Critical Digressions: Twilight in Delhi

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.

Republic_day 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.

Qutb_minar 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.

013_14aIndia’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.

OlddelhiNot 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.

Subway_ridersAfter 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.)

Jama_with_jinnah_hat_saffron_tLater 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.

A_veritable_classicMercifully, 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

Akeel Bilgrami remembers Edward W. Said

Bilgrami4_1Professor 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

SaidpstorThere 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.]

Monday, February 13, 2006

Monday Musing: Good Reason, in Good Faith

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.

Aimdennett01Daniel 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

Below the Fold: The Supreme Court’s Brief, Now Lost Legacy of Constitutional Liberalism

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.

Black20hugoFlush 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.

1101641009_400Black 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.

Selected Minor Works: Historical Reflections on Language and Bipedalism

(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.   

Old Bev: Mr. Danny

Mrdanny4_3_1For 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.

Birgit Nilsson and Joan Sutherland: The Stupendous

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.

BirgitnilssonOn 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.

180pxsutherlandnormaThen 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”

Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding

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

Monday, February 6, 2006

Rx: Sand piles and Cancer

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.

Poison In The Ink: The Cool Art of Planet-Hunting

Ogle_2005_2 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:

Venus_transit_1

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:

Tpf_2 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.Darwin_esa_5

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.

Dispatches: Lahore

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)

Monday Musing: Liberalism’s Loss of the Skeptical Spirit

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.

Benjamin_constant_2

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.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Temporary Columns: Writing About Rape

WomaninberlinI recently read a memoir about rape in Russian-occupied Germany: A Woman in Berlin. In the book, an anonymous young woman recounts her experiences during the first few weeks of Russian occupation. The memoir was written in real time. It reflects the urgency and immediacy of the moment. The recounting was stark, unsentimental and lacked self-pity. The young woman struggled with rape on a daily basis. She was raped by Russian soldiers and by officers, both, young and old. She traded sex with familiar rapists for food, shelter and protection from unfamiliar ones.

Although she used the word rape to describe her experiences, she, never used the term rapist to describe any of the men. She saw the men who raped her as more than just Russian soldiers with weapons forcing themselves on her and other women. The soldiers were young peasant boys from Tartarstan, or older toughened sergeants from the Urals, or middle class Muscovites, or the handsome Pole from Lvov. Understanding Russian, and having traveled in Russia, and read Pushkin and Tolstoy, she did not have the luxury of her neighbours, who could easily lump all Russians together and dismiss them as barbaric and crude men from the uncivilised East. She could recognize, and even almost come to like the Russian occupiers as individuals.

She describes this parting scene of a major who had spent many nights in her bed (more sick and lonely, than violent and overpowering):

The major looks at me a long time as if to photograph me with his eyes. Then he kisses me in the Russian style on both cheeks and marches out, limping without looking back. I feel a little sad, a little empty. I think about his leather gloves, which I saw for the first time today. He was holding them elegantly in his left hand. They dropped on the floor once and he hurried to pick them up, but I could see they didn’t match – one had seams on the back while the other didn’t. The major was embarrassed and looked away. In that second I liked him very much.

She could not dismiss or deplore Russians as a group, leave alone as a uniquely bad one. She made an effort to understand, even empathise with them, and their situation. She was tolerant, albeit dismissively, of men in general, and contemptuously so of German ones in particular. Her description of how the women of Berlin viewed rape in the context of a destructive war was laced with black humour. Referring to US firebombing versus Russian rape she quotes Berlin women as saying – “better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead”.

Primolevi_1Her writing reminded me of Primo Levi — also a “victim” of World War II Germany. While his experiences were very different from A Woman in Berlin, they shared a similar sensibility. They were willing to accept their shared humanity with their tormentors, even as they opposed and resisted them. Primo Levi’s experience in Auschwitz and that of the woman in Berlin cannot be easily compared. Levi faced the systematic oppression of a Nazi state machine bent on humiliating and killing Jews. The woman in Berlin by contrast, was oppressed in the context of the chaos of the initial days of a military occupation – that even she seemed to welcome. Rape was incidental to the military occupation, not intended by it. Her tormentors were uncomfortable with what they were doing, even as they did it. The Nazis who invented and ran the extermination camps viewed Jews as questionably human and therefore deserving exclusion from the human race and extermination. “Even if the Nazis did not always believe in race theory wholeheartedly, they still denied the shared humanity of humankind.”. The Russian occupiers of Berlin did not have a racial ideology that treated Germans as subhuman or deserving of humiliation as a race.

The experience of A Woman in Berlin is also distinct from the reports of mass rape of Tutsi women in Rwanda or Muslim women in Bosnia. Here rape was a weapon of war, not incidental to it. There is no record in the Soviet archives of rape being a policy of the Red Army. The memoir illustrates how a transaction that seems so completely dominated by brute force – men with guns forcing themselves on helpless women – can also involve negotiations between victim and perpetrator. Still, these rapes would be considered war crimes, even though there was no explicit order from Moscow to rape German women, and some women seemed to consent to some sexual activity, albeit under pressure. Each individual act would be a war crime because of the context in which it occurred – under military occupation – making consent itself, irrelevant to the crime. The conditions under which the choice took place already constrained it.

The experiences of Primo Levi and the woman in Berlin are disparate. Yet, there is a striking similarity in their sensibility. They write with a stunning moral clarity and deep human empathy. They never question the common humanity of humankind. Their writing is literary moral rather than political theory. Still, it expresses a sensibility that needs to be captured for a more decent politics.

0674194365In The Decent Society, Avishai Margalit comes closest to the political theorizing of such a world. Leaders who mobilize their people against great injustice and oppression, even as they re-affirm the humanity of those who oppress and discriminate against them contribute to creating such a world. In contrast other leaders who also fight against the oppression of their people question the humanity of their oppressors, not just particular actions, or the politics that leads to these actions. Emerging from an ethos of oppression or discrimination of their people, their politics lacks moral imagination – the ability to create the sensibility of a common humanity. This is fundamental to a peaceful moral politics that is not just an accidental outcome of a balance of power.

Primo Levi or A Woman in Berlin appeal to us. They are inspiring tales of human survival in the midst of great adversity. They are self-reflective about their survival. They do not shy away from narrating the compromises they made to survive and the happenstance involved in it. Because they are unsentimental and lack self-pity – even as we are horrified and sometimes even saddened by what we read, we are never depressed nor dejected. They are also ordinary people, whose heroism and survival stems from banal acts of goodness, not extraordinary ones. And they write with a clarity and precision about the ambiguously singular moment when evil and good intersect – and neither prevails, permanently.

This is because they take their particular experiences – as a Jew or as a woman in Berlin – and make them universal. They do this not by telling us a story about how the oppressed and defiled – a Jew or a Woman – are a part of humankind – but rather by never questioning the common humanity they share with those who oppress and defile. We read them because they express the possibility of an inchoate universalism at the very moment when it seems to have been banished, forever – in the midst of the starkest divide between the self and the other.

