The great 20th century novelist William Gaddis once wrote, “That’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight.” Gaddis was born in 1922. He was an unabashed theorist of decline. For him, the novelist’s task was to narrate that decline, all the way until there was nothing left to say, until language itself gave up the ghost and we’d be left with a literature of empty mumbling.

Alas, just when things seemed like they might truly fall apart for Gaddis’ generation, the next comes along and makes sense of the chaos. Human beings are known to adapt. Give each historical catastrophe long enough to settle and the world simply becomes the world again. Thus has the dilemma always been for the apocalyptic mind. It is a mind well suited to show us how bad things really are, but ill-suited to recognize the staying power of that essential badness.

In a funny way, I see Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine as a sequel to the work of William Gaddis. I say that because they describe the same world. It is a world of meaningless work and a language hopelessly diluted into the jargon of commercial transactions and the exchange of goods and services. Baker’s world is as empty as Gaddis ever said it would be. And yet, it is not.

Baker’s protagonist is a man who spends the entirety of the short novel traveling up an escalator to the mezzanine of the corporate building where his office can be found. His job, a nameless one. His relationships, superficial and generally characterized by office chit-chat. The novel spends most of its time following the narrator’s train of thought as his attention wanders from one mundane subject to the next. But Baker manages to show that within this “empty” experience is, in fact, a richness of human subjectivity vast and complicated as to be a wonder.

On page 72 of the Vintage edition of the book, published in 1988, Baker comes as close as he ever does to stating his purpose. Baker’s narrator is musing upon the achievements of mechanical engineering that can be found in the corporate bathroom:

Valves that allow a controlled amount of water to rush into a toilet and no more, shapes of porcelain designed so that the turbulence in them forms almost fixed and decorative (yet highly functional) braids and twists that Hopkins would have liked; a little built-in machine that squirts pink liquefied soap with a special additive that gives it a silvery sheen (also used in shampoo recipes now, I’ve noticed) into the curve of your fingers; and the soap-level indicator, a plastic fish-eye directly into the soap tank, that shows the maintenance man (either Ray or the very one who was now polishing the escalator’s handrail) whether he must unlock the brushed-steel panel that day and replenish the supply ; the beautiful chrome-plated urinal plumbing, a row of four identical states of severe gnarledness, which gives you the impression of walking into a petrochemical plant, with names like Sloan Valve and Delaney Flushboy inscribed on their six-sided half-decorative boltlike caps—names that become completely familiar over the course of your employment even though if asked you couldn’t come up with them.

It’s the reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins that interests me most here. “Look at the world we are given just as Hopkins looked at his,” Baker seems to be saying. And then he goes out and does just that. Hopkins called this way of looking “inscape.” He said, “Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake.” What he meant was simply that poetry had to pay very close attention to the specific complexity that makes each thing unique. Inscape is that inner uniqueness. Baker, contra Gaddis and in a Hopkins frame of mind, suggests that we are not any more or less able to reflect on experience and “inscape” now than at any other time. All that’s required is a touch of enthusiasm. I mean that in the ancient sense of the term, the Greek sense of the term. For the Greeks, enthusiasm was about entheos or being possessed by a God. It was sort of like channeling. It meant that one had become a vehicle to express something beyond oneself. To be entheos is thus to be fully absorbed. This is almost the exact opposite of the stance Gaddis takes toward the world and his prose. Gaddis wants to reproduce the language of his time in order to make the reader aware of its degradation. He wants to be in language just long enough to get outside it and see it as a whole. That’s how he can express the world and condemn it at the same time.

Baker’s enthusiasm goes head over heels in its immersion. It thus has little to say about the world as such, the era, the relative progress or decline of history. Baker’s narrator simply lets himself go, lets himself interrogate every detail and think through every interaction ad nauseam. The result is an estrangement of the world that, paradoxically, brings it ever closer. The more intently one thinks about what it is really like to tie your shoes, the more it seems a wondrous and fantastical activity and the more, then, we are able to see ourselves as that weird combination of happenstance and habit that is so very human. This is what Hopkins wanted to accomplish in his poetry, to concentrate so intently on the details that the divinity would arise therein. Baker operates without the implicit theology. But he does think that the details will illuminate us, capture us, as it were, in the activities that mark us as a specific people at a specific time. The world, our world. If nothing else, it is inexhaustible in its fascination.

///
Two Deaths
Jim Culleny

1. Mirror

Under cover of light the moon disappears;
goes just like that, following my mother;
travelling not by casket, but instead
by memory and dream, alike
as death and birth, so alike
there’s just this mirror between them.

2. Da’s Marker

In a cemetery overlooking what used to be a lake
my father’s stone’s a tiny dot in space
smaller than a muon, darker than black hole,
more final than his fall from grace,
marking what the earth has swallowed,
naming who can’t be replaced.

//

Edward B. Rackley

Thanks to our financial turmoil, radio talk shows can now probe deeper than the usual ‘house of cards’ metaphor when reporting the quakes of late capitalism to economic illiterates like me. Experts of every stripe are sharing their views on a topic long-shrouded in patriotic orthodoxy. How often in public discourse do Americans openly question the omniscience of the Invisible Hand, a modern myth of cosmologic proportions?

So it’s a glorious time in one respect, given the rarity with which governing assumptions are shattered, their hollowness exposed. But if it sounds revolutionary, such hopes are misplaced. There’s nothing Marxist in this crisis, no collective appropriation of Wall Street’s wealth engines underway. What we have seen is the utter confidence game of our unregulated financial system laid bare, a coup of sorts against manufactured consent.

But I know not whereof I speak. I just listen to the talk shows and wonder what it all means. I compare such ripples, cataclysmic for us, to dramatic events in countries I know much better, developing countries typically described as ‘conflict’ or ‘post conflict’. Both here and there, interpretation is everything, the objectivity of the data moot. Where the crowd goes, so goes the country–or market–a dangerous prospect when the crowd goes wild.

Without trust or confidence in a given financial system, no one steps up to place their bets. Look at the lack of foreign investors in the Congo, where lack of regulation is legion, for proof of the clear connection between regulation and confidence in sustaining volatile or fragile markets. There is an invisible hand at work in the Congo; I’ve described it many times in these pages. It’s called ‘gun barrel greed’, and it runs things impeccably well. For a microscopic few.

The Egyptian miracle

Africa’s natural resources extend across many borders but are not equally abundant for all. Take the Nile River and its extensive tributaries in Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania–all sub-Saharan countries. This neighborhood, also known as the Great Lakes region, comprises the Nile River Basin, the multiple sources of a river on whose lives all Egyptians and many Sudanese depend. Water is literally life for the ancient desert societies of Egypt and northern Sudan, and their skill at conserving water and maximizing its agricultural uses far exceeds that found in upstream Nile countries where water is abundant.

Clearly there is something primordial and miraculous–but alas not causal–in the relationship between scarcity and ingenuity. Take the case of Egypt, whose irrigation capacity precedes its invention of written language, both of which are over 2000 years old. This historical fact becomes amazing in the context of the Nile Basin, whose countries are the poorest in the world. Technologically, they are so far behind Egypt that they still depend entirely on rainfall to grow food. In Burundi, for instance, rivers and lakes abound but basic irrigation and animal traction constitute the unthought for farmers there. As a result, during the three-month dry season rural farmers in Burundi go hungry and die. Egypt learned to solve that problem long before the West existed.

The government of Burundi, like its neighbors with recurrent famine, could move to study and adapt Egypt’s example to mitigate dire poverty and end needless hunger related deaths every year. Unfortunately, authorities in many Great Lakes countries find it more relevant to accuse Egypt of ‘stealing the Nile’, while letting their own people languish in pre-modern darkness and lethal living conditions.

So scarcity is no catalyst for invention, as people continue to die of famine and unclean water in Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia despite these countries’ natural abundance and fertility. Were the state of scarcity itself a causal trigger for change, people and their leaders would have figured out solutions to poverty long ago. And given that practical solutions already exist in the world’s poorest neighborhood, like the miracle of Egyptian irrigation in a barren desert, one wonders why Egypt’s destitute neighbors continue to look the other way.

Where no man fears to trust

Created in 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative seeks to introduce the notion of ‘common good’ to nine countries for whom the Nile is political hot-potato, conflict trigger, and means of survival rolled into one. Many NBI countries have been at war in the last decade, and the Nile as casus belli is not unthinkable with climate changes already affecting the region. Obviously a lack of trust permeates the region and prevents cooperation on mutually beneficial initiatives, like Nile water management. If successful, then, the NBI would use the Nile to promote development in the poorer countries in a way that facilitates a common approach to solutions and averts conflict.   

Nearing its tenth anniversary, the folks at NBI headquarters in Entebbe were rightfully wondering about their impact in the region, and whether regional thoughtleaders appreciated NBI efforts. A qualitative study of perceptions among civil society, government, academics and media from NBI’s nine member countries was commissioned; results are coming out now.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our panel found that suspicion is high among countries north and south of the Sahara. There is a tacit sense that Egypt ‘controls the Nile’, in the sense that if all countries upstream had hydroelectric capacity and even rudimentary irrigation, by the time it reached Egyptian soil the Nile would be but a trickle. So Egypt’s foreign policy is Nile-centric, aiming to preserve current Nile levels even if this means chronic under-development and recurrent famines upstream. Perfectly natural, respondents from sub-Saharan countries say, we just wish they wouldn’t oppose our efforts to build dams. Cooperation seems a long way off.

The more cynical view is that Egyptian survival requires massive dysfunction and disorganization upstream, as poor governance in sub-Saharan Africa staves off Nile diversion for agriculture and electricity indefinitely. Always looking for evidence to counter the Afro-pessimists, I was heartened to learn that civil society in sub-Saharan countries is exasperated at their leaders’ inability to provide economic development. Predictably, the leaders themselves think they are making great strides.

But with so many heads of impoverished states answering that ‘sovereignty’ is the primary obstacle to improved collaboration around the Nile, obsessions over power continue to trump basic development initiatives–simple improvements that could increase life expectancy, improve living conditions and endear citizens to their leaders. Why these leaders can’t see this (think of Mugabe, Kabila and their many mini-me’s) is the real riddle of the Sphinx.

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal’s wager –that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it– should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

There is, we must concede, a non-zero, if vanishingly tiny, possibility that the message of Yoke-Up Ministries is correct, that you, as the woman says, will go to hell.

Pascal had supposed that the persuasiveness of his argument to any rational thinker would result in submission to the long-standing authority of the Catholic church.  But the problem is that the argument is no more, and no less, compelling coming from a 17th-century Catholic philosopher defending traditional faith than coming from a couple of rough and unwashed rednecks in Louisiana in defense of a strain of enthusiastic neo-Protestantism that Pascal himself would have deemed diabolical.

The Yoke-Up version of the wager brings to light something that Pascal’s does not. To accept the wager, to go for it ‘just in case’, is not, or not only, to submit to God’s will. It is also to submit to the will of the person who presents to you the wager, and not just as concerns God’s existence, but also as concerns all sorts of tangential cultural matters that God, if he exists, would have to find perfectly irrelevant.

The only way to adequately convince the illiterate truckdriver and his angry ‘ex-gay’ spouse that one has accepted their message would be, one supposes, not just to declare, “Yes, I believe!”, but also to come to care about things like engine repair, to understand certain sports metaphors, to inhabit a world of small and local concerns that can only make sense if one is already a certain kind of working-class white American. In this particular case, one would likely also have to show signs of the ravages of life prior to being born again, perhaps some tribal or Celtic tattoos hidden under the undershirt, teeth worn down to stubs by meth, a threadbare collection of garments announcing that one has ‘no fear’.

