon of the Prophet in an edition devoted to a satirical look at the Shariat, share a surface resemblance. They have taken place in India and Western Europe, two diverse places but both places that take pride in a tradition of tolerance. While it is possible to read into the incidents the continuing religious intolerance for any examination of faith, it seems to make more sense to me to focus on the differences between the two events and what they say about the manner in which these two societies actually practice tolerance.

The essay removed from the curriculum at Delhi University was written by A.K. Ramanujan, at least in the Indian way of thinking a Hindu, drawing upon a long tradition in which the diversity within the faith is itself a source of tolerance. The opposition to this essay has come from the Hindu right, which is not a conservative but a radical force. It wants to historicize a tradition that is rooted in myth and storytelling. Uncomfortable with the elasticity of myth, they prefer the certainty they think history grants them. For them the figure of Rama, central to the epic, is not subject to the vagaries of storytelling and local lore, he is a historical figure with a kingdom and a birthplace.

This historicity is central to a version of Hinduism that goes by the name of hindutva and shores up the main opposition party in Indian, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Irrespective of its antecedents (it is a modern idea, born in the early twentieth century) it has come to command enough of a following to influence the norms that actually mediate tolerance in India. By tolerance, I do not just mean intellectual tolerance which however important is only a part of a wider idea. By tolerance I mean the wider idea that allows diverse ways of living to coexist in a society.

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—for Ricardo

Reply to a message from Ricardo who wrote:
How U b?
.
I b well enough

Work fairly regular— ’bout 4-5 hours a day at TSA,
plus a couple of side jobs drawing
lucky (to have work)
chug chug

Keep my hand in the writing game:
blogs, two local paper gigs
shooting my mouth off at greedy vampire windmills sucking global blood
working at finishing the downstairs room under the kitchen

Haven’t been writing poems though
It comes it goes
Breath comes till it won’t—
interesting set of circumstances without comprehensible explanation
mysterious as the sun shooting through the middle of nowhere
lifting us on swells of gravity

—it rose again today!
happy and bright
shining on silvery frost
bright and beautifuller
than any precious metal
a commodities speculator might hoard
grass beneath more verdant and moist
than the greenest lust of a banker
air crisper than a fresh
thousand dollar bill

as breathable as necessary
as fine
as sweet
..
…’bout you?

by Jim Culleny
11/6/11

By Usha Alexander

In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.

As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat.

For some years now, the zeitgeist in China has been closer to what Deng Xiaoping, a successor to Mao, neatly voiced in 1993: “To get rich is glorious.” And today it seems that the only thing still communist about China is the name of the party that continues to rule it with an iron hand; for while China’s communist leaders have embraced capitalism with an astonishing zeal, they have not allowed the free flow of ideas and information within China. Ordinary citizens are actively kept in the dark even about the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. As I stood on the square, among the crowds of locals and holiday makers, flying kites or striking “I was there!” poses in front of Mao’s portrait, it struck me that most of the people around me—and most Chinese nationals under the age of 35—do not even know about the event that transpired there.

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WHAT HAPPENED TO A WORLD

My mother cross-legged
On the verandah rug
Scent of mustard oil
Her glistening hair
Fat cook on bike
Midday tiffin to Father

I open my jaw to Maa
Purse my lips to moo
Fleece white as snow on K2
Bathe my lamb Maamoo
In an oval tin tub
Under the grand oak

Eid al-Adha
Day of sacrifice
The cook ropes Maamoo’s legs
Mother pulls at her hair
Pleading with Father
Knife at Maamoo’s throat

In the name of Allah
Father’s Bismillah
Blood crescent soaking grass
Mamoo’s head at my feet
Eyes reflecting light
Of dead stars

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest writer at 3 Quarks Daily.

by Mara Jebsen

…But really, since I exist at all, I believe that it is possible for people to…I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic…That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that's there to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe it.

–Edie Sedgwick

This summer I had a crush on Edie Sedgwick. Recently, I tried to “be” both Edie and Andy Warhol for Halloween. It was easy, because he used to dress like her. The source of her ability to fascinate is hard to explain, even now that she's dead–and I imagine it was even harder for her devotees to explain back then. Over the summer, I read several books about Edie, all of which were half-dominated by glossy photos. In a short time, I developed the sort of crush good girls get on bad girls in Junior High. It just seemed sort of fascinating and marvelous that a person could be almost nothing at all but will and whimsy, and could empty themselves of anything but surface. By this I mean to to say that a young woman, very pained and twisted by the forces of childhood, could become a sort of Peter Pan and fly through New York as if there was no future.