Sojourns: Varieties of Academic Reception

Over a year ago, Perry Anderson pronounced in The London Review of Books that Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des letters, translated into English last January as The World Republic of Letters (Harvard, 2005) “is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said’s Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.” I remember thinking at the time that this seemed unlikely, that whatever strengths Casanova’s book might have as a study of how national literatures compete for attention in the global marketplace it would probably not have a paradigm shifting influence in the literary humanities. While it is too soon to know for sure, the early returns seem to suggest I was right. Casanova’s book has been received as important—noteworthy even—but not as something being read across the discipline, something that everyone in English or Comparative Literature has to read to remain part of the academic conversation.

By now I hope it is clear that I’m less interested here in the content or quality of Casanova’s book than in the hype that has attended its appearance. This sort of hype is not a new thing. Only four years ago, Emily Eakin wrote a rather silly article in The New York Times pronouncing that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire had become gospel for theory starved professors of literature now that deconstruction had passed out of fashion. Needless to say, Eakin had little idea what was going on in the humanities. Whatever else one might say about Hard and Negri—and again, their work has been well received and influential—it has not spawned a school or a movement with close to the impact that Derrida and DeMan had in the seventies and eighties. Emily Eakin is no Perry Anderson of course. But what interests me in this sort of prognostication is the recurrent desire to herald the next big thing in the literary humanities, the book or critic or school of thought that is likely to shake English departments out of the doldrums and back into the center of academic life. For some time, those outside of English (and some within it) have waited for this next big thing to happen. And it hasn’t. And it most likely won’t for some time. And that is probably a good thing.

I had a sense that Casanova’s book was not going to have the impact of Said’s because I knew intuitively that no book could. Why is this so? Wide-ranging impact within the academy (or, to be immodest, paradigm change) requires a vertically organized discipline with a relatively shared set of concerns. That is to say, the writing of a comparatively small number of scholars must be regarded by the wider professoriat as the state of the art. At the same time, the discipline as a whole must have something of a coordinated language of inquiry, one that can be addressed, criticized, and moved in one direction or another. The impact of Said’s Orientalism provides a case study of just this structure of reception. So too do the other great works of criticism and theory written during the heyday of English: Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet. These were books that reached beyond their particular concerns and shaped the language of an entire field of study and with that the larger academy. They gave an élan to English as the discipline of disciplines. Something appears to have changed within the broader intellectual culture over the past decade and a half to make that position untenable. Many books within English have an impact on their specific sub-fields, few or none on the discipline as a whole. The structure of reception that would provide the sort of canonization achieved by Orientalism—that is, the ability to reach across sub-fields to change the language of the discipline—is no longer in place. The vertical organization of English has loosened, as there are simply more books, published at all levels of the university system, than Said or Jameson could probably have imagined. (The reasons for this range from heightened demands for tenure to the democratization of the discipline itself.)  The result is a certain centrifugal dispersion of the discipline at large complimented by a centripetal pull within each sub-field. I cannot name a single book read by all of English over the past decade but I can name several read by all of my particular sub-field. I just won’t bore you by naming them.

English does not have a shared method of study or a single object of analysis. Perhaps it never did. But the moment when the discipline was organized in such a fashion to produce the illusion of such coherence has surely passed. What we see in even as astute a thinker as Perry Anderson is a certain nostalgia, one that will most likely continue to produce the occasional anointing of the next big thing, the newest trend, the latest method to capture the mind and habits of the literary humanities. And those pronouncements will continue to ring false and to seem a little passé.

Monday Musing: Hepburn and Heloise, A Tribute to the Defiance of Women

(On the occasion of a recent viewing of The Philadelphia Story)

For Shuffy.

In the early twelfth century a brilliant philosopher and logician named Abelard fell in love with a remarkable young woman named Heloise. Abelard tricked her uncle into thinking that he would be giving her academic tutoring and then the two fell into a torrid love affair in which the rest of the world seemed to melt away. But the world always comes back. The uncle discovered the ruse and plotted his revenge. Eventually, the uncle hired several men to break into Abelard’s home and chop off his testicles. Abelard became a monk and Heloise a nun. But before that fateful day Abelard proposed that he would marry Heloise and though this would end his career as scholar and teacher and force them into a layman’s life it might protect them from further censure or retribution. Heloise refused and then later acquiesced, though it did nothing to prevent their terrible fate. In his Historia calamitatum, Aberlard, rather self-absorbedly, relates that Heloise realized that marriage would have removed his great mind from the public sphere and could not allow such an event to occur. In a letter written to Abelard many years after the events in question Heloise corrects him on this matter. Referring to Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, she writes, “[b]ut you kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains. God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to posses for ever, it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.” Nowhere in recorded history does there exist a more astoundingly moving, if somewhat disturbing, testimonial to love. It is as beautiful a thing as a human can say. “God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself” she writes to Abelard, “I simply wanted you, nothing of yours.” Thus, for Heloise, “[t]he name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.” The point, she is saying, is in the trust and love that holds two people together, screw what the world thinks.

One can’t help feeling in reading the letters between the two that Abelard is never as steadfast to that ideal as Heloise. It is she who upholds the ethics of pure intention that Abelard had set forth in his Scio te ipsum (Know Thyself). By that doctrine, there is nothing in the act itself that merits praise or condemnation, but everything in what the act intends. “Wholly guilty though I am,” she says “I am also, as you know, wholly innocent. It is not the deed but the intention of the doer which makes the crime, and justice should weigh not what was done but the spirit in which it was done.” The ‘as you know’ that she throws into the phrase directed at Abelard is not without its bite. That is why she can proclaim herself a whore as an act of defiance, and an act of love.

Katharine Hepburn was a whore. She fell in love with Spencer Tracy and he fell in love with her but because of his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church he would never get a divorce from his wife. So he and Hepburn lived in some form of sin together until his death. It is hard not to feel that her position was the nobler and braver of the two, though she never seems to have chided him much for it. They made a number of classic films together and one in particular, Adam’s Rib, that is a secretly utopian film. It imagines a situation in which a man and a woman could love one another and make each other better for it, instead of tearing one another apart, slowly or quickly as the case may be. One of the best details of the movie is the fact that they both have the same pet name for each other, Pinky. One can only imagine the process of emotional exhaustion by which they finally reached the sublime stasis of Pinky and Pinky. That, in itself, is one of those small triumphs of love.

