There are filmmakers who help us learn to watch movies better. Many of them are canonical: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Ford, Kubrick, Kiarostami, Sokurov, etc. What links the group of directors I am referring to is the way that watching their movies forces the viewer to pay attention to form. Rather than simply immersing one in plot, these artists ask viewers to glean information from the directorial choices being made, from compositions and cuts and such. In Hitchcock, to give the classical example, pretty generic plots combine with a camera eye that makes associations and psychological inferences with startling sharpness. These are moviemaker’s moviemakers. The critic-artists of the nouvelle vague did much to emphasize the aesthetic value of highlighting formal elements, and so the auteur, rather than the studio, became the most important unit to consider when watching movies (they also extended this view backwards to incorporate Hawks and many others). Film formalism is really part of the mid-century revaluation of modernism that extended to criticism and architecture. These days, auteurship mostly serves as the justification for self-absorbed directors whose most urgent message is the advertisement of their own genius.

There are, though, directors working today who respect their audiences enough to command and repay that respect with thought-provoking work that also relies on the audience’s attention to formal features. One of these is the Austrian director Michael Haneke. The sobriety and equipoise of his camera, and the subtlety of his aesthetic choices, make most of his films a pleasure to watch. His recent work has seen him rein in his early tendency towards flashy violence and degradation, as in Funny Games. His adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher was amazing in its visual translation of that novel’s obsessive tone, and I though his fondness for menacing quiet moments made “Time of the Wolf” one of the best post-apocalyptic movies made recently.

The first shot of his latest, Cache (“Hidden”) is a perfect example of his talent. He holds the wide shot of the main characters’ home for an extremely long time, maybe five minutes. Luckily (or rather, deliberately) the composition is complex enough, and photographically interesting enough, to maintain one’s interest despite the confusing lack of activity. Soon it is revealed that the nature of the first shot is very different to what one at first assumes, and one is forced to revise one’s faith in the basic nature of shots in movies. It’s that clever. As the image becomes a motif, repeatedly returned to, over the course of the film, its details become more and more familiar, and our encounters with the same space from different perspectives are made as familiar as if we ouselves had inhabited this street. This is filmmaking: to grasp a space and its complexity and impart that complexity to a viewer, in something like three-dimensionality. The movie is about surveillance, literally and figuratively, and it commands the viewer to confront the ambiguity of looking at the world, and how assumptive most of the judgments we make about it are. Like most great formal films, we learn about observation by observing it.

The narrartive theme of Cache might be said to be the return of the repressed, globalized. The movie concerns an haute-bourgeois couple – their modernist dwelling, decor, even food, perfectly observed – who are possibly threatened by figures from the husband’s past. The relations between the modern liberal individual, secure in his sanctimonius domain, and the world-at-large (in this case, the French colonial world) are called in question with devestating results. Compared to a movie like Syriana, whose idea of exploring the links between countries is to represent everything through the tired themes of espionage and politics, with human beings a kind of generic afterthought, a plot device, Cache starts from the most locally situated, domestic setting (the ur-Parisian couple of Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) and gradually expands the circle outward, relentlessly and at times grimly, until you feel the distance between places and places, times and times, unraveling.

At times, in all his films and this one, Haneke can risk dourness. I never actually feel he is a miserablist; more likely, I think, his tone is so even and reserved that easily bored viewers sometimes feel punished. I think his directorial reserve, his lack of flashy camera movements and cuts, is his great strength: it buys him the time to examine people more closely than most filmmakers. If he has a trademark shot, it is the stationary wideshot. These shots, so beautifully composed, are reminiscent of another very systematic artist, Andreas Gursky. But they are much more daring in the cinema than in photography, and they build up great pathos over the long durations for which he holds them. What seems to get exposed by these patient intervals of looking is something like the Pinterian hypocrisy of everday life, the little lies that must be constantly told and that we must ferret out. The artificial, quick style of the commercial film industry can’t show us this; it substitutes the pleasure of cutting to the beat of music and fetishizing the close-up. Haneke can’t or won’t provide these confectionary pleasures, but he substitutes something richer: visual detail, blocks of color, compositions that combine foreground and background elements. In a way, his work is a defense of cinema against music, and against television (the home of the close-up).

Haneke’s comfort with unsympathetic characters, actions, and styles comes along with something a little less savoury: his attraction to sadism. Violence, and especially the visceral display of blood, in his movies is a bit of an addiction for him, and at times it can feel a little too much. But he shows signs of maturation: where he reveled in brutality in his earlier films, especially Funny Games, The Piano Teacher mostly observes blood so clinically as to reconfirm the aversion to violence. In this sense, Haneke’s violence is the opposite of the kind of celebratory intensity that you find in so many American directors (Scorcese, Tarantino). In Cache, despite a pervasive air of menace, there is only one violent moment, and it irrupts so shockingly into the texture of the film that it at first feels manipulative. Later one begins to decide it was earned after all.

The film’s final shot, another elegant stationary composition held for minutes, only furthers the ambiguity of what has come before. The film, full of jokes and setups that defy generic expectation, ends by neglecting to conclude, instead pointing to the unknowability of urban culture. It poses some really difficult questions about contemporary French identity and the price of its maintenance. For his recommitment to radically simplistic cinematic tools; his mastery of tone and pacing; his photographic complexity; his fearless attitude towards unsympathetic characters; and most of all his respect for the viewer’s intelligence, I think Haneke is one of the most interesting directors at work in the world today.

Dispatches:

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)

One of the few vices I have always had an extreme aversion and almost allergic reaction to is gambling in all its multifarious incarnations. So much so, that I have never even learned to play a single card game, because they are all somehow indissolubly (and probably unfairly) associated with gambling in my mind since an early age. Besides the irrationality of trying to “beat the odds” at a casino, and the elaborately idiotic “systems” that people come up with for doing so, the idea that one is getting some entertainment in exchange for throwing one’s money away is, at the least, irritating to me. Since when is sitting in a near-hypnotized state in front of a gaudily festooned refrigerator-with-a-gearshift-lever-attached for hours, feeding small (and not so small) change into it, and occasionally getting some ducats spat out at one, considered entertainment? And why? I’m sorry, it seems much more like a compulsive sickness to me.

Still, if people want to congregate in some monstrously ugly building and drunkenly give their money to casino owners for nothing in exchange, and to find this entertaining, who am I to object? I don’t even begrudge the Native-American tribes that have managed to get something back from the people who have taken everything else from them, by taking advantage of their addictions for a change. I do, however, draw the line at state-sponsored gambling. Human minds have a well-known and well-studied weakness in dealing with probabilistic phenomena. (See this earlier 3QD article, for example.) It is one thing for individuals, or even private corporations, to take advantage of this systematic weakness; it is quite another for government itself to be doing so by actively and enthusiastically promoting gambling, rather than protecting people from it by making sure that they are aware of its obsessive dangers and basic irrationality. Yes, I am talking here of all the lotteries.

From the point of view of rational choice theory, to play a state lottery is undeniably, unarguably, irrefutably irrational. They give out much less than half the money as prizes, than what they receive from the tickets they sell; the rest goes to the cost of administering the lottery, and whatever is left over is used for the benefit of citizens in supporting educational and other governmental programs. It is like someone telling you, “I will flip a coin and you call it. If you lose, you pay me $10. If you win, I will pay you $4.” Would you repeatedly keep playing this game? Well, if you play the lottery, this is exactly the game you are playing. The bigger the potential payoff, the more even otherwise-rational people become willing to suspend all reason, even if the odds of losing have grown to astronomical proportions. The government of my home state of New York constantly takes advantage of this very human mental laziness by running ads on TV whenever the total amounts available in the lottery exceed some amount, like 10 million dollars. Whenever the amount is over a 100 million dollars, the glamor-promising promotion is constant, and it seems to work very well in replacing any misgivings people may have about the basic stupidity of buying lottery tickets, with ineluctably seductive visions of nearly unimaginable wealth. People drive miles from Connecticut and New Jersey to come to NYC to buy Lotto tickets when this happens, no doubt planning what they will do with their winnings along the way. Someone once pointed out that for a round trip of more than 14 miles, there is a greater chance of dying in a traffic accident than there is of winning 100 million dollars in the NY State Lotto. Still, there are plenty willing to take their chances.

So what about the supposed benefits to society? A slogan on the website of the NY State Lotto proudly proclaims: “Raising billions to educate millions!” Well, let’s take a look at where these billions-for-millions are coming from. As you are no doubt aware, many demographic studies in many different states show that the numbers of lottery players are dramatically skewed toward African Americans and low-income groups, and those with low levels of education, with a significant number of senior citizens added to the mix. It is hardly surprising that those who feel most desperate about their situations in society, and have the least hope or avenue of uplift, would be most likely to risk their precious few dollars on the futile dream of escaping their condition. Look, let’s just call this what it is: another tax on the poor, and a racist one at that. What is remarkable in this case is that it is liberals who support such efforts, mistakenly thinking that the monies raised will be spent on the needy, while conservatives, such as George F. Will, vociferously oppose lotteries on the moral grounds that the government should not be in the business of promoting gambling.

I am not sure why otherwise reasonable people are so taken with the idea of lotteries as a great way of raising money for good causes. I was once told by a very distinguished diplomat (whom I respect and admire immensely) that he had suggested the idea of a worldwide lottery administered by the UN to Kofi Annan, as a way of raising money for worthy UN causes. Maybe he was joking. But proposals for new lotteries are everywhere. Look at a sample I just found from today, for instance:

Elmer L. Forbath proposes this in Space.com:

A Space Lottery: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

The National Space Society should promote creation of a National Space Lottery. Ideally, this might become an International Space Lottery, and would offer the possibility of space flight, as a prize, to every man, woman and child on earth…

The problem with funding space efforts with tax dollars is that many say, “What’s in it for me?” To date, space has been reserved for scientists and rich tourists, like Dennis Tito and few imagine themselves as having a chance. A National Space Lottery will offer the possibility of space travel to everyone, rich or poor!

Lotteries generate huge amounts: One multi-state jackpot reached $363 million! The lottery for New York has the motto “A Dollar and a Dream.” The dream offered by a ticket in the “space” lottery could be a ride on an F-16 or the “Zero G” airplane, suborbital flight on SpaceShipOne, a trip to the International Space Station, or eventually to our lunar colony.

Yes, why not have the desperate and the destitute of the world pay for our increasingly controversial plans for space missions? Maybe we can’t con our taxpayers, or even their usually easily-bought representatives in Washington in this case, but, hey, we can always exploit the silly dreams of wealth that the extremely poor and illiterate of the world can always be counted on to indulge! I can just imagine the long lines at the pale blue cash-in-dollars-only UN Lottery terminals in Malawi. While we’re at it, I have a modest proposal of my own: why doesn’t the government also get into the business of hawking Hock? It’s legal, after all, and maybe we could raise enough money to start treatment programs for alcoholics. Maybe there would even be enough left over to house the homeless!

Have a good week!

My other Monday Musings:
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

I’ve generally been dissatisfied with the idea that media outlets such as Fox TV and Sinclair are the drivers behind the rightward move in politics in recent decades. It’s not that I find the claims impossible. I certainly have come across enough people whose arguments for this or that right-wing view pretty much echo Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly, or, at better moments, Bill Kristol. I hear these arguments as well, and remain unconvinced. The smarter conservatives have heard opposite views as well, and they remain unconvinced. There is plenty of space for reasonable disagreement for the simple fact that we disagree about what factors are relevant, how they should be weighted, and that we have differing commitments as to what values should be prioritized. So, that doesn’t leave me surprised. But the trend has been a steady one, or had been a steady one. And while there are reasons we have for our positions, and while in some broad sense these reasons can and do act as causes for our political preferences, something else seemed to be at play, and the media seems as good a place as any—all the more so if reasons and the information they appeal to, matter.

Conservatives often point to how media and entertainment alter values by altering our attitudes and psychological stances on sex, violence, and authority. To the extent that political attitudes depend on psychology, on sentiment, their take that the media alter sentiments and thus political may be at least as true as the left-liberal claim that the media distorts information.

The appeal to the psychological basis of political preferences, and especially the patterning of political preferences is old. Studies of crowd psychology, mass movements, fascism, obedience to authority and the like have been steady, and the turn towards rational choice and strategic behavior, with its assumption that these turns are motivated by self-interest, has not managed to dislodge it.

I was thinking of politics and psychology this past holiday season when back in Houston for a visit. An increasing number of family members were becoming more and more conservative and they were becoming more and more fearful.

Recent studies in psychology suggests the people are effectively made more conservative when they’re made aware of mortality. This new approach, “terror management theory”:

holds that cultural worldviews or systems of meaning (e.g., religion) provide people with the means to transcend death, if only symbolically. The cornerstone of this position is that awareness of mortality, when combined with an instinct for self-preservation, creates in humans the capacity to be virtually paralyzed with fear. Fear of death, in turn, engenders a defense of one’s cultural worldview. Consequently, the theory predicts that if the salience of one’s mortality is raised, the worldview will be more heavily endorsed to buffer the resulting anxiety. Under conditions of heightened mortality salience, defense and justification of the worldview should be intensified, thereby decreasing tolerance of opposing views and social, cultural, and political alternatives.

The relevance of terror management theory to the psychology of conservatism should be apparent. When confronted with thoughts of their own mortality (Greenberg et al., 1990; Rosenblatt et al., 1989), people appear to behave more conservatively by shunning and even punishing outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished worldviews. This perspective is especially consistent with the notion of conservatism as motivated social cognition; terror management theory holds that social intolerance is the consequence of worldview-enhancing cognitions motivated by the need to buffer anxiety-inducing thoughts.

The theory was founded by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, who point to considerable empirical support for their claims.