She can hardly have been the first person to turn partying and the wearing of odd clothing into a primary form of expression, but she seems to have had a real gift (a curse-gift, of course, the kind of gift that kills you) for just that. A few writers attribute our whole fascination with androgyny (particularly, slim little boy-women) to Edie, which is maybe not the best legacy to have left on the world, but from what I've read, I can't imagine she intended for generations to copy her. And while its clear that her life in New York, and at the Factory, made her into a sort of combustible, dancing, fairy-machine that ran off of attention, I don't think that fame (at least, as we understand it now) can have held real attraction for her. I sometimes think I can understand what made her go, but have only been able to access that through poetry.

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by James McGirk

A large pile of garbage has accumulated outside my front door. One of my neighbors is fighting with our landlord. She leaves bags of refuse just outside of the receptacle, untied and upside down so as to better disgorge their payload of soiled panty-liners onto the pavement in front of our house. The cans are in a wire enclosure a few yards away, very easy to access; convenience and squeamishness are not the issue here.

This mischief is intentional. I know it is. Each arrangement is more shocking than the last, the woman has a serial killer’s flair for the grotesque. There is motive too. She was once employed by our landlord as the garbage-minder but was suddenly replaced. I can only assume she is baiting the city into fining him for violating New York's sanitary code. So far it hasn’t worked. She remains a tenant in good standing and the area is horrific. Armies of cockroaches scurry over discarded pizza boxes and piss-soaked kitty litter. And anybody on the block who feels their garbage is too nasty to keep in their own bin will happily dump it on ours. They don’t even bother doing it under cover of darkness any more.

I tell you all this because the other day I opened my door and found a jack-o-lantern sitting on my doorstep: A shitty one. A disgusting withered one collapsing in on itself with rot. At the time I was wearing heavy boots and my first impulse was destroy the thing. I swung my foot back, and was about to punt the thing into the road when I stopped myself. It was almost Halloween, and this unhygienic squash seemed as a fitting a tribute to the horrors I had experienced in New York City as any I could possibly hope for. And believe me there are horrors-a-plenty in this supposedly spic-and-span city.

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by Jen Paton

Every Sunday morning, over the simulacra of breakfast burritos, we have brunch. Sometimes, talk turns to language skills, our relative proficiencies in Russian. This one guy knows Arabic, used to live in Cairo.

“How did you learn Arabic?” someone asks him. “How” was the question, not “why,” nonetheless:

“I think for the same reason everyone in our generation wanted to,” this guy of my generation says, trying to catch my eye.

I’m not having any of this answer, I already know. “After 9/11, I think…everyone just wondered how the hell this happened.”

No, no. I don't speak Arabic, we're not even in an Arabic speaking country right now, but I'm still, like, NO.

*

Be too nice. Probably suspiciously so. Smile during all interactions. Say thank you at the end of every social interaction and in particular every service related transaction. Thanks for bringing me water. Thanks for giving me change at the grocery store. Thanks for handing me my bag of groceries. Thanks for moving out of my way on this crowded public transport. Thanks for allowing me to order at this restaurant without it being terribly complicated. Thanks! You do mean this, by the way, you can’t help yourself. Find that your niceness sometimes impedes your ability to get things done here.

Alternatively, be too rude. Sometimes by accident, because you actually cannot speak. Sometimes on purpose: get unreasonably annoyed and huffy when you get water with gas instead of still water, with no lemon, and when people cannot understand you, which is often. Complain often about the food you are eating, expecting other Americans to agree. Laugh too loudly, even when sober. You can’t help yourself. Find that your rudeness sometimes impedes your ability to get things done here.

Wear clothes whose appropriateness you have not fully considered. Wear military fatigues. Wear a suit. Wear shorts. Wear spaghetti straps. Wear long sleeves you think are modest but forget to consider the tightness of your clothes. Wear flip-flops – people will stare. Wear urban sportswear that makes local teens envious, or giggly. Wear workout clothes that make grandmothers glare. Wear freshly ironed shirts under cashmere sweaters with dark slacks. If under 30, cultivate a well-traveled stubble that highlights the fact that, actually, you have been traveling all over, not just in the capital.

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by Maniza Naqvi

“@Time Square.”

Brian texted back: “Also.” But we were on opposite sides of the street and the police barricades were making it impossible to crossover.

The police, in their blue uniforms, wielding batons and shields, wearing bullet proof vests and helmets and even mounted on horseback strutted up and down several block of Broadway at Times Square as though they were on a catwalk of power showing off to the crowds their latest toys for holding back the crowds. Why on earth would they be on horseback in this day and age if not to show that they were capable of trampling people the good old fashioned way? “Beachwear!” Someone in the crowd shouted invoking the Wendy’s ads from decades ago which poked fun at the totalitarian State of the Soviet Union and its lack of imagination. I looked up at the hundreds of dazzling almost blinding electronic billboards over Time Square and realized the joke went even further. The Billboards overhead were selling only one product—discontent—eat this—drink this, wear this—listen to this, watch this—consume, consume, spend—spend–spend and you will be happy!

