In a peculiar sense, it is okay to refer to our individual selves as “we” without belonging to royalty, yet be scientifically precise since our bodies which have a thousand billion cells harbor ten thousand billion bacteria. Germs are Us. The male of our species may find it particularly hard to accept the idea that it is cooperation and not competition that drives evolution. The story of how we got here is replete with extraordinary examples of networking and compromises over the last four billion years. The question “What is Life?” asked by Erwin Schrodinger half a century ago has been answered in the most concise manner by Lynn Margulis. Life is bacteria. “Any organism, if not itself a live bacterium, is then a descendant, one way or another, of a bacterium or, more likely, mergers of several kinds of bacteria. Bacteria initially populated the planet, and have never relinquished their hold.”

Life on our planet began with bacteria. They precede what you may know as the smallest unit of life or a “cell”. Human and most animal and plant cells have a nucleus which serves as a repository of their DNA, but bacteria (or prokaryotes) are simpler living organisms which do not even have a nucleus. They existed alone on earth for almost two billion years. The greatest revolution in biology was set off when two of these bacteria began a symbiotic relationship, forming the eukaryotic cell; one which has a distinct nucleus as well as pieces of circular extra-nuclear DNA bound in little dark bodies called mitochondria. Mitochondria, it turns out, were once independently living bacteria which apparently fused with another bacterial cell that they invaded. Through a process of cooperative living, different varieties of bacteria came together to give birth to “cells”. These eukaryotes which emerged as a confederacy of bacteria, existed as unicellular organisms for another billion years until they learnt to live in groups or colonies, eventually joining together to form the multi-cellular organism. The proliferation of all the splendid life forms and species we see today has occurred in only the last 600 hundred million years, humans arriving on the scene very recently.

To place the existence of humans into perspective, there is an interesting way to look at the history of our earth in 24 hours as described below:

Or as Lynn Margulis says, “The entire human history from cave to condo represents less than 1% of the history of life.” The great biologist Lewis Thomas had the best description when he wrote, “Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species’ name. The word for earth at the beginning of the Indo-European language thousand of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word meaning simply earth came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also to teach us the lesson, humble, human and humane.”

Here are a few more humbling facts. Microbial life is 25 times the mass of animal life and equals the total mass of plant life on earth. There are 500 pounds of microbes per acre of agricultural soil. There are more bacteria in one human’s mouth than all humans that have ever lived on earth. In fact, bacteria make up 10% of our dry body weight. Some live and replicate in the various organs of our body, and others have become a permanent part of our DNA. The mouth, gut and vagina harbor their own garden of living flora. There is increasing evidence that a balanced existence of these pathogens is critical for the health of the host, and that significant metabolic functions are performed by these microorganisms.

Disease states may occur when the normal symbiotic relationship between pathogens living in one of our organs is disturbed. For example, we often develop diarrhea while taking antibiotics. This happens because antibiotics kill some of the microbes, causing a redistribution of the growth advantage among the many species of pathogens that reside normally in our gut and result in diarrhea. Another example is Crohn’s disease. This is a chronic inflammatory reaction that may affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract. Analysis of the mucosa associated bacteria of patients with active disease suggests that patients have a reduction in the diversity of intestinal bacteria. Interestingly, this disease is common in parts of the world where infestation of the gut by the helminthic worms is rare such as in the developed countries, and uncommon in the third world where people frequently carry worms. Exposure to helminths may help prevent or even ameliorate Crohn’s disease. Researchers from the University of Iowa put this hypothesis to test using the eggs of Trichuris suis, the porcine whipworm, to treat patients with Crohn’s disease. All patients ingested 2500 live T suis ova every three weeks for 24 weeks. The eggs hatch in the duodenum, releasing larvae that ultimately grow in 6–8 weeks into adult worms, but cannot replicate in the human host, dying after completing their short life-cycle. By repeatedly giving the eggs by mouth, a constant source of adult worms can be maintained in the gut without causing disease. While in the gut of Crohn’s disease patients, these worms reset the balance of pathogens back to normal and the inflammation disappears. In fact, the trial yielded a response rate of nearly 80% with no side effects. While a disturbed normal gut flora can produce a chronic inflammatory disease, introducing a live worm may reset the balance.

Microbes not only make up 10% of our body weight, a single organism is capable of a myriad of pathogenic manifestations. An example of this involves the virus called Varicella Zoster. Most of us get infected with this virus in childhood where it causes chicken pox. Once the clinical infection subsides however, not all viral particles disappear. Some of them find refuge in the nerves, where they remain in a latent form. As adults, we can experience a reactivation of these viruses, and depending on the competence of the host’s immune system, Varicella Zoster is capable of causing a variety of diseases as shown in the diagram, including the painful disease called Shingles.

Acute diseases are commonly ascribed to pathogens today. It is likely that many of the chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, inflammatory bowel diseases, even mental disorders like schizophrenia have some association with pathogens. Cancers are chronic diseases that reach clinical manifestation after passing through a number of stages including initiation in a single cell, expansion, invasion, evasion of the immune responses and finally metastasis. Already, some 15% of cancers globally have been etiologically linked to pathogens. To name just a few, associations between cervical cancer and the human papilloma virus (HPV), liver cancers and hepatitis viruses, certain types of lymphomas and herpes viruses, adult T-cell leukemia and HTLV virus, and gastric cancer and helicobacter pylori are now proved and accepted. The encouraging news is that if pathogens are identified as the etiologic agents, then preventive measures such as vaccines can be designed. This has already been accomplished for cervical cancer where the vaccine against HPV is quite effective. Below are a few recent examples to illustrate how more and more malignant diseases are being linked to an infectious etiology:

• There is an inordinately high incidence of lung cancer among women in Taiwan who do not smoke. Recently, HPV has been found in their tumors. This is the same family of viruses known to be the causative agent for cervical dysplasia and cancer in women. The same is not true for non-smoking women who develop cancer elsewhere implying that there may be other etiological agents (pathogens) involved. This makes sense if you think of lung cancer like pneumonia. Pneumonia could be caused by viral, bacterial, or fungal agents, but the organ response is quite similar and by looking at an X-ray of the lungs, we cannot say whether the pneumonic patch is viral or bacterial. In the same manner, lung cancer could be caused by a variety of pathogens.
• Aplastic anemia, a potentially lethal bone marrow failure syndrome, is more common in the rural areas of Thailand and has been linked to drinking un-bottled water. Having eliminated the chemical and physical causes, an as yet unidentified pathogen is strongly suspected as the probable cause.
• The human genome sequencing has yielded over 1000 retroviruses that have apparently been subdued over millennia of evolution, and made a permanent part of our genome. Yet only two retroviruses have so far been found to be associated with human diseases (HIV and HTLV). This is not because there are no other retrovirally induced cancers, but rather because of the enormous technical difficulties related to accurately identifying these elusive agents. Using an exquisitely sensitive “Viral Chip” which can screen for the presence of hundreds of viruses, researchers have been able to show just last week that a potential causal link exists between a retrovirus called XMRV and a rare familial type of prostate cancer. “In order to understand cancer, we must understand the microorganisms that reside in and control our body functions just as aggressively as the DNA sequences that make up our genes”. (L. Margulis).

It is high time that we start paying due respect to our formidable microbial fellow passengers on the planet. In the words of Niles Eldredge, “For microbes will not only inherit the earth (should, for example, we complex multicellular creatures fall prey to the next spasm of mass extinction); microbes got here long before we did, and in a very real sense, they already “own,” and most certainly run, the global system.”

What is it with these writers who feel the need to make up significant portions of their “true life” stories? Why do they think they’re going to get away with it (they never do), and why does the literary world feign surprise with each new scandal? At least the much-feted youthful phenom J. T. Leroy had the novelty value of not existing at all; Leroy was invented by the California couple who had supposedly adopted him and promoted his story of childhood abuse to celebrities. The beleaguered James Frey presents the more typical case. The Oprah Book Club chose his memoir precisely because of its depiction of the author’s harrowing real life experiences, and therein lies the rub: the success of this kind of book relies on the public’s voracious appetite for horrible and nasty events, but of course they have to have really happened in order to satisfy our voyeurism. We feel disgusted and cheated by the revelation that the author’s life may not have been as wretched and terrifying as he or she had convinced us it was.

So, is the problem that there is simply not enough interesting reality to go around – in economic terms, there’s more demand than supply, essentially forcing writers to invent it simply because it would make a better story than what actually happened? Is reality, at least the “good” kind that will sell, like oil, a kind of precious and finite commodity? Or is that people who actually have nightmarish lives tend not to have the wherewithal, connections, literary skills, or relentless desire for self-promotion required to please our compulsive need to pry into their suffering? (As a friend pointed out, in such cases it’s often true that the writer’s supporters and promoters have an inkling of the fraudulence to be unmasked later on; part of the attraction of any good con job involves a nagging feeling at the back of head that one is being scammed.)

The current trend to consume reality as entertainment or even art – from Survivor, American Idol, and The Swan to the memoir fad in publishing – isn’t actually new. Daniel Defoe basically invented the English novel when he realized that the public’s demand for shipwreck stories was so insatiable that he could just make something up rather than actually go through all the bother of risking his life on a deserted island. The result was Robinson Crusoe. Defoe, intriguingly, claimed that he hated fiction in his Serious Reflections: “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime…It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.”

Viewing the novel as a form of compulsive lying – the entire story has to be internally coherent and plausible even while every detail is false – is one way to understand why so many memoirs bend the truth. A lot of memoirists are novelists, and novelists lie for a living. William Faulkner, for example, wore a phony uniform and claimed throughout his life that he served as an airman in WWI; he did learn to fly, and his fiction about flying, in Pylon and his WWII short story “Turnabout,” is masterful. The word “fiction” comes from a root meaning “to fashion something.” It’s the magic mechanism of fabrication, the urge to create what Shakespeare, in The Tempest, called “the baseless fabric of this vision.”

Should we care whether it’s made up or not? Clearly, there are some cases where a line is crossed, like The Painted Bird, whose author, Jerzy Kosinski, pretended to have experienced the horrors of WWII up close. (Kosinski’s suicide is often linked to the reputation-destroying revelation that the story was made up.) But most memoirists’ sins are minor: exaggerations, additions, tall tales, and the like. Of course, anybody who puts dialogue of any kind into a memoir is essentially writing fiction. Unless they possess a preternatural memory, they have no choice but to invent what people said. Perhaps there are hidden rules to this sort of thing: everyone understands that it’s possible that not every hilarious comment recorded in a David Sedaris story was actually said, word for word, but nobody would (or should) conclude that Sedaris is trying to trick anyone. The standard, then, is somewhat murky in a similar fashion to the problem of plagiarism, which, it is generally agreed, must be intentional in order to be a serious academic offense. Similarly, it is not enough to misremember the name of the hospital where you were born, you have to be caught making up lies about how you were born with a hole in your lung and how it shaped your later character, by a blogger who looks up your medical records.

Hollywood has taken the lead in parsing the finer distinctions of the reality-based fiction. In addition to the old standby Based Upon a True Story, we now have the brilliant formulation Based On True Events, or the even more interesting Inspired by True Events. These terms have become increasingly all-encompassing. Presumably, if somebody is on their way to get coffee and they witness a mugging, and later turn the incident into a screenplay, that could be “based on true events,” whereas if they only read about the mugging in a newspaper while sitting in the coffeeshop and did the same thing, they have been “inspired by true events.” But these phrases aren’t just so vague as to be meaningless, or studio legalese. They are also statements implicitly acknowledging that a story is far more salable if it can be shown to have some connection, however tenuous, with something that once really happened. The horror movie bomb White Noise, for example, was promoted with a frightening commercial – far more scary than the movie itself – in which (supposedly real) recordings of the voices of dead people had been caught on tape speaking from beyond the grave.

In their movie Fargo, the Coen Brothers already mocked this entire concept by claiming that their film was based on a true story when it almost certainly wasn’t. (“Names have been changed out of respect for the dead,” the opening credits read, surely a fitting ironic prelude to the “respectful” wood-chipper scene.) The Coens hemmed and hawed when they were asked to fill in details about their sources, but the deception was deliberate and satirical. It was a sly comment on our entire obsession with reality, as well as a nod to the implausible “true detective” pulp stories invoked and parodied in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Weren’t the Coens really making a subtle case for fiction, and for art, where receding levels of playful irony operate in ways that true stories, limited to the facts, can only dream about?

The process of inserting fiction into reality can have unexpected consequences. Consider the case of Ted Perry, a professor of film at Middlebury College who worked on a television documentary, Home, about enivronmental issues, in 1972. Perry was asked to write a script about the virtues of environmentalism, but the show’s producers thought that Perry’s words would sound better if some of the text was presented as the wisdom of a respected Native American historical figure, Chief Seattle. The show claimed that Chief Seattle had said, “The earth does not belong to man – man belongs to the earth.” Decades later, the saying is still ascribed to Chief Seattle, and appears in school textbooks and bumper stickers. Perry, in a turnabout from the norm, has spent years trying to get the true story out. (The saying is really an inversion of a line of poetry by Robert Frost: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”) In all probability, however, the phrase would have never become famous without the trickery. Chief Seattle was a profound guy with plenty of wisdom, and someone realized, shrewdly, that the quotation was more marketable as a Seattleism than a Perryism.

I think it was Schopenhauer who once said that there are two kinds of books worth reading, the kind that exposes us to an experience we could never have ourselves, and the kind that is artfully written and constructed. The best kind of reality entertainment, such as Norman Mailer’s “true life novel” The Executioner’s Song – or The Armies of the Night, with its slogan “The novel as history, history as a novel” – combines both dimensions. But the truth is that many books achieve their only salability and public interest because they are true; the plain fact is that they are often so badly written that they could not sell as fiction. If your writing is false, then your story had better be true.

It’s one of the moments in the annual cycle where some of us at 3QD increase our focus on Darfur. Tilting toward the liberal-lefty bleeding heart side of the spectrum, we get incensed by the news, then feel that perhaps we’re being too monomaniacal and strident. Perhaps something by the powers that be suggests that something may be done—Colin Powell calls it a “genocide”, the African Union intervenes, using mostly Rwandan soldiers—lessens the urgency for attention. Then it all goes to pot—the UN puts the Sudan on its Human Rights Commission, really, and the AU decides, of all things, to host this year’s summit in Khartoum of all places and, even worse, considers Sudanese President Omar El Bashir a candidate for chair of the AU. (Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo was elected.)

This has happened a few times now, with the fact that it has happened a few times being the result of the lack of meaningful action by the international community of nation-states. This current rise in our own attention to Darfur resulted from a few disconnected events: a quick back and forth about Darfur in the comments section of a post, a conversation with a friend of a friend at a party about the work she’s been doing to help organize an upcoming call to action on Darfur, and an HRW report that Janjaweed militia are attacking refugee camps in Chad and the Chadian army is no longer protecting many of the camps. The cycle has been iterated often enough that it seems unlikely that anything will be done—suggestions of NATO intervention included.

In the midst of some back and forth in the comments section of the blog, I recalled a questioned posed by Daniel Davies over at Crooked Timber a while ago. Davies was commenting on an editorial about Sir Mark Thatcher’s alleged bankrolling of a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, which is run by a venal and brutal petty dictator—although no one was under the illusion Sir Thatcher was motivated by a desire to liberate the country.

The serious issue raised by this joke is, if we accept the logic of the “strong version” of humanitarian intervention, then why should we also say that it is only the job of states to carry out such interventions? Since, ex hypothesi, any special position for states is ruled out by the strong pro-war internationalist liberal stance, why shouldn’t groups of private individuals take action? For example, Harry’s Place has five main contributors, each of whom could probably raise about $200,000 if they took out a second mortgage; maybe they should be ringing up Executive Outcomes and getting a few estimates in on smallish African states. Why leave this to the government?

Certainly, mercenaries have been used before. Both Executive Outcomes and Sandline International were used in Sierra Leone against the remarkably thuggish Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh, and they were apparently very effective and relatively cheap. (To make it perfectly clear, I’m not a fan of mercenaries, whom I consider slightly better than international arms dealers, whom I consider, by and large, parasites that feed upon the weakest member of our species.) The UN under Annan considered using Executive Outcomes in Rwanda in the face of the unwillingness of the international community to halt a genocide.

In a footnote the his post, Davies clarifies, “By this [“strong version”] I mean the version pushed in the pro-war blogosphere, under which any intervention that removes a bad regime is by that token good. Not the rather stronger criterion used by Human Rights Watch.” That criterion is fairly straightforward:

In our view, as a threshold matter, humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life. To state the obvious, war is dangerous. In theory it can be surgical, but the reality is often highly destructive, with a risk of enormous bloodshed. Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes.

I don’t think that anyone doubts that the criterion has been met in Darfur. HRW of course is calling for UN-approved intervention carried out by the military forces of member-states, not mercenaries. Davies had raised the question of privatized humanitarian intervention to imply that the strong state-led interventions of the sort seem in Iraq are wrong and wrongheaded by appeal to our intuitions that it would be wrong if carried out by a private force, or at least it seemed so by the tone. (If states have no privileged place in sense that sovereignty is inviolable even if they’re committing atrocious crimes, then states don’t necessarily have a privileged place in the sense of a monopoly in using arms to stop these atrocities, though for many reasons we may want to turn to them first.)

Certainly, on the Left, one of the greater and more heroic images is of the international brigades that came to the defense of the Spanish Republic against fascists. (Yes, they were not mercenaries but idealistic volunteers, but that seems a technical difference rather than an ethical one. Idealist NGOs in this hypothetical would be hiring specialists, who I imagine are better at armed conflict than human rights workers.) In fact, if there was a problem in retrospect with the defense of the Republic, it was the involvement of the Soviet Union.

I’m not advocating that we do so here, that is, have private organizations send in mercenaries. Rather, I’m trying to work out an ethical puzzle or quandary. (The internet is supposed to be an effective tool for pooling information, deliberation and collective problem solving. While that dynamic usually works with technical issues with a right answer, it may help with this moral-technical problem of how should we go about assigning weights to the competing moral principles involved.)

I’m aware of the problems associated with NGOs raising money to hire mercenaries to intervene in humanitarian disasters: unlike with states, there is the problem of weak or absent institutions for exercising accountability, and that fact could thereby lead to more chaos; there is no transparency; there is the problem of precedent, in that do I want some alliance of radical anti-abortion forces in the world to raise money and take out a weak government which allows abortion because it believes it to be mass murder; there is the problem that it encourages mercenaries (parasites) by creating a demand for them; there is the fact that it is a crime in most countries to conduct this kind of private foreign policy; that the further privatization of certain services which are collective goods, the provision of which should be subject to democratic debate and monitoring, is the last thing that the world needs; and there are probably many more that don’t come to mind right now.

Against this there is: the fact that Darfur is a catastrophe; that we are witnessing state failure, in the sense that those who are supposed to stop this sort of thing have failed to do so on enough occasions for us to believe that they won’t do so at all, and perhaps in the same way that individuals have a right to organize their own security if states cannot provide reasonable safety, perhaps we have a right to organize collective security when states won’t; that it is reasonable at times to commit a lesser crime to prevent a greater one; and that it would save a lot of lives. (While the figures come from Executive Outcomes and are probably very self-serving, it’s not unlikely that 1,500 EO mercenaries in Rwanda could have saved tens of thousands of lives.) Perhaps even more importantly, that there are instances which act as exceptions, where other principles weigh enough to suspend in that instance countervailing principles, and that by acting in this instance in violation of the lesser principle, we’re not nullifying it altogether. Darfur may be a reasonable candidate for such an instance. But this last part is just the pro side being the pro side.