As Pascal might have said, these are attributes of a Christian that do not depend on will, or even intellect. They are not up to the individual considering the wager, but are instead constitutive of the white-trash habitus. In this respect, one senses that the Yoke-Up wager is not for everyone: it is not Good News for all the nations of the earth, but only for that extended clan of born-agains and not-yet-born-agains who all, regardless of the eventual fate of their souls, recognize one another as members of the same community.  You, 3QD readers, may consider yourselves exempt.

*

When I was in high school I called myself a ‘communist’. This was the era of perestroika. Gorbachev’s hardline opponents were generally spoken of as if they were the only communists left in the Soviet Union, while the general secretary himself was a ‘reformer’. In addition to my communism, around the same time I was trying to grow dreadlocks, though somehow, I found, resisting the urge to wash and brush was not quite doing the trick. My matted clumps suggested more the coiffure of a homeless white schizophrenic than, say, Peter Tosh.

My suburban punk-rock girlfriend and I used to watch the news together. She would observe the communist hardliners and say: “They don’t have dreadlocks. They don’t have nose-rings. They look like dumpy versions of Ronald Reagan. What do you want to be like them for?” I was hard pressed to come up with an answer, so great had the gap become between the state-socialist gerontocracy of Eastern Europe and the utopian enthusiasm that had inspired both certain strains of 19th-century socialism –such as that of Foucher, who believed that, someday, liberated man will be able to play the piano with his feet– as well as the hairstyle that was to distinguish me from all the complacent bourgeois idiots by whom I found myself surrounded. 

The gerontocracy collapsed, and I cut my hair. I went to university and began writing for the campus Republican newspaper. It was funded by David Horowitz, and was the only student newspaper with anything close to a sense of humor. Once, years before The Onion would develop a similar feature, our paper published fake, man-in-the-street interviews with students on campus, asking them what they thought of the rival Third World Forum. “I think it’s great that the retarded students have their own paper!”, one fake student declared. “I love the big empty spaces on each page!”, said another.  This last comment seems to have pounded into my head once and for all that iron law, of which I am not the discoverer, of the reverse correlation between marginal politics and high production values. 

What I didn’t tell my fellow conservative students is that, at the time, I thought of myself not as a Republican but as a Menshevik. That is to say, like the opponents of the Bolsheviks who believed that Russia would have to pass through a miserable era of capitalism in order to make it to the proper phase of history for the staging of a revolution, I believed that George H. W. Bush was a necessary stage on the path to something far better than what Clinton represented. I didn’t want Bush to win against Clinton because I liked Republicans. I wanted Bush to win because I believed –sincerely and ironically at once– that Bush was marginally worse than Clinton, and that the urgent task of any young utopian was to ‘heighten the contradictions’, as Marxists say, to do what one could to make things as bad as possible, in the hopes that this would precipitate real change faster than the election of a chubby yokel who gave the impression that everything was going to be alright.   

Needless to say I was not perfectly at home with the campus conservatives. It quickly became clear to me that I had gravitated to them only because the campus left of the early 1990s was so stiflingly dull. I blame Stalin, of course, and all the others who made it impossible to belong to an Internationale one could really believe in, thus leading to the fragmentation and decline of would-be internationalism into petty identity politics. I wanted barricades; the campus liberals wanted gender-neutral pronouns.

*

I remain a bit of a Menshevizer, as I think do many who are suspicious of the options presented by a rigidly bipartisan system. A disillusioned Argentine ex-Marxist recently mentioned to me that the Bush fils era has done wonders for the political landscape of Latin America (the praise went mostly to Morales, and not to Chavez), and he worries that an Obama presidency would compromise these gains. I see what he’s saying, but there’s one thing that continues to keep me in line with ‘liberal’ orthodoxy this time around: we’re at a watershed moment in American trash history, when a candidate for high office can appear as if hand-picked by Yoke-Up Ministries.   

I’m talking of course about Sarah Palin, the primitiveness of whose Christianity makes George W. Bush look like a proper, mainline Protestant. Palin remains in that stage of religious fervor, so vividly described by the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, in which the intensity of the belief is to be measured by the degree to which it, presumably through the vehicle of the holy spirit, exercises control over the very motion of the body and of the mouth. Most of us have seen the video of the African preacher laying hands on Palin, so as to drive out demons. But the aim of this sort of exercise is not to gain perfect self-control and rational autonomy once the demons are gone. It is only to ensure that the self be governed by the right kind of daimon, to wit, the holy spirit. The very idea of rational autonomy is one that does not come up.

I have a lingering admiration for old-fashioned Goldwater-style conservatism, of which I take McCain, in certain respects beyond the merely geographical, to be an heir.  Among other things, it laid a heavy stress on individual autonomy and responsibility, and did not maintain that one could get a free pass to radically dissociate oneself from one’s mistake-ridden past simply by announcing that one has been ‘born again’. It left open the possibility for cultivation of moral character, in the laudable sense in which this was understood in antiquity. McCain gets all this, but is forced to cater to the snake-charming, witch-purging, infantile mentality of a large sector of the American population in order to have any hope of winning.

A deep part of many of us might want to see things get bad, in order that they may get better. But no decent person could hope to see things get as bad as they might quickly be if Sarah Palin gains executive power. The Mensheviks only wanted to instigate a period of free trade and economic inequality in order to make reality match up with Marx’s theory of the stages of history. That would have been a step forward, relatively speaking, from miserable serfdom. A Palin presidency –a likely outcome of her vice-presidency, given McCain’s age and evident feebleness– could easily amount to a step way back, to inquisition and persecution, to the serfdom of the soul that preceded the discovery of autonomy, and to a tribal chauvinism that takes one’s own little clapboard church for the sole channeler of divine truth on earth. This is a spectre that trumps any utopian vision of how much better the world might be than what the democrats have yet envisioned, and any concerns as to the absence of real choice in bipartisan elections.

This, and not any lock-step sense of belonging to the liberal orthodoxy, is why I’ve just checked off ‘Obama’ on my useless absentee ballot, and affixed enough Canadian postage to carry it all the way back to the Board of Elections of Hamilton County, Ohio.

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Human innards are noisy: thud of heart valves, hiss of lungs, swish of blood flow, gurgle of intestines; and in disease: the thud muffles into murmur, hiss becomes crackle, swish sharpens to whistle and gurgle falls silent. For about two centuries, medical practitioners have evolved an art to discern these sounds with the help of a simple gadget: stethoscope.

In ancient times, Hippocrates would hold a patient by the shoulders and shake him to produce a splashing ‘succussion’ sound to prove that excess fluid had accumulated around the lungs. He would plant his ear directly to the chest to listen. This practice was common till 1816, when Rene Laennec, a young French physician — who was too diffident to place his ear to the chest of a woman — rolled twenty-four sheets of paper into a tube and placed one end to the woman’s chest and the other end to his ear. He was happy to discover that sounds were clearly audible.

Laennec was also a wood craftsman. In the workshop in his home, he carved a stethoscope from two connecting pieces of wood with hollow bores. He shaped one piece like a funnel to place against the chest and the other straight piece for his ear. He called his instrument ‘Le Cylinder’, but it became popular as stethoscope – a term that originates from two Greek words ‘I see’ and ‘the chest.’ Laennec subsequently refined the stethoscope into a tube twelve inches long and one and half inches in diameter with three-eighth inch uniform bore. He used it to describe various sounds: rales, bruit, bronchophony etc.

In 1819, he published his findings in the classic ‘The Treatise On Mediate Auscultation’. His stethoscope and the book sold together for two Francs. Laennec used his stethoscope to listen to the chest of patients with tuberculosis – the very disease that killed him a few years later.

George P. Cammann, a New York physician, improved its functionality in 1855 by attaching two tubes for both ears and a bi-aural stethoscope became the primary diagnostic tool in the late nineteenth century.

Dr Littman, a cardiologist, described the ideal stethoscope in the Journal Of American Medical Association in 1961. According to him an ideal stethoscope had an “open chest piece for the appreciation of low-pitched sounds, a closed chest piece with a stiff plastic diaphragm to filter out low-pitched sounds, firm tubing with a single lumen bore, the shortest practical overall length, a spring with precise tension to hold the ear tubes apart, and light and convenient to carry and use.” The ‘Littman’ stethoscope became the most popular stethoscope in the USA.

But stethoscope lacks the output that science demands; it does not produce any quantifiable data. The last few decades has seen an explosion of sophisticated diagnostic tools: echocardiographs, ultrasound machines, CAT, MRI and many others, which produce quantifiable, replicable objective information, which has often negated many a subjective diagnosis made by the stethoscope. These superior tools have relegated the stethoscope to a secondary place in diagnostic gadgetry. It has almost become a symbolic necklace.

The rise of this simple gadget saw the rise of the art of medicine. The master practitioners of this art developed extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of human body and made many a diagnosis with precision. The apprentice students were left in awe and emulated the master diagnosticians. A mere fifteen-inch long tube forced medical caregivers to stoop towards the patient and come closer. Figuratively, it fostered the art of medicine: listening to the patient.

The art of medicine has withered in parallel to vanishing of stethoscope. Both flourished together and now the shriveling art of medicine parallels vanishing of the stethoscope. We medical practitioners, in our pursuit of science have forgotten the art. Now we know more about the disease and less about the patient.

The fear is not new or sudden. Over 150 years ago, Armand Trousseau expressed it in the “Lectures on Clinical Medicine, The New Sydenham Society, 1869”

“Every science touches art at some points every art has its scientific side; the worst man of science is he who is never an artist, and the worst artist is he who is never a man of science. In early times, medicine was an art, which took its place at the side of poetry and painting; today they try to make a science of it, placing it beside mathematics, astronomy, and physics.”

Understanding the unique individuality of the patient with compassion is the art, and treating her with morality and knowledge is the science. A patient, who is vulnerable has an asymmetric relationship with the physician – a relationship based on trust. The patient has implicit faith that humanity of the caregiver will overcome any temporal compulsions that may pollute the encounter.

It has been a long journey from the ancient to modern, from Ayurveda to Medicare. The moral implications of the ancient Ayurvedic tradition of healing expressed, “if science is only followed for money, it is wasted” and that “wealth earned from medical sciences is always contaminated as it comes from the suffering of others, thus it must be practiced with compassion and humility, and without greed or ego.”

It will be wishful thinking that we physicians will ever regain this ancient attitude, when Wall Street sets the benchmarks of success. But we can definitely pull out the stethoscope and stoop to listen to the patient.

Michael Blim

For me, summer reading choices have always been something of the voice of the unconscious speaking. If I am lucky, I figure out why I devoted my summer to one topic or another before the next summer rolls around.

Last year, as some of you may remember from a fall column, I spent the summer with Hitler – or rather reading accounts of his life and regime. It didn’t seem an odd choice. In the small town library I was using over the summer, non-fiction choices came down to three – or two and a half – topics: Hitler and the Second World War or the American Civil War. Their only rival was the children’s section, which prompted the wicked in me to wonder if tales of gruesome wars and a venomous dictator are in practice children’s books for adults.

This summer it was Stalin. In comparison to Hitler, he has inspired no universal obsession, no midnight reading in the garden of evil. As in the case of Mao, you might say that Stalin’s accomplishments are still vastly under-appreciated in relation to those of Hitler. Perhaps as the body counts under their regimes rise, Stalin and Mao may yet achieve admission into the pantheon of great 20th Century evil-doers. Hitler may yet find his peers.

Yet will Stalin’s admission be whole-hearted? Look around us: nothing draws universal outrage and dramatic protests as quickly and easily as the neo-Nazi movements that pop up in Europe and America.