Hepburn liked to wear pants and she wanted to live, as she put it, ‘like a man’. By that she meant primarily that she wasn’t going to take any shit and, moreover, she was going to get away with it. She was sometimes accused of being cold and lacking in emotional range as in the famous quip by Dorothy Parker that her performance in “The Lake” ‘ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B’. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that Parker was occasionally jealous of a woman who could be exactly what she wanted and never seem particularly tortured about it either. Hepburn always claimed to envy the ‘meat and potatoes’ style of her love, Mr. Tracy. Which is to say that one can do a lot in the space between A and B. Perhaps no role captures the full range of that limited range better than her Tracy Lord character from The Philadelphia Story. Her eventual route back to marriage with CK Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) is a tribute to everything she ever stood for as the marriage seems the least important part of the process. Indeed, she considers marriage to no less than three different men throughout the film. But that only serves to make her all the more wonderful, more powerful. It is the ethics of pure intention that really matters. The link between woman, whore, defiance, freedom, etc., and the ambiguity of it all is made further delicious by the fact that the notorious underage porn star of the 80’s took her name, Traci Lords, from the Hepburn character in the movie.

Every once in a while Hepburn will look away from the camera in one of her movies. Her chin will point upwards a bit, imperiously, and the high cheekbones will give the whole performance a far away feel. It is not clear entirely what she is looking at in such moments. It is simply remarkable that someone would be able to look away like that.

Vollmann, Crane, and Adventure Journalism

The only real surprise about William T. Vollmann winning the 2005 National Book Award for Europe Central was that merit was rewarded. In literature as in life this is not always the case. I have been reading Vollmann since my college days in the mid-1990s, when a love affair with a Canadian caused me to pick up Fathers and Crows, the second of the Seven Dreams series, about Jesuits in Quebec. (This might be mere sentimentality, but I still believe it’s his best book.) The Vollmann award means that serious novels are still being taken seriously, despite Norman Mailer’s comments at the ceremony to the contrary during his depressing Lifetime Achievement speech. (“It’s a shame in the literary world today that passion has withered, producing fiction that is all too forgettable,” said Mailer. “I’m watching the disappearance of my trade. The serious novel may be in serious decline.”) Does Vollmann publish too much? I leave the question open – it’s not rhetorical. Vollmann’s style is perhaps overly mannered and has not developed much over the years (he started in the stratosphere but has stayed at the same relative altitude), although in his best writing the mannerism works to his advantage. But his seemingly monomaniacal prolixity is more likely to be a sign of compulsive brilliance more than anything else, so that the complaint is almost meaningless – roughly the same could be said of Dickens, for example. This is genius in more than one sense: you get the feeling Vollmann has an actual daemon sitting on his shoulder dictating book after book.

The writer that Vollmann brings to mind most strongly is not Dickens, however, but Stephen Crane. At first this may seem like an odd comparison, given that Crane’s devotion to literary realism is very far from being Vollmann’s first priority. Like Crane, Vollmann writes both adventure journalism and novels. Like Crane, Vollmann is drawn to wars and conflict zones. Vollmann’s series of books about prostitution surely have a classic literary source in Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Like The Red Badge of Courage, Vollmann’s historical novels are strongly flavored with reality and research. Vollmann’s tremendous output matches or perhaps even exceeds the famously productive Crane, who by the time he died at age twenty-eight had already published two novels, a multitude of short stories and poems, as well as an immense body of journalism. (The authoritative edition of Crane’s work, published by the University of Virginia, apparently runs to ten volumes.) It’s almost as if Crane knew that time would be short; a sense you get reading Vollmann as well, who, you sometimes feel, has lived longer than he thought he might. Even Vollmann’s short chapters, with their antiquated newspaper-dispatch style headings, call to mind works like “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” (1897).

Crane made his name as a war correspondent, covering, for example, the sinking of the Commodore, a ship laden with arms bound for Cuba. This happened in 1897, just prior to the sinking of the Maine and the entry of American into the Spanish-American War. Journalists were more than observers in the conflict. The representation of the coverage in Citizen Kane isn’t far off the mark regarding the pro-war Yellow Journalism of the Hearst papers of the day. Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin, the editors of the excellent Riverside Crane volume, write that

The existence of newsreels, filmed reproductions of events, and even enactments that were clearly remote from the action in Cuba provided people in the United States with images of warfare that made it a kind of spectator sport in which most viewers had a clear rooting interest. With his writing, Crane helped create the new public sphere, and as a celebrity journalist, he participated in it.

Iraq was not the first time that reporters were embedded, and the problems of bias they created are nothing new. Crane reported under fire with the marines direct from a very different Guantanamo. Vollmann’s An Afghanistan Picture Show, published in 1992, ten years after he flung himself into the middle of the struggle against the Soviets, has the self-mocking subtitle “How I Saved the World.” In it, Vollmann dissects himself as much as the conflict, creating a ruthless (and very timely) examination of the entire concept of American altruism when it is combined with an emphasis on military solutions. (Not everything Vollmann wrote about Afghanistan was perfect – when the New Yorker sent him back to check up on the country during the 1990s, Vollmann was at times too soft on the Taliban, acknowledging their crimes but presenting received ideas about how they had brought stability to the country.)

Here’s the problem with adventure journalism more generally: it’s not written by experts or beat reporters, and therefore only infrequently rises above the usual combination of local color, exoticism, florid prose, and received opinion back home. (Good adventure writers, among whom I count friends and some of our best writers all around, are to be admired all the more for rising above this level.) The adventure writer is essentially a proxy for the reader, an American dropped into a strange – and, ideally, somewhat dangerously atmospheric, hopefully more atmospheric than dangerous – locale. It’s understandable, but no less peculiar, that we would rather read what American magazine writers think about the Taliban, for example, rather than someone like, say, Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani who writes in English and has covered the region’s politics for something close to two decades. But the adventure journalist gives us something we desperately need – an exotic fix.

This thirst for far-flung locations and the current craze for dispatches is surely not bad in itself; I tend to enjoy it, as a kind of literary stamp collecting. Also, it’s probably another “since September 11” type of trend, and hopefully a sign of renewed American interest in the outside world. The only downside is that the entire genre excludes those legions of literary types who are retiring homebodies and prefer to stay in bed all day crafting sentences. Not everyone should be forced to be a reporter, that’s my thesis; writing shouldn’t be a form of reality TV in which one auditions for a part in the national conversation by exposing oneself to mud and murder.

I think it was Schopenhauer who once wrote that there are two kinds of good books, those which introduce the reader to an experience they couldn’t have themselves, and those which use language in a remarkable way. Probably all good writing combines something of both, but the rise of adventure journalism involves a lopsided emphasis on one aspect against the other. It also represents another chapter in the American tradition of anti-intellectualism, for it is against “thought” and for “experience.” Our magazines are full of direct experience – like the kind that comes mediated through a translator on a two-week junket. Of course, the best writers in this field manage to combine thought and observation in a kind of genre-bending tag-team wrestle, and, in doing so, are creating a fine new genre in the process, don’t get me wrong. Vollmann is an ideal example.