Empirical support for TMT has been obtained in over 200 experiments by researchers in 13 countries, primarily by demonstrating that reminders of death (mortality salience) in the form of open-ended questions, death-anxiety questionnaires, pictures of gory accidents, interviews in front of funeral parlors, and subliminal exposure to the words “death” or “dead,” instigate cultural worldview defense. For example, after mortality salience, people: 1) have more favorable evaluations of people with similar religious and political beliefs and more unfavorable evaluations of those who differ on these dimensions; 2) are more punitive toward moral transgressors and more benevolent to heroic individuals; 3) are more physically aggressive toward others with dissimilar political orientations; and 4) strive more vigorously to meet cultural standards of value. In addition, research has shown that mortality salience does not influence conscious affect or physiological arousal, and its effects are greatest following a delay, when death thought is highly accessible but outside of focal attention. Recent work has demonstrated that it is the potential for anxiety signaled by heightened death thought accessibility, which motivates worldview defense and self-esteem bolstering, which in turn reduces death thought accessibility to baseline levels. . .

President Bush’s popularity soared after the massive mortality salience induction produced by the attacks of 9/11; since then, Bush has emphasized the greatness of America and his commitment to triumphing over evil. . . Do reminders of mortality increase the appeal of such a leader? Studies published in the September 2004 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggest that they do. In Study 1, a mortality salience induction dramatically increased support for President Bush and his policies in Iraq. In Study 2, subliminal reminders of 9/11 or the World Trade Center increased the accessibility of implicit thoughts of death; for Americans then, even non-conscious intimations of the events of 9/11 arouse concerns about mortality. Accordingly, in Study 3 participants were asked to think about death, the events of 9/11, or a benign control topic; both mortality and 9/11 salience produced substantial increases in support for President Bush among liberal as well as conservative participants. Finally, in Study 4, whereas participants rated John Kerry more favorably than George Bush after thinking about being in intense pain, after a reminder of death, evaluations of Bush increased and Kerry decreased, such that Bush was more favorably evaluated than Kerry.

And the mechanism seems to be a fairly straightforward, in-group out-group dynamics. I recalled these studies which I had come across not too long ago when I was in Houston, because a fear and stigmatization of refugees from New Orleans was not simply palpable but open. More importantly it was on the local news all the time.

I stopped watching local news a long time ago mostly because of headlines like “Potholes, what you don’t know might kill you.” (That’s not a made up headline.) The alleged crimes associated with refugees from New Orleans were particular instances of the sensationalist fear mongering that is a staple of local news. If there’s anything to this research, then Fox News and Sinclair may be products rather than sources of the changes in political preferences, and the sources themselves may be from seemingly innocuous media.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Recently in town for the British tour, cricket reporter Andrew Miller observes,

“One of the first things you notice about Karachi, so long as you’re not being hot-boxed in a rickshaw as the morning traffic crawls to a halt, is the improbable clarity of the air. Despite being home to 14 million intensely active inhabitants, there’s none of the oppressive smog that lingers over Lahore like a caggy blanket. As the sea breezes work their magic and dissipate the city’s exhaust fumes, it’s possible too to see through some of the thick layers of misconception that abound about the place.”

During winter in Karachi, the sunlight is soft and milky during the day and after dusk the air becomes cool and wafts firewood and the sea. The billboards down Shahrah-e-Faisal flash and buzz and the wedding halls in and around the wide boulevards of Nazimabad and Hyderi are lit like carnivals. Winter is wedding season, Jinnah’s birthday, Christmas time, new year. In Saddar, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, garlanded by Christmas lights, glows something like a medieval structure in downtown Prague. At Clifton beach, floodlights animate the swelling gray sea and the silhouettes of families skipping on the silt. On New Year, tens of thousands of Karachites flood the beachfront on the backs of motorbikes, chanting, waving flags, celebrating themselves and the city. 

This year, however, a shadow has fallen over the city’s winter pageantry. A few months ago the earth opened up in the north and swallowed up mountains, roads, schools, villages, people. The earthquake in Kashmir is a catastrophe of epic proportion: a hundred thousand dead, three million displaced. The numbers bewilder; and grow: the severe northern winter is now claiming thousands every day. (We urge you to contribute generously, immediately.)

Although far away, the tremors of the earthquake have reached Karachi: not only does the city host a large Kashmiri population but possesses the requisite infrastructure to provide relief. From the city’s efficient political machinery – notably the MQM and the Jamaat – to the remarkable civic organizations – the Edhi Welfare Trust and the Citizens Foundation – all have been involved in the relief and present reconstruction effort. Moreover, students from high-schools and colleges, some who have never left Karachi, are volunteering in far-flung Muzaffarabad and Balakot.

Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, Mahnaz Isphahani notes that “an August 2000 study by the Agha Khan Development Network rated Pakistan as one of the most charitable countries,” a remarkable statistic for a developing country. “It shows. The private sector, non governmental organizations, political parties and thousands of volunteers led the relief efforts. The earthquake has driven a unique mobilization of Pakistan’s civil society.” Rugged individualists, Pakistanis don’t come together often. But when they do, they seem to move mountains.

Pakistan routinely makes headlines for being a “frontline state” on the “War on Terror,” a function of its geography which is defined by a collection of tribal fiefdoms in north, Muslim fundamentalist Iran to the West, and until recently, Hindu fundamentalist India in the East. Consequently other developments escape discourse. Save a piece or two, there has been no coverage of the remarkable summoning of national resources toward relief and reconstruction. Indeed the earthquake has often been essentialized in mainstream media as a matter of five or six Indian army helicopters that were not accepted by the government. As usual, many dimensions have escaped scrutiny.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, however, political commentator Husain Haqqani picks up on an interesting development:

“So much for the popularly peddled view that anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is so pervasive and deep-rooted it might take generations to alter. A new poll from Pakistan, a critical front-line in the war on terror, paints a very different picture – by revealing a sea-change in public opinion in recent months…Pakistanis now hold a more favorable opinion of the U.S. than at any time since 9/11…The direct cause for this dramatic shift in Muslim opinion is clear: American humanitarian assistance for Pakistani victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed 87,000. The U.S. pledged $510 million for earthquake relief in Pakistan and American soldiers are playing a prominent role in rescuing victims from remote mountainous villages.”

There are other seismic developments in the north that have escaped attention. A few months ago, the Hasbah bill made headlines everywhere. The procrustean legislation, passed by provincial assembly in Peshawar (the capital of NWFP, the province bordering Afghanistan), would have created a moral police. In December, however, the Supreme Court definitively struck it down. This, of course, did not make the news anywhere. (We urge you do do a google search on the issue). Furthermore, the sponsors of the bill, the MMA, the Islamist party that won some seats after the second Afghan campaign, has been unable to subsequently pursue it. Sirajul Haq, a senior provincial minister in the MMA, claims in the Herald that “some people in Islamabad are allergic to the word Islam.” Indeed, Musharraf’s administration came down like a ton of bricks on the mullahs.

Of course, Haq’s Islam is not Pakistani Islam; the personality of Pakistani Islam is inherently accommodative. Whenever we return home, for instance, we visit the shrines of Sufi saints in and around Karachi, from Mayvah Shah deep in a necropolis featuring a Jewish cemetery to perhaps one of the most intriguing tombs in all of South Asia, Udero Lal (or Duryah Shah). Here, people congregate on Thursday nights, singing, dancing, smoking chars. The weekly festival features fortune-tellers, wrestling competitions, food stalls. Near the beach, at Abdullah Shah Ghazi, we pay homage to the saint who is said to have saved Karachi from the sea. In the limestone cave behind the tomb there is talk of other miracles. This time around we visited a couple of Hindu temples, including Shree Ratneswar Mahdevi, a five minute saunter from Abdullah Shah. There, we were taken to a limestone cave underneath and briefed about miracles. No doubt, the two caves are connected. Whether you talk about the Barelvi Punjabi countryside or the Maulai Sindhi interior, the weddings rituals or notions of hygiene, the infrastructure of Pakistan’s Islam rests on a syncretistic heritage. And Islam got more civilized the further it moved away from Arabs and Arabia (and arguably is most accommodative in the Far East).

Another exciting development in the north is the emergence of Sajid and Zeeshan, a solidly middle class, Peshawar-based, electronic pop duo. Their thoughtful but finger-snapping, hip-shaking singles “King of Self” and “Freestyle Dive” (that we urge you dowload from their website) have topped the charts and if marketed successfully, their upcoming album can take dancefloors worldwide by storm. The latter’s animated video – featuring a bank robber who suffers a pang of conscience – was nominated for best video at the Indus Music Awards (held, by the way, with great pomp on the lawns of the Karachi Parsi Institute on December 24th.) Sajid and Zeeshan are the face of contemporary Pakistan, resolute members of the Media Generation, heterodox rockers who unlike mullahs don’t worry about what Pakistan should be, about silly notions of authenticity, but are confident that what they do is by definition, Pakistani.

Indeed, the Media Generation is redefining notions of self and sovereignty in a way that no prior generation has before, a phenomenon we have covered in this column earlier. This winter, the Media Generation is responsible for the superb Kara Film Festival and for bringing Bryan Adams to Karachi later this month for a benefit concert (where some twenty thousand are expected to attend). It was also responsible for local channels broadcasting Christmas programming on Christmas eve: not only was there a Christmas address by the Prime Minister to the a large gathering on PTV but Christmas carols on TV1, and on GEO (the most watched entertainment channel), a serial on prime-time featuring Pakistani Christian family, a first. This is the stuff that changes sensibilities. For instance, at Nasra School, one the largest private urban school networks for lower-middle and middle class students, the topic for the annual middle school debates this year (reminescent of the program “50 Minutes” on GEO) was, “Should Pakistan develop relations with Israel?”

The sports channels are commemorating another event: Pakistan walloping England in cricket. For years, Pakistan had been in the wilderness, a team with few stars, little direction, no guts. Things began turning in 2005 with Pakistan’s resounding defeat of India in India. England, on the other hand, was coming off an historic victory over Australia, the best team in the world, and was favored to win. But as with India, the Pakistan boys made chapli kebab out of them. Under the squinty, watchful gaze of Inzi, “The Big Easy,” their towering Punjabi captain who has finally come into his own, Danesh Kaneria, the Hindu leg spinner, took wicket after wicket after wicket as Shahid Afridi, the blue eyed Pathan from Karachi, transformed from a streaky opener to the most explosive batsman in cricket today, swatting pitches as if he were playing street cricket with a tape ball. Cricket reporter Kamran Abbasi avers, “There is a Pakistani way in cricket, abundant talent abundantly flawed, that leaves you holding your breath in anticipation of the next act and staring in disbelief if it comes off.” We see things somewhat differently. The cricket team can be thought as a proxy for nation: rugged individualists with varied styles and backgrounds who against all odds somehow come together at critical junctures to come out on top.

Other Critical Digressions:

Dispatch from Karachi

The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan

The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National

Literary Pugilists and Underground Men

Gangbanging and Notions of the Self

Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)

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.

You quite often see poetry used in contemporary culture in interesting and creative ways. For example, just last week I heard some Emily Dickinson used in the Kneehigh Theatre’s production of Tristan & Yseult at the Sydney Festival, and I’m pretty sure I heard a line from Larkin in Jerry Springer The Opera which was shown here recently. What is a lot less common, I think, is to find what one might call the poetic, or the poetry of the real, in actual television shows. Some would say that all television is poetic in the sense that it heightens the aesthetic experience in ways that can intensify viewing and listening pleasure. The mordant satire of The Simpsons or the social comedy of Frasier or Seinfeld is television of a very sophisticated and pleasurable kind. However, programs that get through to the wound of living and are equal to the realities of how we know our lives to be are much rarer.

Six Feet Under is surely one of the most effective television series from this viewpoint. Here is the poetry of the real, written and produced to entertain, but getting very close to the place where poetry lives. True, the poetry is often near to incomprehension, pain and disillusionment. There are no one-liners to relieve the cataclysms in the heart. From the very opening shots, with their intimations of Poe’s ‘Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’’ (or is it Macbeth?), and the necessary death we witness at the commencement of each episode, we are put in the way of the strangeness and unpredictability of death, and therefore of the strangeness and unpredicability of our lives.

It is a very important creative achievement to bring about this kind of intensification for five seasons of programming. Here, I feel, there are characters who could walk out of the screen and I would recognise them as of my own kind and time. They speak truly, and their silences are true too. And I like the way the characters change our perceptions of them, how our reactions to them vary. Brenda Chenowith, for example, can seem liberated and perceptive, and then self-obsessed and narcissistic—not quite the same thing. Claire’s adolescent wilfulness can be irritating until we remember we were just like that not so very long ago. But Claire is also strong enough to resist the commodifications that want to turn her generation into mindless consumers. Just as David Fisher’s forbearance is of the kind we know is needed to get through, so too you sometimes want to shout at the screen for him to tell Keith where to get off. The southern Californian skies may not be our milieu, and we may not take as many hard substances as the Fisher family and their friends do, but all the same, these people are like us with their desire and hope, their frailty and strength. There are no saints here, just people getting through the rhythm of their days, aiming for good, and often falling short. Alan Ball and his production team have done the most effective job in conveying the wing of their joys and discontents. The program has to be packaged as entertainment, but it is entertainment of the first order where there has been no compromise to get ratings points.