By contrast, Vladimir Putin has made Stalin and Stalinism fashionable in Russia again. In Putin’s Russia, state authority is unitary and inviolate. The state develops Russia’s economy and dictates the terms of life and labor for the Russian people. When force and violence are necessary to defeat anti-state forces, they will be used, and the use will be held accountable only by the agents of the state itself. In other words, Stalinism without the millions dead.

Communism’s kulaks have won. The Soviet state class has not only survived the empire’s collapse, but has parlayed its prior advantage into a new system of privilege. The stakes are no longer two cows and a plow, but access to enormous wealth and power held once more via the state.

Stalinism is not in style in the West, but indifference to its effects, save in the survival of the new satellites the West has acquired, is palpable. If the Russian state creates something of a neo-Stalinist hell for its people, the West appears only vaguely interested in their fate.

Then too, the West has seemed to treat Stalinism as the lesser of two evils when compared with Hitlerism. Perhaps it was a matter of their priorities rather than ours. Hitler had no use for creating Nazis. He had all he needed to rule the world, and for him, the rest of us were low-life mongrels useful only in murderous domination. Revolutionary Stalin was a universalist: he sent out Communists of all nationalities to convert and revolutionize their own. Consequently, no European country since the Thirties has lived without some home-grown Stalinists in their midst. Even the United States has had its Stalinists, or what’s a Gus Hall for? R.I.P.

Perhaps the presence of home-grown Stalinists for three generations in the West humanized Stalin’s Stalinism in ways that Hitler, save for Mel Brooks’ The Producers, has never found.

Still, the monstrous facts of Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union have been known for generations. Khrushchev’s 1956 finally not so “secret” speech to the 20th Soviet Union Communist Party Congress put Stalin’s crimes into circulation throughout the socialist world and into the hands of the West’s spymasters and anti-Communist intellectuals and policy advisors. George Kennan, 20th Century America’s master foreign policy intellectual had published extensive accounts in the sixties of the costs of the Soviet Union’s brutal journey to world economic and political power.

The obituaries commemorating Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death short weeks ago are also reminders that accounts of Stalin and his deeds still circulate widely in the public domain.

No one can pretend ignorance of Stalin’s record as one of the supreme killers in the 20th Century.

But it is not only Putin that is propelling Stalin back into style. The decade-long thaw that occurred in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union enabled researchers to finally get their hands on documents in archives that had long been sequestered, or whose very existence had heretofore been unknown. We have a better chance now at understanding Stalin and Stalinism in its historical context.

The thaw and the newly opened archives have fueled accounts of two kinds. One is the re-exploration of Stalin’s life and character, as well as his relation to the Soviet regime. The other focuses on the impact of state terror on the everyday lives of citizens caught up in the chaos and upheavals of post-revolutionary Soviet society.

Regarding Stalin, well surely it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy, and that’s nothing new. But the vast amount of new material available has enabled historians to take a closer look at Stalin’s character. The result is: complexity, thy name is Stalin.

I rely on Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar for providing me some of the facts from which I derive my impressions.

I’ve gotten to know another Stalin. Malice, murder, and mayhem there are in requisite abundance for satisfying one’s earlier stereotype. But Montefiore in spite of himself as well finds a Stalin possessed of vast intelligence and a cultural literacy that would easily surpass that possessed by any American president in the 20th Century:

“’He worked very hard to improve himself,” said Molotov. His library consisted of 20,000 well-used volumes. Svetlana (Stalin’s daughter – MB) found books there from the Life of Jesus to the novels of Galsworthy, Wilde, Maupassant and later Steinbeck and Hemingway. His granddaughter later noticed him reading Gogol, Chekhov, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac. In old age, he was still discovering Goethe. He “’worshipped Zola.’” (2003: 97)

According to Montefiore, Stalin “adored the Last of the Mohicans, amazing a young translator whom he greeted in faux-Red Indian: ‘Big chief greets paleface!’”

Stalin experienced enormous love and friendship. He inspired devotion as well as fear among his closest associates. As for Sergei Kirov, the fabled Leningrad party chief as his only likely successor, one will never know if Stalin’s love for him was faux, or Kirov’s end at Stalin’s hands was like Otello’s parting kiss.

No one would ever say that Stalin was not the author of his crimes. He signed tens of thousands of death warrants personally, occasionally with comments appended such as “make him really suffer.” He rendered pitch-perfect the endless propaganda campaigns against enemies of the people that exposed people to torture, exile, and death by privation or execution, and in the millions. The mandates given his henchmen were explicit, as were the body counts sent back to Stalin at the Kremlin.

The henchmen too lived in a state of frenzied activity on behalf of the regime while at the same time possessed of abject fear that they too, or their loved ones, would be caught up as victims of the terrors. In one of the strangest tales from this schizoid world, Stalin imprisoned Molotov’s wife for associating with Jewish nationalist even as Molotov was helping Stalin keep Hitler at bay via the 1939 non-aggression pact. Molotov’s wife would go to prison a second time after World War II; her husband would remain loyal to Stalin until the latter’s death.

Stalin, in my view, was no madman. He was possessed of the Manichean worldview of a revolutionary caught up in a violent struggle for power who believed it virtuous to transform Soviet society by any means necessary. But the more he succeeded in subjecting Soviet society to his demands, force and violence became ends in themselves. They became the normal tools in perfecting and finishing the task of revolution.

As with Molotov, so too with so many of the millions of real victims of Stalin’s regime. New scholarship, access to archives and frank oral histories, reveal something even more fascinating to recount than the extraordinary career of Stalin. Several new books allow us a glimpse of how Soviet citizens were reformed or reformed themselves in the caldron of post-revolutionary terrors. Some citizens hid their characters and beliefs from the state, hoping to avoid death or social annihilation. Others sought to change and perfect new characters that would be at one with the revolution’s mission and final triumph in a truly transformed, just, communist society.

Orlando Figes, eminent scholar of the revolution and of the post-revolutionary period, argues for his part that many people resisted “conversion” to a Soviet-ophile character through concealment, the creation of false identities, the aid of kin, and even the occasional kindness of strangers. In The Whisperers (2007), Figes also relates the stories of people’s whose beliefs and characters had been colonized by the Stalinist state. Bolsheviks languished in prisons still believing in the cause. Others might not have believed that their accused father, for instance, was an enemy of the people, but this is in no way diminished their belief in enemies of the people. Still others believed that if their father were accused, he must be guilty.

In Figes, we have an exemplary account of the power of fear. In Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (2006), we see the workings of desire, as he shows how people worked to transform themselves into instruments of revolution and a new communist society. His discovery and recounting of diaries written by ordinary persons during the terrors reveals how people worked on their basic characters to create revolutionary subjects. For society to hurl itself into the new world, so must its devoted citizens. Their diaries were the account books for their change.

There are those who work with rapture daily to be one with the proletarian revolutionary movement represented in the party. There are others for whom the pain of denunciation redoubles their efforts to become worthy Soviet citizens. There are still others who recount their psychic battles to contain or destroy the bourgeois impulses of the past.

The greatest impression left by my summer with Stalin is that Stalin, save as a subject for “big-man” history, is not finally the source of useful knowledge that the study of life under his regime is.

Why? Because we live in times no less subject to mass persuasion, coercion by force, and state violence. What lives do we fashion, re-fashion, under their influence?

Of the heroic tales we tell ourselves, can the strength of character as a human absolute be the biggest whopper of them all? In the story of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, Stalin hardened his character into a violent force of nature. Ordinary Soviet citizens discovered how fragile, how plastic, and how friable were theirs.

And so might we.

Did you have a good summer? And what did you learn?

///

Death is the least we have to fear.
We are all in the hands of God,
Whatever happens happens by His Will.
             —Attention Please, by Peter Porter

Until the Sacred Cows Come Home
Jim Culleny

Vishnu reclines and sleeps
dreaming up the world.

He lounges upon a coiled snake
in the image of ananta shayana
floating on a raft
upon an ocean of milk
pacifying the characters of his dreams,
protecting his turf: his realm of
pleasure and pain; concocting
his improbable dream of a universe,
making it up as he goes.

Here and there Vishnu floats
in the logic of dreams
sailing his ship of tales
–at sea but ever in sight of land;
mything point after point
he goes dreaming on,
sailing and sinking simultaneously;
doing and undoing his work at once
within the same thought;
bobbing on waves of light
while flinging its particles
into black holes.

But he’s never fickle.
Vishnu can never be fickle
because he’s divine.

Any ordinary Joe or Ananda
would be ridiculed for insisting yes
and no in the same breath,
but not Vishnu.

All gods may contradict themselves
without flaw,
say men,
who always give their God
the benefit of a doubt
in any argument.

Faults may never be divine
(not earthquake nor plague,
and especially not
the death-rattle of love).

So Vishnu will sail on
upon his coiled snake,
upon his raft,
upon his ocean of milk,
with his sidekicks Brahma and Shiva
manning the staysail and jib,
dreaming, thinking, uttering
without pause,

forever,
or until the sacred cows come home
and the last man disappears,
whichever comes first.

///

By P D Smith

“the point is…this is exactly what happened in Vietnam…a technological solution to a human problem…”

– Joe Penhall, Landscape with Weapon (2007)

If you were a physicist in the 1920s and 30s, all roads led to Copenhagen’s Blegdamsvej 15. This was where Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics was located. The Ukrainian-born physicist George Gamow recalled that “the Institute buzzed with young theoretical physicists and new ideas about atoms, atomic nuclei, and the quantum theory in general”. [1]

He was a superb footballer and had played to near professional level as a young man. But in physics the tall, softly-spoken Niels Bohr was in a league of his own. German physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker said after meeting Bohr: “I have seen a physicist for the first time. He suffers as he thinks.” [2] Together with Ernest Rutherford, Bohr had mapped the structure of the atom, and later, in the 1920s, he helped shape the quantum revolution, despite strong resistance from its founder, the former patent officer from Bern – Albert Einstein. Einstein’s debates in the late 1920s with Bohr on quantum theory were like a scientific clash of the Titans. Einstein could never accept the indeterministic quantum mechanics that grew out of his own 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Bohr’s annual conference, to which he invited about thirty physicists, was the highlight of the physics’ year. From the 3rd to 13th April 1932, the brightest minds in physics gathered together in Copenhagen. In a few years’ time, many of these same physicists would be working on the atomic bomb. But for now, they still had time for a little light-hearted play acting.

Each year the conference ended with what George Gamow called a “stunt pertaining to recent developments in physics”. [3] The year before, Gamow had rounded up proceedings with a cartoon history of quantum mechanics, starring Mickey Mouse in the lead role. [4] In 1932, as it was the centenary of Goethe’s death, they decided to stage a version of the German writer’s greatest play, Faust.

Written when the industrial revolution was transforming Germany, Goethe’s Faust raises key questions regarding science and technology, questions such as what is the purpose of knowledge, and how can we have progress without increasing human suffering?

Goethe’s Faust is a proto-scientist (the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until 1834), whose desire to know nature’s deepest secrets, leads him to strike a fateful bargain with Mephistopheles. In the sixteenth century, the story of Faust had been used by the Church to frighten people about the dangers of forbidden (i.e. non-Christian) knowledge. Goethe’s play re-works the classic theme for the modern age. His Faust celebrates the spirit of inquiry, while highlighting the dangers of misapplied knowledge. True scientific understanding, Goethe suggests, is life-affirming and creative, not destructive and exploitative.

The 1932 Faust was re-written and, of course, greatly abridged by the younger scientists at Bohr’s conference. Their literary skills were no doubt boosted by the products of Copenhagen’s other claim to fame – the Carlsberg Brewery, which also happened to be one of Danish science’s most generous benefactors. Max Delbrück, who would later become a central figure in the post-war revolution in molecular biology, did most of the writing.