In all honesty, I don’t know how to weigh these against each other. I go back and forth, and I find that my best moral reasoning doesn’t seem to yield any kind of resolution to it.

I’ve found myself listening to the much-hyped, Hasidic reggae/hip-hop artist Matisyahu the last couple days. Needless to say, that makes me a confirmed bandwagon jumper. The live recording of “King without a Crown” and the accompanying video shot in Austin TX have been getting heavy rotation. His new CD is due next week and already two shows have been sold out at Manhattan’s sizable Hammerstein Ballroom. Writing this column, I merely join the rubes finally noticing a sub-cultural phenomenon as it percolates up to the mainstream.

Let me say at the outset that I am no aficionado of dancehall or reggae. But for what it’s worth, it does seem to me that the rhythms of toasting and the syncopations of Jewish prayer and song go well together (biddi-bum, biddi-diddi-bum, sounds equally appropriate for Marley or Tevya). And I like the easy translations Matisyahu has made from Jah to Hashem while incorporating elements of Torah, the Psalms, and the like. Still, I don’t really know enough about music to do anything other than listen to it, and so I’ll leave the discussion of the songs to those who can write about them with some expertise. What interests me here instead is the phenomenon of Matisyahu himself. At first glance, he has every appearance of a novelty act, an amusing suturing of Lubovitcher Judaism with West-Indian dancehall. Use whatever metaphor you would like. He’s a jerk pastrami sandwich, Vanilla Ice made from Manishevitz. Except that he’s not. Read over his fawning press, and you’ll see that he’s survived the inevitable skepticism. Indeed, the verdict has come in on the opposite side. Matisyahu is an authentic fusion of two distinct musical, ethnic, and religious cultures: Jewish and West Indian, matzo and roti. He’s a one man, cross-pollinated product of Crown-Heights Brooklyn.

OK, so in other words, one myth has taken the place of another. We are to imagine a yeshiva boy who cut class to run across Flatbush Avenue and spend afternoons spinning and toasting with the boys from the Islands. But that isn’t exactly right either. As is usually the case, the truth is more complicated and more interesting. Matisyahu was born Matthew Miller to a middle-class secular family in West Chester Pennsylvania. Late in his teens, he found God and decided to become Orthodox while staring deeply at the mountains during a camping trip in Colorado. He subsequently enrolled in a Hasidic yeshiva designed especially for converts to Orthodoxy. The young Matthew Miller seems to have had a wide interest in music, but his interest in the particular religious culture of Jewish Hasidism, with its messianic mysticism, its separatist resistance to modern living, and in the particular, Lubavitch sect he joined, its commitment to the charismatic authority of the late Rabbi Menachem Scheerson, was rather late in coming. It is not right to say that he was Hasidic and then found reggae. Rather, the two seem to have fed off each other in a wholesale reconfiguring of his life.

What is interesting about this, I think, is that the intensely religious and observant Judaism that so marks the persona of Matisyahu was something that he chose, not something he was born into. The beard and the side curls, the long black coats and felt hats, the tsitsis and the like, are self-conscious stylings. They are a Hasidic aesthetic, or Hastheatic, if you will. I do not mean to disparage at all the sincerity of Matisyahu’s beliefs. His commitment to the messianic religiosity of Lubovitcher Hasidism is evident in his lyrics and in his life. Even so, the religious persona is clearly as much a question of style as it is of belief. The more so, I would imagine, for his audience. There is something intrinsically appealing about seeing a Hasid perform his kind of music and perform it well. Matisyahu’s Judaism is interesting because it is so visible and marked, so much like the inner city of a mythical old-world. When it is fused with the musical style of his West-Indian neighbors, it is clearly updated to our polyglot and hybrid moment.

Matisyahu’s sudden popularity is owing in part to the role he has taken within a larger resurgence of hipster Judaism in popular culture, a fascination with Yiddishkeit and klezmer and Bar-Mitzvah-Disco and the like.  As it has long been, Judaism is here a sign of urbanity, of knowingness, and of cosmopolitanism. But in this case the urbanity and knowingness and cosmopolitanism dwell in the musical hybridity: the nexus of Hasidism, reggae, and hip-hop as distinct urban forms. Thus I suspect that few of Matisyahu’s listeners are drawn to the religious content of his music, important as that content may be to him. Whether they know it or not, they are drawn to the familiar unity of Judaism and modernity, the ineffably current and relevant something that resonates in the sound of the Yiddish or the Hebrew, the look of the side curls and the tsitsis, when they are combined and overlaid with an unexpected kind of music. So, while there is little in Hasidism one can relate to as doctrine, and even less as a way of life, there is something clearly attractive about it as a contemporary style. So much so that the fusion with reggae and dancehall and hip hop seems not so implausible, and not at all kitsch. Given the alternatives, that is not so bad a use for religion.

In my last column I noted how Political Science, along with most social sciences, has a bigger problem with prediction than seems to be generally acknowledged. This is of course hardly unique to members of this particular tribe; the media are even worse. Take for example the US media’s treatment of Bode Miller in the Winter Olympics. For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past month, Miller was the ‘sure thing’ for the US ski team. After all, he had his own set of sponsored ads, videos, and an interactive website from Nike. Miller was competing in five events and was, according to the US media, the front runner to lift possibly all five gold medals. Quite why this was the case was a mystery to me. Sure, he’s a damn good skier, but if you looked at his world cup results you would see that he was hardly head-and-shoulders above the competition, and in particular events he was well below the top rank.

Now, consider that each event Miller participated in at the Olympics was hardly an independent event due to the psychological impact of each result on the next, and that he is fully entitled (like the rest of us) to have a bad day at the office. Well, he did. He missed in all five events. Needless to say the media are now picking his corpse clean for defying their predictions. As the New York Times put it after his first ‘failure’ – “He is paying the price for misplacing career priorities.” Quite how the writer of this piece knows exactly where Miller left his priorities is unclear. The fact that he did not win is insufficient evidence, and you can bet your last dollar that had he won his next event such concerns would have been completely erased. Moreover, the last time anyone won five gold medals at a Winter Olympics was Eric Heiden in 1980 for speed skating. As far as I am aware, no one has ever won five medals in an Alpine event. Why Miller didn’t win could be a surprise only if one was deliberately ignoring much relevant information. Indeed, taking a select few data points and projecting them forward as an inevitability almost always produces disappointing results.

Two things stand out for me from this nonsense. First, why is anyone surprised that Miller did not win any gold medals, let alone five, when no one has ever done so? Second, and more interestingly for the non-skiers out there, why do people have a tendency to take two or three data points and project them into the future as an inevitable trend? Beyond the hype associated with US contenders, and the sheer myopia of the US media to the possibility of ‘foreigners’ actually beating the home-grown talent, such a tendency has consequences far beyond the Winter Olympics.

Consider Condoleezza Rice and Hamas’ electoral victory. The Secretary of State noted after Hamas’ victory at the polls that “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.” In fact, me, my wife, my cat, and The Economist Newspaper all knew this was coming down the track. Why then didn’t the Secretary of State, with all the resources at her disposal, not have an inkling that such a thing was going on? Perhaps what might be called ‘the Bode Miller problem’ was at work here too?

Consider that on issues as disparate as the invasion of Iraq, Social Security privatization, and energy policy, the Bush administration has never been one to let mere facts get in the way of a good ideology. Disconfirming evidence is screened out and only confirming evidence is admitted. A few supporting data points are projected as a trend while everything else is ignored.

In the case of the election of Hamas, while Fatah had recently done what the US has wanted in terms of halting suicide attacks, holding elections, and playing nice with Israel (all of which was acknowledged (trended) by the US), what Israel had done to Fatah over the past few years, in particular, bombing the PLO’s governing infrastructure into the ground thus cutting off their all important patronage network, was, like the totality of Miller’s results, totally ignored. The trend-line predicting Fatah’s victory was projected forward since only confirmatory data were being examined, and everything that didn’t fit the trend was ignored. Consequently, when a Palestinian voter said at an exit poll “Fatah hasn’t done anything for us,” this seemed to come as surprise; despite it being manifestly obvious to anyone who wanted to look at the totality of the data. Simply ignoring data because it does not fit with a preconceived model can be justified if the data is randomly distributed and constitutes clear ‘outliers’ from the observed trend. But to ignore a clear trend in the data and simply focus on what you want to see is pretty much guaranteed to end up producing a nasty surprise, pace Hamas.

Now this tendency to see trends, ignore data, and pointlessly project into the future is not only sadly common among the media and the political classes, (remember the US government not so long ago predicting budget surpluses into infinity on the basis of three data points?) it has determinate effects on likely future outcomes. When Hamas won the election the reaction of the US, Israel, and even the normally placid Europeans, was swift and condemnatory, and who could be surprised by this? After all, the Hamas Charter of 1988 does call for the destruction of Israel and cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the current “Nazi-Tartar” invasion by the West as reason enough. Indeed, there are undeniably a lot of data points out there pointing to actions by Hamas consistent with that interpretation and those ends. But even here there may be a ‘Bode Miller problem’ at work in that even here the past may prove no real guide to the future.

Consider that until into the 1990s the main body of the Irish Republican Army believed and proclaimed (quite seriously) that the UK government was holding the six counties of the North hostage as part of a colonial struggle, despite the exercise costing the rest of the UK millions of pounds each month with nothing in return except mainland bombings and death. Indeed, some breakaway Republican groups still adhere to the same beliefs. Yet, in order to believe such things one has to filter out massive amounts of data and project the few points that fit the preferred theory into the eternal and unchanging future. But when is the future ever eternal and unchanging? I am sure that much of Hamas is quite capable of continuing to believe in the forgery of the Protocols and act violently towards Israel, but let’s remember that one could have made the same projections about the IRA a decade ago, and yet they changed fundamentally, and quite unexpectedly.

Filtering the data to see only one trend negates potential futures. Seeing Hamas as a trend that cannot be stopped inevitably leads one to conclude that isolation and punishment is the only way forward. But Hamas has only ever known isolation and punishment. As such, proposals to cut-off aid in order to encourage capitulation is to fundamentally misread the data. True, there has been no IRA-like change yet, but to address the situation as an inevitable conflict preordained in the data will surely bring about such a conflict since we are blind to other possibilities.

So is expecting Bode Miller to win five gold medals the same as expecting Hamas to never change? Yes, but with one difference. Whereas Miller ‘failed’ on his own terms given the competition and the randomness of the day (after all, he might win six world cup races in a row in 2007), Hamas may only really ‘fail’ in the eyes of the Palestinians if the West and Israel are seen to make them fail. Key to the West and Israel doing this is to pick the data points they want to see (Hamas as unchanging and violent due to the trend line of the data) and project it forward.

Now, I freely admit that I know more about skiing than I know about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics, but it does seem to me that, as the millions of people who read their astrology every day attest, humans like patterns and can see them in almost anything. Add to this ‘the Bode Miller problem’ that we can ignore much of importance in order to see much of irrelevance since it reinforces the patterns that we want to see, and perhaps it is better to let Hamas run the schools’ budget rather than deprive them of it. After all, something new in the data might be the start of a new trend, both for Bode Miller and Hamas.

Dear Dr. Conley,

You won’t remember me. I took your “Introduction to Sociology” lecture in the Fall of 2001 at New York University; I received a B+ in the course and we never spoke. I liked your class because it was full of good conversation starters and softball assignments and my only complaint was that I was required to buy your 1999 title “Being Black, Living in the Red” (we discussed it for only half of one session and the connection was shaky). I thought of you again when a glamour-shot of you appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine. I experienced a brief thrill. But I can’t say I would have spent much more energy on you had it not been for your New York Times op-ed that appeared on December 1 of last year, “A Man’s Right to Choose.”

By now a rebuttal of your argument is old hat – it’s been four months – but gosh, I was riled up. A few days after I read your statement that “If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create,” I sat in Blue 9 Burger with my boyfriend and struggled, between bites, to articulate a scathing letter to the Times that would use remembered principles from Intro to Soc. to dismember your argument. My basic strategy was to remind you of one Tuesday morning when you asked your class to “Think about bathroom lines. The women’s line is always longer. Why?” By this point, my ears had perked up (conversation starter!). “They do more in there,” you continued. “They have to sit down, they have to use sanitary products, they change babies more than the men do. But the bathrooms are the same size as the men’s, and so the lines are longer.” I was convinced: for all members of society to receive equal treatment, their inequalities must be addressed. The women should have more stalls than the men, so everybody can pee and buy popcorn at intermission. So when I reached the portion of “A Man’s Right to Choose” when you described the “real work” of pregnancy as “morning sickness, leg cramps, biological risks and so on,” and used that reduction to argue that a male lifetime commitment to his child should render that nine-month female commitment fairly irrelevant, I was baffled. It seemed to me that pregnancy alone (forget the kid!) could and often does threaten a woman’s job, support system, and health. Her boss doesn’t care, her family sure does, and not in a good way, and her diabetes can’t handle it. Those problems aren’t solved with soda crackers and a back rub, Dr. Conley. What you glibly called “biological risks and so on” is a exclusively female set of predicaments, and should inform women’s rights accordingly.

I didn’t write that letter, and I didn’t need to. Critics much more intelligent and eloquent than I, namely Longview Fellow Carole Joffe, took you up on your challenge to examine “men’s claims to a role in the reproductive decision-making process” outside of marriage. In her open letter to you, she primarily focuses on the practical (or rather, impractical) implications of your proposal, finding that it “would create havoc in this already over-regulated and unnecessarily chaotic branch of the health care system.” Joffe points to surrogate mothering as an example of what happens when a pregnancy involves two contractually bound parties, and she asks how your proposal would accommodate these documented problems: “What happens when prenatal diagnosis in such a pregnancy reveals severe fetal anomalies? Does the father now have the right to change his mind about wanting the child that will result from this pregnancy? Even if he does relent and free the woman to choose an abortion, he is subjecting her to a later, more complex and considerably more expensive procedure. And will the father also have the right to monitor the pregnant woman’s behavior during her pregnancy? Will he obtain further court orders to forbid drug and alcohol use? If the pregnancy becomes “high risk,” will he ask a court to mandate bed rest, and to forbid sexual intercourse with others during the pregnancy?” I must say that though I was compelled by the anecdotes you shared about your ex-girlfriend’s abortion (against your wishes) and your friend’s ex-fiancee’s pregnancy (against his wishes), I found Joffe’s scenarios of more urgent concern. If you haven’t yet read her letter, I strongly urge you to do so – she also includes information about the “considerable efforts to involve men in the abortion process in appropriate ways.”

I’m imagining you. You’ve just read Joffe’s letter. You’re happy she paid you such attention, and you think she makes some great points. Mostly though, you’re frustrated. She took you too seriously. I don’t think you were actually trying to argue for a society that would subject women to such treatment, I think you were trying to urge your readers to think for a few moments about the incongruity of child support and abortion laws in this country. You’re a pro-choice guy with personal experience with abortion, and all you want to do is have a conversation. “I can accept that it is ‘your’ body but will someone please then just engage the argument that fatherhood should then be voluntary?” you beg of those who responded online to your Huffington Post piece, “Why My ‘Man’s Right to Choose’ Abortion Argument is Made from a Feminist Perspective.” You’ve used the site to admit you oversimplified in your piece, and to clarify your argument, and to say you shouldn’t have written that bit about how a committed dad “should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.” You’re aching for a real dialogue about fathers and mothers and pregnant women and men who impregnate them, and everyone’s focusing on that pesky question: But how would it work?

I’m interested in that dialogue too, and your initial question crossed my mind again today. “…[W]hen men and women engage in sexual relations both parties recognize the potential for creating life,” you wrote in December. “If both parties willingly participate then shouldn’t both have a say in whether to keep a baby that results?” And I wondered why, Dr. Conley, you chose to focus your energy solely on reproductive rights after conception. Unmanageable, Impractical, Outrageous! we scream when you imply coerced pregnancies and abortions. But what about contraception? Manageable, Practical, Sound. I don’t think both parties should have a legal say in whether to terminate a pregancy that results from consensual sex, but I do think both parties should be able to negotiate the potential for creating life on equal terms. And right now, male options – condoms, abstinence, withdrawal, vasectomy – just pale in comparison to the scads available to women. I’ve got abstinence, diaphragms, the sponge, spermicide, the female condom, an I.U.D., Plan-B, tubal ligation. And more significantly, I’ve got the pill, the patch, the shot, the ring, and sometime soon, a spray. If men and women conceive as equal partners, I wonder why you’re not upset about the gross inequality of contraceptive options for men and women, and why you aren’t taking notice of the trial study of a male birth-control ‘pill’ conducted by the pharmaceutical companies Organon and Schering AG that was set to finish the same month that your op-ed appeared in the Times.

Continuous and reversible male contraception isn’t a new idea. In 2003, Duke University Press published Nelly Oudshoorn’s “The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making.” In it, Oudshoorn states that the viability of such contraceptives was firmly established as early as the 1970s, and argues that the reason you don’t have a prescription for a male birth control pill is more of a cultural, political, and economic story than a scientific one. Excess testosterone, administered orally, as an implant, or injection, lowers sperm count dramatically. Recent research indicates that when combined with progesterone, the hormones can effectively disable sperm production – and clinical trials of the testosterone-progesterone combination are now under way in Europe and Canada. Alternatively, some researchers posit that rendering sperm unable to reach an egg would do the trick; a study at the University of Washington found that monkeys became infertile when immunized against eppin, a protein found on the outside of sperm that’s necessary for fertilization. Both Planned Parenthood and HowStuffWorks.com have informative and readable articles that support Oudshoorn’s contention that the barriers facing male contraception aren’t technological. Rather, she cites lack of funding, unwillingness of research participants, and larger cultural representations of masculinity that don’t have room for pharmaceuticals that cause male infertility (consider for a moment the ubiquity of Viagra and the total absence of male birth control) as the major obstructions. Nevertheless, Oudshoorn concludes that the advent of male contraceptives is inevitable – as is a reevaluation of gender roles and responsibility.

I think she’s right, and I think you’ll be able to have an equal voice in the bedroom before the clinic and the courts. I think you should focus your attention less on your partner’s body, and more on your own. “A Man’s Right to Choose” rests on the assumption that your sperm is a unavoidable surrender, and that years of child support payment depend on a sea of factors out of your control. Did the condom break? Did we conceive? Is she going to have this kid? If you could use a safe, reliable, affordable, and reversible medication that would allow you to decide whether you were capable of creating life – as women have for years – I doubt you would feel as victimized in this debate. Obviously male birth control couldn’t necessarily prevent situations like yours or your friend’s, but a man should have the right to choose what he’s offering his partner. I think we agree that the ideal number of abortions is zero – and providing men with a way to control their fertility gives them a stake in that number.

Permit me to remind you of the closing words of “A Man’s Right to Choose.” You wrote: “Better to deal with the metaphorical dirty diapers than to pursue an inconsistent policy toward fatherhood and an abortion debate that doesn’t acknowledge the reality of all actors involved. Otherwise, don’t expect anything more of me than a few million sperm.” I’d like you to expect more of yourself, Dr. Conley. I’d like you to consider practically where your agency, both as a prominent scholar with many press contacts and as a male sexual partner, is most valuable and viable. It’s not in the message boards of the Huffington Post, or in court orders. It’s back where you started, in the pages of the New York Times and in the bedroom.