There is one aspect of this program that wouldn’t necessarily strike the average viewer the same way it would an independent writer like myself: the fact that Fisher & Sons is an independent business, trying to survive against the onslaught of Kroehner Service International and the shark-toothed Mitzi who is always waiting to devour the Fisher family in her maw. I have often felt every sympathy for Ruth Fisher and for the ghost of Nathanial Fisher who makes unpredictable sorties in the psyche, especially of elder son Nate. They held onto an independent family business for all their working lives, and it has often looked like the business was going to be swallowed up in some capitalist conglomeration. The poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote that some poets store up malice as a kind of life insurance. They have little to give except their bile, and rampant verse offerings. The equivalent of Kroehner Service International is well and truly alive in the arts. David and Nate have to fight off attempts to take over their business at every turn, and so far they have succeeded. Federico, their brilliant mortician who gets people looking as good in death as they ever did in life, also wants in on the action, and he is properly put out when, earlier in the series, the Fishers don’t seem to have any time left over for his ambitions. I think this solidarity against the predatory and levelling tendencies of capitalism in its late phase partly-explains the appeal of Six Feet Under to so many different kinds of viewers, just as each of the characters summons up some aspects of our own lives which can be as inspiring as Ruth’s willingness to shed her old skins or as strange as Brenda’s psychiatrist parents’ shenanigans.

To me, this series attains what is very close to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, where all the contributory factors—the writing, the music, the acting, the sets, the editing—go to make the cathartic whole. SFU is one of those productions against which subsequent series which aim at dramatic credibility will be judged. One can’t, and shouldn’t, go around all the time with your head in aesthetic clouds. A series like Six Feet Under brings you down to earth with a thump, but the kind of thump where poetry can be real for you, and the words spoken and the feelings experienced transcend the passing moment, and you, as viewer, go through to another level of acceptance or recognition; you are somewhere beyond the crassness that some contemporary culture insists is your due. And you are over, at least six feet over, all that detritus and failure.

                                                                      *

        Poem Of The Real

Child soldiers of sex slaves
Cut off lips with razors.
Time for some aesthetics.

Ocean rears from bad dreaming,
Swallowing your family whole.
What about hermaneutics?

Poem of the real is this world
Spun in violent fractals.
Insoluble acrostic.

Written 2005

I’ve decided to become Polish. This will be slightly easier for me than for some because I happen to be almost completely Polish on my mother’s side. But only slightly easier. The Polishness of my Polishness never got going. The things that happen to national identities in the American experience happened to my Poles. The Polishness got filtered out over the years, a couple of generations. It is only a name now, a word that points to origins that stopped explaining things. Calling myself Polish explains almost nothing about me.

But I’ve decided to make it explain something. There are some names associated with this decision. One of them is Czeslaw Milosz, another is Adam Zagajewski. And what about Gombrowicz and more recently Adam Michnik? There is also Ryszard Kapuscinski. There are others; names I’m still discovering and exhuming from the 20th century. In a way, the 20th century is a Polish century. That is if history should sometimes be written by the losers. And probably it sometimes should. Not that Polish hands aren’t stained with the blood of others and stigmitized by the same horrors that marked so many during that terrible century just passed. But Polish Letters, the Polish essay, is profoundly marked by that tragic sense of history that defines the Central and Eastern European mindset that watched, mostly helplessly as Nazism handed them off to the Soviets.

The Polish essay is about individual acts of resistance against the eradication of the mind. Sometimes these essays are conservative, sometimes they are grasping for something new. Sometimes they feel profoundly European, like faded scraps of parchment, testaments to a world that was destroyed by the very hands that had built it. Milosz feels that way most of the time, like a character from one of Sebald’s novels, like a memory waiting to dissapear. Milosz is a million miles away, talking about his Polishness in ways that don’t even completely make sense. And he is so good that he doesn’t have to care. He writes:

My work for foreigners has been of a practical, even pedagogic nature–I do not believe in the possibility of communing outside a shared language, a shared history–while my work in Polish has been addressed to readers transcending a specific time and place, otherwise known as ‘writing for the Muses’.

But Milosz too was an exile and he had to take his Polish with him. Polish essay writing always has some aspect of exile mentality. The Polish 20th century is about the tenuousness and transmutability of physical space. And it is about the power of mental space in the face of that fragility. Zagajewski writes about Gombrowicz:

And yet, despite all his theories, polemics, and quasi-philosophical and anthropological lectures, it is not in the sphere of ideas that we should seek his greatness, but deeper, in a more elementary realm. Through all of his disputes and debates, Gombrowicz, a restless spirit provoked by time, by modernism and recent history, expresses himself, and speaks—not straightforwardly, which is precisely what is so engaging—about himself, his adventures, his sufferings; about pain and about joy. He is like an Everyman for our time; he is our fellow, tormented not only by sickness, emigration, poverty, and loneliness, but also by ideas.

That is exile writing too. It’s tormented but it has found some strength in that condition. The exile in the Polish essay isn’t a victim. The Polish essay bitches and moans but then laughs about it. The Polish essay can always draw on totalitarian humor, the blackest and often most painfully humorous of humors.

I think that the exiled fragments of experience that have come down to us from the 20th century in the Polish essay are something to identify with as ruins. In these ruins are the best, if broken, parts of the human mental landscape. That is the kind of Polish I’ve decided to try and be.

Most grandparents would never admit it, but studies consistently reveal that they treat some grandchildren better than others.

When surveyed, adults said they felt closest to their maternal grandmothers, followed by their maternal grandfathers then paternal grandmothers and finally paternal grandfathers.

The pattern was the same whether the researchers tested for emotional closeness, the amount of time spent per week with a grandchild or the money spent on them each month.

It was also the same whether the adults surveyed were from America, Germany, Greece or Australia and even when such things as the grandparents’ age, the distance they lived away from the grandchild and the number of living grandparents were controlled for.

One of the most intriguing explanations for this trend comes from evolutionary biology. The idea is that the investment a grandparent makes in a grandchildren reflects how certain they are that they are actually related to them.

Biologists refer to an organism’s ability to survive and produce offspring as “fitness.” From a Darwinian point of view, the goal of grandparents is to help their children have as many children of their own as possible. By doing so, the grandparents not only increase their children’s fitness, but their own as well.

Evolutionary theory therefore predicts that a maternal grandmother will be most likely to invest in her grandchild because in nearly all cases, she can be 100 percent sure that the grandchild born of her daughter is really related to her.

It also predicts that a paternal grandfather will have the least incentive to invest in his grandchild because not only is he unsure of whether his son is really his grandchild’s father (the daughter-in-law may have cheated on her husband), he also can’t be sure of whether his son is really his son (his wife may have cheated on him).

But while evolutionary theory does a good job of explaining why maternal grandmothers invest the most in their grandchildren and paternal grandfathers the least, it doesn’t explain why adults consistently said they felt closer to their maternal grandfathers than their paternal grandmothers.

If all that matters is relatedness, both these grandparents should show similar levels of investment since both have an uncertain genetic link to their grandchildren: the paternal grandmother can’t be completely sure that her son was really the father of her grandchild and the maternal grandfather can’t be completely sure that the mother of his grandchild is really his daughter.

A possible explanation for this anomaly was suggested by William von Hippel, a psychologist from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and colleagues in a paper published last year in the journal for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

According to von Hippel, paternal grandmothers are more distant than maternal grandfathers because they have another, safer, bet when it comes to the investment of their time and resources: your cousins.

The reasoning behind this idea is simple: while your paternal grandmother may be uncertain about the genetic link between her son (your father) and you, she can be 100 percent sure of her relatedness to her daughter’s (your aunt) child (your cousin).

This hypothesis therefore predicts that your paternal grandmother will invest more time in your cousins if they are the children of her daughter than in you. Your maternal grandfather, on the other hand, is as clueless about his relation to you as to your cousins and therefore has no incentive to prefer one over another. The researchers also predicted that in cases where the maternal grandmother had no grandchildren through daughters, this effect would dissapear.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers surveyed 787 students from the University of South Wales. They asked the students to rate their emotional closeness with their grandparents and to also indicate whether they had cousins, and if so, whether they were from paternal or maternal aunts and uncles. The results followed the exact pattern that the researchers predicted; however, the effect was only marginally significant.

The researchers were unfazed though. “Rather than being unimpressed by the small size of these effects, one might instead be impressed that such an effect emerges at all,” they write.

“Of all the reasons to feel close or distant to a grandparent, the fact that genetic uncertainty and preferred investment outlets led to predicted differences in closeness testifies to the potency of evolutionary principles.”

The researchers hope to replicate the experiment in non-Western cultures and to use more direct measures of grandparental investment, such as gifts given.

Cancer, the malignant evil that corrodes fatally, is supposed to start in one cell. In appearance and behavior, this cell and its daughters are so different from their “normal” predecessors and counterparts that they appear to represent a new species. In this essay, I suggest that the transformation of a non-malignant cell into a frankly malignant state accompanied by all the biologic changes that define cancer as a disease (expansion, angiogenesis, metastasis) may follow the rules of evolutionary biology during speciation. In the strictest sense, speciation refers to reproductive isolation, which is obviously not the case here; subsequently I will use “clones” of cells in lieu of species. How this clone develops a growth advantage over its surrounding neighbors and at the same time, manages to suppress the growth of its normal counterparts, is a subject which is not well understood. The conventional approach of most scientists to such a problem is that of reductionism where an attempt is made to break the cell down into its individual components, and concentrate on identifying abnormalities that could explain the malignant characteristics. Reductionists would view the initiation and subsequent expansion of a cancer cell into an overwhelming clone as being driven by events related predominantly to the cell itself; for example the dysregulation of genes by mutations or deletions. Although, the reductionist method constitutes the backbone of solid science, transformation of a normal cell into a frankly malignant one is a gradual process involving multiple steps, making it difficult to apply the reductionist approach to the problem. These steps are not confined to the cell alone, but also involve a dynamic microenvironment which affects, and is in turn, affected by the expanding population of the abnormal cells. Thus the cell and its microenvironment, or the seed and the soil, constitute a complex system, and pluralists would argue that complex systems cannot be reduced to simple properties of their individual components. Or, to paraphrase Einstein, one can reduce the problem to its simplest possible solution, but no simpler.

Thousands of putative cancer cells are produced in the body each day, but die without further expansion because they are not well equipped to survive in an environment optimized for the support of normal cells. An ongoing interaction between a potential cancer cell and its micro-environment is therefore a necessary requirement for their co-evolution towards a malignant disease state. In other words, even as thousands of cancer cells are produced in the body on an annual basis, the clinical disease with all its malignant manifestations does not appear unless the cancer cell has had a chance to “evolve”. In fact, the situation has many parallels with the ongoing lively debate between the two groups of evolutionary biologists regarding speciation. The orthodox Neo-Darwinians (Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett) are reductionists who believe that natural selection is the sole engine driving evolution. The proponents of the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis (Niles Eldridge, (the late) Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin) see evolution as being more complex so that natural selection may be the primary but not the exclusive source of modification. They are the pluralists. Application of the broad principles of evolutionary biology to carcinogenesis may define the sequence of events involved in the development of a malignancy, thereby locating therapeutic targets where intervention is likely to lead to an arrest, if not a reversal, of the process.

Let us take the example of the human bone marrow which is an exceedingly dynamic compartment with billions of cells of many different varieties being produced, as well as being programmed to die on an hourly basis. Deviancy is not well tolerated in this high throughput factory. Darwinian tenet would hold that natural selection acts to maintain stasis in a population by jettisoning the anomalous. Survival of a potential cancer cell is clearly incongruous in this background, since it should have been weeded out long before its daughters were able to overwhelm the marrow, but not if the initiation of cancer is a serendipitous phenomenon. Within every population, there are cells with minor variations; some cells are more “fit” to survive than others. Cellular proliferation in the bone marrow, occurs in “niches” where the balance between the negative and positive growth signals is tilted towards the latter. Imagine that a population of cells happened to become isolated in a microenvironmental niche that provided less than ideal support (for example, a slightly hypoxic environment) for the growth of normal cells. Some of the trapped cells may have been better able to survive in this abnormal environment as compared to normal cells that would have died perhaps because they were smaller in size, or they divided faster, or could withstand hypoxia better or lacked a surface protein necessary for recognition by a death effector for elimination. In short, cancer cells may be able to survive and outnumber normal cells in certain “abnormal” microenvironments precisely because of their inability to compete with normal cells in the “normal” microenvironment. The abnormality is best manifested as a growth advantage. If a cancer cell enjoys even a slight growth advantage, it will outnumber its normal counterparts within a few generations, something that can happen in a matter of weeks or days as far as the human body is concerned.

I would like to posit that at least in some instances, the initiation of cancer involves isolation and entrapment of variant cells in a microenvironmental milieu that is not conducive to the proliferation of normal cells. Any variation that enhances the likelihood for survival and reproduction will then be passed from one generation to the next simply as a result of natural selection. Accumulation of even subtle genetic changes over many generations could eventually have a dramatic effect.

An example is that of fatty foods causing gastrointestinal cancer. In rather simplistic terms, there is a burst of secretion of bile acids in the gut following the ingestion of a fatty meal. These bile acids perform their metabolic function efficiently, but as a side effect, also induce programmed cell death in the surrounding mucosal cells. With frequent fatty meals and repetition of this cycle, the stressed cells facing the bile acid assaults fight back by developing survival strategies in this noxious environment. Eventually, one cell will either be selected for survival because of its “differential fitness” or because it has silenced the genes that mediate programmed cell death. An epigenetic mechanisms that cancer cells have been widely shown to employ for silencing genes for death and differentiation is that of hyper-methylation. Simply by adding methyl groups to the cytosines (CpG islands) in the promoter sites of critical genes, the cell can block transcription of that gene. This cell develops the ability to thrive in a microenvironment which is killing its normal counterparts. A survival phenotype is a cancer phenotype.