The protesting crowd good naturedly teased the posturing of the police “Join us! Join us!”Some of the cops smiled back awkwardly others pretended to be unfazed and tough, while others in white shirts looked as mean and tough as they were. In age and anxiety they mirrored the protestors. Whether a protester or a policeman—it seemed clear here that everyone needed to earn a paycheck. The men and women constituting the police force and the protesters shared the same issues of eroding salaries, pensions, social security and rising costs of mortgages, taxes and health insurance. The cops in their blue shirts or white shirts—outfitted with guns, batons, taser guns, pepper spray, plastic and metal handcuffs, walkie-talkies and the protestors accessorized with cardboard placards, American flags, cameras and ideals seemed equally like puppets in an elaborate street theater: as if all were bit parts in an overwhelming landscape of billboards flashing, blinking and winking while the ticker tape circling above announced “Occupy Wall Street Protests Goes Worldwide.” Thousands of cameras were flashing along with thousands of cell phone and video cameras and cameras of all sorts. Security surveillance cameras were everywhere in probably the most densely monitored, square in the world. A giant billboard in fact was flashing back our filmed images on a screen across from us along with a clothing advertisement. In itself, it was a slogan for the privatization of the State’s writ on infringement of privacy.

People, protests, property, parks, public, private, police, prisons, press, politics and permits. To those who are tone deaf these sound like disparate slogans. But the Occupy Wall Street protest movement across the country and across the globe has shown that these are all issues that can be funneled into one or two over arching concerns.

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by Stefany Anne Golberg

Meditations on waiting come in cycles. We’ve always waited—to live is to wait. It’s a devastating thought. To live is to wait.

We haven’t always known we’re waiting. For millions of years, we waited to evolve, we waited for ourselves, but we didn’t know we were waiting then. For millions of years after that, as animals, creatures of the land, we waited in the way that animals do. We waited for seasons so that we could eat, we waited for birth so that we had purpose. But still, we didn’t know that we were waiting. So we weren’t actually waiting. We were just being. And then, at some point, long ago but not so long ago that we cannot remember, we started to have consciousness, awareness. We learned that we could control the things we waited for, could plant what we most desired to eat, and so forth. And with this understanding, we stopped just being and started waiting.

The last time we really considered waiting may have been the 1950s and 1960s, when Existentialism was popular. Existentialism put thinking about waiting back on the menu, because it was primarily a philosophy that sought to understand Time and what we were supposed to do about it, this airy abstract concept that affected every little thing we did but yet had no control over.

In 1953, the world saw the first production of what is the greatest Existential work about waiting that I know—certainly the most famous—the play Waiting for Godot.

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by Hasan Altaf

One of the reviews of the 2010 film Reflections of a Blender (directed by André Klotzel from a script by José Antônio de Souza), in O Estado de São Paulo, describes it as “not a realistic film, but one that takes place in a real world in which poetic license is necessary for the development of the story.” My reading is slightly and perhaps only semantically different – to me, Reflections is entirely a realistic film (one interpretation would suggest that it is simply a story told by an unreliable, possibly crazy narrator) in which one small link to reality has been severed.

The poetic license, the severed link in question: The blender of the title (not all blenders, certainly not all appliances or objects) can think, reflect and talk to its owner. In every other respect, the movie is completely realistic – it takes place in a world exactly like ours, down to the way a man annoys his wife by slurping his soup. There is something particularly unsettling – I think the technical world might be “uncanny” – about seeing our own world become just slightly unmoored; it's as if the ties that hold us down are being cut, one by one, leaving us just enough time to make sense of the process.

Reflections of a Blender is not particularly unsettling, at least not in its conceit. It's very much a comedy, and the word that actually came to mind for its technique was “whimsy.” Talking animals, animate objects: Whimsy of this sort is a tempting technique, but also difficult to pull off; one false movie and you end up with Aishwarya Rai in The Mistress of Spices, begging her chilies to talk to her. As a technique, it is also probably less complicated in movies for children (anything Pixar), or in action films, where the robot's conversational abilities are less troubling than the robot's attempt to take over the world. In otherwise realistic movies intended for adults, whimsy of the kind embodied by an introspective blender might easily become “cute,” too precious to have any real effect. Klotzel balances the cuteness of the talking blender (voiced by Selton Mello) with darkness, an overall twistedness that pulls in the other direction.