The play is re-worked into what is essentially a humorous skit at the expense of the leading physicists of the day. Goethe’s characters were replaced with contemporary physicists, their younger colleagues donning masks to play them on stage. Mephistopheles became the irascible Austrian Wolfgang Pauli, while Faust became Paul Ehrenfest, a close friend of Einstein. The role of God was reserved, appropriately enough, for their host, Niels Bohr.

Wolfgang Pauli’s rudeness was legendary. In the play he bluntly tells the painfully polite Niels Bohr (aka God) that his latest theory is “Crap”. [5] But their gentlemanly host, Niels Bohr, is also gently mocked. His almost pathological fear of being too critical becomes the motto of the play, emblazoned on the text’s cover: “Nicht um zu kritisieren” (Not to criticize). Even Einstein doesn’t escape unscathed. His flawed unified field theory, which had created a media storm of interest when it was published in 1929, is lampooned by his young colleagues as the son of a flea.

Faust is depicted as a proud, even vain, figure, one who is deeply dissatisfied by what he has learnt and what physics can offer. Mephistopheles tries to tempt Faust by convincing him to accept one of the more outlandish theories in quantum physics – Pauli’s own idea of the neutrino, a particle without mass or charge. If once he can make Faust say to such a theory “Verweile doch! Du bis so schön!” (Stay! You are so beautiful!) then he has won his wager with God.

At times the play is anarchic, even Dadaist, in its celebration of the bizarre world of quantum theory. But in the 1930s the new physics was itself full of weird and wonderful notions. Niels Bohr once greeted one of Pauli’s theories with the comment: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” [6]

The physicists transform Faust’s death scene at the end of Goethe’s play into a moment of supreme bathos. Mephistopheles ushers a press photographer on stage and it is this that is Faust’s undoing. Paul Ehrenfest utters Faust’s famous dying words, just as he is about to be immortalized by the photographer:

“Faust (highly excited, he takes a pose for the press photographer)

To this fair moment let me say:

‘You are so beautiful – Oh, stay!’

A trace of me will linger ’mongst the Great,

Within the annals of The Fourth Estate.

Anticipating fortune so benign,

I now enjoy the moment that is mine!” [7]

Although humour was the last thing in Goethe’s mind as he penned this poignant scene, in the physicists’ version of Faust it becomes a wonderfully witty moment, albeit with serious undertones. The younger physicists are making fun of their colleagues’ vanity and self-importance. Indeed, by highlighting the theme of fame, they were making an important point: in the coming years nuclear physicists would indeed enter the public eye and feature ever more frequently in the media.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by the new scientific superweapon, the public would come to view scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer with both respect and fear. Eventually, as they were drawn ever closer to the government and the military, the price physicists would pay for their Faustian bargain was to be immortalized as Dr Strangelove, the ultimate doomsday man.

At the end of the play, a physicist who had entered the media spotlight in 1932 made a brief appearance as Faust’s over-ambitious famulus, Wagner. James Chadwick is portrayed by his fellow physicists as “a personification of the ideal experimentalist”. He walks on stage after Faust’s death scene wearing the scientist’s trade-mark lab coat and balancing a black ball on one finger.

This rather sinister looking figure announces an extraordinary discovery, one of which Faust himself would have been proud. James Chadwick had found one of the basic constituents of matter: the third elementary particle after protons and electrons, the neutron.

The discovery of the neutron, just before the Copenhagen conference, was a seminal achievement for modern nuclear physics. Its discovery made possible Leo Szilard’s idea in the following year of a self-sustaining chain reaction. Indeed there are Faustian echoes here too. For in 1932 Szilard read HG Wells’s novel The World Set Free about a Faustian scientist discovering how to release the energy locked in the heart of the atom. [8] Szilard’s discovery helped open the door to the atomic bomb.

1932 was an important year as regards the science of the superweapon. Wernher von Braun was hired by the German army to design rocket engines, the first step on the path towards ICBMs. In the same year Harold Urey announced the discovery of a new hydrogen isotope known as deuterium. This would become the fuel for the hydrogen bomb. These are powerful reminders that the tragedy of Goethe’s Faust was about to be played out on a world stage. Clearly, the lessons of the play and of Goethe’s science were still profoundly relevant.

In Part II, Act 2 of Goethe’s Faust, Wagner (Chadwick in the 1932 performance) uses alchemy to create not a neutron but a homunculus, a miniature man. In this scene Goethe criticizes what he considered to be a misguided approach to science. Wagner’s alchemistic attempt to create the homunculus combines allusions to both Paracelsian recipes and contemporary advances in chemistry, such as Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesising of urea in 1828. [9] But significantly Wagner only succeeds because Mephistopheles is present. Goethe highlights the fact that Wagner’s approach to science is flawed and supernatural intervention is required to make it work.

Faust has turned his back on alchemy and the knowledge of books at the beginning of the play. As Faust discovers, neither words, books nor instruments alone lead to true knowledge. His passionate desire to grasp ‘the inmost force / That bonds the very universe’ (ll.382-3, “was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhält”) is a scientific and philosophical goal Faust pursues tirelessly throughout his life, regardless of the cost to himself or others around him. [10] But he too has much to learn about science and knowledge. For Goethe, one of the most important lessons was that the route to scientific knowledge and self-knowledge was a parallel process. As he wrote in 1823: “The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world.” [11]

At the end of the play Goethe highlights the dangers of the misapplication of scientific knowledge. Thanks to the temptations of Mephistopheles, Faust has lost touch with the insights he has gained into both nature and himself. His overambitious attempt to reclaim land from the sea, a hasty and hubristic act which results in the deaths of the old couple, Baucis and Philemon, represents Goethe’s fears about the misuse of science and technology. It is one thing to understand the laws of nature – the forces that bind the universe – and to be able to control these laws. It is something else entirely to be able to use this power wisely.

By performing Faust in 1932, the physicists created some intriguing parallels between Wagner and Chadwick, as well as the neutron and the homunculus. Goethe used the scene in Wagner’s laboratory both to belittle alchemy’s supposed achievements and to criticize mechanistic science for its hubristic attempts to play god. What, one wonders, would Goethe have made of Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron?

Goethe’s notion that scientific knowledge and self-knowledge should evolve hand-in-hand, is a deeply suggestive theme when one looks at the history of twentieth-century science. What is the point of knowing nature’s deepest secrets, Goethe asks, if humankind never attains self-knowledge? The Faustian physicist might control the forces of nature but he does not understand, let alone control, himself.

It is fascinating that the atomic physicists gathered at Bohr’s Institute in spring 1932 chose to perform Goethe’s play at this pivotal moment in the history of science. Six years later, one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights began a work that would raise profound questions about the purpose of science in the atomic age. After many revisions, the final version of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo was first performed in 1955. By then, as Oppenheimer said, the scientists had known sin and the world was living in fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust. This hugely influential play reflected the widely-held view that twentieth-century science was in crisis.

Brecht’s Galileo is a Faustian character, who initially boasts that he would happily live out his life in a dark, windowless prison if he could but discover the secret of light. But at the end of his life, under house arrest and – like the aged Faust – nearly blind, Galileo has realised that science is about more than describing the laws of nature.

Brecht believed that, as a human activity, science had a moral dimension that was increasingly ignored. In the midst of the cold war, as the superpowers and their scientists transformed the laws of nature into ever more terrible weapons of mass destruction, Brecht called for a more human-centred science, a point he makes by paraphrasing Galileo’s contemporary Francis Bacon: “I believe that the sole objective of science consists in reducing the drudgery of human existence.” According to Brecht, the alternative is that each advance in scientific knowledge results in “progress away from humanity”. The scientists’ shrieks of Eureka! will one day be greeted by “a universal cry of horror” because of the ever more lethal technologies their discoveries make possible. [12]

Goethe would no doubt have been flattered that a century after his death some of the world’s most gifted physicists performed a version of his greatest play. He would, however, have been appalled to discover that soon scientists such as these would create weapons that could incinerate tens of thousands of people in an instant. Would he have been surprised though? I doubt it.

Today, despite the myriad distractions of an increasingly technologized culture, the lessons of Goethe’s Faust remain profoundly relevant to us all. As Brecht so eloquently put it in the final scene of Galileo:

“May you now guard science’s light

Kindle it and use it right

Lest it be a flame to fall

Downward to consume us all.

Yes, us all.” [13]

References

The issues surrounding the physicists’ Faust are discussed at greater length in my book, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, and in an article for the current issue of the Publications of the English Goethe Society, available to download on my website, Kafka’s mouse.

1. George Gamow, Thirty Years That Shook Physics, 1966; repr Mineola, N.Y., 1985, 51.

2. Cited in Richard P. Feynman, Don’t You Have time to Think?, London, 2005, xii.

3. Gamow, 167.

4. John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs, Madison, 2000, 268, n.

5. The Blegdamsvej Faust is on microfilm 66 of the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (American Philosophical Society). An English version, together with the illustrations, is in Gamow, 165-218.

6. Bohr cited in Robert Ehrlich, Eight Preposterous Propositions, Princeton, 2005, 5.

7. Gamow, 210.

8. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind, 1914; repr. as The Last War, Lincoln, 2001.

9. P.D. Smith, ‘Scientific Themes in Goethe’s Faust’, in Paul Bishop, ed., A Companion to Goethe’s Faust, Rochester, N.Y., 2001, 198-99.

10. See ibid., 194–220.

11. “Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf.” Goethe, “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges Geistreiches Wort” (1823), Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 1981, vol 13, 38; tr. Douglas Miller: Goethe, Scientific Studies, Princeton, 1995, 39.

12. On Brecht and Bacon see P.D. Smith, Metaphor & Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780-1955 (Oxford, 2000), 304; all quotes in this paragraph from Brecht, Life of Galileo, scene 14.

13. Life of Galileo, Scene 15; tr. Charles Laughton (Penguin, 2008).

“Hütet nun ihr der Wissenschaften Licht

Nutzt es und mißbraucht es nicht

Daß es nicht, ein Feuerfall

Einst verzehre noch uns all

Ja, uns all.”

“Moscow waited for almost 24 hours, during which Georgian artillery and planes were sending the capital of South Ossetia to ruins. Almost 1600 people were killed in the shelling. Now it is being presented by the mainstream media exclusively as Russia’s intervention and expansionist policy.” –Centre for Humanitarian Programmes, Republic of Abkhazia

American news coverage of the US-Georgia-Russia conflict continues to be appalling–blindingly biased and simplistic, and yet my knowledge of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is scant.
On August 12, I received an e-mail from a humanitarian organization in Abkhazia describing events as they had unfolded on the ground in South Ossetia. I wrote directly to them. What is below is the e-mail response I received from Liana Kvarchelia. She has kindly given me permission to post it on 3quarksdaily.