Chance factors could operate to facilitate the survival of a variant clone of cells, slightly different than the normal cells, but it is still natural selection that does the rest of the work. The role of natural selection is to improve the “fit” between an organism and its environment. Expansion of the clone of cells must be accompanied by co-evolution of the seed (cells) and the soil (microenvironment). Take the following example. Cancer cells may proliferate continuously either because the soil is providing these “growth factors”, or the cell is constitutively turned “on” because of a genetic mutation. The cancer cell must not only divide and expand its own population continuously, it must also shut off the proliferation of normal cells. One way this is accomplished may be by developing the ability to proliferate in response to signals that are inhibitory to the normal cell as illustrated in the following example.

Cells communicate and transmit signals through proteins called cytokines. Tumor necrosis factor or TNF is a cytokine that induces normal cells to undergo programmed cell death. Some leukemia cells on the other hand are stimulated to proliferate by TNF. Let us go back to our statement that within every population, there are cells with minor variations; some cells are more “fit” to survive than others. Now imagine what happens when there are a number of stem cells with varying “fitness” trapped in a microenvironmental niche which had a higher than normal level of TNF. The “normal” cells will be inhibited from proliferating while the slightly “abnormal” one will begin to proliferate. With time, the more TNF is produced, the better the abnormal cell fits the environment and expands its population at the expense of its normal counterpart. In fact, the abnormal cell itself may start producing TNF to enhance its own growth while at the same time suppressing that of the normal cells.

The microenvironment of cancer cells in the body not only consists of stromal cells capable of producing cytokines such as TNFa, but in addition harbors components of the immune system as well as newly formed blood vessels which directly affect the growth and perpetuation of the abnormal clone of cells. An important implication of these biologic insights is that the “cause” of cancer as a disease entity is at least in part related to the changed microenvironment and not something restricted to the intrinsic properties of the cancer cell. Consequently, strategies directed at eliminating the malignant cell alone, no matter how efficient, will only solve part of the problem at best, and be successful temporarily. Even if 99% of the abnormal cancer cells are destroyed but the microenvironment is left intact with all its abnormal features, then normal cells would not be able to survive for long in that setting, resulting in the redistribution of the growth advantage back to a “more fit” or abnormal cell causing relapse. This scenario is unfortunately all too familiar in the treatment of most cancers. Chemotherapy can produce striking complete remissions, but the cancers relapse eventually, and the second time around, they are more resistant to therapy as the cells causing a relapse have followed the Darwinian selection process of having survived in the presence of the noxious drug in the first place. In order to obtain complete and durable responses, both the seed and the soil would need to be targeted.

Developing models like this is not just of theoretical interest, but there are immediate and practical applications of these to the human condition. The conclusion is that it should not be a case of “either/or” in terms of the reductionist versus pluralistic view of cancer, but a combination of the two views as far as planning effective treatment is concerned. In order to kill the seed or the cancer cell, a reductionist approach must be used to identify the key steps involved in the perpetuation of the clone. Targeted therapies should be developed to interfere with the specific intracellular steps, for example an abnormal protein being produced by a mutated gene. In addition, with the pluralistic view of cancer in mind, the extracellular components should be targeted simultaneously, for example blood vessels or cytokines such as TNF. The future success of cancer treatment will depend on how rapidly and how effectively we learn to combine therapies which simultaneously attack several targets in the cell as well as the microenvironment. Studying cancer cells in isolation without their natural in vivo microenvironment, or through artificial mouse models will only yield limited information.

In summary then, cancer initiation could be the result of the serendipitous presence of an abnormal cell in an abnormal microenvironmental niche. Natural selection then works to improve the fitness between the seed and the soil, making both increasingly abnormal. The rate at which this occurs depends at least in part on the body’s ability to mobilize the immune system to mount a counterattack, and that of the cells to expand their clone, for example through the formation of new blood vessels. Thus, the time from initiation to actual disease manifestation could vary considerably depending on the forces driving the fitness landscape. The famous quip by a Neo-Darwinist (who believe that evolution is a gradual process) criticizing the punctuated equilibrium theory that he “did not believe in evolution by jerks” was answered by the Gould group (who suggest that periods of stasis are punctuated by sudden proliferation of species) with the retort that they “did not believe in evolution by creeps”. The evolution of cancer is probably best described by both jerks and creeps.

Previous Rx Columns:
Spicing Cancer Treatment
The War on Cancer

A couple of weeks ago the travel writer and memoirist Paul Theroux published an opinion piece entitled “The Rock Star’s Burden” in the New York Times. It is an article full of bitterness and bile where, in a display of almost unbelievable hubris, Theroux basically expresses a thinly disguised disappointment that the country of Malawi, where he worked as part of the Peace Corps 40 years ago, has not been able to convert his (and others’) generous donation of time and energy into becoming more like a grateful version of Switzerland:

Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children’s Village. I am speaking of the ”more money” platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for — and this never happens.

He then takes his misguided judgment of the causes of problems in Malawi and, predictably enough, generalizes it to all of Africa:

Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend’s children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

The emigration of Africans to the preposterously prosperous countries of the West particularly galls Theroux; after all, didn’t he go there to try and help them? Why can’t they stay and help themselves? Is he really seriously suggesting that if Malawians, with an average income of around 50 cents per day, 900,000 of whom are infected with AIDS, and who have a basic literacy rate of barely 50 percent, were to just stay home and “volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades,” that Malawi’s problems would go away? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Theroux that while he had the education and the luxury of taking a couple of years off in his youth to indulge his idealistic fantasies (and turn the experience into a lucrative career writing about it–it takes the average Malawian a year to earn the amount of money Theroux probably makes in a day) through a program (the Peace Corps) explicitly designed as a propaganda tool for the American government in the cold war years, most Malawians cannot take a few years off to “volunteer” for the betterment of their country. Of course, those (and there are really very few) who are able to get to the West to make a better life for themselves will do so. And why shouldn’t they? (Mr. Theroux seems not even to have any idea of the difficulties of getting a visa to the West for anyone in the third world.)

Bono, through his high-profile campaigns for African debt relief, serves as the main lightning rod for Theroux’s odious and acidic attacks:

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson — who calls himself ”Bono” — as Mrs. Jellyby in ”Bleak House.” Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha ”on the left bank of the River Niger,” Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes ”to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade,” all the while badgering people for money.

And also:

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa’s ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the ”more money” platform…

By coincidence, at the time that I read Theroux’s hysterical screed against any money for Africa (keep in mind his saying, “I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for — and this never happens”), I had just finished reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, with a foreword by the much-maligned Bono. Sachs is an extremely well-respected economist, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is also the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I recommended Sach’s book in 3QD’s year-end round-up of the best books of 2005, and he does such a good job of not only explaining the “poverty trap” that some African (and other extremely poor) countries find themselves in, but also of anticipating and answering the objections of the likes of Theroux, that I will let him do most of the talking now:

When poverty is very extreme, the poor do not have the ability–by themselves–to get out of the mess. Here is why: Consider the kind of poverty caused by a lack of capital per person. Poor rural villages lack trucks, paved roads, power generators, irrigation channels. Human capital is very low, with hungry, disease-ridden, and illiterate villagers struggling for survival. Natural capital is depleted: the trees have been cut down and the soil nutrients exhausted. In these conditions the need is for more capital–physical, human, natural–but that requires more saving. When people are poor, but not utterly destitute, they may be able to save. When they are utterly destitute, they need their entire income, or more, just to survive. There is no margin of income above survival that can be invested for the future.

This is the main reason why the poorest of the poor are most prone to becoming trapped with low or negative economic growth rates. They are too poor to save for the future and thereby accumulate the capital per person that could pull them out of their current misery…

[The saving rate, for example, of upper-middle-income countries was 25% as opposed to 10% for the least-developed countries, according to a 2004 World Bank study.]

In fact, the standard measures of domestic saving, based on the official national accounts, overstate the saving of the poor because these data do not account for the fact that the poor are depleting their natural capital by cutting down trees, exhausting soils of their nutrients, mining their mineral, energy, and metal deposits, and overfishing… When a tree is cut down and sold for fuelwood, and not replanted, the earnings to the logger are counted as income, but instead should be counted as a conversion of one capital asset (the tree) into a financial asset (money). (TEoP, p.57)

There is much more to this, but you will have to read the book yourself to get all the details, which Sachs does an admirable job of laying out for the non-specialist reader. Much of the book is spent in showing that it is possible, using available data, to estimate fairly accurately the amounts of capital infusion needed by a country to escape the poverty trap. It’s better to just let Sachs take it from there:

Africa needs around $30 billion per year in order to escape from poverty. But if we actually gave that aid, where would it go? Right down the drain if the past is any guide. Sad to say, Africa’s education levels are so low that even programs that work elsewhere would fail in Africa. Africa is corrupt and riddled with authoritarianism. It lacks modern values and the institutions of a free market economy needed to achieve success… And here is the bleakest truth: Suppose that our aid saved Africa’s children. What then? There would be a population explosion, and a lot more hungry adults. We would have solved nothing.

If your head was just nodding yes, please read this chapter with special care. The paragraph above repeats conventional rich-world wisdom about Africa, and to a lesser extent, other poor regions. While common, these assertions are incorrect. Yet they have been repeated publicly for so long, or whispered in private, that they have become accepted as truths by the broad public as well as much of the development community, particularly by people who have never worked in Africa.  I use the case of Africa because prejudices against Africa run so high, but the same attitudes were expressed about other parts of the world before those places achieved economic development and cultural prejudices could not hold up. (TEoP, p. 309)

Hmmm, does the first paragraph above remind you of something you’ve read lately? In the rest of the chapter, Sachs answers these and other objections to aid for Africa in careful detail, with section headings such as:

• Money down the drain
• Aid programs would fail in Africa
• Corruption is the culprit
• A democracy deficit
• Lack of modern values
• The need for economic freedom
• A shortfall of morals

Just to give a flavor of how Sachs’s refutations of these cliched arguments go, let me first quote our self-appointed Africa expert, Mr. Theroux, one last time:

When Malawi’s minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa’s problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Now here is Sachs again:

In the past, the overwhelming prejudices against Africa have been grounded in overt racism. Today the ever repeated assertion is that corruption–or “poor governance”–is Africa’s venal sin, the deepest source of its current malaise. Both Africans themselves and outsiders level this charge…

The point is that virtually all poor countries have governance and corruption indicators that are below those of the high-income countries. Governance and higher income go hand in hand not only because good governance raises incomes, but also, and perhaps even more important, because higher income leads to improved governance…

Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor. Crucially, however, two other things are also true. At any given level of governance (as measured by standard indicators), African countries tend to grow less rapidly than similarly governed countries in other parts of the world… Something else is afoot; as I have argued at length, the slower growth is best explained by geographical and ecological factors. Second, Africa shows absolutely no tendency to be more or less corrupt than other countries at the same income level. (TEoP, p. 311)

As for Africa’s lack of democracy, Sachs notes that:

Africa’s share of free and partly free countries, 66 percent, actually stands above the average for non-African low-income countries in 2003, 57 percent…

Democratization, alas, does not reliably translate into faster economic growth, at least in the short term. The links from democracy to economic performance are relatively weak, even though democracy is surely a boon for human rights and a barrier against large-scale killing, torture, and other abuses by the state. The point is not that Africa will soar economically now that it is democratizing, but rather that the charge of authoritarian rule as a basic obstacle to good governance in Africa is passe. (TEoP, p. 315)

Well, you get the idea. Buy the book and read it. As for Theroux, he should stick to doing what he does best: writing gossipy accounts of much better writers than himself, like, In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his book trashing his former mentor, V. S. Naipaul. And more power to Bono!

From Sach’s website: How You Can Help End Poverty.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
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

Justin E. H. Smith

One often hears that Montreal is the New York of Canada. It seems to me one may just as well say that Iqaluit is the New York of Nunavut. Both analogies are true enough, insofar as each settlement in question is the undisputed cultural capital of its region. But analogies can often work simply in virtue of the similitude of the relation in each of the pairs, even when the two pairs are vastly different the one from the other. Montreal is the New York of Canada, to be sure. But Canada, well… Canada is the Canada of North America.

This will be the first of two articles in which I lay out a scurrilous and wholly unfounded diatribe against the place I now call home. The second part will consist in a screed against Canada as a whole; today I would like to direct my bile towards Montreal in particular.

Sometime in early 2002, there was an amusing article in the New York Times, chronicling the fates of a few New York families that had fled to re-settle with relatives in Canada for fear of further attacks. Within a few months, they were back. As I recall, one man was quoted as saying something like: I’d rather go up in fireball, I’d rather be vaporized, than live out the rest of my days up there.

New York pride is not only quantitative, yet it is interesting to note that there was more square footage in the World Trade Center than in all the highrises of Montreal combined. Still, in terms of square feet, if not of lives, September 11 scarcely made a dent in Manhattan.  It is of course not everywhere that the greatness of a city is measured by the number of skyscrapers it hosts. If this were the universal measure, Dallas would have London beat by a long-shot. But in Montreal the skyline is constantly pushed, on the ubiquitous postcards and tchotchkes sold along St. Catherine Street, as though this were some great accomplishment of human ingenuity, rather than a paltry imitation, a mere toy model, of the envied city to the south.

Les gratte-ciel are also celebrated shamelessly in Quebecois art and cinema. Take Denys Arcand, the tiresome and repetitive director of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire and its sequel The Barbarian Invasions, as well as of the slightly more compelling 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal. The way he cuts to new scenes with panoramic shots of the city’s skyscrapers at night, alto saxes blaring, you would think you were watching a promotional segment of the in-flight entertainment program on an incoming Air Canada plane. You would almost expect this schmaltzy segue to be followed by scenes of children getting their faces painted at a street fair, of horse carriages in the old town, or of a group of young adults, sweaters tied around their necks, laughing in a restaurant booth as a man in a chef’s hat serves them a flaming dessert. And yet this is not Air Canada filler, but the work of a supposedly serious director, himself only one example of a very common phenomenon in French Canadian movies. Every time I see the Montreal skyline glorified in Quebecois cinema, I think to myself: if Nebraska had a state-subsidized film industry, Omaha too would be portrayed as a metropolis.