Best Wishes,

Jane Renaud

I recently visited Dien Bien Phu, a dusty nondescript Vietnamese border town near Laos. Here, French fantasies of re-colonialism were dashed by a Vietnamese peasant army. Visiting Dien Bien Phu is not difficult for a progressive anti-imperialist left liberal. There are no mixed emotions, at least politically. Who can begrudge Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party their great victory in Dien Bien Phu? Even the Americans thought the French were a lost cause. They refused to help France directly when Dien Bien Phu was about to fall.

I was taken around by a motorcycle taxi to the different battlefield sites. They included the hills and other the strong points which the Vietnamese inexorably took, despite a heroic French defence, the French Commander’s bunker, and the war cemeteries. The motorcycle taxi driver stopped on the way to the war cemeteries and bought sticks of incense. He made me burn them for the souls of the dead, French and Vietnamese. I was surprised that he wanted me to burn incense sticks for French souls as well. I should not have been.

The Vietnamese did not fight a xenophobic war. They fought an “internationalist war”. This may sound strange in these days of “identity politics” when your ethnic or religious identity is supposed to determine the side you are rooting for, or whether you live or die. In his official memoir of the war, General Vo Nguyen Giap commander of the Vietnamese forces, considered the mastermind of the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu, thanked the French people and the French Communisty Party for their support of the Vietnamese cause. Ho Chi Minh, the first President of Vietnam and founder of the Indo Chinese Communist Party, was also a founder of the French Communist Party.

Ho Chi Minh’s bedroom and study are still as they were on the day he died. The books near his bedside include one on New Zealand Verse, another on the Indian nationalist leader Veer Savarkar, another on the history of Vietnam, another on Marxism and several other titles I could not read clearly. These books were written in English, German, French, Russian and Vietnamese. He read all these languages, and spoke many of them. No party hack, however sophisticated, could have put such an eclectic collection of books together after his death. It had to be his.

The Museum of Women in Hanoi described the support they received from women’s groups in the West opposed to the war. The Vietnamese highlighted, maybe even exaggerated, the international support they got from the people of countries who had sent troops to fight them – from France, the US and Australia. Peace activists traveled to Hanoi, and were welcomed as friends.

Watching the TV news of bombings in Baghdad every night, while visiting Vietnam, it was hard not to think about the current war against another US occupation. There are many reasons for Americans to oppose the US occupation of Iraq. It is leading to the loss of American lives. It is diverting resources away from fighting Al-Qaeda. It is exacerbating hatred of the US in the World. It is making the world less safe for Americans. There are also many reasons for Iraqis to oppose the occupation. It has yet to deliver stability to their country. It is contributing to sectarian violence. It is preventing Iraqis from taking charge of their own destiny. It is strengthening Islamic extremism in Iraq. And it is a foreign army.

These factors together may eventually lead to a parallel with Vietnam, when the costs of occupation – for the occupiers and the occupied – become less bearable than the consequences of a pullout. It is not clear that we are there yet – politically. In all the death and mayhem in Iraq, there is still a possibility that a democratic, secular multinational society may emerge from it. And it is not unimportant that Iraq’s neighbours – Iran and Turkey – still seem to believe that this is preferable to the alternative. This is not inconsistent with arguing the invasion was wrong, not just in international law, but for the people of Iraq. (The UN position.)

Whatever the similarities between the US occupations of Iraq and Vietnam, there is a critical difference in the attitude of the Viet Minh and the radical Islamists resisting the respective occupations. The former fostered and supported the creation of a peace movement from the anti-war movement in the US. They welcomed and highlighted the efforts of peace activists who came to Hanoi. The radical Islamists in Iraq are stunting the development of an antiwar movement. They are kidnapping and executing the very kind of people the Vietnamese welcomed and embraced.

[Last photo shows Harmeet Singh Sooden, a peace activist taken captive in Iraq.]

Well, it’s President’s Day in these United States. And it just so happens that I’ve recently become fascinated with that group of early Americans and Founding Fathers whose names resonate as huge and historical but about whom I’ll confess I’ve never known all that much. I’ve started reading biographies, some studies by American historians and scholars, The Federalist Papers, the correspondences between Adams and his wife Abigail and then between Adams and Jefferson. The latter are particularly amazing; they’ve changed me, changed how I think about Americanness, good and bad. The debate between Adams and Jefferson about what they thought democracy was supposed to look like is mind-blowingly interesting, really. Alexander Hamilton is a huge figure—a huge brain, half-mad, scary son-of-a-bitch, awesome, admirable. And Benjamin Franklin isn’t just the cute and cuddly little tinkerer with his kites and crap you hear about. The man was a polymath giant and pretty funny too. Madison, Jay, some of the lesser-known figures like Paterson and then Monroe—they really are massively fascinating figures.

But there will be no hagiography here. So, in lieu of semi-nationalistic ass-kissing I give you some tidbits from a project I’ve been working on here and there when the time and mood affords. It’s about 80 pages long now and it purports to get into the heads, subjectivity if you will, of some of those figures who are hard to think about in the flesh and blood, warts and passions, failings and complexities sort of way. I pretend no deep insight, just a feel for the ‘mood’ and ‘sense’ of some of these figures. I’ve made them talk and think in a modern-day man-on-the-street vernacular because it was pleasing to me to think of them that way. That is what made them real to me again.

Anyway, it’s my tribute to individuals who were simply extraordinary, other judgments, for the moment, being held aside. Finally, I apologize for the language, this being a family website. But you go where the muse takes you, damn it.

John Adams

Took a walk today.
Shit-ty day.
All the birds must
Be dead or goofing off.

Why do I get so
angry at birds?

Who knows.
But, I do.

We’ll have to get rid
Of all the animals
Sooner or later.
Or most of them.
Immolate them in a
Great fire
Like the early Greeks
And their
Stupid rites for
Worshipping
Pantheons of false
Gods.

Drive the animals into
The sea.

But for now let
Them putter on
The smooth hills,
Unknowingly.

When I move
My left foot
I feel rage.

I walked for
Seven miles.

The smooth hills were
Alive with animals
And their cries,
Crying out laments about
Death and simultaneous
Pleas for more sex.

They wouldn’t dare
Fuck the dead earth
Like I do.

You know it,
I know it,
Abigail knows it.

She cooked a plum pie
Last night.
I threw up when she
Lanced the skin.
It was like war in there,
Pulpy madness.
Tasted fine though,
Sweet and bitter
And fine.

Alexander Hamilton

This coat looks like
Crap and I’m getting fat.

Have the tailor executed,
I quipped,
Then burn his store
And rape the shit out
Of his horses.

It’s so motherfuckin’ boring in
The countryside.

Everybody thinks they
Know something.
Everybody thinks they’ve
seen something.
But they’ve only
Witnessed gleams
On the sides of barns,

Little neuron
Misfirings in the
Frontal lobes.

No one knows shit.
That much I know,
Without even dragging
My tired ass to
Delphi…
Which is simply
A rock, in the
Middle of nowhere,
For the sun to shine
Upon in the morning.

James Madison

Were we really
Like demi-gods
Back then?
Someone said that—
Demi-gods.

Now I can’t feel
my left leg and my
fingers always smell
like Gruyere.

The older I get,
The more I think
There should have been
One senator for
Every person.
That way, each
Person would
Have a senator.
And vice versa.

And we should have
Developed a new language
With a tense just
For lying,
And a verbal mood
For things we utter
Into young boys’ ears
To make them fear living.

And we should have
Designed new clothes
To seem more
American; so when
You put the great suit
On and latched up
the buckles,
tied on the extensions,
inserted the medallions…
The people would say
‘That’s an American coming’.

‘That’s an American suit.’

George Washington

To really fuck
With people,
Just don’t talk a lot.

Act like you already
Know something.
They keep talking
and you’re a
brick house…
It fucks with them.

Everyone is scared,
Everyone wonders whether
They are dumb,
Or ugly,
Or both.

Just stare and think
About something else.

I like to consider
The puckered assholes
Of youngish black girls
When people are
Talking.

Just keep talking
Idiot,
I’m thinking,
continue your prattle;
For me
Every new sentence
Is another black
Flower.

Thomas Jefferson

Just got in
From a long ride.

I wish someone
Would sing to
Me until their throat
Fell out and they died.
Then I would eat
A pheasant and
Some rich sauces.
Then I would go outside
And bury one
Of my goats up
To its head
Until the next morning.
You can blah blah
All you like, goat,
You’re staying in the ground
Until the sun comes up.
Then I would ride
Out to the end
Of the property
And cut my favorite
Tree down,
Unable to stand the
Sound of the
Goat’s cries.
Then I would
Take a bath with
Every fucking nigger
On the plantation.
One after the other,
In succession.
Then I’d write a letter
To France and go
to bed.

Dear France,
You made a pretty
Good frickin’ joke with
Me, didn’t you?
Ha ha.
Now who’s laughing?

George Washington

“How do you
stand so great?”
asked Morris,
“you’re like a
mortal Apollo
or a graceful
rhinoceros.”

“Huge.”

“While we twist
and dangle
like a coterie
of faggots.”

I didn’t answer.

But the truth was
Two stories.

One:
I place a chestnut
Betwixt my
Buttcheeks
Each morning.
I squeeze it all day
Long.
I’ve never ever
Dropped it.
That precious
Chestnut.

Two:
I think of the
Killing.
I think of the
Occasion I
Fucked my own
Sister, and
Without her
Approval.
In short,
I’m a man who’ll
be burning, soon.
I’m a man
Who waits
For the Devil.

Assuredly.

That’s why
I’m great.

James Madison

I’m pretty sure
My wife
Has the biggest tits
In Virginia.

I’m like, what,
Four foot ten.
Her left tit is
My size.

Each of those
Milky glands is like
A brother to me.
And they’re smart,
A dual nippled genius.

We fight and we talk
And we dream,
Usually in the
evenings, best in
The summers, amongst
The fireflies.

“Tell me a story, tit,
I’m feeling sleepy.
Of Tacitus
Or Catiline,
Or Benjamin Hoadly.”

When the sun goes
Down on the shitty
Little prairie, I’m usually
Thinking…

They’re a
Perfect union,
They’re a perfect
Union.

George Washington

I hated to see men
Dying,
I did.
But also I didn’t
Always give a shit.
Go figure.

Sometimes there’s nothing
Funnier than a stone
Dead human.

Sometimes you’re
Quivering to find a
Corpse somewhere,
Rigid, frozen, broken
Human forms.

Completely empty meaningless
Faces aren’t even
somethings.

They’re nothing.

I have a box
Full of shit.
It’s in the attic.
Dead people stuff,
Stripped from corpses.
Nice stuff,
Some silver.
Watches, hundreds of
watches,
Ticking away upstairs
For no reason.

John Adams

Skiddely skoo
Skibbeldy ska
I’m having a good one
Today.

I woke up
And farted right
In Abigail’s face.
You should have
Seen her look.

“I’m still alive,
baby,”
I was saying,
“I’m still alive.”

I grabbed a switch
and went after
John Quincy
With purpose.
“I’ll tan your
hide boy!”

But he’s like
50 now and
he’s bigger than me,
and pretty fast.

We ran around
In the yard
With no pants on.

He’s got a pretty
Big dick
For an Adams.

The sun was
Fine.
Warm and big
And spitting all over
The fields.

“This is something,”
I said to
One of the pigs
Later.
“We did it.”

Alexander Hamilton

I’d like to
Lay this whole gay
Thing to rest.

What is gay anyway?
Is it having
Certain kinds of
Feelings?
Is it a feel for
Fabrics? A certain
Specific inversion?

I loved him.
And when he
Died I sobbed and
thrashed like
Achilles and felt
Similar rages.
I too would have called
Down Apollo’s plague
Had I any sway
Over heaven’s affairs.
But Achilles’ mother
Was immortal and mine
Was just a slut floozy
From the tropics.

Slaves and sugar,
Dysentery and the clap,
Ain’t exactly fucking
Homer.

Truth is,
He had a lust
For death anyway,
He connected it with
Glory.
I remember how
Writhing his sinews
Were to touch them,
How hot his skin
Could get while
Still somehow icy.

In trajectory he
Was an arrow:
No swerving.

There was no
Battle he didn’t try
To die in.

That’s the story.

But I never fucked him,
Not once.

James Monroe

Just dinking around
the house today.
Started in on
Heavy cider at
Sun up.

Now my face
Feels like
It’s sliding off
My body,
Slowly.

The wife fell
Into the fireplace
The other morning,
Another case
Of the shaking.
She’s wrecked now,
Broken,
Over.

My Lesbia,
My Cynthia,
My Laura.
Tanto piu’ di voi,
quando piu’ v’ama

I’m going outside
To douse myself
In rain.

My love.
Somehow,
I failed you.

Benjamin Franklin

I’ve discovered that
It isn’t possible
To mate a warthog
With an earthworm,
Even if the earthworm
Fully enters the warthog
Genitally.

A dog won’t bang
A mouse,
Regardless of how much
you electrically
Shock them.

A cow and a
Horse will
Potentially get it on
In the evening,
Though, mysteriously,
Not always.

You can do pretty
Much anything you
Want with a goat.

If you replace
The innards of
A chicken with
Those of a piglet,
they both stop working,
unless I just
screwed up a few
of the connections.

The world is
Filled with gases,
Different kinds of
Gases, and that’s
about all the info
I have on that
Right now.

The Jews are
Watching everything
We do with great
Interest, no
Pun intended.

I’m gonna measure
The rest of the
Stuff in the house
Tomorrow.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last month, we packed our bags and headed to Delhi. We flew on a cheap ticket, got in at an ungodly hour, bleary-eyed but excited. Indira Gandhi International airport is typically third-world, featuring ramshackle transit busses, greasy walls, dull immigration officials, who, because we hail from across the border, gravely told us to fill out extra paperwork. Outside, we dryly smoked a Dunhill, spent close to an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the parking lot, traversed the dark swaths of the city by car, and slept at dawn. In the afternoon, wide-eyed, we headed out.

This was our first time in India. We thought we’d be a foreigner in a foreign land but were immediately struck by the obvious, or not so obvious: from the anemic flow of water in taps to the quality of light in winter, India is like Pakistan, familiar territory, terra cognita; the flora, colors, topography, architecture, traffic and beggars, suggested that we had been here before. Delhi seemed like a larger, sometimes grander version of Lahore.

Touring the city on rickshaw, we rattled past the very impressive Rashtrapati Bhawan, the old Viceregal Palace, where preparations for Republic Day were underway. Here, where Lord Mountbatten once determined the fate of the Subcontinent, we now observed posters featuring the visiting Saudi head-of-state, King Abdullah; police with semiautomatics trolling the wide boulevards as the odd monkey scurried by; stands and seating and portable toilets busily being set up for the throngs that would in days observe artifacts of Indian martial identity: ballistic missiles named after the gods Agni and Prithvi, as wells as Russian-built T-90 tanks. On TV later, we also watched colorful folk dancers and elephants participate in the festivities. Strangely, save the animals, it was all familiar, the sort of display we have often seen on the wide boulevards of Islamabad on Independence Day. Although we would have liked to stroll around, our rickshaw-wallah advised us against it.

Next we stopped at the Qutb Minar, the awesome two-hundred-and-forty foot tower constructed in 1199 to commemorate the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan by the Turk Qutbuddin Aibak. A testament to Indo-Islamic syncretism, the tower ostensibly shares the muscular aesthetic of many of the Hindu temples we have visited in and around Karachi but upon closer inspection, is adorned by Arabic script. Interestingly, we happened upon a secret carving of the elephant-god Ganesh on a foundation stone in the north wall of the complex (a must-see). As we ambled about, we were beckoned by a waving middle-aged woman seated reading a newspaper in one of the cupolas. Hand extended, she declaimed: “Photo!” We immediately complied, handing over our camera. She then meticulously documented our visit, taking pictures of us from different angles, framed by different arches, the Qutb Minar sometimes in the background, now on our left, now on our right. We were quite touched by her sense of duty to the solitary ambling tourist which, we figured, had something to do with native pride, patriotism. Having depleted most of our roll, she returned the camera and extending her hand again, said, “Tip please!” Parting with a ten rupee note, we thought, “Hand ho gaya.” On the way out, we mentioned the incident to another tourist who said, “She took me for a hundred.”

Finally, we headed to the Mughal Jamia Masjid, a smaller, duller version of the Badshahi Masjid in Lahore. We muttered some secular prayers in the courtyard then scaled one its minarets. After a vertiginous five-minute climb, we were suddenly upon Delhi; the city spread before us in twilight. And the flat skyline, the Shahi Mohalla, the adjacent squat neighborhoods, the bustle of humanity, reminded us of surveying Lahore from the Minar-e-Pakistan. We felt dizzy and elated and at that moment, claimed the city, and country.

India’s similarity to Pakistan extends further than the glance of the tourist. Both countries are fundamentally similar in significant ways, an obvious, even mundane observation but one mostly neglected in the media, academia, and popular discourse, within and without the Subcontinent. The edifices and detritus that we happened upon are testaments to a common past defined by competing religious, cultural and colonial heritages, repectively: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh; Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Pashtun, Balouchi, Sindhi; British, French, Portuguese. Many assume that in this common past there is the suggestion of common ground, of the Subcontinent functioning as a cohesive political entity. The vast area, however, has functioned only thrice as such: under the legendary Ashoka circa 273 BCE, under the Mughal Aurganzeb three hundred years ago, and most recently under the British. Regional aspirations have been the rule rather than the exception throughout history. The creation of the modern states of India and  Pakistan is testament to this historical momentum, of competing visions and ideas grating against each other, centralized state structure on one side, federalism on the other. And this dynamic may shape and reshape the Subcontinent in the future as it has for millennia.

That we share a common history is not an interesting claim. What is interesting, or rather, peculiar, is that in recent history, India and Pakistan have rarely occupied the same space in discourse. The only notable academics that have made a syncretic effort are the Harvard professor Sugata Bose and the Tufts professor, Ayesha Jalal. In Modern South Asia they note that they

“…aim at breaching the spatial and temporal divide which that moment has come to represent in the domain of scholarship. Despite a much longer shared history, marked as much by commonalities as differences, post-colonial India and Pakistan have been for the most part treated as two starkly antithetical entities. Only a few comparative analysts have risked trespassing across arbitrary frontiers demarcated at the time of partition, preferring to operate within the contours of independent statehood, even when these fly in the face of overlapping developments…Such scholarly deference to the boundaries of post-colonial nation-states in the subcontinent is matched by the attitude of Indian and Pakistani border patrols…”

Regionalism and other varieties of centripetalism continue to inform both states. In a rare article comparing the two countries, The Economist, notes

“India…sometimes wonders whether it really is one nation. Many of its 25 states are big enough and different enough from each other to be large countries in their own right. Bids by various regions for more autonomy were accommodated (most of the time), bought off or suppressed by the Indian government with varying degrees of finesse. Clashes of caste, class and creed periodically undermine order, if not India’s territorial integrity. India is pocked with small wars, from the tribal insurgencies of the north-east to the caste wars of Bihar, where upper-caste private armies slaughter dalits (formerly known as untouchables), and Naxalite (Maoist) militias murder landlords in return.”