Even though much of Crane’s and Vollmann’s fiction is based on research, interviews, and reportage, it is more enduring stuff. “The Open Boat” is a classic, whereas “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” is more ephemeral. Maggie was based on Crane’s real experiences with prostitutes, but the imaginative work outlives the adventurism, just as Vollmann’s The Royal Family feels superior to his Butterfly Stories. But it is the historical fiction of both writers – The Red Badge of Courage and Europe Central, respectively (plus, for my money, Fathers and Crows) – that critics have celebrated as their greatest accomplishments. Historical fiction might be the least fictional of fictions, the most closely related to facts, a genre involved directly with actuality as a magical element in the alchemy. But these two novels have more in common than an obsession with or addiction to the atmosphere of violent conflict. They are both novels documenting real events that their authors never could have experienced. It’s almost as if their thirst for experience was so overwhelming that when they ran out of the amount of reality available to them directly they had to fabricate other worlds to inhabit as well.

Talking Pints: Happy Birthday, Political Science

Towards the end of this year, The American Political Science Review will publish its 100th anniversary issue. In researching for a submission to this centennial issue, I examined what political scientists have been saying for the past 100 years, and in doing do something very odd struck me: that the arguments that I have been having for a decade with my colleagues about the idea of a science of politics being at all possible are the same arguments that have been going on in the pages of The American Political Science Review since its inception.

Then and now, political scientists tend to fall into two camps. In the first camp are those who wear the badge of ‘scientist’ and see their field as a predictive enterprise whose job it is to uncover those general laws of politics that ‘must’ be out there. The second camp contains those who think the former project logically untenable. For years now I have tried (largely in vain) to convince my colleagues in the first camp that the idea of a political ‘science’ is inherently problematic. I have marshaled various arguments to make this case, and each of these has been met by a some variant of; ‘political science is a young science’; ‘what we face are problems of method’; and that ‘more ‘basic research is required’. Then, with ‘more and better methods’ we will make ‘sufficient’ progress and ‘become’ a science. I remain unconvinced by this line of argument, but it was enlightening to see it played out again and again over a century.

Discovering that these same arguments have been going on for 100 years was both heartening (I was in good company) and depressing (‘round and round we go’). But in doing so I discovered something else. If political science is a ‘science’ by virtue of its ability to predict, as many of its ‘scientific’ brethren maintain, then it really should have been abandoned years ago since the prediction rate of my field over the past 100 years is less than what would be achieved by throwing darts at dartboard while wearing a blindfold. To see why this is the case consider the following potted history of political science.

From its inception in 1906 until World War One American political scientists took ‘public administration’ as its object and the Prussian state as the model of good governance. Sampling on this particular datum proved costly to the subfield however when the model (Germany) became the enemy during World War One and the guiding models of the field collapsed. Following this debacle, political science retreated inwards during the 1920s and 1930s. One can scan the American Political Science Review throughout these tumultuous decades for any sustained examination of the great events of the day and come up empty. What I did find however were reports on constitutional change in Estonia, committee reform in Nebraska, and predictions that the German administrative structure will not allow Hitler to become a dictator.

After World War Two this lack of ‘relevance’ haunted the discipline and its post-war re-founders sought to build a predictive science built upon the process notions of functionalism, pluralism, and modernization. These new theories saw societies as homeostatic systems arrayed along a developmental telos with the United States as everyone’s historical end. Paradoxically however, just as the field was united under these common theories, they were suddenly, and completely, invalidated by the facts of the day. At the height of these theories’ popularity, the United States was, contrary to theory, tearing itself apart over civil rights, Vietnam, and sexual politics while ‘developing’ countries were ‘sliding back’ along the ‘developmental telos’ into dictatorships. Despite these events being the world’s first televised falsification of theory, once again political science turned inward and ignored the lesson waiting to be learned – that prediction in the social world is far more difficult than we imagine, and the call for more ‘rigor’ and ‘more and better methods’ will never solve that problem. Our continuing prediction failures continue to bear this out. Since its ‘third re-founding’ in the 1980s till today, political science has predicted the decline of the US (just as it achieved ‘hyper-power’ status); completely missed the decade long economic stagnation of Japan (just as it was supposed to eclipse the US); missed the end of the Cold War, the growth of international terrorism, and the rebirth of religion in politics.

After reviewing this catalog of consistently wrong calls, a very simple question occurred to me. If political science is a science by virtue of its ability to predict, and its prediction rate is so awful, can it be a science even in its own terms? I would say that it cannot. But this answer itself begged another, and I think more interesting, question; why is my field’s ability to predict so bad? The answer to this question is not found in the pages of the American Political Science Review. Rather, it is found in how political science as a discipline, through its training, thinks about probability in the social world. To see why this is the case I ask the reader to follow me through three ‘possible worlds’ that have three different probability distributions, and then decide which world it is that political science studies – and which one it thinks it studies.

Our first (type-one) world is the world of the dice roll where the generator of outcomes is directly observable. Here we live in a world of risk. We know when throwing a die (the generator) that there are six possible outcomes. Given the ability to directly observe the generator and a few dozen throws of the die, the expected and actual means converge rapidly via sampling, and this is sufficient to derive the higher moments of the distribution. This distribution, given the known values of its generator, is reliably ‘normal’ and sampling the past is a good guide to the future. One is not going to throw a ‘300’ – there are only six sides on the die – and skew the distribution. This type one world is reliably Gaussian, and is, within a few standard deviations, predictable. Political science thinks it operates in this world. This is the familiar world of the bell-curve.

Our second world (type-two), is a world with fat tails (Gauss plus Poisson) where uncertainty rather than risk prevails. An example of the generator here would be a stock market. Although one can sample past data exhaustively, one does not observe the generator of reality directly. Consequently, one can ‘throw a 300’ since large events not seen in the sample may skew the results and become known only after the fact. For example, stock market returns may seem normal by sampling, but a ‘Russian Default’ or a ‘Tequila Crisis’ may be just around the corner that will radically alter the distribution in ways that agents cannot calculate before the fact. This is a world of uncertainty as much as it is risk. Agents simply cannot know what may hit them, though they may be think that the probability of being hit is small.

Our third possible world (type-three) is even more unsettling. Imagine a generator such as the global economy. In this case, not only can one not see the generator directly, agents can sample the past till doomsday and actually become steadily more wrong about the future in doing so. As two probabilists, Nassim Taleb and Avatel Pilpel, put it, with such complex generators “it is not that it takes time for the experimental moments…to converge to the ‘true’ [moments]. In this case, these moments simply do not exist. This means…that no amount of observation whatsoever will give us E(Xn) [expected mean], Var(Xn) [expected variance], or higher-level moments that are close to the “true” values…since no true values exist.”