September 2, 2008

Dear Laray,

I am glad that there are people who are interested to hear the other side of the story. Indeed I was told by friends in the US that the coverage there is extremely one-sided. I do not know if you read Russian. If so, I can recommend you a website www.apsny.com. Apart from that you can find some information on our country and the situation in www.circussianworld.com. There are some articles there including mine. I have also written about the conflict for the Accord series published by “Conciliation Resources”, based in London.
On the whole I must say that we have found ourselves (not without some doze of surprise) in the epicenter of global conflict. It is clear to many people that there is power struggle going on between the US and Russia, with EU trying to accommodate their own interests, that not always compliment each member states’ vision. However our conflict with Georgia has a much longer history that the EU, and definitely longer than Georgia’s plans for NATO accession.
When at the end of the 19th century many Abkhazians having lost to the Russian Empire fled to Turkey and further, other ethnic groups were competing in resettling the vacated territories. Later when the Bolsheviks came, Abkhazia as well as Georgia became union states with an equal status within the USSR. But Jozef Stalin, Georgian by origin, reduced the status of Abkhazia to an autonomy within Georgia in 1931.
The Abkhazian language was banned, it was substituted by Georgian. Since the ’30-40s the second wave of Georgian settlers came to Abkhazia. This process continued throughout our existence in the USSR as a Georgian autonomy. That’s how we ended up a minority on our land. The 1990s was the time when Georgian nationalism was at its peak. “Georgia for Georgians” was a popular slogan. All non-Georgians were announced to be “hosts on Georgian land.” Not many people even in the USSR knew that Abkhazians protested against being within Georgia even in the Soviet times, every decade. But in the ’90s these protests became known to the world.
On 14 August 1992 when the Abkhazian Parliament was discussing a draft proposal for a Federation with Georgia, the Georgian bombs started falling on our heads, and the Georgian tanks attacked our towns and villages. It was a bloody war, with crimes committed first by Georgians and then by Abkhazians. The Georgians purposefully burnt down our State Archives and our Institute of Literature, History and Culture. It was quite symbolic. You can read about all this in the UNPO report that organized a fact finding mission to Abkhazia in 1992.
You can also read about it in Tom de Waal’s article specifically devoted to the State Archives. Georgia lost the war, but tried to use its anti-Russian position to mobilize (quite successfully) Western support for its so-called “territorial integrity.”
I respect the people of Georgia, and I respect their desire to be independent, but I also want them to respect my people’s desire to be independent too. Not long ago I was interviewed by a US public TV company. You can find the interview on their website “>“NATO rapid-response unit proposed to address fears about Russia,” LA Times, 19 September 2008

Noam Chomsky,

“>“The Militarisation of the Eastern Mediterranean: Israel’s Stake in the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline,” Global Research, 23 May 2006

Laray Polk lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at laraypolk@earthlink.net

///
What is Mind?  No matter.  What is Matter?  Never mind.
–Bishop Berkley

A Meating of Mind
Jim Culleny

If my brain
does not tell my arm what to do
nothing much will happen.
Without a brain my arm is
not much smarter than
a leg of lamb

In fact, meat
without mind
is never going to get
much done, while
mind without meat
wouldn’t have any
point in space/time

but when they mate
-when Mind and Meat meet,
when they kiss and make love
things fecund soon become
and run the gamut from
dumb-and-dumber
right on up to the sublime:
from Rush Limbaugh to
Albert Einstein

It’s just the way it is with
sentient being:
Mind needs Meat
to do its work
and Meat needs Mind to
have the inclination to do
anything

but Mind-meets-Meat
is a crap shoot

sometimes it’s a match made in heaven
sometimes it’s a hell of a thing

///

My brother in law (BIL) has ‘flu’: his dry throat and raspy cough bother him, but it his mucus laden stuffy nose that is the cause of his misery. He cannot smell and food has lost its flavor. If I were sentimental about food like BIL, I would sympathize; instead, I congratulate him, “Celebrate your anosmia BIL, you will loose a few pounds and come out slimmer.”

“Anosmia, what is that?”

“The loss of ability to smell.”

BIL, the laid off hedge fund manager, cannot unshackle himself from the clutches of his limbic system and hates any loss. He fears, he would not be able to enjoy the aroma of Indian cuisine during his first trip to India, where we plan to travel together in two weeks. I console him, “It is temporary, and you will get your smell back in a week.”

Sense of smell is perhaps the first sensory system where the molecular mechanism of the process of olfaction has been established. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck jointly published the fundamental paper in the journal “Cell” on the functioning of olfactory system in 1991. They won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1994 for their work on “Odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.” The researchers, working on mice, discovered a pool of more than 1,000 different genes (about 3% of all genes) that encode olfactory receptors in the nose, which can distinguish over 10,000 distinct odors.

BIL carries right number of genes but cannot smell; mucus has stuffed his nose, which prevents air from reaching the olfactory membrane at roof of his nose. Nerve cells or neurons, that line this area of about 10 square centimeters, dangle hair like projections (cilia) into the nasal cavity, where they work as receptors of smell. Odor molecules, mostly volatile organic oils and some inorganic compounds, fit snugly into of receptor sites – a pocket made by a chain of amino acids (protein molecules) – which triggers the coupling of G protein and the process of olfaction through a chain of chemical reactions generating electric signals, which the biologists call ‘transduction’. These olfactory receptor cells are the only neurons in the nervous system that regenerate regularly and replace the old ones every 4 to 8 weeks.

Most of the nasal cavity – about 95% – works as a conduit for air and does not participate in the act of smell. At normal air speed of 250 ml per second in the nose, only some inhaled air comes in contact with the olfactory membrane. Sniffing or deep breathing enhances turbulence in the nose, which gushes more air to contact olfactory receptors.

Nerve processes (axons) from about 10 million odor receptor cells travel into the base of skull to regroup into about 2000 micro-bunches (glomerulus) and form olfactory bulb. Each receptor cell carries only one type of odorant and signals from the same types of receptors end in same glomerulus.

The nerve extensions from the olfactory bulb emerge to form an olfactory tract, which relays information to two parts of the brain: primitive regions of limbic system and neo-cortex. Biologists believe that direct limbic connection of smell is due to its earlier appearance in evolution compared to sight and hearing.

Most common odoriferous substances emit complex mixtures of hundreds of different smells, which activate multiple receptors leading to a combined odor pattern. The cortex recognizes it as a pattern relying on about 10,000 patterns in its memory.

Olfactory sensitivity deceases with age; older people over 70 have over 10 times less sensitivity compared to young adults and older males are less sensitive than females. Alterations in the sense of smell carry various names: hyposmia for diminished sensation; dysosmia suggests distorted sensation; cacosmia is sensation of foul smell and parosmia describes smell without a stimulus. About 2 million people in the United States have no sense of smell, called anosmia.

How do our friends and foes – dogs and mosquitoes – compare with us?

The size of the olfactory lining and the number of receptors determine the prowess to smell. Dogs have 170 square centimeters of olfactory lining and have one hundred times more receptors per square centimeter than humans, hence their ability to recognize more odors.

Sensory organ of the mosquito is the maxillary palp on its head, which probably works as a long range smelling system. The palp contains specialized receptor cells that detect octenol and carbon dioxide, which leads it to its target: human prey. Knowing this, I had advised BIL to apply a mosquito repellant and wear long sleeves while in India.

When our plane landed, I was ready for the forthcoming assault: in a few moments my olfactory system would be overwhelmed by the first smell of Delhi. The volatile, water-soluble and partially lipid soluble molecules would fly into my nose and attach to the smell discriminating nerve receptors at the roof of my nose.

If a perfume maker were to imitate the aroma, he would have to mix early morning dew, tall grass, gasoline fumes, charcoal smoke, runway tar, summer dust, construction steel and human sweat. The product would be a mixture of nostalgia and hope; poverty and progress; a juncture of future and past.

Having landed often at the Palam airport, I should have got used to this expected welcome. But no: not to the nostril-piercing gust. India evokes strong emotions. Love or hate starts at the first whiff.

I wanted BIL to love his first trip and was grateful that BIL had anosmia.

I enquired to confirm. “Can you smell?”

BIL paused, stared at the steel scaffold holding the granite walls of the new construction. The greedy glint in his eyes betrayed his limbic system.

“Yes, I can smell opportunity.”

For those America-Bound

Justin E. H. Smith

Hi-ho, brave trail-cutters! Won’t you please tell us whether it is true what the French explorers say, that America is “une nation avec quantitez de beuffles,” so many buffaloos in fact that one can scarce walk from door to street without risking a sharp poke in the rump? Is it true they have descended upon the great cities, and greedily muzzled the garbage there, as in New-Jersey’s Camden, and the Dutch strong-hold of Coxsackie?

Can you please tell us also, whence comes this place-name, Coxsackie? Does it have to do with cocks? With sacs? Why does it reduce even learned men to puerile snickering? (Why, even as I dictate this, my loyal old secretary, Isaac, appears on the verge of an infarctus!)

But let us come to the pressing matter of that land’s electoral politics. We have heard that all men in America have “the vote,” and that this was the result of a tragic twist of fate some years ago in which “the vote” was rudely and unexpectedly “rock’d.” Won’t you please tell us wherein this rocking consisted, how many were injured, what was the role of the Red Indians, what the Negroe’s, &c.?

Our explorers in the Great Northern Ocean –sent there to collect samples of Iceland spar, which, we are told, is a stone with many rare qualities, such as the power to produce “electricity,” and to make men lactate– have met there travellers from Minsk, who tell them that the leader of all White Russians, Alexander Lucasenckough, correctly predicted some months ago the outcome of the Americans’ primary elections. How did he exercise such prescience? Do the Bello-Russians, perhaps, have some “friends on the inside”?  Were they “pulling the strings” in Denver and Saint-Paul? Could their immense reserves of Iceland spar be giving them the “upper hand” in world affairs?

We have heard that Americans wish for their political leaders to be “like them.” Do they wish for them to grow corpulent like Bahama mer-cows, then, and to ignore the manners and customs of men beyond their shores? Do they wish for them to pass their time watching situation comedies on tele-vision? It is clear from reports that Barack Obama is not at all like them, whereas John McCain is, so it is said, like their uncles. Sarah Palin is reported to have “shaken things up” by the alarming likeness of her person to the Americans who would elect her. Wherein does this likeness consist? We know that a French adventurer has recently returned from those parts, and has been causing the women of the Parisian salons to drop to the floor in obscene laughter with his report that she looks like nothing so much as “un cochon maquillé.” Could this be the likeness that pleases the Americans?

We have learned from ordinarily reliable sources, who learned from a drink-besotted Esquimau while anchored off the coast from Godthab, that McCain fathered a bastard child with Palin, a half-wit, and that she used this to black-mail him into naming her as his “first lady.” It is reported that McCain never appears in public holding the bastard, on the grounds that, so he says, “men do not lactate.” Yet there are other parts of this grotesque family epos that do not hold together, such as the story of the “red-neck” who defiled Palin’s eldest daughter, only to be suddenly and without warning propulsed into the role of a virtuous husband and father. 

We have heard that Palin bravely annulled the plan to build a “bridge to nowhere.” Could this have been the great land-bridge of Beringia? But if so, did she not know that it leads not nowhere, but to Chukotka, home of the brutish and bear-like Chuckchee tribe?

It is said that Palin hates ear-marks, yet collects eye-glasses. It is said that the American people now wish to wear spectacles that resemble hers, but that they too hate ear-marks, and moreover that these ear-marks are sometimes found on “pork.” Could it be that in that land the pigs are decorated with pendants about the ear-lobes as well as rouge à lèvre? Why does Palin promote the one sort of adornment, while combatting the other?

We have learned that Barack Obama, while “liberal,” is also “conservative” with respect to chewing-gum: he will chew upon spear-mint, pepper-mint, and cinnamon gums, but not upon the more whimsical varieties, as the bubble-making resins with fruity aromas preferred by his daughters. Won’t you please explain to us how, in the face of a matter of such great importance, the American voters are content to simply “look the other way”? 

A man named Barney Smith, we are told, was called from his home in Indiana to the Democritickal convention in Denver, in order to declare there his support for Barack Obama, and to announce common cause with this candidate in the war against his arch-rival, the hog-farming baron of Terre-Haute, Smith Barney. Broadsheets here have described Smith as a “king-maker,” and as a veritable “American Richelieu.” Can you please explain to us why this man –who, after all, is said to have the physiognomy of a regular imbecile– wields so much power in that land?