Interestingly both countries – one with democratic credentials and one with sporadic and spotty democracy – resort to the army when regionalism threatens. The Pakistani army has crushed movements for autonomy in Sindh and Balouchistan while the Indian army has crushed those in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam. Both countries also invariably accuse each other of aggravating these movements when in every case, regional anxieties are local matters. For instance, the present phase of the independence movement in Kashmir – which the wonderfully erudite Pankaj Mishra has examined in a series of articles on Kashmir in the New York Review of Books – can be traced to a single bullet fired by an Indian soldier into a peaceful student demonstration in early 1990.

Both countries share the same parliamentary system of government (and the same archaic bureaucratic apparatus), a legacy of our shared colonial past. During our trip, the uneasy relationship between the center and periphery was highlighted by the Buta Singh episode: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came under attack for not sacking the controversial governor of Bihar who had been indicted by the Supreme Court for a “politically motivated report recommending Central rule in the state.” Other debates taking place in the parliament seemed familiarly silly: elected public officials arguing about the fate of Sourav Ganguly, the captain of the Indian cricket team (and the fact that Musharraf has managed to resist American pressure to vote against Iran in the IAEA when Manmohan had not.) Similarly, in Pakistan, a strident and ineffectual committee was convened last year to examine the functioning of the Pakistan Cricket Board.

We also share an unfortunate feature of the postcolonial nation state: systematic corruption amongst the political class. Pakistan’s corrupt politicians – Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, in particular – are infamous but in recent memory, at least one major scandal has rocked every India administration: the Bofors arms deal involved $30 million in kickbacks and implicated Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi himself; the $138 million sugar contracts scam in 1996 implicated another Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao; the screwy deregulation of the telecom sector under communications minister Sukh Ram; the dramatic “Operation Duryodhana” which featured eleven members of parliament caught in tape taking bribes for the release of development funds; and most recently, the Volker report on the Oil-for-Food scandal brought down the External Affairs minister, Natwar Singh. A BBC reporter observed, “Corruption pervades nearly every aspect of Indian life. Even mundane procedures such as applying for a driving license, school and university admission, and getting a telephone connected often need to be accompanied by a pay-off to an official to speed up the procedure.” Familiar indeed.

Not everything is familiar though. In the shadow of the mosque, we dined at Karim’s, a much celebrated restaurant: National Geographic called it a “magic little restaurant”; BBC raved about it; and various Indian newspapers employ only hyperbole to describe it: “every time [sic] on the menu is a celebration of special mughlai cuisine that fed and probably enslaved the Royals to their cooks, who in turn have been making parallel history by making their ways into people’s hearts through their stomachs.” We trembled with anticipation reading these elegies displayed in cutouts on the walls. As a discerning culinary tourist, we ordered three very different items: Jahangiri chicken, chicken liver, and paya, or goat trotters. Tragically, ladies and gentlemen, we were disappointed. The chicken had no kick, the liver was served soupy, and the paya was doused with haldi. In fact, save one exception (the rather amazing Kakori kebob in Lucknow), over the course of our jaunt we realized that Northern India cuisine doesn’t quite compare with Pakistani cuisine: you can’t go wrong in Pakistan whether you eat paya in the Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla, tak-a-tak in Chandi Chowk, or nihari on Burns Road in Karachi.

After dinner, we strolled through the Shahi Mohalla with an uneasy stomach. Unlike the Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla, the neighborhood does not features beautifully frayed (and restored) havelis, harmonium music, the tintinnabulation of ghungroo, but money exchanges for Pakistani currency, small restaurants, dim stalls, and a decidedly troubled bustle. We purchased a Jinnah hat, searched (and found) Razia Sultana’s forgotten grave, and then amid the squalor, happened upon the bright entrance to a subway station. As if entering the security gate at an airport, we passed through a metal detector while armed guards inspected our camera. Once inside, we were quite taken; Delhi’s spanking new subway system is very impressive indeed; Pakistan does not have anything like it. We descended underground via escalators as a young couple looked on, marveling at the march of technology, then followed, hesitantly, one foot at a time; riding the escalator was for them an act of supreme balance. We got off the train during an exodus and found ourselves at Connaught Place. Reminiscent of Mall Road or Liberty, Connaught Place is a vibrant market planned around a large roundabout. We purchased a saffron-colored T from the Lacoste shop to celebrate our Indian excursion, and then sat outside chewing on spiced yam, observing the Indian middle class.

Indian’s middle class is definitely larger than Pakistan’s although its size and purchasing power (or even moderntity) is disputable. Writing in The Hindu, novelist and columnist Shashi Tharoor writes,

“Whenever I hear foreigners talking about the Indian ‘middle class,’ I wonder what they mean…Conventional wisdom is that this middle class is some 300 million strong…and together with the very rich…has both the purchasing power and inclinations of the American middle class…Today’s economic mythology sees this new Indian middle class as ripe for international consumer goods…[but] manufacturers, I hear have been dismayed by the weak response of the market…the Indian middle class is not quite it’s cracked up to be.”

Tharoor scrutinizes the numbers citing a somewhat dated economic survey, perhaps, not be the best way of going about this sort of analysis. But if, say, mobile-phone users can be thought to be a proxy for the middle and upper classes, then as of 2005, combined, India’s middle and upper middle class number 60 million. (Back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that 5 in 100 people own mobile sets in India in comparison to 10 in 100 in Pakistan, 29 in 100 in China, and 47 in 100 in Brazil.)

Later that night, clad in our newly acquired Jinnah hat and saffron Lacoste T, we met a friend at a chi-chi bar called Shalom (which of course reminded us of the Karachi nightclub, Virgo Legacy). At four hundred rupees a cocktail, Shalom was outside the purview of the middle class. The dimly lit room had an exposed finish and was populated by fifteen, perhaps twenty people huddled around small tables. The crowd was young, affluent, and the music loud and loungy. We ordered a couple of very tasty Mojitos. A recent law-school graduate informed us with edgy pride that she is becoming a corporate lawyer to contribute to India’s GDP. Our conversation turned to the modern veneer of Delhi. We were told that bars such as Shalom have sprung up within the last couple of years. On the table besides us, we heard a rake coo to a Caucasian, perhaps another tourist, “You could be anywhere in the world in here.”

India’s recent spurt of economic growth after the “lost nineties,” the anemic 3% “Hindu rate of growth” that characterized the eighties, and its previous experiments with socialism has inspired many with certain confidence. The celebratory mood permeated the celebratory articles by New York Times reporter Amy Waldman late last year. South Asia Bureau editor of the BBC avers, “The new mood is summed up and also being shaped by the country’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. His book The Argumentative Indian encourages the liberal middle class to reclaim pride in their country and culture from the worst of the Hindu nationalists who hijacked them in the 1990s.” Sen’s wonderful project is a function of this turn-of-the-century mood. Arguably, then, The Argumentative Indian could not have been produced in the eighties (when Naipaul found India to be a Wounded Civilization, a step up, we suppose, from An Area of Darkness).

Across the border there is also a celebratory mood. Vishaka Desai, the President of the Asia Society in New York, observed, “I think there is a level of confidence because of the economic takeoff of Pakistan…I also think people feel that in the last five-six years, since Musharraf has come to power, there is a moderation that has taken place. Where it seemed before that it was going in the direction of more Islamisation, it is quite different and is something we should respect.” Last month, the stock market crossed the 10,000 rupee mark, a few weeks before India’s managed the same. Shaukat Aziz’s macroeconomic stabilization has resulted not only in a skyrocketing stock exchange but 8.3% GDP growth in 2005 (7% in 2004). In turn, cheap credit has flooded the market, availed of by the middle class (who are estimated at 30 million) who have purchased cars and houses with loans for the first time in decades. The newly economically enfranchised middle class has clamored for schooling, an interesting demand push phenomenon. Harvard economics Professor Asim Khwaja has documented the explosion in private school growth in the last few years in a surprising report. Manifestly, economic growth, whether in India or Pakistan, has real social (and political) implications. Fareed Zakaria astutely notes, “Compare Pakistan today—growing at 8 percent a year—with General Zia’s country, and you can see why, for all the noise, fundamentalism there is waning.”

A dated issue of The Economist (a few months before Musharraf took power and before the present Congress administration) posed the following question:

“Secular, democratic India v sectarian, coup-prone Pakistan: no question, surely, which would win a political beauty contest? Set India’s $30 billion of foreign-exchange reserves against Pakistan’s near-bankruptcy, India’s world-class software engineers against Pakistan’s outdated cotton mills, and awarding the economic prize looks just as easy. Yet the comparison is not as lopsided as it seems at first. Travellers to are often surprised to find its people looking more prosperous than Indians. Pakistan’s income per head is indeed higher than India’s, even leaving aside the giant black-market economy. Pakistan also appears to be a more equal society, even though most members of parliament still belong to the landed elite. India may boast that democracy has churned the social make-up of its political class, yet the caste system, despite half a century of deliberate erosion, still blights Indian society. In Pakistan, you would not see a scene witnessed by your correspondent on a railway platform in: a small, dark-skinned man being shooed off a bench by a corpulent, lighter-hued woman as though he were a stray dog. As for Pakistan’s fabled lawlessness, Delhi’s murder rate last year was roughly the same as Karachi’s.” 

Of course, India is roughly seven times Pakistan’s size by population; its economy is three times Pakistan’s; and its labor force has an edge in magnitude and education. The million man strong BPO industry may be small in a nation of a billion but a million remains a large number, and its skill-set is noteworthy; and since Y2K, a number of these BPO shops – Wipro and Infosys, in particular – have become international players. Moreover, India’s democratic tradition and institutional infrastructure might prove to sustain future growth more effectively and evenly than in Pakistan.

A few drinks into the evening, we wondered, why did we expect India to be any different? We then remembered back to December 2003, when a large contingent from Bombay arrived in Karachi to attend the Kara Film Festival. The first such a delegation to cross the border in a very long time, our guests  – including the charming film director Mahesh Bhatt and his beautiful daughter, Pooja – were not only blown away by their reception but by Karachi’s cultural and nightlife, and infrastructure. At the rollicking closing party at a warehouse in Korangi, an Indian confided to us after a few drinks that he thought that “women here are veiled and men have beards. That’s what the newspapers say.”

While we were in India, we had the misfortune having the Times of India delivered to us daily. Every day the newspaper ran a front page article on Pakistan – not China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, but Pakistan. And the headlines were rarely newsworthy. We don’t think that any English-language Pakistani paper fetishizes India like the Times. When we had asked a friend what the deal was, he told us that we should read The Hindu, which is published in the South; the establishment resides in Northern India.

Of course, the news bulletins the state run Pakistani channel, PTV, for example, features damning reportage on Kashmir. The state run news channels, PTV or Indian Doordarshan, also represent another problem: newscasters speak languages that sound foreign, made-up, because the Indian state machinery has worked hard at Sanskritizing Urdu, while official Urdu in Pakistan has become increasingly Persianized and Arabisized. The establishments of both countries have put great effort in defining us as each other’s “Other”; put simply, being Indian means not being Pakistani and being Pakistani means not being Indian.

The state also selectively excavates history: whereas many Pakistani textbooks commence with the Indus Valley Civilization and jump to the Muslim conquest of Sind by the teenager, Bin Qasim, ignoring the preceding Hindu dynasties and Buddhist civilization, many Indian textbooks feature the fictional “Indus-Saraswati civilization” and exclude the fact that Mahatama Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist. Rewriting Indian history has become not just a cottage industry but a serious endeavor and matter. Although such revision is associated with the previous administration of the fundamentalist BJP, we were unsettled to learn from the intrepid weekly, Tehelka, that Macalester professor James Laine’s work on Shivaji has been banned in Maharastra. And we were shocked to learn that state issued textbooks in Gujrat praise Hitler and the “internal achievements of Nazism”! Of course, the curricula of Pakistani madrassas (attended by about 1% of Pakistanis), are also horribly and ludicrously retrograde; the Hindu is often the enemy. Indeed, “The Idea of India in the Popular Pakistani Imagination” and the “The Idea of Pakistan in the Popular Indian Imagination” could make for fascinating doctoral theses.

Mercifully, the youth in either country watches Indus Music and MTV Asia, not the state-run television channels. We speak the same language because we watch Indian movies (our favorites being, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, Tridev, Yashwant, Lagaan, and Saathyia) and listen to Pakistani music (music shops in Delhi are stocked with CDs of Junoon, Noori, Fuzon, Strings, and Hadiqa). We, the generation, generations removed from Partition, travel light; we don’t carry much baggage. A sense of the familiar, not nostalgia, informs our sentiments. We want to move on. In Twilight in Delhi, one of the first novels in English from the Subcontinent (the first being Mulk Raj Anand‘s Untouchable), the great Ahmed Ali depicted the decline of old Delhi. Like millions of others including our family, Ali fled India at Partition for Pakistan. During twilight in Delhi, however, we had a different vision than Ali; one of a common past and future, of the celebration of commonality. That’s why it’s our generation that will breach the divide. We returned home that night, slept easily, anticipating the morning after.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
Literary Pugilists, Underground Men
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Beyond Winter in Karachi (or the Argumentative Pakistani)
Dispatch from Karachi
Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)
And, the original Critical Digression

Professor Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish the text of a speech he gave at a memorial service for Edward W. Said on September 29, 2003. Professor Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanties 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. He has published a book in the Philosophy of Language and Mind in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell). He has two forthcoming books from Harvard University Press — Self-Knowledge and Intentionality and Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity. He has published various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology.

Edward Said: A Personal and Intellectual Tribute

There are a very few intellectuals ––Bertrand Russell, E.P. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky come to mind in the English-speaking world— whose writings and whose lives provide a kind of pole that thousands of people look toward so as to feel that they are not wholly lost or marginal for possessing instincts for justice and humanity, and for thinking that some small steps might be taken towards their achievement. Edward Said was, without a doubt, such a man. The daze and despair so many of us here at Columbia feel, now that we have taken in that he has gone, is only a very local sign of what is a global loss without measure. And to think of what it must be like for his own brutalized people to lose him, is unbearable.

I.

Edward was, as they say, ‘many things to many people’, and though he was too vast to be contained by a mere university, even one as uncloistered as Columbia, he was a teacher and took great pride in being one. So let me say something about that first.

To put it seemingly frivolously, he was deeply ‘cool’. I say ‘deeply’ and mean it. One day, the best undergraduate I have ever taught and my very favourite student, said to me “Prof. Said is really cool”. Now I, who have been trying to be cool for decades, was mildly annoyed by this, and said, “Look, I can understand that you think he is a great scholar and intellectual and a peerless public figure, but why ‘cool’? He doesn’t wear black, he despises popular music, he hangs out with well-heeled professors and other rich and famous people, and he is preposterously handsome –how uncool can you get!” She looked at me dismissively and said, “All that’s really not a big deal. It’s –like– really on the surface.”

Edward’s influence on the young came from his refusal to allow literature to offer merely self-standing pleasures. The connections he made in even our most canonical works, between the narrations of novels and the tellings of national histories, between the assertions of an author and the assertion of power by states, between the unconscious attitudes of a seemingly high-minded writer and some subtle illiberal tendency of social or national prejudice, drew to the study of literature numberless students who, out of a quest for worldly engagement, or more simply out of a cosmopolitan curiosity, demanded just such an integrity of words with morals,. Not long ago while giving a lecture in Honkong, I found that students were passing around a faint and barely readable photographed parchment of one of his unpublished manuscripts — a contribution to a symposium held ten thousand miles away — as though it were a handwritten poem by a Renaissance courtier. No other literary critic has had such a, literally, planetary influence.

And he achieved this without any of the heart-sinking, charmless, prose of the literary avant-garde, nor the natural, unaffected dullness of the old guard. His writing, like his speech, had the voltage of dramatization and (it has to be said) self-dramatization, which no young person could find anything but cool.

II.

Because of his great political courage, because he repeatedly broke his lion’s heart in the cause of Palestinian freedom, because so much of his most familiar and famous writing was intellectually continuous with those political themes and struggles, and because it was expressed with a ceaseless flow of political ardour, Edward’s intellectual legacy will be primarily political, not just among the young, nor just in the popular image, but also in the eyes of academic research. There is no gainsaying this. And it must be so. It will be right to be so. This side of him was of course manifest to his own people, but it was also central to so many others for whom the Palestinian struggle is a reminder that the fight for the most elementary of freedoms is not yet over. Since so much has rightly been written about it, I want to briefly situate that most vital part of his life and thought in the larger setting of his humanism, of which we often spoke in our conversations inside and outside the classes we taught together, and on which he had just completed a book, when he died. It was perhaps the only ‘ism’ he avowed (he was, despite being in the midst of an anti-colonial struggle, consistently critical of nationalism), and he avowed it with a stubborn idealism, in the face of its having been made to seem pious and sentimental by the recent developments in literary theory.

Underlying the civic passions and the charged impressionism of his political and literary writing was a deep and structured argument of greater generality than anything that is usually attributed to him. (He was always impatient with arguments, and would tell me that it was a philosopher’s obsession, keen to find philosophers as bad as lawyers on this score. But he was wrong about this, and came around to saying that something like this argument was indeed a thread in his work.)

Two elements of frameworking breadth have abided through the diverse doctrinal formulations of humanism, from its earliest classical hints to the most subtle surviving versions of our own time. They can, in retrospect, be seen as its defining poles.

One is its aspiration to find some feature or features which sets what is human apart –apart from both nature, as the natural sciences study it, and from what is super-nature and transcendental, as these are pursued by the outreach of theology and metaphysics.

The other is the yearning to show regard for all that is human, for what is human wherever it may be found, and however remote it may be from the more vivid presence of the parochial. The dictum, ‘Nothing human is alien to me’, still moving despite its great familiarity (and despite the legend about its trivial origin), conveys something of that yearning.

These two familiar poles framed the argument that Edward presented throughout his life as a writer.

At one pole, to explore what sets the human apart, he invoked early on in his work a principle of Vico’s, that we know best what we ourselves make –history. Self-knowledge thus becomes special, standing apart from other forms of knowledge. And only human beings, so far as we know, are capable of that self-knowledge.

At the other pole, to make urgent the Senecan dictum, he plunged into the topical, warning us of the disasters that will follow, and which indeed are already upon us, if we conduct our public lives as intellectuals with an indifference to the concerns and the suffering of people in places distant from our Western, metropolitan sites of self-interest.

Relatively fixed poles though they may be in a highly changeable set of ideas we call ‘humanistic’, these two features are not ‘poles apart’. They are not merely unrelated and contingent elements of humanism. They must be brought together in a coherent view. And Edward tried to do just that.

To bridge the distance between them, he started first at one pole by completing Vico’s insight with a striking philosophical addition. What Vico brought to light was the especially human ability for self-knowledge, and the special character possessed by self-knowledge among all the other knowledges we have. This special character which has affected our paths of study in ways that we have, since Vico’s time, taken to describing with such terms as ‘Verstehen’, “Geisteswissenschaften”, or as we like to say in America,‘ the Social Sciences’, still gives no particular hint of the role and centrality of the Humanities. It is Said’s claim, I think, that until we supplement self-knowledge with, in fact until we understand self-knowledge as being constituted by, self-criticism, humanism and its disciplinary manifestations (‘the Humanities’) are still not visible on the horizon. What makes that supplement and that new understanding possible is the study of literature. To put it schematically, the study of literature, that is to say ‘Criticism’, his own life-long pursuit, when it supplements self-knowledge gives us the truly unique human capacity, the capacity to be self-critical.