But pay attention to the panorama, and you will see that there is simply not much there. Montreal is probably a notch closer to Iqaluit than it is to New York on the scale of the world’s great cities. I place it just behind Timisoara, and just ahead of Irkutsk, Windhoek, and Perth. It is admittedly not just an aluminum shed and a ski-doo or two. But still one gets the sense there that the entire settlement could be easily dismantled and quitted overnight, as one might pack up a polar research station. I’ve lived in Montreal for three years, and still, every time a Canadian commences another soporific paean to the place I think to myself: where is this city you keep mentioning? I must still be lost in the banlieue. I must not have discovered that dense and vital core of the place that would justify all this effusive praise. And so I consult the map repeatedly, and determine to my confusion that I have by now been just about everywhere in the city, indeed that I live in the centre-ville. In New York, in contrast, I always know, in the same way I know I exist, that I am most assuredly, metaphysically there. You cannot be in New York and doubt that you are in New York.

A student of mine recently returned from her first trip to New York and announced that it is ‘not all that different’ from Montreal. She noted that there is virtually the same concentration of hipsters in each place, and that many New York hipsters are listening to Montreal bands such as Les Georges Leningrad. Call it ‘the hipster index’. In Baltimore, Tucson, Cincinnati, and even Edmonton, there are plenty of ruddy youngsters who collect vinyl, make objets d’art with trash they find, do yoga, declare ‘I’m not religious per se, but I consider myself a very spiritual person,’ read Jung and Hesse and Leary and (‘just for fun’) their horoscopes, have spells of veganism, try to build theremins, decorate with Betty Page artifacts, and speak disdainfully of that empty abstraction, ‘Americans’. I’ve been to these places, and seen them with my own eyes. All these places rank very high on the hipster index. I’m afraid, though, that I am reaching a period of my life in which I measure the greatness of a place by other indices. Like beauty, for instance, and the intensity and importance of the things the grown-ups there are up to.

The other city often invoked in order that Montreal might borrow a bit of greatness is, of course, Paris. The city on the Seine, but without the jet-lag, is how the tourism industry packages it. I think this has something to do with the fact that a French of sorts is spoken in the province. But an English (of sorts) is spoken in Alabama, and nobody thinks to invoke London to try to get people to go there. It is odd, when you think about it, to make a claim to greater affinity with the Old World on the mere basis of la francophonie. After all, every major language of the New World –excluding those of the First Nations—is part of the European branch of the Indo-European family, but this doesn’t give Brazil, Panama, or the United States any special foothold in Europe.

I have been to Paris, and stood at intersections waiting to see pick-up trucks pass by with bumperstickers exclaiming the French equivalent of ‘This vehicle protected by Smith & Wesson,’ or ‘U toucha my truck, I breaka u face.’ They don’t have these there. They don’t have strip malls, or ‘new country’, or donuts, or (regrettably) coffee to go, and WWF wrestling has not made much of an impact.

The situation is quite different in Quebec. La belle province is 100% American, in the early-18th-century sense of the term, and Montreal is but an outlying provincial capital. The metropolitan capital to which Montreal is subordinated is New York. What counts as center and what as periphery does not, of course, stay the same forever. A few more decades of incompetent US government and global warming may change the balance between the two cities. For now, anyway, this is just how things are.

A very happy new year from 125th Street in Harlem. I will be returning to my usual, deracinated life up north a few days from now. If they’ll still let me in.

Strikes have engulfed New York City this winter. While members of the Transit Workers Union have gone back to work, NYU graduate assistants are preparing to resume picketing with the start of term on January 17th (usual disclaimer: me too). The situation is simultaneously encouraging and grim. Administrative threats of three semesters’ loss of work and pay have caused some attrition, but, impressively, have not broken the strike. By comparison, the 1995-6 Yale grade strike ended after threats of a similar variety – perhaps having already had union recognition and a contract has made the NYU graduate assistants more optimistic. Individual departments’ attempts to protect students from the severity of the administration’s punitive measures have mostly fallen short of extending any promises to those who continue picketing on the 17th. The climate, then, has become inhospitable to assistants who, for entirely legitimate reasons (among them, concerns over visa status, financial hardship, and impeded career advancement), no longer find enough certainty with respect to escaping potential reprisals. So far from signifying dissent from the union, however, these losses measure instead the level of vituperation with which the university sees fit to treat its members – the preservation of a ‘collegial’ relation to whom supposedly necessitates the union’s destruction. Here, rather than attempt an ethical adjudication (a perusal of the relevant documents will allow you to do that for yourself), I think it might be useful both to narrow and widen the usual perspective, which sees the university as the relevant object of focus, in order to consider some relevant internal differences as well as some external factors in this conflict. (For the basic dossier, see the Virtual Mind strike archive.)

To begin with, a narrower focus. Much discussion of late has had to do with the alleged concentration of strikers in the humanities and social sciences. Like many assertions in this debate, it usually remains unsubstantiated, circulating instead as a dark hint that the strike is the result of naive idealism. Consequently, NYU President John Sexton often describes graduate assistants in infantilizing terms,  reinforcing the idea that their grievances are an immature form of teenage rebellion. Furthermore, such infantilizing rhetoric carries with it the paternalistic notion that the university administration should be trusted to have its charges’ best interests at heart, even and especially when said charges are misbehaving. The longstanding association of the humanities with countercultural protest, amplified by the academic “culture wars,” in this case serves to delegitimize, and render strictly cultural, complaints of exploitation by graduate students. Strategically, then, this emphasis on the culture of protest over social analysis is a favored tactic of the administration and its supporters: as one anti-union philosophy professor put it on a weblog discussion of the strike, “if graduate students don’t want to be treated like spoiled children, they should stop behaving like spoiled children.” (Of course, the irony of this tautological ad hominem attack is that graduate assistants are attempting to dispute just this characterization of their position.)

Here I might return to the theme of “collegiality.” The picket line, with its chanting, drumming, singing – in short, its performativity – is by its nature often carnivalesque: not only the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the very habitus, or social and bodily disposition, of university life is suspended by it. The result is an unleashing of pent-up energies and frustrations of many kinds, including elements that exceed the basis of the conflict, such as the offensive nature of the university’s communications with graduate assistants. This is why the defense of collegiality has become an important high ground to the administration: harping on it allows the picket line’s symbolic excess to be depicted as a form of reactive immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also seen to be a form of belatedness: Sexton’s euphemistic corporate terminology of an “Enterprise University” and “University Leadership Team” leaves no room such “dated” practices as strikes and protests, and the supposedly expired sixties radicalism from which they are thought to stem. Just as the domain of the humanities is linked to anachronistic countercultural protest, so then is the social practice of picketing. On both counts, we’re both too young and too old, past our sell-by date before we grow up. This argumentative tack, however, allows for the obfuscation of the original conflict. Even so, analyzed as a cultural form, the picket line performs an important function: it inscribes and instantiates the strike both to observers and in the minds and bodies of those striking. As Louis Althusser might have said, it “interpellates” (roughly, allows the self-recognition of) those who take part, and thus functions as a radicalizing action. Insofar as it refuses collegial dialogue and substitutes the implacable presence of the bodies of strikers, picketing only belongs more purely to the category of action.

Whatever the ideological hailing effects of picketing, if humanities students are strongly in support of striking, the true cause is not a nostalgic commitment to counterculture. The sociological facts on the ground, which are cleverly obscured by the strategy of infantilization, provide much more compelling justification. Unfortunately for the University Leadership Team’s propaganda efforts, graduate study these days tends to include discussion of the sociology of graduate education itself, which has become an important sub-field in literature departments. Doctoral students thus know all too well that fewer than half of them receive tenure track jobs within a year of receiving a diploma; that the number of non-tenured teachers continues to grow at a much faster rate than that of tenured faculty across the disciplines; that universities continue to rely on graduate and adjunct labor, while relatively fewer and fewer tenured professors enjoy the privilege of teaching only upper-level and graduate courses; that graduate assistants teach nearly all introductory courses in language and literature; and that collectivization is the rational response to the exploitation of a labor pool. These are not cultural differences between bohemian graduate students and technocratic administrators; they are social realities. And although these realities are not restricted to the language and literature programs – not at all – these departments have been affected very deeply by this macrocosmic shift in the structure of university teaching.

For this reason, which the “U.L.T.” knows as well as we do, a “New Policy” was announced in November by the university’s deans, which stipulates that graduate assistants’s normal teaching load of two stand-alone courses per semester will be reduced to one (this will primarily affect language and literature graduate assistants, as they teach most of the stand-alone courses). On the face of it, an early Christmas present, no doubt unrelated to the strike. In practice, however, it means three things: one, the university is suddenly authorizing itself to hire large numbers of new adjuncts to fill the newly vacated positions, in contradiction to its expressed aim of reducing the amount of contingent (adjunct) labor, without it looking like these are replacements for striking workers. Why, they’re simply being brought in to fill brand-new positions. The fact that these adjunct professors might conveniently be asked to substitute for striking workers is doubtless a coincidental side benefit. Second, it nourishes the university’s paternalist stance: reducing the teaching load strengthens their claim that graduate teaching is nothing more than apprenticeship or training, and that long-term shifts towards graduate and adjunct labor are being magically reversed. They really care! And third, most disturbingly, graduate assistants who choose to take on the heretofore normal load of two courses next semester can “bank” the extra course, and collect a free semester of funding in the fall. That’s right: teachers who strike this spring semester will lose their work and pay for the next three semesters, according to the Provost, whereas those who return to work and teach what until now was the standard two courses will receive a semester of free money. It might be supposed this will not foster a collegial atmosphere amongst teachers. Best of all, for the administration, this policy will primarily affect the language and literature programs, where students have a clear-eyed view of the labor issues involved because of their disciplinary location and thus strongly support the union. One is perversely impressed with shrewdness of this policy, although one is also sure that the law firm NYU employs to eradicate the union is more straightforwardly proud.

Finally, by way of briefly widening the focus beyond the institution of the university, let us consider NYU in a larger context. As this investigative piece in the Nation reveals, the MTA’s leadership has been engaged in a number of lucrative business dealings involving renting office space to its corporate sub-contractors. All this has been financed through public debt, and overseen by the presence on the MTA of the very people who stand to gain the most from such arrangements, but whose interest in public transportation is unclear. At NYU, the body with whom ultimate authority rests is the Board of Trustees (here is some background on its chair and vice-chairs). In an example of determination in the last instance by the economic sphere, to again allude to Louis Althusser, this board is populated by people with very different interests to those of university teachers. Comprised largely of financiers, corporate lawyers, real estate developers, and the leaders of media conglomerates, the board has shown very little interest in the sympathetic appeals of graduate assistants and our claim that the union palpably improved working and learning conditions at NYU. Of course, the commonly held conception of the university as the privileged space outside of the dominance of corporations in American society tends to disable the recognition that, in fact, universities reside within the sphere of economic determination, and are not necessarily any more amenable to arguments based on social justice than any other type of institution. The indifference of the board to the measurable benefits of unionized graduate assistants only reconfirms this. In fact, perhaps one can go so far as to postulate an inverse relation between the progressive prestige of a university and its hostility to a collectivized workforce: as evidence, one can adduce the immensely anti-union positions of the Ivy League schools. An ambitious school such as NYU is no doubt under immense pressure from the administrators of its more established siblings to resist precedent-setting unionization, and along the way absorb all the costs and bad publicity that accrue to union busting. Sadly, NYU seems more than happy to take one for the team it wishes to join, and thus to leave in place this inversion by which institutions who loudly condone progressive agendas in their publicity materials are the same ones who most viciously fight to prevent them from gaining any ground. A consolation: if we win, perhaps they will eventually realize that they have too.

Dispatches:
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)

For many years Abbas and I have spent the occasional evening composing lists of the greatest this, the smartest that, and the most overrated other. As you can imagine, it usually comes at some late moment when we’re tipsy. It’s a silly act of camaraderie which I would do with very, very few others. For me, it’s also a very private affair, which is precisely the opposite role that lists play in society.

I was reminded of it this holiday season, as I am on every other holiday season, because it is the season for collective judgment. Sometime between the beginning of November and the end of January, we are bombarded with lists, usually top 10 lists—and not just the best books, best fiction, best non-fiction, best movies, best albums, best songs, and their complement “worst’s”, but also worst disasters, worst web design mistakes, best and worst toys, and industry or sub-culture specific objects that are, so to speak, too numerous to list.

A list is different in kind and in effect from a simple “person of the year” or other declaration of a superlative. The latter sorts of things usually require some extensive justification of the judgment. If I were to say that Tony Judt’s Postwar was the best book that came out this year, you may reasonably ask why I thought so. And I would give a host of reasons to defend my claim. (In this instance, the claim is hypothetical.) But once I list runners up, I’m forced to answer different questions—why a work of history over fiction? why this prose style over that one?

This comparative quality of lists is the seductive virtue that turns the whole affair into a participatory event. (I was thinking about this when Abbas was soliciting top 10 books of the year from 3Quarks editors.) Relative judgments seem to engage us more than absolute ones. Say Hitler is a monster, you have no quarrel. Say Hitler is a worse monster than Stalin, and then you have a debate. Or if that’s too contentious, try: Franklin Roosevelt was a great wartime leader, against Franklin Roosevelt was a greater wartime leader than Churchill. This is not to say that the judgments of the former kind aren’t debated but that the latter elicits more responses and wider audiences. The Prospect/FP poll of the global public intellectuals did probably far more to create an audience for Oliver Kamm (with his neurotic Chomsky-phobic rant) than it did for Chomsky. Kamm was part of the debate; Chomsky was its object. And for the wider circles, Chomsky’s ordinal rank relative to Daniel Dennett, Richard Posner, or Slavo Zizek, is more contentious affair than whether he is well-known and well-respected public intellectual (at least in many circles).