Obama also has the firm support of Teresa Asenap, a woman from New-Mexico (as if Mexico were not new enough!) with, as she is said to have declared triumphantly, a “Doctorate in Education.” How, we would like to know, does he attract not just vulgar cretins like this Smith, but also such a learned and wise woman as she?  In this very important matter, we ask you to confirm for us, and to be very precise: is it certain that this woman has obtained not the degree of Master in Social Work, nor yet that of Associate in Hotel-and-Tourism Studies, but a true Doctorate in Education?  If so, we are dumb-struck with awe and trembling with anticipation, for this is bound to be a union of wisdom and power undreamt of since the immortal Platon founded his Republick. 

It is said that Americans vote for such rough and common candidates as McCain and his consort Ms. Palin not because they agree with the ratiocinations of these persons in matters political, but because their world has been “dis-enchanted” by the onslaught of “modernity,” beloved of the atheistickal party of Democritus, and they are now looking for a means to re-enchant their world with “values,” to see themselves (to quote another learned American doctor) as “part of a normative whole that includes man and nature in a unified and intricate web of meaning.” What do McCain and Palin propose in this connection?  What vital principles do they see as governing natural motion? Souls, perhaps? Entelechies? Psychopyric semina? Hylozoickal archaei?

We must know: What is McCain’s position on hylozoism? If he is against it, then what, pray tell, does he propose to get nature moving again? We have heard reports of his proposals for giving the economy a “boost,” but in God’s name what use will this be if, in the end, our world is nothing more than a great mass of corpuscles rudely knocking each other about?

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

I am a nerd. I used to be an engineer and so I like calculating stuff in my head. I hardly ever use electronic calculators, even when exact calculations of something are needed, preferring to do them by hand (try it, it can be a soothing thing) on chit’s of paper, backs-of-the-proverbial envelopes, etc. But a lot of the time, I am just calculating really stupid things for fun in my head, especially if I am sitting somewhere (doctor’s office, airport, porcelain throne, bed-before-sleep) with nothing to do. I also have other ways of amusing myself in such situations. For example, I might endlessly rewind and replay a conversation I had with someone over and over in my head, like a TV program, which I realize makes me weird but also remarkably patient with things like flight delays. But mostly, I calculate.

Another thing I do is collect weird quantitative facts about stuff in my head (I have a pretty good memory for numbers; for other things… well, not so much–as unfortunately many people have found out upon meeting me for the second time! ;-). Quick, how much does a fully loaded 747 weigh? How much of that weight is fuel? How dense is gold compared to water? What is the radius of the moon? What is Avogadro’s number? I happen to know these and many other (mostly) useless things. I don’t know why, but I suck them up out of magazines and things like that, and some I remember from high school and college textbooks. (It helps that I am a big rereader of books.) I am also the type of person who reads his car manual from beginning to end, and idiotically remembers what the capacity of the windshield-washer-fluid tank is.

I use these useless things to calculate even more useless things (while waiting in the aforementioned doctors’ offices, airports, etc.). But I don’t calculate things exactly (most of the time), I just like to estimate stuff very roughly. Today, for example, I estimated (by looking while sitting on my balcony) that the amount of water flowing by in the river next to me (the Eisack) every minute is enough for everyone living in my city of Brixen to flush his/her toilet about 10 times each day (or enough for about 200,000 flushes). This was pretty simple to do:

• Sometimes, the water management authorities dam up most of the water temporarily in the river, so I have seen the bottom of the river (or at least the larger rocks on the bottom–some water is always flowing), and so I can estimate the (higher today) average depth of the river just by looking at it. I’d say it’s about 2 feet.
• The river looks about 50 feet across over here. (It’s wider in the photo at the right, which I took at a different spot.)
• I timed a bit of driftwood floating down the river and in 10 seconds (one-thousand one, one-thousand two…) it went about 60 feet–it flows fast because of the steep downhill grade in this mountainous area–so about 6 feet per second.
• I confirm my estimate of 60 feet in ten seconds in my head by noticing that the driftwood is floating just a tiny bit faster than a person walking fast in the same direction on the path next to the river. A fast walking person goes about 4 miles per hour, and 6 feet/second X 3600 seconds/hour = 21,600 feet/hour, and 21,600 feet/hour X 1 mile/5,280 feet = (approximately) 4 miles/hour. Checks out. Good.
• The cross-sectional area of the river is 50 feet X 2 feet = 100 square feet.
• The volume of water flowing by in a second is therefore 100 square feet X 6 feet = 600 cubic feet.
• Newer commodes often have written on them the amount of water they use per flush. Most often I have seen the figure 6 liters/flush. Now, the problem is converting cubic feet to liters.
• To do this, I think the following: I know that a cubic meter is 1000 liters. How many cubic feet are in a cubic meter? Well, I remember that there are about 3.3 feet in a meter, so 3.3 X 3.3 X 3.3 = (approximately) 36 cubic feet/cubic meter.
• So, we have 1000 liters/cubic meter X 1 cubic meter/36 cubic feet = (very approximately) 30 liters/cubic foot.
• Now 1 flush/6 liters X 30 liters/cubic foot = 5 flushes/cubic foot of water.
• 5 flushes/cubic foot X 600 cubic feet/second (from above) = 3000 flushes/second.
• 3000 flushes/second X 60 seconds/minute = 180000 flushes/minute of river flow.
• 180,000 flushes/20,000 persons = 9 flushes/person, from a minutes worth of water flow, which I rounded up to 10 just ’cause it sounds better when I tell my wife this astoundingly impressive fact. (Yeah, yeah, I know she’s sick of crap like this…)

Incidentally, it just occured to me as I write this that the amount of water flowing by every second (600 cubic feet) in the river weighs as much as about 18 Toyota Corollas (and this is not a very big river). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to convince him/herself of the approximate truth of this.

*************************************

Here is one more example: recently (on a train) I wondered how much the air in the Empire State Building weighs. Here is how I went about estimating the answer:

• I read somewhere that a north-south NY city block is about a 20 of a mile. I confirm this rough figure in my mind by thinking that Manhattan is about 12 miles long and the northernmost streets are numbered around 215 or so. Since there is a bit of Manhattan below 1st street, I figure 200 blocks divided by roughly 10 miles gives a nice round number of 20 blocks per mile. Good.
• A mile has 5280 feet, so a 20th of that is half of 528 feet, about 250ish feet. (It’s a rough calculation!)
• It seems to me that the area of the footprint of the building (from having seen it many times) is probably close to the square of a city block (it actually is more rectangular, with the north-south dimension a bit less than a block and the east-west one a bit more), so let’s just say 250 X 250 feet, which is 62500 square feet, or roughly (remember, I have to keep this stuff in my head! And I’ll round up this time, since I rounded down last time) 70,000 square feet.
• It’s a little broader at the bottom floors and tapers sharply starting at the 86th through the 102nd floors, I think, so I’ll just say it is 90ish stories.
• Let’s say 10 feet (surprise, a nice round number!) of height for each floor, so multiplying by the area of the footprint, we get 10 X 90 X 70000 = 900 X 70000 = 63,000,000 cubic feet of internal space. You with me?
• I’ll say about a sixth, or roughly 13 million cubic feet of this is probably taken up by solid stuff including people, internal supports, furniture, etc., so we’re left with a nice round number: 50 million cubic feet of air.
• Now I just happen to know that the  density of air is about 0.08 pounds per cubic foot (at sea level and normallish temperatures), but even if I didn’t, I just remembered reading somewhere that air is about 800 times lighter than water, and knowing the density of water I could have figured it out easily enough.
• So, the weight of all the air in the Empire State Building is… 0.08 X 50,000,000 or 8 X 500,000 which equals… (drumroll, please) 4,000,000 pounds!

Which, as it happens, is 2,000 Toyota Corollas, or ten times the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 767 (by now you know not to ask why I know this!), like the one which crashed into the World Trade Center. Each tower of the WTC was bigger than the Empire State, so it is interesting to note that the weight of each of the planes that struck it (the other plane was slightly smaller), was less than a tenth of just the weight of the air inside the building.

What’s surprising about such estimates is how often they are very close to the reality. This is especially true in a multi-step approximation, where over- and underestimates at various steps tend to cancel each other out, usually resulting in something not too far off from the truth. To convince you of this, I emailed my friend, the mathematician John Allen Paulos, and asked him to estimate the weight of the air inside the Empire State Building. I told him he could look up the density of air, but nothing else, and to tell me his reasoning. This is what he wrote back:

Here’s my quick back of the envelope rough calculation of the weight of the air in the Empire State Building:

The building is about 1200 feet high and at ground level it a large square which then tapers as the building rises. I guess that on average it is about 200 feet by 200 feet. This gives us 48,000,000 cubic feet for its approximate volume. Since the density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/cubic meter or, translating into English units, roughly 2.5 pounds/35 cubic feet, the approximate weight of the air in the building is 48,000,000 x 2.5/35 or about 3.4 million pounds, somewhere around 3 or 4 million pounds.

The thing to notice here is that while John’s individual assumptions are significantly different from mine (for example, my estimate of the area of the footprint of the building, 70,000 square feet, was 75% greater than his estimate of 40,000 square feet), in the end things kinda’ even out and my answer of 4 million pounds is less than 20% greater than his answer of 3.4 million pounds.

But how can we know the actual figure? We cannot. We can only get closer and closer approximations by measuring things more and more accurately (the volume, not just of the building, but of everything in it, which must be subtracted). It’s not like there’s an easy way to pour the air out of the building and weigh it!

The fun in doing these estimates is in NOT looking anything up, and instead trying to answer questions by using, along the way, what we do know to estimate everything we need to know to answer our question.

*************************************

Suppose you have a baterium cell of a kind which divides into two every minute. (Normal bacteria like E. Coli divide about twenty times slower than that, but it’s just an example.) Now you put this cell into a large jar (with lots of bacterium food) at 11 AM. In one hour, at 12 noon, the jar has just completely filled with bacteria. Can you work out the time between 11 AM and 12 noon when the jar was half full? Can you estimate it? Go ahead and keep the figure in your head. I’ll give you the answer later.

Meanwhile, let me say a few words about doubling times. Let’s say you have an investment which is earning 10% interest per year. How long will it take for you to double your money?

There is a very simple little rule which works quite well in approximating doubling times for rates of growth between -25% (that’s “minus” 25%) and 35% or so (and very accurate for single digit percentage rates of growth), which goes like this: just divide 70 by the percentage rate of growth, and you have the time needed to double the quantity. (The reason this works is a little complicated and would require me to explain stuff I don’t want to get into at the moment.)

So, what is the answer to the question above: how long will it take to double your money if it is growing at 10% annually? The answer is simply 70 divided by 10, or 7 years. Say a country’s population is growing at the rate of 2% annually. How long before it doubles? 70 divided by 2, or 35 years! This rule is very useful in doing the rough mental estimates that I like to do.