Turning then to the other pole, how can a concern for all that is human be linked, not just contingently but necessarily, to this capacity for self-criticism? Why are these not simply two disparate elements in our understanding of humanism? Said’s answer is that when criticism at our universities is not parochial, when it studies the traditions and concepts of other cultures, it opens itself up to resources by which it may become self-criticism, resources not present while the focus is cozy and insular. The “Other’, therefore, is the source and resource for a better, more critical understanding of the ‘Self’. It is important to see, then, that the appeal of the Senecan ideal for Said cannot degenerate into a fetishization of ‘diversity’ for its own sake or into a glib and ‘correct’ embrace of current multiculturalist tendency. It is strictly a step in an argument that starts with Vico and ends with the relevance of humanism in American intellectual life and politics. Multiculturalism has not had a more learned and lofty defence. It may in the end be the only defence it deserves.

James Clifford in a now famous review of Orientalism had chastised Edward, saying that he cannot possibly reconcile the denial of the human subject in his appeal to Foucault in that work, with his own humanist intellectual urges, reconcile, that is, his historicist theoretical vision with the agency essential to the humanist ideal. But if the argument I have just presented is effective, if the methodical link between the two poles I mentioned really exists, it goes a long way in easing these tensions. It allows one not simply to assert but to claim with some right, as Edward did, that criticism is both of two seemingly inconsistent things: it is philology, the ‘history’ of words, the ‘reception’ of a tradition, at the same time as it allows for a ‘resistance’ to that tradition and to the repository of custom that words accumulate.

The argument, thus, gives literary humanism a rigour and intellectual muscle, as well as a topicality and political relevance, that makes it unrecognizable from the musty doctrine it had become earlier in the last century –and it gives those disillusioned with or just simply bored with that doctrine, something more lively and important to turn to than the arid formalisms and relativisms of recent years. For this, we must all be grateful.

III.

I first met Edward twenty years ago when I noticed an incongruously well-dressed man at a luncheon talk I gave as a fresh recruit at the Society of Fellows, on some theme in the Philosophy of History. With a single question, asked without a trace of condescension, he made me see why the issues of substance and urgency lay elsewhere than where I was labouring them. I knew immediately that he was a good thing, though I did not know then that I would never change my mind. One had heard so much about him. No person I knew had more political enemies. They did not find it enough to hate him, they wanted the whole world to hate him, and they weaved fantastications and myths in order to try and make it happen. For those who admired his indomitable political will, these scurrilous attacks against him made him seem even more iconic, and for those who knew him well, his seductive, self-pitying responses to them, made him even more dear.

An essential part of his great and natural charm was that friendship with him was not without difficulty, nor without steep demand. He would do his best sometimes to appear a credible swine, if for no other reason than to raise a spark in the conversation. I recall when we were on the stage together at some public meeting, after the idiotic fuss that was made about his having thrown a stone in the air at a site in Lebanon which had just been evacuated by the Israeli army. The person who introduced us began with me, and gave me the modest introduction I deserved, and then went on to poetic heights about him, and concluded by saying that he was the author of over twenty books. As she finished, I leaned into my microphone and said “Over twenty books! Somebody has to stop this terrorist! First he throws stones! Now he is cutting down trees!” He immediately leaned into his own microphone, and said, “My dear fellow, you should worry just a bit that for a man who has not written that much, that remark will come off as bitter rather than funny.” On another occasion, we were sitting in his flat last New Year’s Eve for dinner, with a gathering of his friends from the Modern Languages Association, which had just had its annual meeting in New York City. The talk that evening had had much to do with feminism in the academy, the usual drill about the feminine pronoun, and all of us had self-consciously displayed our impeccable commitments. The conversation came around to whether my wife and I would be moving our daughter from Brearley to the newly started school for the children of faculty at Columbia University, a subject of vexed indecision for us. Edward asked us impatiently, “So are you bringing her to the Columbia School? What the hell is holding you up?” And I said, “Well, I am not sure, she is very happy at Brearley”. And he said, throwing a glance around at the women, “Who cares, she’s a GIRL!!!” This teasing sometimes became willfully, even if delightfully, dangerous. Charlie Rose once asked him on television, if he had read a recent book on Wagner, which had come to the extraordinary conclusion that his music was so infused with anti-Semitism that if someone who was not anti-Semitic heard his operas, he or she would become anti-Semitic by the end of it. What, Rose asked, do you think of that conclusion? Edward, who despised anti-Semitism as much as anyone I know, but perfectly aware of the obvious dangers of the subject for a person with his political commitments, leaned forward and said, as if in earnest: “You know, I tried it. I got all my Wagner out and heard it all day and half into the night.” He then paused, allowing the menace to build up, and then, shaking his head, “ It didn’t work.”

Yes, he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and he was a great and good and inspiring and beloved man. It is very hard to bear the loss of someone, so large of heart and mind.

As I wrote those last words, I was reminded that that heart and mind were lodged in a body, which, for all its robustness, was cursed with a wretched illness that he fought with such heroism for a dozen years. Reminded too of that more muted and less recognized form of heroism -forbearing and endlessly giving- with which his remarkable wife Mariam stood by his side each day for all those years, and of that obscure and nameless thing she will need now that he is gone, to be without the presence of the most present person she, and his children, and his friends, have known. I wish her vast reserves of it, whatever it is, and of every other good thing.

[See also this remembrance of Edward Said by S. Asad Raza.]

A review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett.

Isaiah Berlin resurrected the line “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, and famously used it to divide thinkers into two camps:

The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.

Daniel C. Dennett is a fox. In fact, he is perhaps one of the greatest foxes alive. Dennett has had more great little ideas than anyone else I can think of. And his foxiness has a fractal quality: it exists at every scale. He has written about philosophy, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and much more. Within philosophy, he has written on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, the problem of free will, and much more. Within philosophy of mind, he has written on… well, you get the idea. He is astoundingly prolific in his output of ideas and arguments for dealing with a given issue, and an adept at inventing what he calls “intuition pumps” (thought experiments, illustrative examples, new vocabulary–like “intuition pump!”, you name it) to help us grasp difficult concepts. He has written books for specialists (The Intentional Stance) as well as for the well-educated lay reader (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) and everyone in between, but in his new book he targets and reaches out to his widest audience yet, “the curious and conscientious citizens of my native land–as many as possible, not just the academics. (I saw no point in preaching to the choir.)”

Dennett’s project in Breaking the Spell is to use the methods and tools of science to examine religion, just as science examines any other natural phenomenon, and to write about it in such a way that it is accessible to everyone. The book is divided into three parts. Dennett is particularly eager that religious people read his book, and for this reason spends the first third of the book motivating and justifying his project, and even just appealing to his audience to keep reading:

…in spite of my best efforts I will no doubt outrage some readers, and display my ignorance of matters they consider of the greatest importance. This will give them a handy reason to discard my book without considering just which points in it they disagree with and why. I ask that they resist hiding behind this excuse and soldier on. They will learn something, and then they may be able to teach us all something. (p. 21)

Here is Dennett’s own description of his goal:

While I recognize that many religious people could never bring themselves to read a book like this–that is part of the problem the book is meant to illuminate–I intend to reach as wide an audience of believers as possible. Other authors have recently written excellent books and articles on the scientific analysis of religion that are directed primarily to their fellow academics. My goal here is to play the role of ambassador, introducing (and distinguishing, criticizing, and defending) the main ideas of that literature. (p. 23)

Dennett says that scientists study fields like sports and cancer, where miracles are sometimes said to happen. Maybe they don’t and maybe they do, but:

…the only hope of ever demonstrating this to a doubting world would be by adopting the scientific method, with its assumption of no miracles, and showing that science was utterly unable to account for the phenomena. (p. 26)

He says the same goes for religion. And for this reason, even the Roman Catholic Church at least goes through the motions of objective scientific investigation of miracles when considering candidates for sainthood. If believers really want to show that something supernatural exists, they should welcome a scientific examination of the facts. Frankly, this portion of the book may be a bit tedious for those (the choir) who are already convinced that a scientific examination of the phenomenon of religion is a good idea.

The second part of the book is where the real fun starts. Dennett says that there is no reason that religious practices cannot be accounted for in terms of our understanding of evolutionary biology. He begins with theories of the origins of folk religion, and then shows that as human culture grew in scope and sophistication, these ideas developed into fully-fledged organized religions. This is covered in considerable detail, and he makes many interesting points along the way. One of his strategies here is to do with religious memes what Richard Dawkins did with genes thirty years ago: he adopts their point of view. In other words, what characteristics would a religious meme have to have to reproduce itself successfully and spread? Note that memes are:

…passed on to one’s offspring by non-genetic pathways. Speaking one’s “mother tongue,” singing, being polite, and many other “socializing” skills are transmitted culturally from parents to offspring, and infant human beings deprived of these sources of inheritance are often profoundly disabled. It is well-known that the parent-offspring link is the major pathway of transmission of religion. Children grow up speaking their parents’ language and, in almost all cases, identifying with their parents religion. Religion, not being genetic, can be spread “horizontally” to nondescendents, but such conversions play a negligible role under most circumstances. (p. 86)

This method of looking at things from a meme’s-eye point of view makes possible a number of interesting observations, and also explains why so many religious memes share striking similarities, for example, a systematic invulnerability to empirical refutation. It also helps to explain the similarities of various religious practices across different religions, for instance, the ritual of walking unharmed over a bed of hot coals has religious significance in India, China, Japan, Singapore, Polynesia, Sri Lanka, Greece, Bulgaria, and other places. (I know from my own childhood that Pakistan is no exception: walking on burning coals has at least been incorporated into the mourning rituals that are practiced by the Shia, along with self-flagellation.)

Just to give a flavor of the kinds of interesting insight that are made possible by the use of memetics in Dennett’s hands, I will quote him at some length here:

Domestication of both plants and animals occurred without any farseeing intention or invention on the part of the stewards of the seeds and studs. But what a stroke of good fortune for those lineages that became domesticated! All that remains of the ancestors of today’s grains are small scattered patches of wild-grass cousins, and the nearest surviving relatives of all the domesticated animals could be carried off in a few arks. How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance.They even got shelter and emergency medical care thrown in as a bonus. The price they paid–losing the freedom of mate selection and being slaughtered instead of being killed by predators (if that is a cost)–was a pittance compared with the gain in offspring survival it purchased. But of course it wasn’t their cleverness that explains the good bargain. It was the blind, foresightless cleverness of Mother Nature, evolution, which ratified the free-floating rationale of this arrangement. Sheep and other domesticated animals are, in fact, significantly more stupid than their wild relatives–because they can be. Their brains are smaller (relative to body size and weight), and this is not just due to their having been bred for muscle-mass (meat). Since both the domesticated animals and their domesticators have enjoyed huge population explosions (going from less than 1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass ten thousand years ago to over 98 percent today–see Appendix B) there can be no doubt that this symbiosis was mutualistic–fitness-enhancing to both parties.

What I now want to suggest is that, alongside the domestication of animals and plants, there was a gradual process in which the wild (self-sustaining) memes of folk religion became thoroughly domesticated. They acquired stewards. Memes that are fortunate enough to have stewards, people who will work hard and use their intelligence to foster their propagation and protect them from their enemies, are relieved of much of the burden of keeping their own lineages going. In extreme cases, they no longer need to be particularly catchy, or appeal to our sensual instincts at all [as was the case with folk-religious memes]. The multiplication-table memes, for instance, to say nothing of the calculus memes, are hardly crowd-pleasers, and yet they are duly propagated by hardworking teachers–meme shepherds–whose responsibility it is to keep these lineages strong. The wild memes of language and folk religion, in other words, are like rats and squirrels, pigeons and cold viruses–magnificently adapted to living with us and exploiting us whether we like them or not. The domesticated memes, in contrast, depend on human guardians to keep going. (p.169)

It is for such inventive ways of presenting ideas that Dennett is such a pleasure to read, and so easy to understand. Notice that in the above passage, wild animals and plants were domesticated by humans because they provided a mutual benefit. So what was in it for the domesticators of wild memes? Dennet examines this question in some detail next, but I must try to refrain from rewriting a short version of his book here.

The last part of the book is an examination of where religion stands today. This is the part of the book that is explicitly motivated by the current tensions that religion is producing in the world, and here is where Dennett urges his reader toward a serious reexamination of his or her own faith. A religious person might argue that for all of Dennett’s reasoning about religion, he is missing the point. Accepting religion and accepting God is not like accepting a conclusion, it is more like falling in love. To which Dennett says:

…it isn’t just like falling in love; it is a kind of falling in love. The discomfort or even outrage you feel when confronted by my calm invitation to consider the pros and cons of your religion is the same reaction one feels when asked for a candid evaluation of one’s true love: “I don’t just like my darling because, after due consideration, I believe all her wonderful qualities far outweigh her few faults. I know that she is the one for me…

But Dennett wants you to evaluate your love anyway, and he is right. He ends by first examining the question of whether morality is possible without religion (guess what his answer is!), and then by considering what our attitudes toward religion should be today. The whole book is marked by a careful attention to documenting sources and studies whenever an empirical assertion is made (this reminded me of Steven Pinker’s books, where hardly a paragraph goes by without his citing of several studies to back up what he is saying!) and, indeed, it also succeeds in being just about as accessible as is possible to a very wide audience while applying sophisticated analytic tools to its subject. Dennett has done what he wanted to do, and it is an extremely important and timely achievement. I strongly urge you, specially if you are religious, to click here to buy the book, and read it, will you?

Have a good week!

My other Monday Musings:
Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding
A Moral Degeneracy
In the Peace Corps’ Shadow
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

The sudden ascension of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court within a few short months, time mostly taken up with opposition to their appointments, has precluded deeper reflections on the world we have lost. It is no longer possible to imagine the Supreme Court as a guardian of individual rights against state intrusion. Indeed, quite the opposite is occurring: the new Court is likely to sacrifice civil liberties given what they judge to be a “compelling state interest.” Already, the present Court has deprived aliens, permanent residents or sojourners, of civil liberties as a necessity of our undeclared wars, and citizens are next. Except for Justice Kennedy’s 2003 attempt to enlarge homosexual protections with an appeal to international law, a move Justice Scalia fiercely attacked as submission to the “homosexual agenda,“ the present Court has shown little interest in guaranteeing, let alone extending the rights and protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. A solid statist majority, shorn of the libertarian streak of the old American right wing, will see to it that Bush and his successors, in the spirit of their great autocrat predecessor, can say: “L’etat, c’est moi.”

The golden age of what might be called “constitutional liberalism,” begun with the appointment of Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937 and ending with the retirement of Justice William Brennan in 1990, is over. During this just a bit more than half a century, justices such as Black, Douglas, Warren, Brennan and Marshall wrote opinions that said in simple, eloquent English that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights applied to every citizen in almost every human circumstance. Under their tutelage, the Court became the ultimate protector of individual liberties, a role these justices cherished.

It was not always – in fact – never was thus. This remarkable band of brothers that ruled during the Court’s Golden Age was an historical anomaly. One suspects that students are still taught Chief Justice Roger Taney started the Civil War in 1857 by ruling in the Dred Scott case that slaves were property and their owners’ rights protected by the Constitution. What students are no doubt not taught is that the Supreme Court before the 20th Century was essentially a chancery court for rising corporate capitalism, magically transforming corporations into legal persons and availing them of most 14th Amendment protections, even while depriving African-Americans of same in Plessy versus Ferguson (1896). No greater thefts of civil rights save the Indian treaties have been sanctioned before or since.

Before the Golden Age, there were prophets with honor. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, not for nothing known as the Great Dissenter so little did he carry a Court majority from 1902 to 1932, and Justice Louis Brandeis, the Progressive era’s leading legal genius who sat on the Court from 1916 to 1939, anticipated constitutional liberalism but made little law. They along with Benjamin Cardozo, in his short six-year tenure ending in 1938, were the minority that protested the Supreme Court dismantling of the first New Deal.

Flush from his 1936 landslide victory, Franklin Roosevelt tried to add to their number by packing the Court with younger, more cooperative members, and for his hubris, suffered the loss of much of his second mandate’s power. Roosevelt, out of revenge and even out of spite, nominated in 1937 Hugo Black, the senior senator from Alabama and certified fire-eating New Dealer, to the Court. As Roosevelt knew, senatorial courtesy would protect Black, and the Senate confirmed him within days. As New Dealer Harold Ickes put it, the economic royalists, as corporations were known as in those days, would get a good licking now.

Son of a dissolute small town merchant in a hardscrabble, red clay county pushed up against the Appalachians, Black (1886-1971) got his start as a lawyer defending poor people against corporations, and was proud that unlike most of his peers in rural Alabama, he had never taken a dime in retainer or bribe from the railroads and other trusts then cracking open the South for new profits. Instead, he represented clients suing corporations for personal injuries, job-related disabilities, and wrongful separations, the latter often related to union activities. He hated big money and monopolies and became one of the crusading Democrats that brought the political impulses of populism into the party. He became a Klansman too, a fact that got him elected the first time to the Senate but that almost ruined him shortly after being named to the Court.

A radical New Dealer, Black was against Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act because it propped up big business through legalized price-fixing. He was likely the first national politician to call for national health insurance. He originated bills for the minimum wage and the 30-hour week, and was the author of the groundbreaking fair labor standards act. Though Black regretted it, he like Roosevelt gave in to southern Democratic demands that minimum wage protections be stripped from agricultural and service workers, thus re-consigning, in effect, African-Americans in the South to a Jim Crow economy.

Black was the leader, the inspirational force for the Golden Age, serving for 34 years between 1937 and 1971. At first something of an apprentice “Great Dissenter,” Black soon learned the craft of how to put together majorities. With William Douglas as his great ally, he began making law, affirming the right to counsel for poor defendants in federal trials (1938), demanding racial integration of juries (1939) and due process for black defendants in criminal trials (1941). He ordered the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi (1962). He defended freedom of speech, association, press and religion with an old-fashioned, Bible-thumping injunction that the Founders had said that Congress shall make no law respecting these freedoms, and they meant it. He brooked no compromises with the Bill of Rights, seeing in it a citizen’s sole defense against government tyranny. He defended it against all comers, even those liberals like Felix Frankfurter, and by implication so many others since, who believed that the protections of the Bill of Rights must be balanced against other rights and privileges granted in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights contains “absolutes,” that were not mere “admonitions,” in his words, but prohibited prejudicial action of any sort. Unable to get his colleagues to apply the entire Bill of Rights in defense of citizens in altercations with local and state authorities as well as to federal jurisdictions, he painstaking and relentlessly sought over the course of 34 years to achieve the same result piece-meal.

Black defended Communists, pacifists, and said with generosity, pornographers. They were all protected, as were their rights to a living. Tyranny, he said in Chambers versus Florida (1940), was the great truth of human history, and those who suffered the most at tyranny’s hand were almost always “the poor, the ignorant, the numerically weak, the friendless, and the powerless.” The Court’s job was to affirm their rights – to stand up to governments and stop them from taking rights away. This was the kernel of constitutional liberalism, whether the Court found itself deciding for equal protection under the law and equal opportunity, or against extracted confessions, lawyerless suspects, and unreasonable search and seizure by the agencies of the state.

Sadly, the Golden Age began to decay by the late sixties, as a quick look at Justice Black’s last decade suggests. It had gone about as far as these brothers could take it. Black worked hard to put the Court behind equal protection under the law for African-Americans and for desegregation of schools and other public facilities, and for his pains, became anathema in his native South. Integration, on the other hand, was social policy to him, a matter of community preference, not jurisprudence. He stepped down just as the Court began hearing the cases that moved the federal government beyond simply assuring equality of opportunity to toward equality of outcomes. The Court’s many attempts to protect the rights of crime suspects led him to despair that that the Court may be aiding in letting guilty criminals go free.