This fun-silly exercise is not restricted to dilettantes such as yours truly. Sidney Morgenbesser once recounted a dinner with Isaiah Berlin spent classifying philosophers into gods, geniuses, brilliant men, smart guys, and some fourth category, whose title I don't recall. They got into a fight over where to place Leibniz, and wound up creating the category of demigods, which became populated solely by Leibniz. The story made me feel less silly.

Now with the audience that Amazon.com brings, these exercises grow more and more common, so much so that it calls itself listmania. (But some times I wonder whether this need to state our judgments even over matters of taste to wider and wider audiences doesn't make us kin to Judge Judy or the mobs found in Jerry Springer.)

Criticisms or reflective assessments of lists commonly begin with something like: “List say more about those that construct them than they do about . . .” the object, or the real world, or whatever else they’re supposed to tell us about. That of course is trivially true, in the sense that any made object tell us something, often a lot, about the maker. But it is true that lists generally deflect attention away from the criteria for judgment and, quite often, the judge. (“Judge, lest ye be judged,” Karl Kraus once said.) This is so even when the criteria for judgment are made fairly explicit.

Interesting lists offer us not so much new rankings but new dimensions for evaluation. The lists that fill much of the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, lady in waiting to the Empress Sadako (or Teishi) during the Hiean, are wonders. Each list evokes memories and sensations rather than judgments and thereby disagreements. Some of my favorite lists of Shonagon’s:

109. Things That Are Distant Though Near

Festivals celebrated near the Palace

Relations between brothers, sisters, and other members of a family who do not love each other.

The zigzag path leading up to the temple at Kurama

The last day of the Twelfth Month and the first of the First

And especially,

44. Things That Cannot Be Compared

Summer and winter. Night and day. Rain and sunshine. Youth and age. A person's laughter and his anger. Black and white. Love and hatred. The little indigo plant and the great philodendron. Rain and mist.

When one has stopped loving somebody, one feels that he has become someone else, even though he is still the same person.

In a garden full of evergreens the crows are all asleep. Then, towards the middle of the night, the crows in one of the trees suddenly wake up in a great flurry and start flapping about. Their unrest spreads to the other trees, and soon all the birds have been startled from their sleep and are cawing in alarm. How different from the same crows in daytime!

The lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji, one of the earliest novels ever written (circa 1000 A.D.) and contemporary of Shonagon, described her as “frivolous”, and concluded that “[h]er chief pleasure consists in shocking people, and, as each eccentricity becomes only too painfully familiar, she gets driven on to more and more outrageous methods of attracting notice.” But this is precisely the virtue of lists such as Shonagon’s; they get people to notice by pointing to new dimensions and new collections, and not simply to our judgment. If we can't be outrageous with the playful, where can we be?

The lists don’t have to consist of exotica. Nick Hornby did a remarkable job of using simple lists to construct a seductive story in High Fidelity. But when they do consist of exotica they really seduce, as in the case of many of Borges' stories. It’s probably a little late now, but for next season, I suggest new kinds of lists, ones that speak of our wit, creativity, and even whim.

Happy Monday and a Happy New Year.

Despite the fact that December 25th happens to be the birthday of a number of important historical figures (for example, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, which is where I am from), last year we at 3 Quarks Daily thought we would celebrate Newton’s birthday on this date. Unbeknownst to us, Richard Dawkins had just published an article suggesting the same thing. We were flattered. So here we are again, on Newton’s Day!

To commemorate this auspicious occasion, I thought I would try to deal with the apple today. You know what I am talking about: the apple that supposedly fell on Sir Isaac’s head while he was resting under a tree, and which jarred him into formulating the theory of gravity. The story is almost certainly apocryphal (no getting away from the Bible, is there?), but what could it mean? There are many ways to try and understand this story, but I just want to point out something simple but very cool: look at my drawing of me lobbing a ball over to a friend of mine below.

The ball follows a parabolic path from my hand to those of my friend. But what if my friend wasn’t there, and nor was the surface of the Earth? What if the ball could just pass through the Earth as if all its (the Earth’s) mass were concentrated at its center? What would happen then? Look at my next drawing below.

The ball would go in an elliptical path, with one of its foci being the center of the Earth! The parabola above the surface of the Earth is just one end of the bigger ellipse! Where had Newton heard of ellipses before? Yep, from Kepler, who had shown that planets travel in elliptical orbits around the Sun. How’s that for a connection between small objects falling on Earth, and the heavenly spheres? Of course, we’ll never know Newton’s real line of reasoning, but here’s a possible one:

• apple falls on Sir Isaac’s head
• he starts to think how freely falling objects behave
• he generalizes to objects following parabolic paths
• he imagines what happens if the surface of the Earth doesn’t stop the object
• he realizes the object falls into elliptical path
• he realizes planets are just “falling” around Sun

Okay, it probably wasn’t that way, but I still think it’s a nice thought. And in case you’re wondering just how big Newton’s intellectual reputation is, check this out from the London Times:

Newton trounces Einstein in vote on their relative merits

His most famous equation, E=mc², is 100 years old, and 2005 has been named Einstein Year in his honour, but Albert Einstein has been trounced in a scientific beauty contest held to celebrate his own greatest achievements.

The most famous head of hair in science was soundly beaten by Sir Isaac Newton yesterday in a poll on the relative merits of their breakthroughs, with both scientists and the public favouring the Englishman by a surprisingly wide margin.

Asked by the Royal Society to decide which of the two made the more important contributions to science, 61.8 per cent of the public favoured the claims of the 17th-century scientist who developed calculus and the theory of gravity.

More here.  And, oh, what the… 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

[This post dedicated to LWP.]

In the movie “My Dinner With Andre,” a touchstone for the antic film buff, Wally Shawn muses about the things that make life bearable despite the heavy weight of human suffering and existential dread that torment his friend Andre Gregory. “I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything,” he says, “more than I enjoy… you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night, that’s still there for me to drink in the morning, and no cockroach or fly has died in it overnight – I’m just so thrilled when I get up, and I see that coffee there, just the way I want it, I just can’t imagine enjoying something else any more than that.”

This little reverie has always struck me as a note-perfect piece of writing (or speaking) by Shawn, who here depends on a long-running association of coffee with a form of escape from the prosaic, even as it fuels that most prosaic form of labor, writing. The social meaning of coffee combines its conception as the fuel upon which workers of all kinds rely with the notion of the coffee break, the oasis in the day in which workers are temporarily freed from adherence to their routinized schedules and can indulge in idleness. The twin sites of coffee drinking, the coffee shop and the cafe, represent the two class locations in which these escapes can occur: the coffee shop for laborers and the cafe for the intellectual, who turns her own idle philosophizing into her special form of production.

The association of coffee with both labor and the emancipation from labor is a long one. In the standard narrative of the Enlightenment, coffee shops in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries play a large role as sites that hosted the workingmen’s collectives and other forms of nascent intelligentsia. Jurgen Habermas, for example, famously identified the London coffee houses as the birthplace of the modern critique of aristocratic power in the name of liberty in his influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas’ claim that the public sphere expanded and developed into an inclusive site in which middle-class interests could be voiced also gestures at the interesting social connotations of coffee drinking: a practice that bridges the public world of letters with the private world of internal reflection, which duality that remains in effect to the present time. Coffee is the special beverage of intellectual labor and mental stimulation, and along with other products of the tropical colonial world, such as tea, sugar, and spices, perhaps accrued its social meaning precisely because of its novelty and the absence of pre-existing traditional associations with its consumption (as would be the case in Europe with beer, for example).

Until 1690 or so, nearly all the coffee imported to Europe came from Yemen, after which time the West Indies began to dominate, due to large plantations established by European colonialists, until roughly 1830. London at this time was the major trading center for the world’s coffee supply, supplanted by Rotterdam and coffee from Java later in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth by Brazil’s production and New York’s factorage, or management of trade. What is interesting about this extremely truncated potted history is how little known it is, beyond the vaguest associations with these locations and coffee drinking: Java, for instance, or Colombia more recently, being places generally associated with the commodity. The fact that coffee as a crop is extremely amenable to the large-scale plantation system had much to do with its spread around the world, and also with the inculcation of the desire to drink it. Coffee as a commodity has also been extremely important to the development of the global economy, perhaps second only to oil. In between the world wars, coffee surpluses in Brazil grew so large that enough beans to supply the world for two and a half years were destroyed, prompting the development of international agreements to govern the flow of trade and prevent the destructive influence on prices of huge surpluses.

As you will have guessed, what I’m interested in here is the caesura between the social meanings of coffee and its consumption, on the one hand, and the economic and historical conditions in which it is produced, on the other. Note that our airy and metaphysical associations of coffee with scribal labor, and our notion of cart coffee as the fuel for wage workers, show no trace of the globally instituted plantation system of production and distribution that allows for its availability. Now, a sociologist friend of mine, upon hearing my thoughts on this subject, remarked dryly: “Well, yes, standard Marxism, the commodity always conceals the conditions of its production.” Which is true, yes, my friend, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that, when we come to our present age of late capitalism (to adopt the favored descriptor). For we specialize in nothing so much as the inflection of meanings in order to create and reinforce markets for products: the process called branding. Coffee has presented an interesting problem for marketers because it suffered from the problem of inelastic demand.

What this bit of jargon means is simply that coffee drinking was typically habitual and not generally considered to be divisible into gradations of luxury. In other words, people do not make fine distinctions when it comes to coffee – and indeed, the world’s coffee market is dominated by one varietal, arabica (though robusta is often used in cheaper brands as a blending ingredient – in fact, the whole question of why arabica is considered superior to robusta is of interest, though not sufficient relevance here). Or at least, coffee was considered to be this type of commodity through the nineteen-eighties. At that point, a revolution occurred with the application of European connoisseurship to coffee-drinking. I am referring, of course, to the vogue for Italian coffee that swept the world at this time. Finally, with the nomenclature of espresso, macchiato, cappuccino, etcetera, marketers had an opportunity to make gradations, to identify a style of coffee drinking with sophistication and taxonomies of taste in such a way as to basically invent a whole lifestyle involving coffee preferences, and thereby to supplant the inelasticity of demand that was preventing consumers from changing their buying patterns.

Ironically, of course, most of these gradations have little to do with the coffee itself; rather, they involve the milk, whether to steam it or froth it, add it or not, or whether to adulterate the espresso with hot water (americano), and so on. The effect is the same: making coffee drinking into a form of connoisseurship. My sociologist friend and I recently walked by a Starbucks, the apotheosis, of course, of the current technocratic style of coffee drinking. Outside was a chalkboard, the faux-handwritten message on which inspired these reflections: “The best, richest things in life cannot be seen or bought… but felt in the heart. Let the smooth and rich taste of eggnog latte fulfill your expectations.” Depressingly contradictory, the message also advertises a beverage which may or may not include coffee itself, though the misuse of the Italian word for milk, in the world of Starbucks, usually signifies its presence. Yet there’s also something honest about it, in that it baldly announces the contradictions that the drinking of coffee embodies. Seen to be the escape from the prosaic, the fuel for the laborer, the joiner of public and private, the psychoactive stimulant that incites philosophy, coffee, so far from a purely metaphysical vapor, contains all the strange compressed complexity of the world of real objects and the webs of relations that bring them to our lips.

Dispatches:

Divisions of Labor II
Divisions of Labor I
Local Catch
Where I’m Coming From
Optimism of the Will
Vince Vaughan…Eve Sedgwick
The Other Sweet Science
Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermanence

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.

The Circus Maximus was the arena for mass entertainment instituted by the Etruscan kings and then enhanced by subsequent emperors for tens of thousands of spectators. Trajan, Julius Caesar and Augustus, among others, added to, and enhanced, this structure. Its chariot races were a particular feature of its activities in later times.

In the theatre of his mind, the great Italian auteur, Federico Fellini, casts forth his films as entertainment, serious entertainment which is worthy of the greatest art that the twentieth century produced. However, it is no good coming to Fellini looking for Thomas Mann or Persona. Fellini is just not that kind of artist. He puts his trust in his feelings, and he believes that feeling is the way to discover the reality of the world. He doesn’t believe in intellectualising about life or art, or in theorising about art either. But to say Fellini is not intelligent in his films would be wrong. Fellini is supremely intelligent as film director. He shapes his films as carefully as any novelist or poet does in the silence of their rooms. Circus Maximus translates from the Latin as largest circle, and it is this largest circle which Fellini draws around the world, enclosing in its phantasmagoric visions the poetry and pain of a loving heart. He invites his audience to participate in his films as would the audience at the Circus Maximus for some games spectacular. You may sit around the edge of the circle and enjoy the surreal passing parade, smell the sawdust, see the most startling use of colour, and of black and white. If he allowed himself to be styled emperor in his domain, Cinecittà, he always did so with a light touch, and he could be scathing about his own persona—he virtually accuses himself of fraudulence in Otto e mezzo. Of course Fellini was no fraudster but a subtle artist of the most unusual kind. The caricaturist from Rimini went on to become a true maestro.

Fellini’s films are musical, and the word maestro is not inappropriate to use in association with his work. His orchestra is his production team—and what a singular group of artists he gathered together for his purposes. It is doubtful that films like Fellini’s could ever be made without this kind of team to work with. Underwriting the whole endeavour is the music of Nino Rota who provides such an insouciant soundtrack to Fellini’s visual panoramas, by turns tender, melancholic, wistful, or vital and exuberant, music for eating, laughter, dancing and loving. But Fellini knows when to keep the soundtrack silent too. Usually, somewhere in a Fellini film, there is that sudden silence followed by the sound of wind, premonition of an ending Fellini doesn’t try to understand. He simply accepts death as part of the spectacle we must all participate in.