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Drawing

In my drawing a line moves
northwest along the edge
of a white birch
toward the top left limit of a page
like an inky contrail
tracing an idea of something
seen in a white sky
it banks up and right
along the dark underside of the shadow of a limb
until it branches again and again
retelling a tale of deciduous DNA,
limbs a matrix of lines
furiously scratched,
motionless,
without sound or scent,
a tree that can’t be touched;
an impression eery as a still ghost
in a closed room
unmoved by wind
untroubled by cold or heat
impossible to be climbed
even by Frost’s swinger of birches,
being abstract as many arts
……………………… .…. —and every art’s
a dependent clause in the narrative of genes
moving as it does
river-like
through lips and limbs
singing dancing leaping
until at its delta it reposes
not spent but
quietly seeping to the sea
it spreads the remains of its tale
leaving it to the furies
of what storms
come

by Jim Culleny
© Oct. 29, 2010

by Ryan Sayre

A few months back, a friend and I were in the underwear
section of a Tokyo area UNIQLO disagreeing over what kind of drawers she ought to buy for her imaginary husband. Boxers seemed the obvious choice to me. She was leaning toward briefs. I was in favor of solids. She was of the opinion that stripes would better suit him.

This friend of mine is among the not insignificant number of women in Tokyo who hang men’s clothes out to dry with their own undergarments to ward off would-be panty thieves, stalkers and/or peeping Toms. So here we were, scarecrow shopping at UNIQLO.

In the end, my gender wasn’t enough to dissuade her from what I thought was a fashion misdemeanor. But what could I say? She had, after all, been shopping for this imaginary man for a decade. The poor guy ended up with a pair of Size M briefs, blue with light grey stripes.

Hanging laundry out to dry on the veranda might seem a strange departure from the techno-domesticity that we like to imagine governs all aspects of Japanese urban life. Nevertheless, the obsession for washing clothes in Japan is matched only by an equally obsessional aversion to the use of clothes dryers. The Japan Soap and Detergent Association conducted a survey in 2010 that found as many as seventy percent of women do laundry seven days a week. When passing through a residential peri-urban neighborhood, overcrowded geometries of stripes, plaid, argyle and polka-dot come at the eye from all angles. Before the 1964 Olympics the government called on Japanese citizens to temporarily reel in these clotheslines. While Japan is supposed to be the seat of architectural austerity, cleanliness and orderliness rarely keep such distant company as they do on the exterior of a Japanese apartment block. The more an apartment dweller gives herself over to cleanliness, the more she throws her building’s facade into a savagery of colorful disarray.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

One of the little-known delights of the Midwest is pioneer cemeteries. These are burial places dating from the late 18th century to the early years of 20th century, during the period of westward territorial expansion.

Like many people, I find cemeteries to be places that promote contemplation at many levels, the most obvious being one's own mortality. Unavoidable, but perhaps best not to dwell on. Another level is on the mortality of the people buried there. The typical ages at death, and high child and infant mortality rates are major reality checks on just how unusual the period that we in the first world enjoy today is: But for vaccinations and antibiotics many of us would be under the sod ourselves.

I like to focus on how these people lived rather than how they died. As I read their headstones, I wonder, what events encompassed their lives? What, if anything, did they read besides the Bible? How did they prosecute a daily existence in this area, through subzero winters and blazing hot summers? If they were immigrants, what was their voyage to the New World like? What did they bring with them? What did they leave behind? There are a couple Civil War casualties. Sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, elderly, adults, teens, children, infants, and so on,…

At yet another level it is easy to get wrapped up in the craftsmanship evident in the carving of the headstones: The fonts, the epitaphs, and the iconography are all fascinating. The range of size and quality of the stones is also quite extraordinary.

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by Meghan D. Rosen

Last month, I asked you to submit a science-y question that you'd like to have answered in simple terms. You asked about light, and mirrors, and spices and space— I was delighted by the scope of the questions posed.

This month my fellow SciCom classmates tackled three. Steve Tung glides through the mechanics of flight; Beth Mole spouts off about asparagus pee; and Tanya Lewis reflects on mirrors.

Enjoy!

If you have more burning science questions, just post them in the comments. We'll be back next month with more answers.

And if you don't have a science question, but do have a thought or a picture to share, check out www.sharingamomentofscience.tumblr.com

How can an airplane fly upside down?

Daredevil pilots execute stunning aerobatic maneuvers― loops, rolls, spins, and more― sometimes while upside down for a long time. How do they do it? It might seem that the force keeping a right-side-up plane aloft would push a flipped plane down.