From early on, he carried forward perhaps the two most crucial flaws of constitutional liberalism, and perhaps of the political liberalism of his time. First, Black treated property rights as sovereign. Picketers on company land were trespassers; even bus counter boycotters raised his ire. Second, the President’s powers in war were virtually supreme. He voted to affirm putting Japanese Americans and Japanese resident aliens in camps during World War II, because President Roosevelt and his generals had declared it a military necessity. His brothers Earl Warren (also the governor of California who had urged internment) and Tom Clark (U.S. attorney general at the time) later regretted their votes for it; Hugo Black never did. Consider the consequences. Of the first flaw, property, not opportunity or dignity is what our law protects, and we live the consequences daily. Of the second flaw, perhaps the word Guantanamo suffices.

The Golden Age is over, over by a good 15 years, though Clinton’s giddy Gilded Age spread money enough around to help us forget. The Supreme Court now decisively returns to is historic role as the protector of privilege, but this time it adds the defense of autocracy to its brief.

(You will find an extensive archive of Justin E. H. Smith’s writing at www.jehsmith.com.)

Justin E. H. Smith

Contemporary evolutionary biology tells us that there are five distinct evolutionary lines in which bipedalism has emerged independently, including, among other species, lizards (see R. C. Snyder, “Adaptations for Bipedal Locomotion in Lizards,” American Zoologist 2 (1962): 191-203); kangaroos (see M. B. Bennett, “Unifying Principles in Terrestrial Locomotion: Where do Hopping Australian Marsupials Fit In?” Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 73, 6 (2000): 726-735); and, obviously, birds.  Yet the perception persists that these other species are not really bipedal, but only balance on their hind legs for long periods, and that moreover they cannot be bipedal, since as we all know the ability to walk on two legs is peculiar to humans. 

As Craig Stanford writes in his popular book, Upright: The Evolutionary Key to Becoming Human: “Kangaroos and birds such as ostriches and penguins are bipedal — sort of. But they are built on an entirely different body plan and are not, strictly speaking, reliant only on their legs for transport. Even if we throw in all the extinct forms of terrestrial animal life, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and its kin, the percentage of bipeds is still remarkably small. And birds and dinosaurs differ markedly in their brand of upright posture,” etc. (Houghton Mifflin, 2003, Preface).

Such popular resistance suggests that bipedalism functions something like language, even if it is not quite as contested, in the way human beings conceive themselves: an adaptive trait among others that is inflated to tremendous significance as a way of marking out human uniqueness.

But surely language truly is a unique feature of humans.  Or is it?  To cite just one recent treatment of the subject, Lesley Rogers and Gisela Kaplan give substantial evidence that numerous species of mammal do in fact make referential sounds deserving of the name ‘language’.  Studies of ground-dwelling mammals, they affirm, “including squirrels, suricats…, marmots, and Diana monkeys, have confirmed that the ability to discriminate between different alarm calls that signal the presence of different predators exists in a variety of species and that such signals lead to predictable responses by the receivers” (“All Animals are Not Equal: The Interface between Scientific Knowledge and Legislation for Animal Rights,” in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)).  The authors infer from these studies that “many other mammals, not in the primate order, possess referent signals in their vocal repertoires and may thus show at least rudiments of higher cognitive abilities.”

Language and bipedalism have long served as the most promising criteria for marking out human distinctness among natural beings.  It is noteworthy that in antiquity ‘featherless biped’, while tongue-in-cheek, was as a definition of ‘man’ the only available alternative to ‘rational animal’.  In the 17th century some, such as the philosopher Margaret Cavendish, explicitly identified language as dependent upon upright posture, while the anatomist Edward Tyson had to devote almost as much energy to arguing that chimpanzees can walk on their hind legs as to arguing that they cannot speak.  Both doctrines reveal an incipient atheism and materialism, and Tyson was not radical enough to accept them both. 

Tyson had a long career in comparative anatomy, and it is clear that he approached his subject with passion and wonder.  He makes a telling debut with his study of the “Scent-Bags in Poll-Cats” in 1676.  In 1682-83, Tyson performs a great number of dissections, most of which take place in front of members of the Royal Society and the results of which are subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions.  Noteworthy among these is  the “Tajacu, seu Aper Mexicanus Moschiferus, or the Anatomy of the Mexico Musk-Hog,”  as well as the study of a porpoise, an American rattlesnake, and numerous species of worms and insects.  This is followed by a roughly 15-year hiatus in which he appears to have been engaged primarily in medicine, only to return to comparative anatomy in 1698 with the “Carigueya, seu Marsupiale Americanum, or The Anatomy of an Opossum,”  followed by the Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris, Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man a year later. 

In his early anatomical frenzy, Tyson’s approach seems prima facie to be to dissect any animal he can get his hands on.  But further consideration seems to reveal more specific concerns.  On the one hand, he is concerned to study species that produce unusual secretions, particularly odoriferous ones, but also venom.  In the human being, Tyson discovers in 1693 the scent-producing gland in the penis responsible for the secretion of smegma, a part now honored by the name ‘Tyson’s gland’.  On the other hand, he is interested in what Mary Douglas, in her study of the dietary prohibitions of Leviticus,  would identify as borderline cases: taxonomically puzzling species such as marsupials and marine mammals, the species that cannot be easily accommodated in folk-taxonomical systems.  In the Orang-Outang, Tyson tellingly expresses regret that he has never been able to procure a zoophyte—a borderline creature par excellence. 

Quadrupeds, generally speaking, have served in Western thought as the paradigm brute, and ape perambulation, as much as any other purported ability, has persistently threatened the neat categorization of them with the cows and horses.  One way around this problem has been to identify all of their four limbs as ‘hands’: thus the taxonomic designation suggested by Tyson, ‘quadrumanes’.  Animals, then, are the things that go on all fours, whether on four feet as the cows, or four hands as the ape, but humans are the creatures that, uniquely, have two of each. 

Another approach is to deny that being able to balance on one’s hind limbs for extended periods is a true marker of bipedalism.  Thus Pliny in his Natural History is able to describe the satyrus indicus as “an animal, a quadruped, in the tropical mountains of India, a most pernicious one; with a human figure, but with the feet of a goat; and with a body hairy all over.”   And Aristotle maintains in the Historia animalium that bipedalism in apes is just a flourish, that the creature’s underlying nature is to go on all fours.

Tyson believes that the ape is capable of both sorts of motion, and tellingly notes that bipedalism reveals the ape’s humanlikeness in more ways than one: “When it goes on all four, as a Quadruped,” he writes, “it seems all hairy: When it goes erect, as a Biped, it appears before less hairy, and more like a Man.”  He presumes that the knuckle-walking he had observed in the infant chimpanzee had been a consequence of the weakness resulting from its debilitating illness, and that a healthy ape would naturally prefer to walk on its hind limbs. 

Tyson (correctly) adduces evidence for ape bipedalism from the direction of the hair follicles on his specimen’s limbs: “The tendency of the Hair of all the Body was downwards; but only from the Wrists to the Elbow ‘twas upwards; so that at the Elbow the Hair of the Shoulder and the Arm ran contrary to one another.  Now in Quadrupeds the Hair in the fore-limbs have usually the same Inclination downwards, and it being here different, it suggested an Argument to me, as if Nature did design it as a Biped.”

But can they speak?  This would be something more than a proprium quarto modo– a property universally shared by the members of a species that nonetheless does not serve to constitute their essence.  Tyson explicitly sees the view that apes are capable of language as atheistic, and as a ‘romance of antiquity’.   As Richard Serjeantson notes of the early modern period, “An unsuitable anatomy… was one of the principal reasons for denying animals the capacity for articulate speech.  They were widely taken to lack the right equipment of palate, larynx, tongue, lips…  For this reason… the miraculous constitution of the human speech organs served as a powerful proof in natural theology” (“The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2001)).

Tyson shares in the majority view of animal language in the early modern period, yet, as we shall see, his own account of ape anatomy in the region of the mouth and throat poses a serious explanatory problem for him.  No one in the 17th century is on record as defending the view that animals were capable of the sort of rich and flexible, referential vocal utterances that we today attribute to a grasp of syntax in human beings.  Much more common was the view that animals were equipped to communicate to one another whatever they might have the need to communicate within the context of their animal lives, whether by calls or by visual signals, and that there was no reason in principle to consider this sort of communication inferior to human speech.  This latter view is associated with certain radical deniers of human uniqueness among creatures, such as Girolamo Rorario with his 16th-century treatise That Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Humans, as also with those figures who hoped to set the art of physiognomic divination on a proper scientific footing, such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Bulwer. 

Tyson for his part is very clearly worried about the particular physiological likeness of apes and humans in the region responsible, at least in humans, for the production of speech: “As to the Larynx in our Pygmie,” he writes, “I found the whole Structure of this Part exactly as ‘tis in Man…And if there was any further advantage for the forming of Speech, I can’t but think our Pygmie had it.  But upon the best Enquiry, I was never informed, that it attempted any thing that way.  Tho’ Birds have been taught to imitate Humane Voice, and to pronounce Words and Sentences, yet Quadrupeds never; neither has this Quadru-manous Species of Animals, that so nearly approaches the Structure of Mankind, abating the Romances of Antiquity concerning them.” 

Here, then, Tyson explicitly accounts for all reported instances of teaching animals to speak as mere imitation, and not as indicative of any conscious activity.  He goes on to write of the larynx that “Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Galen have thought [it] to be the Organ which Nature has given to Man, as to the wisest of all Animals; for want perhaps of this Reflection: For the Ape is found provided by Nature of all those marvellous Organs of Speech with so much exactness… that there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto; for, according to these Philosophers, Apes should speak, seeing that they have the Instruments necessary for Speech.”

Well then, why aren’t they speaking?  Tyson repeats  his conviction that the only explanation lies in the fact that anatomy is not, to borrow a phrase, destiny, that one cannot infer from the organs a creature has what it will be able to do: “From what is generally received, viz. That the Brain is reputed the more immediate Seat of the Soul it self; one would be apt to think, that since there is so great a disparity between the Soul of a Man, and a Brute, the Organ likewise in which ‘tis placed should be very different too.  Yet by comparing the Brain of our Pygmie with that of a Man; and with the greatest exactness, observing each Part in both; it was very surprising to me to find so great a resemblance of the one to the other, that nothing could be more… Since therefore in all respects the Brain of our Pygmie does so exactly resemble a Man’s, I might here make the same Reflection the Parisians did upon the Organs of Speech, That there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such Actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto: for then our Pygmie might be really a Man.”

But this is an odd sort of reasoning, particularly in view of the fact that, as concerns bipedalism, Tyson is perfectly willing to reason that the ape is capable of this simply in view of the fact that “‘tis sufficiently provided in all respects to walk erect.”   Why does sufficient provision translate into a capability in the one case but not in the other?    

By the late 18th century, we find Lord Monboddo offering a different account of Tyson’s findings regarding the presence of speech organs in apes, but the absence of speech.  For him, the great apes are “a barbarous nation, which has not yet learned the use of speech.”  He argues that since, as Tyson has shown, they possess the organs necessary to speak, what prevents them is only that they have never been educated, just as “men, living as the Orang Outangs do, upon the natural fruits of the earth, with few or no arts, are not in a situation that is proper for the invention of language.”   Among 17th-century writers, only Louis Le Comte employs a similar racist comparison between non-European people and apes, but even he continues to see speech as a marker of absolute distinctness separating all humans equally from all apes: he writes of apes that their “Shape, Stature, Countenance, Arms, Legs, and other Members of the Body, are so like ours, that excepting the Voice only, one should have much ado not to reckon them equally men with certain Barbarians in Africa, who do not much differ from Beasts.” 

One of the great ironies of early modern anthropology is that it is the religious and creationist world-view of the sort defended by Tyson, with its commitment to supernatural and permanent species reification, that spoke in favor of common origins for all of humanity with clear genealogical and essential criteria for discriminating the ‘lowest’ humans from apes.  The opposition to such a reified view of species, already celebrated by Locke, is a part of the story of the emergence of modern scientific racism—once humanity is no longer conceived as uniquely a reflection of God, then greater and lesser proximity to the ape becomes thinkable.  For Lord Monboddo, the lower boundary of humanity may be crossed by a well-trained orangutan, and there is nothing about the people dwelling near the lower boundary that ensures their superiority to it.  For Tyson, in contrast, the Cartesian criterion remains in place: there must be an absolute division between humans and animals; animal speech would threaten to collapse this divide; therefore, it is unthinkable. 

We may speculate, though, that by opening the door to ape bipedalism, Tyson himself has set Western thought on that path that will lead to the dissolution of the neat ontological divide between humans and animals, and that will bring in its wake so much social havoc, and so much scientific progress, over the following 300 years. 

If we wish to continue jealously guarding language as something uniquely our own, and to inflate it into some quasi-divine human virtue, we should ask ourselves whether this is any less small-minded than the ongoing effort, Craig Stanford its latest spokesman, to do something similar with bipedalism– an impressive skill, to be sure, but far from godly.  It is amazing to me that old pieties about the special place of humans in the cosmos can still sell books, even when the case can no longer be made on the basis of profound, theologically based convictions, and must instead rest on trivial features of our species such as gait and call.  I suspect that there’s some kind of dim self-congratulatory buzz coursing through electric eels too, some faint self-love rooted in the singularity of this species’ special adaptive trait, which, unlike language and bipedalism, really is a rarity in nature.   

For nearly a year after S. and I moved to Scholes Street, the laundry around the corner was operated by a broad-faced, solid, and grinning man we called Mr. Danny. He was a source of much discussion between us; in the early morning S. once saw Mr. Danny leaving the home of another neighborhood icon, a woman who stood in her pinwheel-decorated front yard yelling at her dog Sean; one afternoon I thought I heard him arguing with a woman in his supply room, peered in, and saw only Mr. Danny. His face was freckled and wrinkled about the eyes and neck, and he wore polo shirts in bright, aggressively unfaded shades of green and yellow. The short sleeves revealed arms roped with muscle, and his legs were strong too. I imagined he might have been a swimmer or a weightlifter ten or twenty years ago, but in his eyes I could rarely read a subject other than laundry.

What interested us in Mr. Danny in the very first place was the manner in which he ran the shop. It was impossible to wash anything out from under his glare. He stood behind a dingy white countertop, folding a baby’s underpants, and stared at S. and I as we shoveled our wet clothes out of the machines and into one of the many wheeled wire baskets that cluttered the narrow room. If on the way to the dryers I nudged another cart with my own, he’d drop the baby’s panties, shoulder me out of the way, and steer my basket swiftly to an empty dryer, all with a static grin. If I dropped a sock on the floor he’d pick it up, smooth it and hand it back. Once I put liquid detergent in the softener chute and Mr. Danny’s grin persisted though his eyes were panicked; when he finally consented to let me right the problem myself, his hand hovered above mine as I tipped water into the machine.

Unfortunately unable to manage everything alone, Mr. Danny employed several women to handle the heavy volume of ‘drop-off’ laundry, and when they spread the work across the counter and there was no place for him to stand, he sat in a folding chair by the door and watched them fold. His gaze would sometimes drift to the Telemundo gameshow playing on a TV set in the corner, but just as quickly would snap back to the dryers to catch a red display read “1 minutes left.” Then he’d watch the machine spin, and would rise as it shuddered to a stop. His eyes were just full of laundry: even when S. saw him leave our neighbor’s home he was carrying hundreds of wire hangers.

Towards the beginning of our relationship my feelings toward Mr. Danny ranged from fascination (remember when he balanced a bulging 30 pound trash bag of laundry perfectly on that tiny scale?) to irritation (but what about when he sold me that dirty, dented Coke?). Eventually they settled firmly in the resentment corner, and I let my laundry accumulate for weeks to avoid Mr. Danny’s pained smile as I folded a shirt with a wrinkle down the front. I had once found doing laundry relaxing. Now I was consumed with dread.

So when Mr. Danny disappeared from Danny’s Laundromat a few months ago, I was shocked not to feel an ounce of relief. His departure was so sudden and unexplained. I did my wash under Mr. Danny’s nose one week, and returned a few Saturdays later to find a slight, smooth skinned woman with wire rimmed glasses and a pink shirt giving Mr. Danny’s stained and sticky linoleum floor a thorough scrub. The television was gone and the machines were priced higher. I left my sack of wash in her care, something I’d never done with Mr. Danny, and the pink ticket she gave me read “Amy’s Laundromat.” I went home with a hollow feeling.

S. was equally put out. “Maybe she’s his wife,” she offered feebly. Privately we referred to Amy as Mrs. Danny for a few weeks, but in the end it just felt desperate. Mr. Danny really was gone, and we were free to fold in peace.

But I couldn’t fold. Every time I set foot in there, I threw my bag on the scale and fled.

I did trust Amy to handle my wash, and it was convenient, and her style did impress (I asked her when tomorrow my clothes would be ready, and she offered “We open at seven”), but the truth seemed to be that I missed Mr. Danny. I didn’t want to do my laundry my way while Amy power-vacuumed the floor. I wanted to seethe under Mr. Danny’s direction, and I wanted to imagine that my devil-may-care detergent measuring bothered him as much as his crazy grin killed me. It was a reliable tension, probably in the end as soothing as laundry alone had once been.

I thought I saw Mr. Danny the other day on the 6 train. I was standing at the back of the car; his broad shoulders were squeezed into a middle seat and he was snoozing, his chin settled firmly on his chest. I wanted to get closer to verify the I.D. but some shopping bags and school kids blocked my path. Suddenly I noticed his pants: from the knee down they were wrinkled and there was a greasy smudge at the hem. It’s not Mr. Danny, I knew, when the train stopped and the stranger looked in my direction, I felt what Mr. Danny would have wanted me to feel. I wanted to take that man’s pants and clean them myself.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

On Christmas day 2005 the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died in her homeland. News of her death was kept private, apparently at her own request, until the requisite obsequies were observed, so obituaries did not appear in the press until mid-January 2006.

The passing of such an artist gives every reason to ask myself again where such vocal excellence comes from. It is no good telling me about the mechanics of voice production. There is a mystery to beauty, and anyone who was ever at a performance of Nilsson’s will tell you that such resplendent power, glistening acrobatic vocal technique, warmth and stamina could bring down the house, not just with applause and cheering, but with the certainty that one had been in the presence of greatness. This is one of the imponderables of theatre life—you never know when you are about to run into unexpected revelations. Only recently I experienced one of the great nights in the theatre when the Chekhov International Theatre Company presented Declan Donnellan’s production of Twelfth Night in Sydney. So much panache, but with subtlety; how effective the choreographed movement; what intimacy and musical delivery of the text (in Russian with surtitles). And what actors. Surprised by joy indeed! Well, this sometimes happens in the opera theatre which is one of the reasons people look forward to going.