It is to be regretted that the main way people now come to Fellini is through re-release on DVD, or on television. If ever a director needed the big screen it is Fellini who designed his films as a medium in which there is a participatory audience. I remember two experiences in my early years of picture going. The first time I saw Otto e mezzo it was a revelation to me, and I also found it profoundly moving. And I almost hurt myself laughing, along with the rest of the audience, when I saw the family argument around the table in Amarcord. I doubt I would have had these reactions if my first viewing of these films had been via the television set. Fellini embraces you through the screen. If you can’t participate in the manner of an Italian feast, you won’t get the best out of his films. These are not works of art for people who want to sit at a distance in judgement. They are meant for enjoyment, involvement. His camera is lascivious, and it gets very close to its subject matter, which some people find disturbing. And people who think Pulp Fiction instituted some new kind of film narrative need to have another look at Fellini’s work, especially from Otto e mezzo onwards, just as cliched ideas about Fellini’s sexism ignore a lifelong preoccupation with the facade of Italian machismo.

For some, Fellini’s films can be a stretch, they ‘don’t wear well’, his sensibility, with its strangely compatible dual carriageway of sensuality and moral prodding, being at odds with present conformities. Satyricon especially is difficult to get hold of. On one hand it is a spectacle which Fellini fills with characteristic striking visuals. On the other, it comes across as cold, as if one was visiting a moonscape. Fellini called it science fiction of the past. Perhaps it was his comment on what he saw going on about him in supposedly liberated times. True, you don’t want to sit down to a tranche of his films in one go. His work is intense, baroque. There is maximum sensory overload. He is like Emily Dickinson and Bruckner in that way; you can’t take on too much of their intensity at one time. It would be a mistake to try to because then the appetite sickens. These are artists who are for a lifetime. You can always come back to them and their depth and seriousness will always be there for you when you have need of it. The fact that Fellini insists on joy being part of his sensibility makes him the major artist he is—he refuses to degrade himself in the manner of so many European intellectuals and artists who mortify themselves with doubt, self-hate and cynicism. It is not as if Fellini avoids tragedy. Who could forget Zampano’s despair on the beach at the end of La Strada or Marcello’s horror at Steiner’s suicide and the murder of his children in La Dolce Vita. Fellini is the realist who accepts suffering but who nevertheless insists on the pleasure principle too. One of the things Fellini takes most pleasure in is the human face. For him, it is endlessly fascinating. Fellini does not, contrary to a lot of Fellini criticism, put freaks in his films, but the variousness and beauty of the human face and form. In that sense he is a portrait painter, filling the screen with characters that give witness to the strangeness and majesty of the human: the alluring image of Anita Ekberg standing in the silent Trevi Fountain, the fantastical ecclesiastical fashion parade in Roma, the out-of-touch aesthetes on board the Gloria N. in E la nave va.

Was ever a director luckier than to have Giulietta Masina as a life companion? How one marvels at this actor’s performances in Fellini’s films. I am especially fond of her work in Giulietta degli spiriti. Here was companionship that led to beauty and greatness. But all Fellini’s actors seem to belong to a troupe. The circus master may crack the whip, but what performances he gets from his casts. How vital his characters seem with their dreams and delusions, their grandeur and pettiness, their gross appetites, their inwardness and hopefulness.

Opera, theatre, cabaret, vaudeville, circus. Luminous and celebratory, fantastical but all too real. Cinema. Art. Fellini is all of these things. For me, his films are inimitable, poetic, unforgettable.

— *** —

The following poem was written in late October 1993 when the press reported Fellini’s stroke.

               Intervista
        Federico Fellini 1920–1993

Maestro, lover, dreaming poet,
Must we say farewell just now?
Here on this uncertain street
Of a tawdry century
You encompassed multitudes,
From the fountain’s quietude
To a seaside ecstasy.

Trumpets at the darkened gates?
But how are we, who trust you still,
Beyond the failings that we share,
To live without your gaiety,
Except that in film flickering
And in Giulietta’s eyes
We know your passion will be strong.

Soon to sawdust you must drop
And circus clowns will hang their heads,
But while you live the world seems good,
For a pure heart brings such grace
And mischief that shows kindliness.
Stay to see our wretchedness
You maker of the marvellous!

But stillness is approaching now,
Tender, as this last spool spins
To silence in unending night.
Ciao, dear artist. May you slip
Quickly to that other side
Behind the screen, and leave us with a smile
Whose joy is deep, whose laughter was so wise.

Intervista: Fellini’s penultimate film
Giulietta’s eyes: Giulietta Masina, Fellin’s wife

Written 1993

You forget how much the sky can be different until you come out West again. There is a simple explanation. It has to do with flatness, it has to do with vistas. Maybe the idea of the West as simple and honest comes partly from that. You can see where the clouds are and where they’ve been and where they are going.

One of the myths that gets worked up into a reality in America is the one about the past and history and identity. It is a rejection of the ancient idea that character is fate. It is the idea that one can be anything one wants. This is largely a lie of course, but so what. There is no going back. Las Vegas is a place where it is pretty clear that no one is going back to anything. But at the same time, it is trying to have its cake and eat it too. There’s no past in Vegas but even so the place crazily attempts to fit the entirety of human history onto a few miles of the Strip, from the ancient pyramids to New York City. Pretty amazing.

What I’m trying to say is that Las Vegas makes no sense but it explodes into a phantasm every night anyway and then dies into the sunlight. It doesn’t even really exist during the daytime. There is something a little sad about a place that is such a spectacle at night and so invisible during the day. It is an American sadness somehow, a Jay Gatsby sadness. And it is a strong sadness, or there’s a strength in it. There’s a depth there all of a sudden just when everything seemed pure surface.

Las Vegas evaporates into the sand, into bits of road that give up so suddenly it can make you laugh. All at once you’re at the end of the world and there are just the dusty mountains beyond that make some final limit to how far the housing developments can creep. The desert said, “you can have this bowl in which to fester and glow.” At the center of it all stands the Strip, generating the outward push.

The great casinos of the last fifteen years have developed according to one overriding impulse. That impulse has been to capture the imaginative spaces of the world for commerce. Of course, the real world spaces, Paris, Venice, New York, etc., are centers of commerce in themselves already. But what is immediately striking about Paris or Venice, Las Vegas is how each place has been contained, distilled, and represented as a manageable version of the original purged of everything but its symbolism and imagery reconstituted into gaming areas and shopping corridors. The thirst for civilizational spaces seems to be the primary driving force in the most recent incarnations of the Strip. The indeterminate fantasy zones, the Palms, Sands, Sahara, Flamingo, and even the more recent Treasure Island have receded into the background or disappeared altogether. The fun of those older fantasylands was the fun of pure play. They were escapes beyond the boundaries of any possible world. The newer spaces are interesting in that they are playing with the real world. Vegas has the audacity to recreate and thus lay some claim to the actual world, to other locations with which it shares space and time. And yet it is still under the guise of a giant wink and nudge, a knowing smile. But the sense of funny is muted. It’s muted because of the sadness, the sadness that is, one must suppose, at the center of gambling and its infinite monotonous temporality. What a stunning audacity to claim the entirety of world culture for your own and then admit that you don’t care, that it is as boring and empty as the mechanism of a slot machine – a machine that, in the end, merely produces randomness. And it might be an honest admission too. Las Vegas never seems to be having the fun that it claims to be having, is always more aware of itself than it would like to be. It’s more exhausted than exhilarating. At least, this is how one can start to like it. There is something honest about it even as it is playing all these games and pretending to be so many things at once.

At New York, New York, Las Vegas they have built a rollercoaster that weaves in and out of the compacted skyline of New York City. It is fast and scary. You get a glimpse of the back side of the Statue of Liberty before you tumble down again in another loop or corkscrew. I love it. They should put one in the real New York. You could see people screaming in a loop around the Citicorp building or spiraling down the side of the Empire State. The theorists of simulacrum would send up a cry: one more defeat for the really real! But they would be wrong. There is no lack of reality on the Las Vegas Strip. It is just one more version of things. From the top of one the big drops at the New York rollercoaster you can see the mountains outside of Vegas for a moment before you plunge. If it is twilight you will see a very special desert light. It is soft and clear at the same time, gentle and brittle simultaneously. And then you speed down into Brooklyn while the whole car train screams and laughs in delight and the mountains are gone in the distance again. Las Vegas.

The 88 spotlights had been turned on since late afternoon, but it was only as dusk fell that their beams became visible. Wan and informal at first, their lights grew steadily brighter as the evening grew darker. The spotlights were aimed skywards and set up inside a fenced-in lot in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City, divided up between two raised platforms and arranged into two squares. They remained lit from dusk on September 11 until dawn the next day, their beams combining to form two phantom pillars of pale blue—ethereal echoes of the World Trade Center towers that once stood nearby and a tribute in light to the victims who died when those towers fell.

Seen from a distance, the columns appeared to sparkle as light was being reflected off of small objects moving swiftly in the beams. The effect was beautiful but unintentional. The tribute designers never planned for it and no such sparkling was seen the first few times the memorial was lit.

When the effect began appearing in 2004, people didn’t quite know what to make of it. Some thought that dust or ash had inadvertently become illuminated, like floating dust in a shaft of light. Others thought that maybe fireworks had been set off and that distance was muting the sounds of their explosions.

Rebekah Creshkoff was in Battery Park that evening, close enough to the tribute to know that none of these guesses were correct. Gazing up, she didn’t see dust or ash or fireworks, but wings. Thousands of wings. Wings from birds and bats and moths that were flying in and circling the beams. Flapping and flitting and fluttering, the wings reflected and scattered and dispersed the tribute’s light, making the pale spectral beams sparkle.

The first thirty feet above the beams were packed with moths that had become drawn to the lights. On the platforms where the spotlights were arranged, Creshkoff saw technicians wearing dark sunglasses walk from one to another and using cloth rags to wipe off the blackened husks of those that had strayed too close to the 7,000-watt lamps.

Creshkoff is the founder of New York City Audubon’s Project Safe Flight, an organization that has been monitoring bird causalities in the city since 1997. During the spring and fall when birds migrate, volunteers patrol the perimeter of skyscrapers in Manhattan’s midtown district, collecting and cataloguing dead and injured birds, casualties of either mid-air collisions—with the sides of glass buildings or with each other—or from exhaustion after circling repeatedly around especially bright lights.

Gazing up at the Tribute, Creshkoff worried that a similar end might await some of the birds wheeling overhead.

“Sometimes they would break free so you could see them exiting the light and then they’d come back into the shaft of light,” Creshkoff remembered. “They would do that repeatedly—break free from one beam and get sucked into another one.”

Creshkoff remembers looking up at the birds and feeling sick. “It was really distressing to someone who has been following this problem like I have,” she said.

Creshkoff didn’t linger long at the tribute. After about half an hour, unable to bear the birds in distress any longer, she headed home.

Creshkoff had witnessed the same thing happen last year. Shortly after that first experience, she came up with an idea that she thought might help the birds. She proposed that the city end the memorial at midnight—before bird migration traffic reached its peak—and having the 88 spotlights be turn off one at a time, rather than all of them simultaneously at dawn. According to the plan, the lights would begin dimming around 10:30 pm and then gradually fade out until the last light was turned off at midnight. The plan seemed like a win-win situation: the birds would be spared a major distraction during their migrations and the city would have a beautiful and fitting end to its memorial.

When Creshkoff met New York City’s Municipal Art Society to discuss the proposal, however, she was kindly told that the plan would never work. The problem, of course, was money—not that there wasn’t enough, but that too much had been invested.

“I thought it was a wonderful idea but a lot of people contributed a lot of money to buy these lights,” Creshkoff said. “They get to use them only once a year. They’re not going to want to see them go out early.”

While Creshkoff was watching the birds from the ground that night, Andrew Farnsworth, a graduate student at Cornell University’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, was observing the same spectacle from atop a nearby thirty-eight-story building.

Farnsworth had been hired by Audubon to monitor bird activity around the tribute while it was lit. Concerned about the effects the lights might have on migrating birds, Audubon had made a deal with the city: if observers like Farnsworth witnessed at least 5 birds being killed or injured as a result of the lights, the city would shut down the tribute for 20 minutes to allow the birds time to disperse.

An avid birder since he was four-and-a-half years old, Farnsworth has spent many nights awake just watching and listening to migrating birds’ nevertheless, the tribute stakeout was a unique experience for him.

Farnsworth was accompanied by his fiancé, and the two of them camped out on the roof of the building from before sunset on Sept. 11 to sunrise the next day.

“We spent the whole night on top of the building,” Farnsworth said. “Our monitoring consisted of 3-5 minute periods watching the birds in the beam, followed by the same time period watching the general procession of migration in and around the beams.”

Over the course of the night, Farnsworth recorded the presence of a wide variety of birds.

“Small songbirds were by far the most common in the beam, especially warblers,” Farnsworth remembered.

That night, Farnsworth also recorded the presence of 7 veerys, 6 yellow-billed cuckoos, 4 scarlet tanagers, 4 rose-breasted grosbeaks, 3 gray catbirds, 3 indigo buntings, 2 wood thrushes, 1 sora, and 1 American robin; there were also herring gulls, sparrows, northern waterthrushes, yellowthroats and redstarts.

Whenever possible, Farnsworth identified the birds based on their size and plumage color through the use of binoculars and a spotting scope. But sometimes the swirl of birds became too chaotic and visual identification became impossible. When that happened, the birds were identified based on the distinctive sounds each species made. Using a shotgun microphone and a digital audio recorder, Farnsworth recorded the birds’ calls for later comparison against a computer database of bird calls.