I’ll give one last example: I read somewhere recently that the total energy consumption of the world is currently approximately 5 X 10²⁰ Joules per year, and worldwide energy consumption is increasing at a little over 2% annually. (This rate is expected to go up, not down, in the next couple of decades. China’s energy consumption has been growing at double-digit rates!) The following question occured to me: at this rate, how long will it take before we outrun the total amount of energy which is coming in from the sun? (Fossil fuels are just a stored form of this solar energy, and renewable forms of energy like wind power, are also just a small subset of the total radiant energy we receive from the sun daily.) Here’s how I went about estimating how long it would take:

• I know (I did some research on solar panels a few years ago) that the total radiant power coming in from the sun per square meter is about 1400 Watts (1 Watt of power is a Joule of energy per second).
• Half the world’s surface (the side facing the sun) receives energy at this rate. What is the area of this region? Well, it is just a circular cross section of the Earth, and the radius of the Earth is about 6,000 kilometers.
• The area of a circle is Pi X radius X radius, which is 3 X 6000 X 6000, or approimately 100 million square kilometers, in our case.
• One square kilometer is 1000 meters X 1000 meters = 1 million square meters, so we have a total area receiving solar energy of 100 million square kilometers  X 1 million square meters/square kilometer, or 100 trillion square meters.
• 100 trillion square meters X 1400 Watts/square meter = 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Watts of power, or 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Joules per second.
• So in a year we have 60 X 60 X 24 X 365 seconds or approximately 60 X 60 X 20 X 400 = 28,800,000, or about 30 million seconds = 3 X 10⁷ seconds.
• 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Joules/second X 3 X 10⁷ seconds/year = roughly 4 X 10²⁴ Joules of total radiant energy from the sun every year.
• Let’s just round it up to 5 X 10²⁴ Joules. Remember, our current world wide consumption is 5 X 10²⁰ Joules annually, or only 1/10,000th(!) of the total radiant energy of the sun that falls on the Earth every year. This seems a tiny fraction, but consider:
• At 2% annual growth in worldwide energy consumption, we double consumption every 35 years (by the approximate doubling time rule given above).
• How many times do we need to double consumption to reach 10,000 times our current level? This is just log₂ (10,000). I know that 2¹⁴ is 16,384 (I was a programmer!) and this is more than the factor of 10,000 that we need. So let’s just say we need 14 doublings.
• At 35 years/doubling X 14 doublings, we get 490 years.

In other words, given our current worldwided energy consumption, and the fact that it is growing at more than 2% per year, if it were to continue to grow at that rate, we will have outstripped ALL the energy coming in from the sun in less than 500 years! Pretty shocking, no? And if we took into account the solar energy that is absorbed by the atmosphere before reaching the surface of Earth, and things like that, we have MUCH less time during which we can sustain 2% growth in energy consumption. I know very little about economics, but I wonder if economic growth rates are related to energy consumption rates in any straightforward way. (Robin?) If so, this points to a cap on economic growth as well. So that’s my nerdy column for today.

Oh, and yes, the answer to the bacteria question: the jar will be half full at 11:59 AM. Just think about it for one minute!

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

by S. Abbas Raza

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got a Bachelor’s degree there in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In 1983 he got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Akeel Bilgrami is my teacher and my friend. A couple of years ago I had him over for dinner at my apartment in New York one night. Leon Wieseltier had just published what I considered at best a confused hack job of a review of Daniel Dennett’s then new book Breaking the Spell in the New York Times. I was quite outraged by this odium-filled denunciation of one of the living philosophers that I most admire, and even orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to the publishers of the New York Times.

I asked Akeel that night what he thought of the review, and he said that while he agreed with me that Wieseltier’s attack was shameful, he didn’t see too much of interest in Dennett’s book either, because while attacking religious faith in predictable ways (certainly preaching to the choir in my and Akeel’s case), Dennett completely failed to even acknowledge, much less analyze in any meaningful way, the more important cultural, political, and philosophical underpinnings of the much-lamented religious fundamentalist resurgence here in America as well as in the Muslim world.

As I have written here at 3QD in the past, I am sympathetic to this criticism of not just Dennett’s book, but the whole slew of best-selling anti-religion books since then by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, John Allen Paulos, and others, even while I feel that these books have had the tremendously salutary effect of creating, or at least greatly expanding, the space available to atheists in the public sphere.

Akeel then told me that he was writing an essay for Critical Inquiry which addresses precisely the cultural and political contexts of religion that these books ignore, and that he would send it to me when it was done. He did, and I was immediately captivated by his subtle and deeply original analysis. After much late-night discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Akeel’s analysis between Robin Varghese and me, we decided to send the paper to some philosophers, political scientists, and other academics for critical comment. Six of those have now responded. In the next eight posts, you will find first the full text of Akeel’s paper, followed by the six critical responses, and then finally a last essay by Akeel answering his critics. 3QD will not be publishing further replies from the participants as full posts, but additional responses can always be left as comments on the appropriate post.

By the way, I recently spent some hours attempting to distill Akeel’s argument for this introduction, only to realize that it is already very dense (Akeel covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space) and far too intricate to be comprehensibly condensed. (To give you a sense of the rare and admirable concision with which Akeel writes, let me mention that in the essay, during the course of dismissing recent attempts at inverting the argument of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Akeel gives a brilliantly brief summary of the trajectory of the main arguments of that book in one page!) So I strongly urge you to take the time to read Akeel’s essay, which follows this post, in full.

In fact, I should perhaps also add that the material which makes up this seminar is somewhat more academic in tone (and length!) than readers of 3QD may be used to seeing here. I nevertheless encourage them to make the effort to read it as it is a thoughtful treatment of most-consequential topics (as Akeel himself puts it, “There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, eventually, nothing short of the democratic ideal is at stake…”) and the contributors make some fascinating arguments.

Robin Varghese and I would like to warmly thank all the contributors for their submissions, and of course, most of all we want to thank Akeel Bilgrami, not only for writing the original paper as well as a response to the critical comments, but much more for his long and affectionate mentorship.

Here, for your browsing convenience, is a table of contents:

1. Akeel Bilgrami: Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment
2. Colin Jager: Literary Thinking: A Comment on Bilgrami
3. Bruce Robbins: Response to Akeel Bilgrami
4. Justin E. H. Smith: A Comment on Akeel Bilgrami’s “Occidentalism, The Very Idea”
5. Steven Levine: A Comment on Bilgrami
6. Ram Manikkalingam: Culture follows politics: Avoiding the global divide between “Islam and the West”
7. Uday Mehta: Response to Akeel Bilgrami
8. Akeel Bilgrami: A Reply to Robbins, Jager, Smith, Levine, Manikkalingam, and Mehta

by Akeel Bilgrami

It wouldn’t be too lofty to describe the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades about the inherited ideas and ideologies of the ‘Enlightenment’ as our intellectual efforts at self-understanding — in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the sense in which we belong to a period, properly describable as our ‘modernity’.

These ongoing efforts on our part, however, gain a specific interest when they surface in the context of a new form of cold war that has religious rather than communist ideals as its target. Since religion, at least on the surface, in some fairly obvious sense runs afoul of the demands of the Enlightenment, our modernity may seem to be much more at stake now than it was in the contestations of the original cold war, where the issues seemed to be more about a conflict internal to the ideals of the Enlightenment.[i] But in the passage of analysis in this essay, I will have hoped to raise one serious angle of doubt about this seeming difference.

A recurring complaint among critics of the Enlightenment is about a complacence in the rough and cumulative consensus that has emerged in modern ‘Western’ thought of the last two centuries and a half. The complaint is misplaced. There has, in fact, always been a detectably edgy and brittle quality in the prideful use of omnibus terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ to self-describe the ‘West’s’ claim to being something more than a geographical location. One sign of this nervousness is a quickness to find a germ of irrationality in any source of radical criticism of the consensus. From quite early on, the strategy has been to tarnish the opposition as being poised in a perpetual ambiguity between radicalism and irrationalism (including sometimes an irrationalism that encourages a fascist, or incipiently fascist, authoritarianism.) Nietzsche was one of the first to sense the theoretical tyranny in this and often responded with an edginess of his own by flamboyantly refusing to be made self-conscious and defensive by the strategy, and by explicitly embracing the ambiguity. More recently Foucault, among others, responded by preempting the strategy and declaring that the irrational was, in any case, the only defence of those who suffered under the comprehensive cognitive grip of the discursive power unleashed by modernity, in the name of ‘rationality’.[ii]

I want to pursue some of the underlying issues of this confusing dialectic in such disputation regarding the modern. There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, eventually, nothing short of the democratic ideal is at stake, though that particular theme is too far afield to be pursued in any detail in this essay.[iii]

A familiar element in a cold war is that the warring sides are joined by academics and other writers, shaping attitudes and rationalizing or domesticating the actions of states and the interests that drive them, in conceptual terms for a broader intellectual public.[iv] Some of this conceptual work is brazen and crass and is often reckoned to be so by the more alert among the broad public. But other writing is more sophisticated and has a more superior tone, making passing acknowledgements of the faults on the side to whom it gives intellectual support, and such work is often lionized by the intellectual elites as ‘fair-minded’ and ‘objective’ and despite these marginal criticisms of the state in question, it is tolerated by the broad consensus of those in power. Ever since Samuel Huntington wrote his influential article “The Clash of Civilizations”,[v] there was a danger that a new cold war would emerge, one between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ to use the vast, generalizing terms of Huntington’s own portentous claims. Sure enough since that time, and especially with two or three hot wars thrown in to spur the pundits on, an increasing number of books with the more sophisticated aspiration have emerged to consolidate what Huntington had started.

To elaborate this essay’s concerns, I will proceed a little obliquely by initially focusing closely and at some length on one such book and briefly invoking another as its foil, and then situate the concerns in a larger historical and conceptual framework. The focus is worth its while since the conclusions of the book I have primarily chosen, as well as the attitudes it expresses, are representative of a great deal of both lay and academic thinking on these themes.

Read more »

Colin Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Early in April presidential candidate Barak Obama remarked that “some of these small towns in Pennsylvania…like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them….And it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The remarks were widely seen as a slip for the normally sure-footed Obama—certainly Hillary Clinton went to town with them, accusing Obama of condescending to working-class voters and being “out of touch.”

Obama’s remarks might be seen as an example of the kind of thinking that Akeel Bilgrami finds lacking. In the essay under discussion here, Bilgrami criticizes the ease with which left-liberal thinkers translate enchantment into its supposedly more worldly (read: economic) causes. Bilgrami argues that there is a wider and more philosophical issue at stake here, namely the disenchantment that attends modernity. That disenchantment has a certain “feel” to it. Consequently, those who see in re-enchantment simply a form of false consciousness miss the cultural dimensions of disenchantment: the transformation or outright destruction of indigenous and local forms of solidarity, the isolation and alienation that trail in its wake.

Bruce Robbins, in his response to Bilgrami, wonders whether this is the right approach. Do the kind of cultural-philosophical interpretations of what ails red-state America that Bilgrami recommends really hit their mark? The beliefs of values voters, says Robbins, may be “less representative of would-be theocrats struggling to free themselves from liberalism’s privatization of religion than of consumer-citizens, whipsawed between consumerism and asceticism, who live a relatively happy inconsistency between public and private” (639).

Now it may be that Robbins has misconstrued his target here. Bilgrami certainly thinks so. That’s something for them to work out. I’m more interested in the fact that Robbins’s remarks might serve as an admirable gloss on Obama’s remarks. Both Obama and Robbins might be understood as suggesting that the modern age has brought with it a distinctive set of tensions, even contradictions, perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom the promises of modernity have not materialized. This way of construing things puts most of its emphasis on getting the description right, and much less emphasis trying to imagine how it might feel to be a consumer-citizen so “whipsawed.” (Thus, right wing media outlets continually mentioned that Obama had made these remarks in San Francisco, implying that elites on the Left Coast just don’t “get” the heartland.)

Read more »

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

[Colin Jager’s response, which Bruce Robbins’s piece refers to, can be found here.]

I’m grateful to Colin Jager for attaching this renewal of the “Occidentialism” conversation immediately and firmly to the upcoming election. Akeel Bilgrami’s Critical Inquiry article (Spring 2006) suggested that the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was in large part the result of the “shallowness of the Left diagnosis,” which saw the red states’ bitterness and turn to religion as “consequences of the market.” The Republicans won, Bilgrami argues, because their analysis was “less shallow.” Looking deeper, they saw, correctly for Bilgrami, that the real problem was “something with a much wider and longer reach than market society, something that subsumes market society, that is, … the thick ideal of scientific rationality.” The so-called “values voters” who went Republican in the name of religion were very properly turning against the secular/ scientific rationality of the Left, which could not give them “values to live by.”