Then there is Australia’s own great soprano, Joan Sutherland. Australia has produced many fine singers, Nellie Melba, Florence Austral, Marjorie Lawrence and Lisa Gasteen among them, but Sutherland truly was La Stupenda, as the Italians dubbed her. We have all had the experience of being told about the supposed greatness of this or that performer or work of art, only to find ourselves disappointed and perplexed by the actual embodiment of the said diva, actor, book or film. Well, I had the pleasure of seeing Sutherland on many occasions towards the end of her career when she returned to Australia to perform at the Sydney Opera House, and I always marvelled at how easily her voice would fill the largest hall. One of the most astonishing sounds for people visiting Australia for the first time is the noise of kookaburras with their uproarious, cackling birdcalls. Hearing their laughter is sheer delight. But perhaps never did a more beautiful human sound come out of Australia than that of Joan Sutherland’s voice. Joan Sutherland, OM AC DBE, one of the few non-Americans to receive a Kennedy Center Honors award.

My admiration for these two singers has nothing to do with canary fancying, for which I have little time. Neither do I exclude other singers from the pleasure dome. I think you should take your vocal pleasures where you find them. I enjoy Trent Reznor and Jeff Buckley too, Jussi Björling and Waltraud Meier, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Charles Trenet, Nina Simone. Where do you stop? I do not like the development of cults around singers. For example, the cult of Callas leaves me cold, even if Callas was a great singer too. Also, I dislike ranking people, insisting on one’s favourites at the expense of other vocal grandeur. One should be properly grateful for any kind of performing excellence, wherever it might derive. There is this thing called the glory of the human voice. Its equivalent in poetry is the enormous range of poets whose largeness of spirit and expressive power revives and delights. Well, Nilsson and Sutherland have different kinds of voices, of course. They are both sopranos, but what a difference in sound. Nilsson’s voice was often compared to that of a laser beam, cutting through vast Strauss and Wagner orchestras with consummate ease. Sutherland’s voice was also big, with an agility that took you on the wings of song to dazzling heights that astonished with their incandescent nobility.

One of the interesting similarities about Nilsson and Sutherland was that neither of them played the diva. They were both immensely practical, down to earth kinds of people with a sense of humour needed to cope with the ups and downs of the theatrical life and the egos one sometimes encounters in performers of a certain kind and ability. These singers were humble before the greatness of the works they performed but did not allow themselves to be sold short either. I can never forget Nilsson walking onto the platform of the Concert Hall in the Sydney Opera House at the all-Wagner concert she gave in 1973. She was clearly nervous, and this after her long-lived career and success in all the world’s major opera houses. What a lesson to other performing artists about priorities, about duty towards greatness, about accepting a gift with due respect. But you would also have to have a sense of the ridiculous to survive epic Wagner and Donizetti runs, the nightmare roles of Salome and Elektra, the stratospheric coloratura of Bellini’s I Puritani or Massenet’s Esclarmonde. I’ll bet there was plenty of laughter backstage after, or during, performances. You would go insane if you took all that high seriousness around with you after curtain call. There are two well-known anecdotes regarding Nilsson’s humour: managing to put Herbert von Karajan in his place—quite an achievement—wearing a miner’s helmet to make fun of Karajan’s dim lighting in his Ring; and once quipping, when asked if she had any dependents, ‘Rudolf Bing’, then general manager of the Met.

Nevertheless, there still remains the question of beauty, where it comes from. It will always remain a rhetorical question, since there can be no answers to it. Keats was wise: ‘ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ However, ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’ is not nearly good enough for our latter-day rationalists who think everything can be explained. Beauty is going to turn out an adaptive Darwinian mechanism for them. The human is a mutation of the gene pool in a dress, or suit. These people will tell me about vocal training, using the diaphragm correctly, scale practise, hard yakka as we Australians might call it. Necessary, but not an explanation. There are no explanations for Tristan, the statue of David or the taste of Australian shiraz. Don’t tell me about harmonic progression, quarrying marble in Carrara or the terroir of Western Australian soil. These are banal explanations for wonders, just as when we fall in love we realign the universe on inexplicable principles. And who would ever try to explain love? Only a very foolish person. When I hear Nilsson singing the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung or Sutherland performing ‘At The Balalaika’ I know that explanations must stop and that I must submit myself to a different form of knowledge, the knowledge that comes from feeling, into words, into the world. We know all too well that terrible things happen on this earth, but that is no reason to disavow greatness. That is a striking hypocrisy exhibited by nihilists who take delight in nothing so much as their own certainty that everything is awful, except, perhaps, their own pontifications about why things are awful.

What a privilege it is to have heard these artists. One gives profound thanks for their splendour, the gift of their singing, the pleasures of their amazing artistry.

                                                                     *
                              Music

When thinking of the world, or tired, or excited,
And taken with the moment,
Music brings detachment
To our bizarre involvements.
The subtlety of this dwarf planet’s errors
Contracts to ample harmony, to water, wind and fire,
When life seems stale desire
And chaos the only factor to remember.
To hear the warp, the earth’s emphatic surface,
Pressing from thick scores of black and white
Is passionate, past circumstance or time,
And breaks the barrier of the flesh’s senses.
Music is geometry of space
Bending to our doubting minds the final, purest shapes.

Written 1975 Published A Temporary Grace 1991 43

Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti sing the Brindisi from La Traviata here. 4′ 51”

Imagine this: a small group of white supremacists collects in Strauss Park near where I live in New York City, and then marches up Broadway, past 125th Street, into the heart of Harlem, all the while chanting anti-African-American slogans of the vilest kind. They have a permit from the city for their march. They use the n-word, they call black people monkeys, they taunt them with reminders that their ancestors were slaves owned by the white people’s own ancestors. They call black people lazy, stupid, and repeat every stereotypical epithet from the centuries of historical insult and injury to which African-Americans have been subjected in this country. An angry crowd gathers around the marchers. African-Americans yell some threats at the marchers, vowing to hurt them. Words are exchanged, and a shouting match erupts between one of the march leaders and a black man. The black man’s mother is subjected to a particularly repulsive and obscene insult by the white man. Suddenly, the black man cannot take it anymore, and lashes out at the marcher, striking him down to the ground and kicking him until he is seriously injured. A few other young and hot-blooded black men jump into the fray and attack some of the marchers. The black men are arrested for assault and battery and taken to jail.

In an editorial, the New York Times very rightly blames the black men for responding to a legal expression of free speech with unnecessary violence, and calls for them to be punished severely. Articles in papers all over the country express the ultimate importance of free speech for all citizens, and correctly remind us that no matter how offensive we may find what people say, we must never respond with violence. They correctly tell us that we must not be cowed by the threats and irrational behavior of the African-Americans, who seemed unable to respond to words with words of their own, and instead resorted to threats of violence and even real violence. All over the world, decent people who wish to live in peace with all races wonder what it is about African-Americans that makes them prone to violence, and unable to engage in rational debate. Those who are particularly fair-minded, realize that it must have been the leaders of the African-Americans who manipulated them for their own ends. Others make the helpful suggestion that it is wrong to condemn all African-Americans and that it is only a few extremist elements among them that resort to violence whenever they see something that they find insulting. President Bush tells us that most African-Americans are peace-loving people, after all. Still others explain that it is poverty which has driven African-Americans to such violent behavior. A white professor at Harvard warns of an imminent and inevitable clash of black and white civilizations. Many black intellectuals also have the courage to condemn the violence of their people. Everyone reasonable agrees that the most important thing to come out of this is that free speech is something that must be protected at all cost. It is what makes us a civilized people.

What’s wrong with this picture? This is not just a rhetorical question. It is something to think about very carefully and deeply. One of the reasons that I am writing this (other than Robin’s urging me to do it) is that in the last few days, I have received quite a few emails from 3 Quarks readers asking me to explain what it is about Islam that makes it so intolerant and irrational. These are well-meaning individuals, hoping to figure out a way to avoid what many have come to see as the inevitable “clash of civilizations”. How should they be engaging the Islamic world when it appears to them so incapable of reasoned debate and discussion? They mean no insult, but I still wonder if they wrote to their black friends during the Rodney King riots, asking them to explain why black people behave so irrationally? No, they didn’t. Why didn’t they? Because while they do not give sanction to criminal and violent acts of looting and vandalism, they can understand how a collection of historically oppressed people can be driven to irrational rage by repeated acts of injustice and caricature. Look, one can say, “It was wrong of Adam to slap Bob,” but no one says, “I don’t understand why Adam had to stand up for his mother, and slap Bob.” As Edward Said said in a different context, to understand something is not to condone it.

But Muslims have resorted to death-threats against the publishers of the cartoons. Yes, unfortunately they have. Did you know that Michael Moore regularly receives death threats from right-wing nuts? Do you know that the Dixie Chicks have received countless death-threats from American patriots? Do you know how many death-threats Martin Scorsese received from Christians for making The Last Temptation of Christ? Did you know there were Christian bomb-threats to movie theaters right here in New York City that played the film? Well, there were. Is this, then, a defense of the Muslims who have made such threats? No, it emphatically is not. It is also not an attempt to say that there was anything like the globe-spanning demonstrations and death-threats that Muslims are engaging in now, in any of the cases that I mention. What I wish to say is that while there is a difference between those cases and what is happening in the Muslim world right now, it is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. Despite their crusades and holy wars of the past, most Westerners do not any longer have an attachment to religion strong enough to easily give up their lives for it, and this is a good thing in my view. But it is not a good thing to forget what such an emotion can be like. Others still have it and one must deal with that reality.

What is of importance to understand here is that (however unfortunate this may be) one of the few remaining sources of dignity for many in the largely impotent world of Islam, unable to compete militarily or economically with the West and unable to remain free of interference from the West because of the curse of holding much of the world’s oil-supplies, is their religion. This is the last redoubt of their pride. And this is why they lash out so angrily against what is correctly perceived by them as a deliberate provocation and insult to their religion by their erstwhile colonizers and oppressors via crude and offensive caricature. Those of you who cannot stop yourself from loudly and continually proclaiming the right of newspapers to publish whatever they want (no one serious is really arguing with you there), please take a few minutes to condemn the cheap provocation of the Danish newspaper which published the revolting cartoon of Mohammad as a terrorist. If the New York Times publishes a vulgar and racist cartoon about African-Americans, for example, my first reaction will not be to proclaim that they have a right to do so, which of course they do. My reaction might be to boycott the paper and otherwise bring attention to what they are doing. Do this, condemn the racism of the Danish newspaper, then lecture me about free speech. If the Muslim world saw large-scale Western condemnations of the cartoons and demonstrations in which white Christian Danes stood shoulder to shoulder with their Muslim fellow-citizens in protesting these racist insults, it would have a much needed calming effect and demonstrate that the Danes truly are a well-meaning people. Instead, the endless prattling-on about principles of free speech and how Islam doesn’t care about it, only serves to confirm to many in that part of the world that the West sees all of the vast and diverse landscape of Islam only in terms of crude generalities of contemptuous enmity.

What I have written so far leaves unanswered the following question: what about the silencing of dissent within the world of Islam (as well as dissenting views on Islam, within and without) that giving in to threats from religious zealots may result in? This is a serious and genuine concern. Well, let me tell you something personal. One of the formative events of my mental life occurred on Valentine’s day, 1989: the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa asking for Salman Rushdie to be murdered. Having grown up a Shia Muslim, this shocked and saddened me beyond what I can describe. As a South Asian, Rushdie’s writings were a great source of pleasure and pride to me, and perhaps even life-changing for me, in the sense that I developed an addiction to literature at least partly through my enjoyment of Rushdie. I supported Rushdie wherever and whenever I could, as vociferously as I could, and still do. (In a private act of protest against those who failed to stand up for him, I even stopped reading books by John Le Carre and Roald Dahl, both of whom suggested that Rushdie got what was coming to him.) But that situation was different: a religious leader and a head of state had incited people to murder, and a whole country had gone along. No leader or country, to my knowledge, has done that in the present case. Of course, one must condemn anyone who calls for death or violence because of some stupid cartoons. One could also try to understand the historical and current sources of Muslim rage. That is the only way that we can encourage them to move toward more confident and more open and more tolerant societies. One could say much more about every part of this, but I must stop somewhere. More discussion is needed and one must deal with a real and dangerous situation and try to defuse it. But the media have more serious and pressing issues to discuss, like this from Slate: Where Do Muslim Protesters Get Their Danish Flags?

My other columns at 3 Quarks Daily:
A Moral Degeneracy
In the Peace Corps’ Shadow
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

In 2001, I read Mark Buchanan’s wonderful book “Ubiquity” and became introduced to the concept of “critical states universality” through the “sand pile” game devised by physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Weisenfeld. They created a computer game in which grains of sand fall slowly and in a single file, and as the pile grows and becomes unstable, a single grain of sand can set off an avalanche that causes the collapse of the mountain. The grain of sand that set off the avalanche is no different than the other grains already in the pile. Rather, it is the pile that has become hypersensitive and unstable; a peculiar self-organization that gets pushed away from equilibrium and becomes prone to sudden and cataclysmic changes; the “tipping point”. This state is called a “critical state” and seems to develop in the sand pile on its own through self-organization. ‘Self-organized criticality’ has been found to underlie events as disparate as earthquakes, forest fires, stock market crashes, and mass extinction of species.

I was thinking about the application of these universal laws to cancer, especially the parallels between self-organization in sand piles and the initiation of leukemias through self-organization in bone marrow cells when I received a call from a patient who wanted to consult me from London. His name was Per Bak. Per was suffering from the bone marrow disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) which happens to be my specialty. Since he was too sick to be transferred to the US, over the next few weeks, I was able to get him connected with the right specialists in London, where he began his chemotherapy, eventually undergoing a bone marrow transplant. There were many days when Per would call me with his latest results or ask me to help interpret what the hematologists had told him, and after our professional consultation was over, we invariably ended up discussing the issues of critical states and power laws. Many things became clear to me for the first time during these trans-Atlantic conversations. Per was ever so gracious and kind while explaining some of the more complicated aspects of his work. Following interminable and depressing weeks in the hospital, I finally received the good news from Per’s wife Maya:

12/13/2001
Per is coming home today! His white count was over seven yesterday when the GCSF was stopped. We took a long walk in a nearby park. He is amazingly well.

I had been wondering why after spending almost $200 billion since 1971 on the war on cancer, 150,000+ experimental studies on mice and publication of ~1.5 million papers, we are still not sure about the roots of cancer. “A workable theory of cancer has to explain both why it is predominantly a disease of old age, and why we do not all die from it. A 70 year old is roughly 100 times as likely to be diagnosed with a malignancy as a 19 year old is. Yet most people make it to old age without getting cancer.” This is what W. Wayt Gibbs says in his excellent review “Untangling roots of cancer”. He summarized four prevailing views of how cells turn malignant. “For decades, the most widely accepted view of how cancer begins has been that mutations to a handful of special genes eliminate tumor suppressor proteins and activate oncoproteins. More recently, three alternative theories have gained currency. One modifies the standard paradigm by postulating a dramatic increase in the accumulation of random mutations throughout the genomes of pre-cancerous cells. Two other theories focus on the roles of aneuploidy: large scale aberrations in the chromosomes.”

Each possibility described by Gibbs traces the root of cancer to either the gene or the chromosomes within the nucleus. Because cancers universally begin in a single cell, explanations regarding origins naturally concentrate upon identifying an intracellular event as the initial cause. After reading about the phenomenon of self-organized criticality, I began to wonder about events preceding the intra-cellular gene-chromosome cataclysm which could bring about a malignant transformation.

Per was gaining strength after the transplant.

01/08/2002
Dear Dr. Raza,

I am writing to update you on how Per is doing. First, the good news: a bone marrow test at day 30 showed 100% donor cells, which were normal! His blood counts have also been fine: the most recent is platelet over 100, neutrophils 4.5, Hb has been up and down but he hasn’t required transfusions since discharge after the transplant. All the white counts are normal except for lymphocytes (0.18). I find the change almost miraculous! Also he doesn’t have GvHD, at least nothing that the doctors have mentioned.

That’s all,

Maya

The precursors of blood cells exist in the bone marrow as “stem cells”. At any given time, only a small number of bone marrow stem cells are actively cycling to produce blood cells, the rest are in a quiescent state. The activities of the stem cells are controlled by cells of the bone marrow microenvironment or “stromal cells”. The dose of the signal stem cells receive is critical, and depends on the distance between the two cells. This distance can be perturbed as we age. In a healthy adult, roughly half the marrow is occupied by cells while the other half is fat. With increasing age, this fat:cell ratio increases so that it is not unusual to find the cellular compartment reduced to 30% in a 70 year old individual. The spatial re-organization may be sufficient to disturb the normal physiologically graded cell-cell signaling in the marrow. Even a very slight resulting proliferative advantage in a given stem cell distanced from its controlling stromal cell would gradually lead to an unchecked expansion of its clone. If this abnormal situation continues, then the marrow can eventually become predominantly “monoclonal” or populated by the daughters of one cell. As the number of monoclonal cells grow, the system may begin to move away from equilibrium, and towards self-organization and a “critical state”. Obviously, monoclonality does not by itself mean that a malignant transformation in one of the daughter cells is inevitable. Rather, monoclonality may predispose to the development of malignancy. Once a critical state has been achieved, the system is now prone to sudden and cataclysmic changes. This is the order of events:

• Aging frees up more space in the marrow
• Decrease in inhibitory signals (distance) that keep normal “stem cells” from continuous proliferation
• Increase in clonal expansion of a stem cell
• Monoclonal state
• Self-organization and recession from a state of Equilibrium
• Critical State Universality
• System now predisposed to sudden and violent change
• Accumulation of events such as single gene mutations or aneuploidy during cell division may be sufficient to “tip” the system towards a malignant transformation
• Cancer

Support for this hypothesis comes from several observations. For example, practically every malignant cell in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia is marked by a translocation between chromosomes 9 and 22 which is known as the Philadelphia chromosome in honor of the city where the discovery was made. Some years ago, it was demonstrated that clonal expansion and a monoclonal state preceded the appearance of the Philadelphia chromosome (Fialkow). The incidence of monoclonality increases in direct proportion to advancing age; as many as 40% females over age 60 show monoclonal born marrow function (Gilliland). Interestingly, not only are almost all cancers monoclonal, but their precursor states called dysplasias are also monoclonal. Thus, dysplastic states affecting the bone marrow (MDS), cervix, liver, esophagus and stomach are all monoclonal. MDS is what Per had started with; a dysplastic state of the marrow which can evolve to acute leukemia or prove fatal by itself through an increasing profundity of the lowered blood counts. One of the saddest conversations I had with Per was several months after his bone marrow transplant. Just when everything appeared to be stabilizing, he developed one of the known and dreaded complications of the transplant procedure; severe pulmonary damage. After many rounds of therapies, some bordering on the heroic, Per finally knew that he was not going to make it. In that last telephone conversation I had with him, he talked about his young child and beloved wife. He did not want to be a pulmonary cripple and burden them any further.

Once a system follows critical state universality, it is impossible to predict the course it is going to have. The very diagnosis of cancer represents the end of a complex chain of events, where nature (stem cell) interacted with nurture (environmental influences) at multiple steps in unpredictable and often accidental ways. What are the therapeutic consequences of this hypothesis? Targeting the cancer cell alone may only be palliative rather than curative. The microenvironment which predisposes towards self-organization of any residual clonal cells needs to be targeted as well if a cure is to be achieved.

09/12/2002
Dear Dr. Raza,

I am writing with some sad news. Per has been in Copenhagen since April, and the last three months confined to hospital. His lung function has been worsening and he has been having ongoing infections, as well as sometimes bleeding in his gut. A few days ago he decided to stop all treatment except palliative like oxygen and morphine, and is not expected to live very long. Even though his oxygen requirement is low (2 liters) he feels very incapacitated and cannot get out of bed without enormous strain.