To see what this means, consider the following example. Macroeconomics, like political science, has had at least four general theories of inflation over the past fifty or so years, which suggests two things. First, that these theories cannot be general theories since they change every decade or so. Second, that such theories might be thought of as general (at the time they were constructed given the sample that they were derived from) but such theories must become redundant since the actual sources of inflation change over time.

For example, if the agreed-upon causes of inflation in one period, (monetary expansion) are dealt with by building institutions to cope with such causes (independent central banks), this does not mean that inflation becomes impossible. Rather, it means that the conditions of possibility change such that the theory itself becomes redundant. In such a world outcomes are fundamentally uncertain since the causes of phenomena in one period are not the same causes in a later period. Given this, when we assume that outcomes in the social world conform to a Gaussian distribution we assume way too much. Any sample of past events can confirm the past, but cannot be projected into the future with the confidence we typically assume. Take away that prior assumption of ‘normality’ in the distribution and standard expectations regarding prediction fall apart.

Given this, which world is the world most likely studied by political scientists? Our type-one world can be ruled out since if the world was so predictable our theories should be able to predict accurately. Given the record in this regard, it is safe to conclude that the world we occupy is not this one. Our type-two world seems suspiciously normal most of the time, but our theories ‘blow up’ much more than they should since most of the action occurs in the tails and we cannot see the generator of outcomes. This sounds more like the world where people actually live.

A type-three world is even worse however, since in a type-three world all bets are off as to what the future may bring. Humans do not however deal particularly well with such uncertainty and try to insulate themselves from it. Whether through the promulgation of social norms, the construction of institutions, or the evolution of ideologies, the result is the same. Human agents create the stability that they take for granted. In taking it for granted however they assume the world to be much more stable than it actually is. Consequently, our theories about the world we live in tend to assume much more stability, and thus predictability, than is warranted.

In short, we cannot live in a type-three world, so we build institutions, cultures, and societies to cope with uncertainty. But when we are successful at doing so we assume we live in a type-one world of predictability and develop theories to navigate such a world. Unfortunately, we actually have succeeded only in constructing our type-two world of fat tails, and this is why we are constantly surprised. We think (and model) type-one while living type-two. Meanwhile, as a discipline, we refuse to admit the possibility of a type-three world generating both the others.

The result is that the action is in the tails, and we, given our type-one assumptions and models, are blind to what is going on there. So we focus, like the proverbial drunk under the lamp-post, on the middle of the distribution since that is where the (theoretical) light is; and like the proverbial drunk, we are constantly surprised that our keys are actually to be found somewhere else entirely. Political science may have reached the ripe old age of 100, and I congratulate it for doing so. It did so however by imagining the world to be quite different from what it is, and by completely ignoring its predictive failures. If however political science wants to be around for another 100 years it may want to think a bit more about what those failures are trying to tell us.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Lunar Refractions 1: Cacciari: Politician, Professor, Philosopher, or Don Juan?

Cacciari_2Massimo Cacciari’s writing fell on me a few days ago. He first came to my attention a few years ago when a colleague waved a book called Architecture and Nihilism in my face. I didn’t read this book, but its almost violent passage before my eyes opened an entirely new world. This unknown sphere remained dormant until recently, when I began a rather sunny yet despondent morning reading an essay of his. Cacciari and his writings are less prominent (among North American English speakers, at least) than they deserve. The few excerpts and musings here are meant merely to act as introduction and point of departure for those of you who know little or nil about his work.

My relationship—if one can call it that, as I probably shouldn’t, given the reputation speculative gossip attributes to him—with Cacciari has always been one of chance. I wasn’t looking for that architecture book, which is one of only four by him that is easily accessible to an English-speaking audience, or anything else on nihilism. Nor was I looking for an interview of him, a “sentimental interview” charmingly entitled “Massimo the Incomplete,” when I stumbled across it in L’espresso magazine a couple of years after the first incident. Finally, he came back to haunt me on a recent morning when a book about the classics literally fell off my shelf as I walked past; it’s clearly a physical connection.

Confronting the Classics: in Conversation with the Greeks and Latins was the book I’d inherited from a friend and not since had time to open. I was in what one could term a very brooding, contemporary mood that morning, reflecting on how many things that fascinate me serve no practical purpose in today’s world, and how planned obsolescence and incessant (and often conspicuous) consumption have come to replace many older, more substantial modes of existence. A walk around New York, or Venice, or any other city of the over-privileged world easily inspires the question of just what, exactly, people did before they spent their lives shopping…but I digress. Just as the superficiality of this particular moment in history overwhelmed me, I saw Cacciari’s essay, “Inactual Abstracts on the Study of the Classics.” Having only read a smattering of classics myself, and never really having studied them officially (whatever that might mean), I wanted to see what he had to say. The Nietzscheian reference particularly piqued my interest. I decided to dedicate the morning to this rich eight-page piece.

I mentioned Venice earlier because Cacciari was reelected Mayor there on April 3 of last year after having held the same position from 1993 to 2000. He also served in the Italian Parliament from 1976 to 1983. From the sixties forward he has been publishing his musings, creating a bibliography too vast to address here. His political activity, to many, may seem incongruous with the vocation of philosopher. The reason he is remarkable is precisely because so many things about him initially seem incongruous. It remains to be seen whether or not a completed whole can be made of this picture.

In North America it is fairly rare to encounter a politician who is also professor, author, philosopher, and generally curious thinker (I invite all those reading this to refute any of my statements). Italy gave the world such vastly different figures as Benedetto Croce, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Antonio Gramsci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Leonardo Sciascia, Manfredo Tafuri, and many others, all of whom blurred the borders between politics, philosophy, and aesthetics. While it’s perhaps a little early to add to such a group, the ability of all these thinkers to assemble a unique opus collecting otherwise fractured and distant fields is certainly echoed in Cacciari’s work.

Returning to his essay, he very concisely makes twenty-seven key points about contemporary study of the classics. He begins with the general feelings of resignation regarding contemporary education—how much it supposedly must adapt to the needs of the day, acting more as something in the service of a technical-economical context rather than a school based on the ideas of culture and real education. Early on he asserts that all words indicating the “school-education complex” (i.e., Schole, paideia, Bildung) refer “not to any specific contents, but to a field of energy; a state that generates potentialities and openness to multiple possibilities rather than orientation toward a precise scope. The goal of the educational process is not the transmission of acquired values…. The real sites of education remain, despite any assertions to the contrary, centers of criticism, discussion, comparison of different trends, and questioning.” I can think of many brilliant people who’ve proven this point after fleeing stifling academic programs that somehow managed to neglect education in this sense of the term.

While that is interesting in itself, and a useful bit for anyone considering study in graduate programs or other accredited, official schooling, it doesn’t yet address the real importance of the classics. Cacciari here clarifies that, in an environment like that of most schools, “which act much like businesses specialized in producing workers, the teaching of the classics can only have a merely ornamental role. The idea of the school-business is metaphysically opposed to all that is classic. Classic, in fact, expresses no return to the past, much less to the dead past, but assuredly a high-spirited contrast to custom, to the present time. Classic is that which is not currently fashion, not the refrain of the day; it carries within it a timbre of battle, an exigency of contra-diction.”