Where are these values voters today? According to the New York Times/CBS poll reported in the Times on May 5, 2008, voters who were asked “Does the candidate share the values of most Americans?” responded exactly the same for Hillary Clinton and for Barack Obama, 60%. John McCain trailed only slightly at 58%. A sizeable minority apparently feels that the candidates do not share its values (presumably anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-immigrant, and so on), but that minority is not positioned to decide anything. In other words, the strategy of seizing comparative advantage by claiming to speak for “values” has all but disappeared from this year’s political contest. In my earlier reply to Bilgrami, I had proposed that even in 2004 the “values” issue was not in fact decisive. To me at least, the new poll data confirm that this issue was never the deeper and truer reading of long-term American politics that Bilgrami, among others, saw in it. And as the failing US economy has re-asserted its prominence as voter issue #1, it has not become more plausible to think that voters are moved by their repulsion from scientific rationality and hunger for enchantment more than they are by market-generated unemployment, foreclosures, gas prices, food prices, and actual physical hunger. There may be strong arguments for the re-enchantment of the world, but in 2008 political urgencies are not among them.

I’m comfortable talking politics here, which is to say talking at the level of educated common sense, because I have no illusions about my ability to engage with Bilgrami at the level of technical philosophy. In the last sentence of his response-to-my-response (Critical Inquiry Spring 2007), Bilgrami offers a gloss on what enchantment means: “the oughts are there in nature and need no derivation.” I’m told that some philosophers (among them John Searle) have indeed argued that under certain conditions ought can be derived from is. I’m also told that this position has not won anything like general acceptance even among professional philosophers. I can imagine at least some reason for taking this idea on: knowing more about the distant impact of my actions on the natural environment (is) might well change my sense of my ethical obligations (ought). But I don’t think this is what Bilgrami means, or what his argument would mean if taken seriously by the non-philosophers like myself who seem to be the implicit addressees of his original essay. So if I offer this statement as a concise summary of the differences between Bilgrami and myself, I do so on the assumption that we arguing at a non-technical level.

Read more »

Justin E. H. Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University.

Akeel Bilgrami has so decisively exposed the weaknesses of the recent attempt to invert the argument of Said’s Orientalism that I do not see much point here in weighing the virtues of his essay against those of Buruma and Margalit’s book.  I would like to focus instead on his essay as a self-standing argument, and to pursue a few problems I see arising from it.  In broad outline, these problems stem from two very large aims of the essay: to describe the way things are today, and to account for how they got to be that way. 

Bilgrami’s broad historical thesis concerning a dissenting indigenous tradition in the West is intriguing but debatable.  He does not focus on Spinoza explicitly, but on the notion of a “Radical Enlightenment” that, since the publication of Jonathan Israel’s tome of that name, has been primarily associated with the impact of Spinoza on modern history.  Now, Spinoza has been recruited of late to do all sorts of things for all sorts of factions.  He has become the great hope of some segments of the post-Marxist Left, yet the uses to which he has been posthumously put are part of Spinoza’s reception history, not part of Spinoza.  The 17th-century philosopher was not a post-Marxist, and was no more sympathetic to Giorgio Agamben than to Paul Wolfowitz.

Spinoza is said to represent a possible alternative modernity because he conceived God as immanent rather than transcendent, and of nature as itself divine.  Yet Robert Boyle, too, had compelling reasons to believe that the vision of nature as clockwork, and of God as mechanic who set the world in motion and then absconded, was the only vision that adequately exalted God and thus that was acceptable for a pious natural philosopher such as himself.  For Boyle, to have God implicated in the “operose and distractious” workings of nature (Cudworth’s phrase), whether through direct implication or through the parting out of motive force to subordinate plastic natures or archaei, would be to render God a lowly custodian, when in fact, he wanted to argue, God is great enough to create a nature great enough to do everything it has to do in accord with a few basic laws.  There is no contempt for nature here, and no call to replace piety and awe with hard-headed rationality.  There is only a desire to avoid the ‘pagan’ mistake of conflating God and the world, and of explaining natural processes in terms of the inherence of quasidivinities in the natural landscape of clouds, streams, mountains, etc.  There may in fact be nothing wrong with such paganism, but Boyle’s desire to avoid it was not a symptom of some nascent disenchantment; it was rather a central feature of the great majority of theological reflection in all three of the great traditions of Abrahamic religion.

Another prominent theory of how nature works, and of God’s relationship to nature, was occasionalism, the doctrine defended by Nicolas Malebranche, Louis La Forge, Arnold Geulincx and others, according to which nature is intrinsically inert, and every change that comes about in the world is the result of God’s direct causal intervention (“perpetual miracle,” Leibniz called it).  Reading Bilgrami, the question naturally arises: were Malebranche and his kind early disciples of disenchantment, or were they part of the countercurrent?  It is worth noting that in the 17th century occasionalism was consciously and explicitly appropriated from medieval Islamic philosophy: Al-Ghazali, for example, had thought that it was an easy step from “There is no God but God” to “There is no Cause but God.” Occasionalism from 11th-century Persia through 17th-century France appears to have been motivated, again, by a form of piety, characteristic of monotheism and not of animism, that seeks to glorify God by attributing direct responsibility for every state of Creation to him.  Now, Bilgrami may simply think that belief in a unique transcendent God is unfortunate, and thus may find Spinozan immanentism and animism attractive.  But he has not convinced me that the representatives of the “Radical Enlightenment” were resisting what we would later come to recognize as the scourge of scientific rationalism, nor that the Occidentalists have anything in common with the members of this supposed indigenous Western countercurrent.  I thus remain skeptical concerning Bilgrami’s central thesis, that, in his words, “there really are conspicuous intellectual and critical affinities between the ‘Occidentalist Enemies of the West’ and Gandhi on the one hand and a longstanding and continuous dissenting tradition within the West itself on the other.”

Read more »

Steven Levine is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Prof. Bilgami’s make two central claims in his illuminating paper: 1) that certain malignant aspects of Western development and society are internally and not contingently related to the scientific rationality of the Enlightenment, and 2) that it is not science itself that leads to these malignant aspects but rather an interpretation—and the practices based upon this interpretation—of what science requires of us in our thinking about rationality and value. As Bilgrami himself points out there has been a long history of thinking—some of which was contemporaneous with the scientific revolution itself—which makes claims similar to these. Because the particular tradition that I stand in, Left Hegelianism, is part of this long history of counter-thinking, I find both claims very plausible. In our preferred jargon, the point that Bilgrami is driving at is encapsulated by the phrase ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. The dialectic of enlightenment claims that enlightenment reason is at odds with itself, that while it provides for the possibility of an autonomous form of life, one not determined solely by the contingences of nature and fate, it, in securing this possibility, often expresses itself instrumentally. When instrumental reason is take to be the whole of reason the malignant aspects of Western development and society mentioned above follow, i.e., nihilism and new forms of domination. The left Hegelian does not take it that this dialectic requires the abandonment of enlightenment reason for the irrational or the mute silence of the Other, rather it signals the necessity for undertaking an immanent critique of dogmatic conception’s of enlightenment reason and the practices based upon these conceptions. Dogmatic conception are ones that overlooks the dialectic of enlightenment, taking it—as Buruma and Margalit do—that the principles of the enlightenment are only contingently related to their malignant consequences.

The goal of the left Hegelian is to achieve a higher order type of reflection in which reason reflects on its blind spots and potential one-sidedness. This task is especially important now since a dogmatic conception of the enlightenment and enlightenment reason informs the position of most US policy makers and ideologues who still, post-Iraq, take it to be their duty as Enlightened to maintain US hegemony. The question is whether this charge applies to Buruma and Margalit. While Buruma and Margalit don’t endorse open hegemony (indeed both were against the Iraq adventure), they are still, so Bilgrami argues, ‘Cold War Intellectuals’ who contribute to the ideological underpinnings of Western dominance. How does he make out this claim? To first thing to recognize is that Buruma and Margalit ignore completely internal critiques of the enlightenment—those offered by the early modern radical enlightenment, left-Hegelianism, or more distantly, Ghandi—and instead focus all of their attention on Slavophile, Japanese, and German Romantic and nationalist writing, as well as Islamist Occidentalist writings. In my view, this selection of topics, one very reminiscent of Paul Berman’s influential yet incoherent Terror and Liberalism, is prepared for by a certain imaginary that shapes the views of many if not most current ‘Cold War Intellectuals’. This imaginary posits a simple opposition between the enlightenment universal and the non-enlightened particular, Gesellshaft and Gemeinshaft, the progressive and the reactionary, the Lexus and the olive-tree, etc. Once this imaginary is in place, the affinity between Western romantic and nationalist writings and Islamist Occidentalist writings seems commonsensical. And indeed, there are obvious affinities here. The problem is not in identifying affinities, but in the narrowing of vision in which the positions mentioned above—the early modern radical enlightenment, left-Hegelianism, and Ghandi—disappear from view altogether. In performing this disappearing act, liberal intellectuals like Buruma and Margalit, who otherwise might be one’s political ally, play a key ideological role in the ‘War on Terror’; for now political argument cannot call upon the resources of the excluded positions but can only express which side of the simple opposition one is on. This narrowing of argumentative space is distinctive of our age. One of the virtues of Prof. Bilgrami’s paper is his attempt to reopen this space and let a bit of light shine in.

Ram Manikkalingam is visiting professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.

Bilgrami’s paper is centrally located within the contemporary debate about the global divide between “Islam and the West” that is popularly called “the clash of civilisations”. This debate is motivated by the question – “why do they hate us?” – posed by some (or is it many) westerners looking askance at intensifying negative, if not hostile, feelings in the Muslim world towards the west, in general, and the United States (US), in particular. This question has led to two answers: they hate us/you because of who we/you are? (Buruma and Margalit), and 2) They hate us/you because of what we/you do? (Mahmud Mamdani). Bilgrami’s paper links “the who you are” to “what you do.” My comments will try to first unpack this linkage and then re-pack it in a way that I hope will contribute a little more to the effort made by all three works (Buruma and Margalit, Mamdani and Bilgrami) towards linking values, culture, politics and violence in order to better understand the impact of Western policies and (Islamic) terrorism on our lives.

Let me begin with a summary of my take. Bilgrami is sympathetic to the intellectual objective of Buruma and Margalit to link culture with politics. But he is dismissive of their intellectual effort at doing so, as well as hostile to the political motivation behind it. His main objection is that Buruma and Margalit slip too quickly from a cultural critique of the west to the resort to violence on the part of Islamist terrorists. He believes that the step – from culture to violence – is contingent on other political factors. The first step – sharing a set of (cultural) values need not lead to agreement on whether or not (and how) to resort to violence. However, while sympathetic to Mamdani’s effort to view violence as a response to the politics of the West, he disagrees with Mamdani’s dismissal of the cultural elements in such a linkage. But if violence is only contingently linked to politics, then why can’t politics be only contingently linked to the cultural critique.

To put it in Bilgrami’s language, Gandhi and Bin Laden can share a cultural critique of the west (and a set of values – liberal individualism and scientific rationality are bad), but differ in politics (the West may or may not be inherently bad); they can share politics (the West is imperialist), but differ in whether to resort to violence (together with Western progressives and moral suasion the West can be changed according to Gandhi, or it will only change under the threat of force according to Bin Laden); and finally it is possible to agree about resorting to violence (threat of force is necessary to change Western policies – Bin Laden and Fidel Castro), but disagree about how to resort to it (terrorism is acceptable given asymmetries of military power according to Bin Laden or terrorism is morally unacceptable according to Castro). This weakens Bilgrami’s endorsement of the effort to integrate the cultural critique with politics and violence, and appears to place him uneasily between Mamdani and Buruma and Margalit.

Read more »