The trick is how the plane is angled in the air. Pilots can adjust the tilt to lift the plane, even when it is upside down.

You may have stuck your hand outside of a moving car and felt the rushing air push it up or down. Tilt your hand more, and that force is stronger. Turn your hand upside down and it still happens, though it might not be as powerful.

Plane wings, flipped or not, work the same way― tilt them up more, and air lifts the plane more. There are drawbacks and limitations, however. Higher angles cause more drag, slowing the plane. Tilt too far and the plane loses its aerodynamic properties and falls like a rock.

But not all airplanes can fly upside down. Some depend on gravity to fuel the engines; some would break under the different stresses of flying inverted. Stunt airplanes use specially designed wings, bodies, and engines to be more agile, more durable, and more versatile.

Steve Tung once dreamed of designing airplanes and rockets. He now dreams of pithy, memorable prose. (He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in fluid mechanics from Cornell University) Twitter: @SteveTungWrites

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by Alyssa Pelish

There was a time, oddly, when I very much identified with Alan Shore, the charismatic skirt-chaser of an attorney played by James Spader on Boston Legal. Not that I shared Alan Shore’s tastes for bespoke suits or cigars, let alone his highly cultivated predilection for women. My fellow feeling did, however, have everything to do with his absolutely mordant wit. As with the best wit, it had an economy and timing that thrilled me. (And it was, of course, all of a piece with Spader's acting that, in its purest, most enduring form, seems to rely on only the musculature of his eyes.) But Alan Shore’s wit, like his eternal bachelor of a character, was never quite matched. His remarks, cutting through the general babble of conversational convention, would typically hang in the air for a beat — while I would chortle and the characters on the show would either ignore, shake their heads at, or (most typically) take offense at them. Even his best friend, the aging rainmaker Denny Krane, was typically too near the precipice of senility (or his own lascivious preoccupations) to fully match Alan’s witticisms. That was just how the dynamic of the show worked — and it worked pretty well. But of all the staple characters — the bluster and senility of William Shatner’s Denny, Candice Bergen’s no-nonsense senior partner, René Auberjonois’ milquetoast authority figure, the expendable cast of comely junior partners — Alan Shore was really the one who had my empathy.

Alan Shore was (and probably still is) one of my favorite instantiations of what I think of as the solitary wit. This is the sort of person who is always at the ready with an epigram or an ironic aside. There's a detached elegance to their pith that places them above the pedestrian fumbling of ordinary conversation. But if honest-to-goodness repartee consists, at a minimum, of one wit’s thrust followed by another’s riposte, the solitary wit’s rapier is ever brandished but never met by another blade. Alan Shore’s predecessors, Oscar Wilde’s most epigrammatic characters must have pride of place in this. Although the dialogue of Wilde’s prose and plays is, in general, known for its incisive wit, it almost always turns on the solitary wit — for whom the world is his straight man. Think of the caustic bon mots dropped by Dorian Gray’s Lord Henry, which are never quite returned in kind by the more socially reserved Basil or wide-eyed young Dorian.[1] Even in The Importance of Being Earnest, which is adored for its comically mannered exchanges, Algernon is the only true wit. His every other line is a perfect epigram — but it's rarely ever returned in kind by the others.[2]

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by Colin Eatock

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the principal meaning of “cool” is “Moderately cold; said of a temperature which, in contrast with heat, is cold enough to be agreeable and refreshing, or, in contrast with cold, is not so low as to be positively disagreeable or painful.”

But of course there’s much more to it than that. The OED also tells us that the word, when applied to persons or their actions, can mean, “not heated by passion or emotion; unexcited, dispassionate; deliberate, not hasty; undisturbed, calm.” This is the sense that Shakespeare intended when he wrote, “Such seething braines … that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.”

Now let’s fast-forward to the dawn of the twenty-first century. On television, one trendy young man is angry with another. The other young man, it seems, has recently done something underhanded: he has lied, cheated or stolen (I don’t recall which). But our hero, Brandon, has uncovered the truth – and he bravely confronts his acquaintance about his low-down behaviour. “Trevor,” he seethes, summoning every shred of moral outrage in his soul, “what you did was not cool!”

Brandon could have said unfair, dishonest, hurtful – any number of things. But he was so offended by Trevor’s crimes that he delved more deeply, uttering most damning phrase in his vocabulary: “not cool.”

Trevor and Brandon are (thankfully) fictional characters, the inventions of scriptwriters. Yet they subscribe to the same Weltanschauung that hordes of young and young-ish people do today: cool is pretty much the best thing one can be. For many, coolness has replaced cleanliness as the worldly condition closest to God.

How did this happen? When did this happen?

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