Rather than acting as a throwback to the past, the classics “should arm us to face the present time…. The classic doesn’t flee, it rather challenges. It belongs to the present time, but refuses to serve it…. It speaks of the present time, of this world, even of our daily life, but from a sound distance. Those who weaken the spirit of the classics, transforming it into a sedentary philology; those who make of the classics a cupboard of memories neatly arranged in historical order; those who don’t know how to make them live in divergent agreement with the present time, destroy their essence ten thousand times more than its vulgar detractors.”

Cacciari_3I don’t wish to elaborate each of his points here; suffice it to say that various dangerous words—logos, philology, concordia discors, variety, forma mentis, net-workers—and dangerous thinkers—Nietzsche, Celan, Leopardi, Alberti, Kafka, and Arendt—all make appearances in this tightly-constructed brief. This is the ultimate précis of the truly liberal arts. This is what made it impossible for me to mope around wallowing in the tragic thought that I’d lost days and years of my life to a pleasurable yet utterly fruitless interest in the classics. This is the artillery with which I will respond to the next person inquiring why many of my colleagues and I are “so obsessed with remote, ancient things” in our work. This helped me shoulder what is indeed the heavy weight of taking up active conversation with the classics, yet that load is lightened when I look around and come to a very visceral awareness that I’ve no other choice.

I imagine that many who have heard about Cacciari will have done so through the abundant gossip circulating about him, which merits no further comment here. I will leave you on your own in getting to know his opus, and can only hope that the very limited number of his writings currently available to English speakers will soon grow.

Lastly, a salute to those who have similar dedication to crossing and dismantling the artificial borders between disciplines and cultural epochs—if only we had leaders here in the United States capable of addressing with such depth, or at least being aware of, education and the classics’ roles.

Selected Minor Works: The Heresy of Intelligent Design

Justin E. H. Smith

I would like to explain why, in the matter of the origins of species, there can be no compromise position, no accommodation by one side of the principle tenets of the other.  There can be no way of conceding the basic mechanisms through which evolution works while holding onto an anthropocentric view of the cosmos or a conception of human beings as unique among creatures in their likeness to the creator.  It is time, in short, for evolutionists to be clear: you are either with us, or you are against us.

Last year, Christoph Schönborn, an Austrian cardinal with close ties to “Benedict,” brought the Catholic church a step backwards by calling into question the earlier moderate view on evolution put forth by John Paul II.  In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Schönborn downplayed a 1996 letter in which the former Pope described evolution as “more than a hypothesis.”  The cardinal held forth with the view that “[e]volution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense –an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection– is not.”

The cardinal is not, evidently, denying that random variation and natural selection are the basic mechanisms of evolution.  He is only denying that these proceed without guidance and planning.  For the cardinal, every transformation in animal species prior to the emergence of homo sapiens must have been rigged in such a way as to guarantee this eventual outcome, since human beings, in traditional Christian theology, are the very reason God bothered creating all that cosmic dust and hydrogen and mud, all those supernovae and humble worms, in the first place.  It is all for us.  Things could not have unfolded in any other way.

This account of evolution has become quite common over the past years among conservatives trying to take a moderate stance in the debate.  They argue that there is nothing impious about the view that God may have worked through evolution in order to arrive at his crowning achievement, homo sapiens.  Thus George Will, in a recent article on the woes of the House Republicans, begins with a telling comparison: “Before evolution produced creatures of our perfection,” he writes, “there was a 3-ton dinosaur, the stegosaurus, so neurologically sluggish that when its tail was injured, significant time elapsed before news of the trauma meandered up its long spine to its walnut-size brain” (“How to Evict the ‘Rent-Seekers’,” January 11, 2006).  The implication is that God worked through such earlier rough drafts until he arrived at his final goal, namely, us (overlooking the obvious fact that there still are plenty of neurologically sluggish species lumbering around, and that in the Jurassic there were plenty of species that did not suffer from this shortcoming).  The Christians can hold onto their anthropocentric cosmology, while nonetheless taking good scientific evidence about shared ancestry into account.  It’s the best of both worlds!

But is such a compromise tenable?  Let us review some of the basics of the Darwinian account of how exactly “higher forms” (this is Darwin’s own misleading language) are thought to arise from lower ones.

The supreme virtue of an organism, in an evolutionary sense, is fitness to its environment, and fitness does not admit of non-relative degrees.  Thus, when it comes to getting one’s oxygen supply underwater, a fish is fitter than I, and thus, I suppose, better.  To the extent that we can talk about “better” and “worse”, we must make clear what sort of environmental circumstances we have in mind before we can say whether an organism is better or worse able to live in them.  Beyond this, it makes no sense to speak of an organism’s place in some non-relative, hierarchical chain of being.  The image of the chain is a vestige of a world-view that is hopelessly at odds with the theory of evolution.  (One thing its latter-day supporters frequently leave out is that, traditionally, human beings were not the highest placed on the catena rerum.  This spot was reserved for the angels–purely spiritual beings with nothing of the animal in them.)

But even with this circumscribed conception of betterness as fitness, could we not still go along with Schönborn and say that human beings are still God’s best work, moving from the comparative to the superlative on the grounds that, say, human beings are well-adapted not just to some tiny ecosystem, but to the entire globe, and eventually, perhaps, to outer space as well; or on the grounds that they cannot just live in any ecosystem, but can also dominate all of them, and all their inhabitants, by use of reason?  And is it not in virtue of the possession of reason that we are justified in speaking of human beings as the image of God?

The problem here is that, as Schönborn worries, the mechanism of adaptation that ensures the greater fitness of some organisms in some particular environment –whether this fitness involves the evolution of gills, bipedalism, or language– is one that can be better understood in terms of randomness than in terms of intelligent guidance.  In any population, there are variable traits.  Some organisms have them, some don’t, and the reasons for this variation are random mutations at the genetic level.  If Schönborn wants to deny this, he will also have to deny a whole host of elementary facts about genetics that he probably never even noticed were offensive– facts that have nothing to do directly with evolution, and facts the knowledge of which he probably benefits from on a regular basis in his reliance on modern medicine.

Some of the traits will prove more useful in response to certain environmental features, and the subset of individuals in a population that have these traits will be more likely to survive to  reproductive age and pass them on.  If God is working through evolution, then, as Schönborn and Will believe, he will have to be actively rigging not just all genetic mutations, but also all of the environmental changes to which the organisms, in which these genetic mutations occur, prove to be well or poorly equipped to respond.