I am going to Copenhagen now to be with him through this sad time.

With warm regards,
Maya

And after a few more increasingly painful e-mail exchanges, this:

10-01-2002 Subject: Valediction
My Dear Maya,

I was deeply disturbed to read your note. While it was good to know that Per is still alive, it is also very sad that he is essentially waiting to die. The emotional burden on all concerned is of an unspeakable nature. I should know as I just lived through a very similar situation. My best advice under the circumstances is to make him as comfortable as possible, and that is all. This may sound a bit heartless to you, but given the irreversible nature of his current problems, I think the decision made by his physicians for only providing comfort care is the right one. I hope you are not upset that I agree. This does not mean you and the rest of the family should not try to give him as good a quality of life as possible within these confines. Spending time with him, talking to him and making him feel loved are all natural parts of that.

Please keep me informed and give him my best regards,
Dr. Raza

10/04/2002
Dear Dr. Raza,

I was saddened to hear that you had also lost your husband in this slow and deliberate way. After thinking about what you wrote, and talking some more with his doctors I am eventually coming around to going along with the plan that Per has made to die, even though it seems, as you wrote, heartless. I have always tried to give Per hope and encouragement in what were some desperate situations, so it is hard to know when to stop. I had some doubts because there are people who can live reasonably fulfilling lives, even when they are on oxygen support. But it seems clear that for Per that situation was unacceptable.

He has been resting peacefully and sleeping more and more.

With warm regards,
Maya

Shortly thereafter, a highly creative mind was laid to rest forever, and it reminded me of Alexander Pope’s moving eight lines where he looks poignantly towards death, and back to the arduous years of creating his rhyme:

Years following years, steal something everyday,
At last they steal us from ourselves away;
In our own Frolicks, one Amusements end,
In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend:
This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time,
What will it leave me, if it snatches my Rhime?
If ev’ry Wheel of that unweary’d Mill
That turn’d ten thousand Verses, now stands still.

[Note: The article as written was approved by Dr. Maya Paczuski, and her emails are used with her permission.]

Suggested Reading:

• Mark Buchanan. Ubiquity: Why catastrophes happen. Three Rivers Press, New York. 2000.
• W. Wayt Gibbs. Untangling the roots of cancer. Scientific American. Vol 289 (1): 2003.
• Per Bak. How Nature works. Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Gary D. Gilliland. Nonrandom X-inactivation patterns in normal females: lyonization ratios vary with age. Blood.88(1):59-65, 1996.
• Azra Raza. Consilence across evolving dysplasias affecting myeloid, cervical, esophageal, gastric and liver cells: Common themes and emerging patterns. Leukemia Research 24(1):63-72, 2000.

A few weeks ago, astronomers announced they had found a new planet in orbit around a dim red star 28,000 light years away. Called OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, the extrasolar world was not only the latest to be uncovered by planet-hunters, it was also the smallest to be detected around a normal star—only five and a half times as massive as Earth.

The new world was detected using a trick of Einsteinian physics called “gravitational microlensing,” whereby warped spacetime around a star acts like a lens to bend and focus light from a distant star directly behind it.

This lensing effect magnifies the distant star’s light, making it appear brighter than it normally would. If the lensing star is also host to a planet, the distant star’s light becomes brighter still. Here’s a flash animation of how gravitational microlensing works.

Astronomers use this increase in brightness to calculate the ratio between the lensing star’s mass and the mass of its planet. They can also calculate the distance between the two objects.

OGLE-2005 was only the third planet—and the first rocky one—to be found with the microlensing technique. The other two were giant gas-planets that were several times larger than Jupiter.

The rest of the more than 150 planets discovered so far were found using two other techniques. One of them is variously referred to as the radial velocity or Doppler or “wobble” technique. The other is called the transit technique.

My editor often has to remind me that the general public is usually more interested in what a finding is than in the technical details behind a finding. Most of the time, my editor is right. In this case, however, I think the techniques employed by planet-hunters are pretty cool so the following is a brief primer on how the techniques work and the pros and cons of each:

Transit technique:

If the orbit of a planet around its star just happens to be edge-on, then once during every revolution, it will pass in front of the star. If astronomers have their telescopes trained on the star when this happens, they can detect a dip in the star’s brightness.

Scientists compare this to watching a mosquito fly in front of a very large flashlight from two-hundred miles away and trying to figure out how much dimming has occurred. To get an idea of the size-relationships involved, here’s a picture (credit: David Cortner) of Venus transiting our Sun:

As this picture shows, the transit technique works best for big planets. Another disadvantage of the the transit technique is that only a small percentage of planets are configured this way around their stars.

Doppler (aka “wobble”) technique:

By sheer virtue of its mass, a star will affect the movement of the planet orbiting around it. This is easy to understand. Something that may be more difficult to wrap your head around (at least for me) is the fact that planets, by virtue of their mass, can cause their host stars to move in small counter-orbits.

Astronomers can detect this tiny “wobble” in the star’s movements, and use it to determine the size and mass of an orbiting planet.

The wobble technique has been the most successful so far in finding extrasolar planets. It was this technique that found the first extrasolar planet around a normal star in 1995, called 51 Pegasi.

Because the perturbations that a planet induces in its star is so small, the wobble technique can only detect very massive gas planets or planets very close to their stars. This requirement rules out the possibility of finding rocky, Earth-like planets that lie within a star’s habitable zone, the space around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface.

Also, the wobble technique can only detect stars that are within about 160 light years of Earth and it can be slow. Astronomers must watch a planet make one complete orbit before they can be sure that what they’re seeing is the effect of a planet on its star. For small planets close to their stars, this isn’t too big a deal, but for big gas giants that are quite a distance away, orbit times can take many years.

Gravitational microlensing:

Like the other two techniques, gravitational microlensing has its strengths and weaknesses.

Currently, microlensing is the only planet-finding technique capable of detecting low-mass, rocky planets within a star’s habitable zone. It can also find planets that are very far away. Whereas the transit and wobble technique can only find planets that are hundreds or thousands of light years from Earth, respectively, microlensing can find stars that are tens of thousands of light years away.

Microlensing is also the only one of the three techniques that can find planets around small, dim stars like red dwarfs. That’s because unlike the wobble or transit technique, microlensing doesn’t rely on the detection of light from a planet’s host star.

As for its cons, microlensing yields very little information about a planet  compared to the other  two techniques. With the transit technique, astronomers can not only glean information about a planet’s size and its distance from its star, they can also take measurements of its atmosphere. And in the wobble technique, scientists know how long a planet takes to orbit its star.

A planet-detection made with microlensing, in contrast, yields only two types of information: the mass ratio between the star and the planet and the distance between the two objects. Critics point out that determining a star’s mass is very difficult, so if that’s off, calculations about the planet’s mass will be off too.

Another common criticism of microlensing is that it relies on a precise  alignment between a distant star, a planet-hosting lensing star and observers on Earth. This type of alignment occurs only once in all of cosmological history for any two stars. A microlensing experiment can therefore never be repeated or verified by other scientists at a later date. 

Many astronomers view this as an acceptable trade-off, however, because of microlensing’s speed (OGLE-2005 was confirmed in a day) and the type of information it can provide.

Microlensing is the shot-gun approach to planet-hunting. It’s a quick and dirty way for astronomers to take a galactic planet census to see what types of planets exist in our Milky Way and determine how common each type is.

Astronomers also point out that what a microlensing experiment lacks in repeatability, it makes up for in simultaneous verifications made with numerous telescopes scattered around the globe. The detection of OGLE-2005, for example, involved 73 researchers and 32 institutions worldwide.

The next generation of planet-finding tools:

The holy grail for planet-hunters, of course, is to find a habitable Earth-like planet, but many scientists don’t expect this to happen until the next generation of space telescopes are deployed, which won’t be for nearly another decade at least. Two projects that have received a lot of attention are NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), set for launch in 2014, and the European Space Agency’s Darwin, also expected to launch sometime around the same time.

The TPF will consist of two observatories. One will carry an ultra-sharp optical lens that will be at least 10 times more precise than the Hubble Space Telescope. This could potentially allow astronomers to directly detect an extrasolar planet for the first time.

The other TPF observatory will carry an infrared interferometer that will allow it to detect dim planets despite the bright glare of their parent stars. The interferometer will also be capable of analyzing the reflected starlight from a planet to detect the presence of gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, ozone and methane. If scientists know the relative amounts of each gas that a planet contains, they may be able determine whether a planet is suitable for life—or if life already exists there.

Darwin is expected to carry an interferometer that works in a similar way to the TPF’s. NASA and the ESA are also considering combining the two projects into a joint collaboration that they would launch and operate together.

Lahore is perhaps the most underappreciated city in the world.  The widespread ignorance of the charms of such a beautiful, complicated, and historically important city is sad, though unsurprising, given Western conceptions of the Muslim world – India has droves of tourists, while Pakistan has virtually none.  Most of its natives, and most Pakistanis generally, rightly regard it as their country’s most  cultured metropolis, but even this acclaim does not go far enough.  Lahore is the conservatory of a lost world whose traces have been largely erased from more touristic destinations, like Delhi and Agra – I will come to the reasons for this below.  The world in general has few cities that interweave so seamlessly a great vitality today (the city is about the twenty-fifth largest on the globe) with an unbroken and luxurious history (spanning the last two millennia).  Only in Lahore do you find the sepulcher of the legendary Anarkali, the star-crossed dancing girl buried alive for her love of the young prince Selim (the film Mughal-e-Azam is a version), inside the dusty Archives of the Punjab Secretariat, which was a mosque that the British whitewashed, and is now decorated with portraits of British colonial governors.  Layers and layers: it’s that kind of place.

Beyond its Mughal grandeur, landscaped gardens, and Sufi shrines, beyond its dense bazaars, colonial museums and Parisian boulevards, beyond its kebabs, nihari (shank stew) and sarson ka saag with makai ke roti (mustard greens with cornbread roti), beyond the G.T. road, the insane rickshaw driving and Kipling’s cannon Zamzama, there is a part of Lahore that I believe is one of the most culturally important districts in Asia: the Walled City.  To cross the threshold of any of the gates of its unbreached walls is to cross into a truly unique zone.  There is simply no other city anywhere that has preserved the mixture of influences that produced the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ great cultural flowering in this part of the world.  In Fatepur Sikri (near Agra), you can see an abandoned capital that records the intermingling of Muslim, Hindu, mystical, secular, imperial and local influences that were synthesized during the reign of Akbar, the greatest Mughal.  In Lahore, you can see what that intermingling actually looked like, rather than merely its reflection in elevated architecture.  Traverse the walled city from one gate to another, get lost, and find your way back out.  It’s an experience of incredible density and richness.

There are also moments of great solitude to be found amidst the clamor.  Wazir Khan’s Masjid might be the most beautiful mosque in the world (Wazir Khan was a friend and trusted ally of the emperor Shah Jahan, and shared his love of building – the hamaam, or baths, he built on the palace grounds are also worth a look).  To find it isn’t so easy: you must notice an unmarked little stone gateway off to the side of a cacophonous street full of utensil bazaars and giant steaming woks of milk for tea.  To enter the mosque of Wazir Khan after that fray is to enter a heterotopia, an “other space” as moving as there is.  The noise dies away and a thousand pigeons flocking from side to side of the courtyard animate some sixteenth-century spirit.  It’s a haunted, benevolent place.  Then back out towards children clinging five to a Vespa, their dads weaving desperately between knife sellers and kebab wallahs, dodging donkeys and low-hanging arches.

Another religio-cultural influence that Lahore possesses in greater quantities than any other city is that of Sufism.  The mystical sect of Islam is commemorated with hundreds, maybe thousands, of shrines to Sufi saints, many of which are difficult to find.  One nestles just outside the colonial-era King Edward Medical College, which resembles a sort of hot-weather Hogwarts.  These shrines, in any case, are fascinating to see if one’s experience of Muslim culture is limited.  They are a proof of the mutiplicities of Islam and a rebuke to the repulsiveness of any orthodoxy that wishes to curb their crazily blissful peacefulness.  The Sufi, of course, are also responsible for qawwali music, and Lahore is full of qawwali performances.  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the famous Pakistani vocalist, was a Punjabi, and at the shrines you imbibe something of the flavor of the intoxicating gentleness that defined him.

The capital of Punjab, Lahore was strategically important for many of India’s rulers, becoming under the Mughals an imperial city and gateway to Afghanistan and the frontier.  The most lasting mark of Mughal rule is the imposing Badshai Masjid, an enormous mosque built by Auranzeb (the son and imprisoner of Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal) with an adjoining fort and extensive gardens.  There is also a Sikh temple sitting next door – the sight of Sikhs openly coming to and from a place of worship inside Pakistan is a heartening one.  You can eat the aforementioned Punjabi mustard greens and cornbread roti from little shacks right outside the Shahi Qila’s walls. And I highly recommend that you do.  Here you’ll also find Coocoo’s, a famous old restaurant decorated with portraits of the women who ply these streets at night.  It never seems to be serving food, but eating in Lahore is a humbler thing anyway.  The nihari shops at the walled city gates are worth braving (disregard cowardly gastroenterologists): shank meat buried in embers, simmered overnight and topped with fresh ginger, chilies, coriander and lime juice is about as good as eating can get.  The chicken karhais of Lahore, cooked to order with pieces of stringy, tasty chicken and served with the best naan, are also, for me, a pinnacle of gastronomy, expressing Punjabi zest directly and eloquently.  These are, after all, the people who invented bhangra.

Funnily enough, the reason for the unique preservation of Lahore’s walled city is largely luck.  Certainly equivalent districts existed in other cultural capitals of North India, most notably in Delhi and Lucknow, the two centers of the high culture of Urdu poetry.  Sadly, both cities’ inner districts were razed completely in 1857, as payback for the Revolt against British rule.  Lahore remained untouched.  What the British did by burning down those cities but leaving the great Mughal structures was something roughly like destroying London except for the Tower and St. Paul’s: the trademark “high” points of the city survived but none of the textures of its lived reality, the influences that suffuse a city’s culture, its streets.  In Lahore, by contrast, you can see what tourists can only imagine at the Red Fort or the Taj Mahal: the dense, complex, and still vital operations of an inner city bursting with markets, shrines, mosques, food, dancing girls, riotous children.  That’s what makes Lahore different: its history is sometimes worn on its sleeve and sometimes hidden within, but never is it advertised or reified.  It’s lived.

Dispatches:

On Michael Haneke (Directors)
Divisions of Labor III (NYU Strike)
Divisions of Labor II ( NYU Strike)
Divisions of Labor (NYU Strike)
The Thing Itself (Coffee)
Local Catch (Fishes)
Where I’m Coming From (JFK)
Optimism of the Will (Edward Said)
Vince Vaughan…Eve Sedgwick (Homosocial Comedies)
The Other Sweet Science (Tennis)
Rain in November (Downtown for Democracy)
Disaster! (Movies)
On Ethnic Food and People of Color (Worcestershire Sauce)
Aesthetics of Impermanence (Street Art)

I recently completed Raymond Geuss’ Outside Ethics, a collection of essays from various talks on contemporary Western political and moral philosophy. I’ve been a fan of Geuss’ work ever since reading his very thin but insightful book The Idea of a Critical Theory, which Ram once described as lacking an unnecessary word, and after taking his course on continental political thought in my first year of graduate school. For the most part, Geuss’ concerns have been on continental philosophy and continental thinkers, to which he brings an (for lack of a better phrase) Anglo-American analytic clarity.

In recent years, his books have been occupied with liberalism and what he clearly sees to be liberalism’s confusions and self-delusions—specifically, with what he sees as its inconsistent and unreflective understanding of public and private, and of rights. Although, he does not approach these ostensible limits in the standard ways that intellectual descendants of Nietzsche or Marxists in the tradition of the old Frankfurt School do (though there are very strong elements of both, and others, such as those of Hobbes), which is what makes his books rather unique and worth a read.

The recent collection opens with two essays that critique the work of the great American political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls’ project was of course to provide a rigorous reformulation of liberalism. That reformulation initially began with an attempt to construct universal principals through a thought-experiment that yields a “reflective equilibrium”, a political equivalent of a purely normative perspective that generates an analog of the categorical imperative, a principle that one wills to be universal and, by virtue of which, holds oneself. The project describes itself as Kantian.

The traditional liberalism of the nineteenth century, as Geuss sees it, consisted of a commitment to toleration, voluntary and consensual human interaction, individualism, and a feasibly minimized coercive power.

This historical struggle against theocracy, absolutism, and dogmatism has left behind in liberalism a thick deposit and skepticism not only vis-à-vis all-encompassing worldviews, but also vis-à-vis universalist political theories of any kind. On this point [Benjamin] Constant, [Isaiah] Berlin, [Karl] Popper, and [Richard] Rorty (and also, of course, [Edmund] Burke) are of one accord. Classical liberalism did not wish to be an all-encompassing, universal worldview but merely a political program aimed at eliminating specific social and political evils.

In its origins, liberalism had no ambitions to be universal either in the sense of claiming to be valid for everyone and every human society or in the sense of purporting to give an answer to the all important questions of human life. There is no clearly developed single epistemology for classical liberalism, but it would seem that a liberal would have to believe that liberal views are easily accessible to humans who have no special expertise or epistemically privileged position. The ideal of liberalism is a practically engaged political philosophy that is both epistemically and morally highly abstemious. That is, at best, a very difficult and possibly a completely hopeless project. It is therefore not surprising that liberals succumb again and again to the temptation to go beyond the limits they would ideally set themselves and try to make of liberalism a complete philosophy of life. For complicated historical reasons, in the middle of the twentieth century, Kantianism presented itself as a “philosophical foundation” for a version of liberalism, and liberals at that time were sufficiently weak and self-deceived (or strong and opportunistic) to accept the offer. (Outside Ethics, pp. 24-25)

I’ve also been a fan of Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, though there’s plenty in them to disagree with. But one thing that struck me in Geuss’ essay and made me think of Rawls in a new light was the claim that the move away from a broad, easily accessible and understandable skepticism of the sort found in nineteenth-century liberalism to the deeply grounded and seemingly Kantian certitude of many contemporary formulations of liberalism has gone hand in hand with a “muscular” American foreign policy. It is as much a criticism of Rawls’ spirit as it is of the content of his work. (The ostensibly Kantian Democratic Peace Theory has been invoked as a justification the Iraq war. In addition to Geuss, Perry Anderson recently made such a claim, and he too suggests that Rawls’ work, for all its seeming egalitarianism, is an expression—or is it celebration—of American hegemony. Anderson, though, seems really uncharitable in his readings.)

(The other thing that struck me had less to do with political philosophy than with political science and the social sciences generally; specifically, I was struck by the shifts in attitude in the social sciences, which appear to have moved away from seeing themselves as some form of craft knowledge that uses insights into social mechanisms that in conjunction with a rich familiarity with our world allows us to intervene in it without the illusion of certitude. As I read it, Mark was, among other things, describing one source of that illusion last week.)

The debates around the war have seen a realignment of sentiments. Some thinkers who’ve preserved the skepticism of the old liberalism such as Fukuyama have been designated to be “paleocons”. And certitude certainly seems to be the order of the day of the idealism of the neo-conservatives. The odd thought is that the Kantian turn in liberalism was less an attempt at making liberalism viable by making its acceptance easier than a reworking of liberalism into project it has historically been suspicious of. But the loss of the skepticism that one associated with an anti-utopian and pragmatic liberalism of old is palpable.