Let us consider an example, one that is very close to home for us human beings.  Paleoanthropologists suggest that a significant moment in our becoming human arrived when our ancestors transitioned from arboreal swinging as their primary form of locomotion to bipedalism  This new and handsome way of getting about is thought to have brought in its wake a number of other adaptive consequences, including, some speculate, the evolution of a vastly larger cranium than those of our ancestors.  This, in turn, is what ultimately facilitated the performance of complicated mental feats, including those we today think of as “rational”.

But why did our ancestors go peripatetic in the first place?  Unfortunately, this change cannot be accounted for in terms of any innate desire for self-improvement among hominids, nor can it plausibly be explained in terms of God’s plan for their kind.  The full story of the evolution of bipedalism will also have to take into account the way in which meteorological and geological events changed parts of the landscape of Africa from rain forest into savannah, and forced the hominids in those parts, at pain of extinction, to start moving about in new ways.  If you wish to assert that evolution is a guided process, you must not think only of God pushing his creatures to go down one path rather than another, you must also take into account God’s micromanagement of every single event in the physical world so as to ensure particular outcomes in the biological world.  The passing of meteors, landslides, volcanic eruptions in the Mid-Atlantic range, the dissolution of a cumulonimbus here and the emergence of a cumulus there, the decay of this atom as opposed to that one, all of this must be meticulously set up for the sake of desired results among one tiny subset of natural phenomena.

Indeed, what we end up with is a sort of neo-occasionalism, the view that the only true cause of any event in the universe is God, that there can be no talk of causality except in reference to the ultimate cause of everything.  In the 17th century, Gottfried Leibniz derided this view, held by his contemporary Nicolas Malebranche, as recourse to “perpetual miracle.”  Leibniz, like many fellow Christian thinkers of his era, understood that implicating God in the nuts-and-bolts of the universe’s daily maintenance is to assign to God a task that is beneath his dignity, and thus to lapse into impiety.  If miracles like the incarnation or the resurrection are going to count for anything, Leibniz saw, then they are going to have to be set apart from the ordinary flow of nature.  This is what occasionalism would preclude.  How much more Christian it would be to account for natural phenomena not by perpetual miracle or by divine micromanagement, but by appeal to a few simple and regular laws.

One can easily see why intelligent design cannot work as a compromise position.  Prima facie, it is much more plausible to suppose that, had God made the universe with human beings in mind as his ultimate goal, he would not have bothered coming up with such a meandering mechanism, and one that would require so much upkeep.  He would have seen rather to the simultaneous, instantaneous, once-and-for-all creation of all species in their present form, and would have shaved several billion years of build-up off the history of the universe, setting things into motion around, say, 5,000 BC, rather than circa 15,000,000,000 BC.  In other words, God would probably have done things more or less as Genesis would have us believe.  The creationist’s attempt to compromise with science, whether for honest or disingenuous reasons, by taking the middle road of “guided” or “managed” descent from lower forms, cannot fail to lapse into nonsense.  I would certainly prefer to debate a scriptural literalist who sticks to his guns, who only recognizes one source of truth, and is clear about what this is.

What Schönborn is worried about is not so much the proposition that human beings are the kin of “lesser” animals (elsewhere I have argued that it is precisely this worry that guides many creationists).  In line with traditional Christian theology –as opposed to the aberrant theology of many fundamentalist protestant sects– the cardinal recognizes that the proper understanding of a human being is as a creature that shares part of its nature, though not all, with the animal kingdom.  Rather, Schönborn is concerned that the best scientific theory of how we got here disconnects us from any divine purpose, leaves us to fend for ourselves metaphysically.  This is a worry that is not limited to the debate about human origins.  Indeed it is one that many were expressing long before the descent of man from lower forms became an issue.

While many early modern thinkers agreed with Leibniz that excusing God from the task of micromanaging the affairs of nature is the best way to exalt him, there were just as many who feared that, with diminished responsibilities, God runs the risk of becoming irrelevant.  Some early modern vitalists, such as Ralph Cudworth, the author of a 1686 treatise not-so-humbly entitled The True Intellectual System of the Universe, thought he had the perfect compromise solution: God dispatches a certain “plastick nature” that intelligently guides the unfolding of natural processes in the material world while allowing him to retreat and, I suppose, contemplate his own divine excellence, while this subordinate force “doth drudgingly execute” those tasks that are beneath God’s station.  What terrified Cudworth was the thought that the things of this world might be accounted for, to use Cicero’s compelling phrase, simply as “a fortunate clash of atoms,” yet he understood that the answer is not to make God himself take care of all the “operose, sollicitous, and distractious” affairs of this lowly world.  But this position prompted others to accuse Cudworth of reintroducing the pagan doctrine of the world soul. 

One might easily get the sense that, when it comes to characterizing God’s involvement with the world, you just can’t win.  There will always be reasons for denouncing any position as impious.  If I can hope to contribute anything to the unfortunate debate about intelligent design that has developed over the past few years, it is that ID theory is just as suitable a candidate for denunciation on the grounds of heresy as any other account of what God is up to.  The standard criticism of ID is that it is bad science.  I would like to propose that it is bad theology as well. 

But fortunately none of this has anything to do with the prospects of evolutionary biology.  Today we have at our disposal biochemistry, genetics, and numerous other promising fields of inquiry that are in a position to explain how atoms, in accord with a few simple laws, really can produce human beings.  And at just this promising moment, creationists want to throw in the towel in view of the “irreducible complexity” of it all.  This phrase had some resonance 300 years ago– vitalists had good reason to think that billiard-ball-style mechanical physics was inadequate to account for all the phenomena of nature.  Now, however, it is nothing more than the proclamation of a preference for ignorance.

Unlike Richard Dawkins and his bright friends, I find people who put too much faith in science obtuse, and I do not think my own life would be easily bearable if I were to abandon all hope for a perfect, eternal order beyond this shoddy, decaying one.  But let us keep our activities straight.  Let us not do interpretive dance in our trigonometry classes, and for God’s sake let us not complicate the teaching of a perfectly autonomous and rigorous science with the problem of finding meaning and purpose in the universe.

Negotiations 6: A Christmas Tale

I go home for Christmas, and it is a vast cacophony of family, with grandparents and siblings, aunts, uncles, boyfriends, in-laws and all manner of cousins present: first cousins once removed, double cousins, first double cousins, second and triple cousins. There are fires in three hearths, each trying to outburn the others; the house is shimmering with heat. There are logs to be hewn, trees to be raised, beds made, furniture moved, carpets taken up, banners unfurled, icons hung, candles lit; and there is food, food, food! to be eaten at all times and in every location: grilled venison sausages, baked salmon stuffed with spinach and feta, steamed mussels, smoked trout, wild rice, pearled onions, boiled peas, roast duck, mince pies with brandy butter, Spanish clementines, Belgian chocolates, Danish marzipan, fudge as dense as flesh, suckers, lollipops, chewies, stickies, gummies and squirmies.

These last are for the children: children crawling from under beds, hanging from rafters, sliding down banisters, and building forts. Children banging drums, bouncing balls and riding bicycles; snot-smeared children, wide-eyed children, children with earaches and bellyaches and toothaches; children hacking, spitting, whispering and howling. Their little fingers are ceaselessly working, pushing into pockets, manipulating trucks and plucking violins; grubby fingers pinching, gouging and tickling; wet fingers squishing into ears and noses; grabby fingers at your sleeve; greasy fingers in the shrimp; fragile fingers curling and uncurling with each breath when like the sea, finally, the children sleep.

I am unaccustomed to such activity. No longer a child, I carry myself within myself. I want to slow this traffic; I want to pluck moments and preserve or heal or burn them. My frenzy is a private thing, a damnable, maddening, lonely thing. Thus it is that I find myself, late this Christmas day, under the pretext of gathering mistletoe, climbing the thick crotch of a dying maple just to gain some solitude, and to breathe and to think.

We are a family of spies, however, and one of us has followed me out. It is the girl we call Bug, full of questions and sugar. She is an elf-child, all blonde and blue, with eyes that glow and blink and swell, and I can feel them glowing and blinking in the winter grayness. She contemplates my activity from below then calls up to me in the gathering sky. “What are you doing?”

I am thirty feet above her now, standing in the limbs of a tree that was a mere sapling at the end of the French Enlightenment. I feel like an affluent worm when I consider this fact. Time weaves fate. This means nothing to her. “I’m looking for mistletoe.” “Can I come up too?” She carries the scar of an immense and terrible wound upon her belly, something went wrong in the pre-life of her mother’s womb, but she is quick and agile and I would like nothing so much as to haul here into the transcendent heights of this massive, wooden thing.

“No. The ladder is not secure.”

“I’m an auto-didactic climber,” she insists.

The last time I sent her into a tree, she ended up in the topmost branches of a magnolia in full bloom; we lost her in the perfume and the blossoms, and she refused to come down until I directed her out onto a limb from which she could leap into the swimming pool below. Her mother was not impressed.

“No,” I repeat.

“Uncle, are you a teacher or an artist?” she calls up to me.

“The ladder is not secure,” I repeat. “I’m coming down now. Let’s go inside.”

We step into the house and I am immediately set upon by a troll. It is the boy we call Moo-shu, on account of his fondness for pork wrapped in pancakes. He has been standing on the stairway, wearing a cape of curly sheepskin, waiting for me to enter, and he flings himself at me from above as though he is plunging into a gorge. His arms go around my neck and he is trying with all his tiny strength to throttle me. It is a game we play; he is a boy without a father in a family of women and he longs for his dad, but I am not that person, and the best I can do is wrestle with him, entangle arms and legs and hair with him, teach him to fight and to run and mingle my male smells with his. I drop to my knees and roll, dislodging his grip and his cape. Like a crab he scuttles away, but I catch his knee and drag him back into the fray. “Now it’s your turn, boy,” I am saying. “Prepare to meet the Sheep of Parnassus!” I am wrapping him up in his cape, as though it would swallow him whole, and at first he is giggling, then a note of panic creeps into his laughter. “No, Uncle, no!” he shrieks. “It is too late for you boy,” I continue. “No flight for you; fight, boy fight!” With that I give him license, we both know this game, and his fear turns to fury. He becomes a small Heracles, seizing my wrists like the fabled serpents and twisting them back with a howl. Our eyes meet for a moment; his loneliness and fear of abandonment fall away like dust and he is just a boy at play in the world, struggling for triumph, and he delivers a good shot with his knee to my stomach. I roll away, doubled up and moaning, and he stands over me, glowering with a grin on his face and his hands on his hips. “You have wounded me, Moo-shu,” I groan, “but the sheep will return!” I make a grab at his ankle, but he scampers up the stairs and is gone.

A family is like a loaded gun: point it in the wrong direction and someone is bound to be killed. We take our shots over dinner, stuffing ourselves with creamy, sauce-laden dishes, then we belch up our vitriol and fire away. “Let’s play a game,” says my grandmother. She is 90 years old and as mean as a switch, with violet eyes that glimmer like thistles in rain. “Let’s say the most insulting things we can possibly think of to each other!”

“Okay, Joanna,” my father responds. “I’ll go first.”

At the children’s table, meanwhile, one of the boys has tipped his plate into his sister’s lap, and he is moaning over his loss. “Clean it up, fatso,” she says to him. Her mother looks over sharply. “Well he is obese, you know,” says the girl. “You said so yourself. You said you would take us all to Hawaii if he lost thirty pounds. You called him obese.”

A cousin is slugging his wine and barking across the table at someone’s boyfriend. “Our president has said that if you are not with us, you are against us. Well, are you with us or against us?” This is a man who considered joining the priesthood but ended up flying jets for the navy instead.

“As I mentioned,” says the boyfriend, “I am from Switzerland. We are a neutral country and I am here to study science, not politics.”

My mother is having a quiet talk with one of my sisters. “Your son has been doing something odd in the bathroom,” she says.

“Mm-hmmm,” says my sister. “Tell me about it.”

“He seems to have taken to smearing his feces on the wall when he defecates.”

Bug is at my elbow at once, tugging away. “Theses? What’s theses?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that myself,” says my sister. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t much care what it means,” says my mother, “but it’s staining the finish in the bathroom and I’d rather not have to repaint it.”

“What’s theses, Uncle?” I want to avoid this conversation if I can. “He thinks his name is Martin Luther,” I say to Bug. “Why don’t you ask him if he’s thrown his inkpot at Satan recently?”

My grandmother is clutching at the boy we call, on account of the size of his head, The Squash. He is 13.

“Don’t ever trust a woman,” she is hissing at him. “Once she gets her claws in you, you’ll never get them out.”

My father is chatting with his vegan/neurotic daughter. “You were, without a doubt, the most obstreperous six year old I have ever met.”

The boy we call Sharp-Tooth is picking a scab, and my sister-in-law is thinking her Republican thoughts.

“Priests are such funny things,” my aunt is saying. “They’re always shaking things. I wonder one day they don’t shake something out of their noses.”

Someone begins to pray. “Hail and blessed be the hour and moment in which the Son of God was born.” The children are under the mistletoe, performing some weird ceremony. They seem to be making out with one another. The moments we forget likely mean more than the ones we remember. The prayer continues, “…in that hour be pleased, oh Lord, to hear my prayer and grant my desire.”

Bug is at my elbow again. “Uncle.”

“Bug.”

“There’s someone in the tree.”

“No, Bug.”

“There’s someone in the tree.”

“It’s just a memory, Bug.”

“…through the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Uncle!” Bug’s eyes are so wide and blue they hurt to look into. “Be an artist!” she says.

“…and his most afflicted mother.”

“Come look!” she says, and we flee.