The birds started to arrive at about 8 pm, approximately half an hour after the first moths and bats had begun appearing, Farnsworth said. The birds flew at a height of about 300 feet from the ground and those that strayed into the beams remained anywhere between 2-15 minutes at a time.

Bird traffic around the beams was light at first but gradually became heavier as the evening progressed. The peak occurred at about 2:30 am when there were about 50-60 birds in the beams at once and many more circling nearby. By 4 am, the number of birds had dwindled and the last bird flew through the beams at about 6 am.

Scientists don’t really know why some species of migrating birds are attracted to bright, artificial lights or why they become reluctant to leave once they reach the lights’ source.

“Birds are attracted to the light much the same way that moths, insects, and many other organisms are attracted to light,” Farnsworth said. “They’re attracted to lights mostly under very specific conditions, usually associated with poor visibility, low cloud ceiling, fog and haze.”

It’s thought that under such conditions, the birds have to rely heavily on visual cues to guide them. Many bird species are known to navigate by moonlight or starlight, and some scientists think the artificial lights may be acting as a distraction.

“The theory is that once birds focus on such a strong visual cue, they move toward it and once they get to it they do not want to leave it,” Farnsworth said. “Some anthropomorphize this as fear to leave, but it’s probably closer to simply being overwhelmed by the strength of the cue.”

In the end, Farnsworth and the other observers didn’t witness any bird casualties that could be attributable to the lights and Audubon’s emergency plan was never enacted.

Creshkoff fears that in a few years migrating birds will face an artificial light disturbance that makes the Tribute lights seem pale in comparison.

The Freedom Tower, the building designed to replace the twin World Trade Center towers that were destroyed, is expected to be completed in 2010. Rising 1776 feet into the air, the new tower is expected to be the tallest building in the United States. At night, a 400-foot spire atop the tower will emit an intense beam of light that will penetrate more than a thousand feet into the air above the tower.

“I just shudder to think what impact that will have on migrating birds,” Creshkoff said.

Creshkoff believes people need to become more aware of the impact of artificial lights.

“Light is beautiful; people like it and get aesthetic jollies from seeing the New York skyline lit up,” Creshkoff said. “[But] we need to educate ourselves and realize that light is not benign, light is not a non-event, light does not have zero-impact either on ourselves or other animals.”

[Please see NOTE at end of this post.*]

Richard Dawkins has been an intellectual hero of mine since college, where I first read The Selfish Gene. Though I thought I understood the theory of evolution before I read that book, reading it was such a revelation (not to mention sheer enjoyment) that afterward I marveled at the poverty of my own previous understanding. In that (his first) book, Dawkins’s main and brilliant innovation is to look at various biological phenomena from the perspective of a gene, rather than that of the individual who possesses that gene, or the species to which that individual belongs, or some other entity. This seemingly simple perspectival shift turns out to have extraordinary explanatory power, and actually solves many biological puzzles. The delightful pleasure of the book lies in Dawkins’s bringing together his confident command of evolutionary theory with concrete examples drawn from his astoundingly wide knowledge of zoology. Who doesn’t enjoy being told stories about animals? If you haven’t read The Selfish Gene, do yourself a favor: click here to buy it, and read it over the holidays.

I have read all his subsequent books, and Dawkins has only gotten better. Last year around this time, in a roundup of the best books of 2004 here at 3QD, I wrote this about The Ancestor’s Tale:

This is Dawkins’s best book in years, and he has never written less than a brilliant book. The literary conceit which lends the book its title is, of course, that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Dawkins’s tale is that of all of life. Starting in the present he travels back in time to meet the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, then further back to meet other ancestors connecting us to other life forms, and so on, until we are at the origin of life itself. At close to 700 dense pages, the book is filled with a massive amount of biological information. The sweep of Dawkins’s erudition is truly astounding, and if you find yourself getting exhausted at times by the relentless and seemingly endless litany of facts, keep going: at some point toward the end, I had the supremely ecstatic experience of being absolutely awed at the majestic grandeur, variety, and tenacity of the whole history of life, as well as at the prodigious effort that has gone into classifying and understanding it.

Professor Dawkins has also been kind to me personally. Upon hearing of my father’s death earlier this year, he sent a warm note of condolence along with a beautiful passage about death from one of his books, and he has been appreciative of our efforts at 3 Quarks Daily, as you may have noticed if you have ever clicked on our “About Us” page.

I have never had anything much of interest to say about Richard Dawkins’s writings because I agree with 99% of what he says. He has also inspired feelings of gratitude and loyalty in me, so I am loath to disagree with him. But (you knew there was going to be a but, didn’t you?) there is that 1%, and the twin dictates of intellectual honesty and deep respect for Professor Dawkins compel me to say something about that today. I am only able to muster the requisite temerity because our small disagreement is about a subject which I probably have spent much more time studying than he: the philosophical matter of truth. Because I do not have space here to write a lengthy disquisition on truth, my treatment of it here will necessarily be somewhat cursory, but I am hoping that it will be enough to show that Dawkins’s concept of truth is overly simple.

In the past century, scientists seem to have become increasingly hostile to philosophy. Einstein was representative of a dying breed of physicist with a philosophical bent (see this). By the second half of the twentieth century scientists were frequently openly contemptuous toward philosophers. For example, in his popular books, the famous physicist Richard P. Feynman often expresses an impatient disdain for the whole subject: “Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.” The highjacking of philosophy by literary theory that took place in the 1980s and 1990s in the American academy and its subsequent conflation with cultural studies, minority studies, and other disciplines, mostly indulged by English departments across the country, with all its attendant (and now notorious) obscurantism and lack of rigor, certainly did not help matters. It was only a matter of time before an Alan Sokal would appear to burst that bloated bubble, and he did. Meanwhile, philosophy departments continued their more sober reflections, but science’s attention had by now been focused on the regrettable abuses of science by a handful of postmodernist thinkers. (Where were these welcome objections to nonsense in the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis, by the way?) What has resulted is a widespread tendency on the parts of scientists to not only dismiss philosophy, but to do it in a facile manner, more often than not using the straw man of relativism. And Richard Dawkins has also fallen into this tempting trap.

The second piece in Dawkins’s collection of essays entitled A Devil’s Chaplain is “What is True?” and it begins this way:

A little learning is a dangerous thing. This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark, but it comes into it’s own in the special case where the little learning is in philosophy (as it often is). A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word (‘true’) is likely to encounter a form of philosophical heckling which goes something like this:

There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit’s entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favor your brand of truth.

The straw man is being set up here by Dawkins, so that it can be knocked down rather easily later. He cannot possibly expect us to believe that if he were to utter the words “It’s true that whales are mammals,” to his friend Daniel Dennett, say, that Dennett would then respond with the sort of reply that Dawkins has put into the mouth of his imaginary philosopher above. Nor would any other respectable philosopher. The words “true” and “truth” are used in many contexts in English, most of them ordinary everyday usages of the “Is it true that it’s raining outside?” variety, where no normal person will respond with “What is truth?” or some other bizarreness. It is only in highly technical and subtle issues which surround the philosophical notion of truth, such as attempts to pin down what entities the predicate “true” applies to (it doesn’t apply to words, but can apply to sentences, for example), and what it means for something to be “true” in a very general way which would cover all of its usages, etc., that the philosopher might object. Just as “energy” or “work” are technical words in physics, “true” is a technical word in philosophy (as well as in mathematical logic). And just as no normal physicist is going to heckle or object to someone saying, “I did a lot of work today carrying furniture down to the street from my fifth floor apartment,” (no work was done in technical physics terms by carrying things down) no philosopher will object to common uses of “true” or “truth”.

Similarly, I am not sure what Dawkins imagines a relativist to be, but according to his description above, if I say to the relativist, “Snow is green,” the relativist will be happy to accept my statement to be just as true as “Snow is white.” In fact, no normal English-speaking person will agree with me, or agree that my statement is true. To argue that philosophers are naive or wrong is one thing; to imagine that they are insane is quite another. What such a person would probably think and say is that perhaps I don’t know English well, and I am referring to something other than snow with the word “snow”, or that perhaps I don’t know what “green” really means, or even that perhaps I don’t know what “is” is.

There is an important principle in philosophy that any disagreement must take place against a background of much greater agreement. Before we can argue about whether “whales are mammals”, we must at least agree on what “whales” are and what “mammals” are. If I believe that mammals are animals with legs, that walk on land, and always must be so, then we are presumably not even arguing about the same thing.

This brings me to the gist of the matter. What Dawkins is really defending is a particular view of truth: what in philosophy is called the correspondence theory of truth. By contrast to his own fictional philosopher, he is saying that “there is an absolute truth”. In this view of truth, words refer to a reality external to the mind (for example, “hydrogen” refers to a substance consisting of atoms made up of one proton with one electron in orbit around it–ignoring the heavier isotopes of hydrogen), and sentences either capture that reality accurately (correspond to it), in which case they are true; or they don’t, in which case they are false. At first blush this may seem commonsensical and unproblematic, but this is not so. Let me attempt to give a flavor of the difficulties with a quick example: suppose that in the fifth century B.C., Socrates one day came home and said to his wife, “I saw a falling star on my way home,” and also suppose that I came home one night and said to my wife, “I saw a falling star on my way home.” Suppose Socrates and I mean the same thing by each of the words in the sentence. I think it is fairly clear that both our wives would instantly know what we were talking about, and perhaps visualize something similar in their minds’ eye to what we had just seen. But to Socrates, it was literally a falling star, while I know that stars don’t fall, and that it was most likely a meteor being incinerated in the atmosphere, and I was deliberately referring to a meteor as a “falling star.” Now according to me, Socrates’s sentence to his wife was a falsehood, while I told the truth. Both women understood the same thing. Both had no reason to suspect that their husband was telling a falsehood, yet from Dawkins’s point of view, what Socrates said was a falsehood (though he did not know it). And some future scientist may realize that meteors are actually something else, and on that day, suddenly, unbeknownst to me or my wife, my sentence will also become a falsehood. Is this not an odd notion of truth? There are many other problems with this sort of “absolute truth” view, but I must move on.

The other major theory of truth in philosophy is known as the coherence theory. This is a holistic view in which the meanings of words depend on the meanings of other words and so on. There is a “web” or “network” of interdependent meanings, with words at the periphery being pinned down by ostention. Words (or sounds) are initially associated with certain salient aspects of the environment by repetition. If every time we are in the presence of any rabbit, I say “rabbit”, you will eventually understand that the sound “rabbit” refers to a rabbit. I may, by pointing and so on, also define the word “ear”. Now if I say that a “tibbar” is a rabbit that does not have any ears, you will know what I mean. The meaning of “tibbar” then is given by the meanings of the words in terms of which you have understood it, not some external reality of tibbars. Truth in this view, is a predicate which applies to beliefs which cohere with other true beliefs. By this kind of holistic thinking, we get rid of the strangeness we encountered in the last paragraph where the same sentence is judged true when I speak it, but false when Socrates spoke it. Now, when Socrates says, “I saw a falling star on my way home,” all that is required to make this true is that it cohere with his other beliefs. This sort of view gets rid of many of the difficulties of a correspondence theory of truth, but sometimes at the cost of giving up on a certain notion of a fixed and absolute reality.

This may sound a bit odd at first, but is a defensible theory and many (possibly even most) respectable philosophers, including Daniel Dennett, now hold it. What I am trying to say is that it is not automatically wrong and silly to say that “there is no absolute truth.” There are reasonable ways of thinking in which truth is (in a very technical sense) not absolute, but dependent on our web of shared meanings, and our other beliefs. There is no need for these philosophical ideas to do violence to any of our common everyday usages of truth, such as “It is true that Plasmodium causes malaria,” any more than our understanding through atomic physics that solid matter is mostly empty space should prevent us from saying, “It is true that the box is completely filled with iron.”

There is, of course, a lot more than what I have hinted at to all this, but it strikes me as unfair of Dawkins to imply that all philosophers who do not believe in “absolute truth” are being ludicrous relativists. Dawkins has rightly and often urged us to give up on the comforting notions of religious superstition. Why then must we cling to the scientifically comforting notion that there is an absolute truth out there waiting for us to discover it, rather than the idea that truth (in the limited sense I have described above) has to do with who we are and what we make it? Many philosophers know a great deal of science and mathematics. My own advisor at Columbia, David Albert, has a Ph.D. in physics and publishes in quantum theory as well as philosophy. Hilary Putnam is a mathematician as well as a philosopher and holds joint appointments at Harvard. Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland know as much neuroscience as some neuroscientists. I could go on and on. But few scientists take more than a superficial interest in philosophy anymore, and it is their loss. Dawkins is right when he quotes Pope in the first line of “What is True?” above. I can only very respectfully recommend to him and to you to drink deep at the philosophical spring.

[*NOTE: It has become clear to me after looking at some of the responses to this column (here and at other sites) that I almost surely misinterpreted Richard Dawkins’s meaning in the passage that I quoted from his article “What is True?” While I had originally thought that he is attacking philosophers in general, it is now fairly clear to me that he was there only attacking lunatics of the sort that would object to the use of the word “true” in a statement such as “It is true that snow is white.” This does nothing to change my assertion that what Dawkins is really doing in his article is defending a correspondence theory of truth, nor does it in any other significant way change the main thrust of my essay.]

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

The strike of graduate students at NYU continues.  The single demand of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee remains unmet: that NYU negotiate with their union, as they did since 2001.   (Once again, discloure: I am a member of GSOC, and striking.)  Currently the single most important labor struggle in the nation involving university teaching, the issue has attracted great amounts of coverage lately, and I believe that those interested in the current state of U.S. universities would do well to pay attention. 

In a previous piece, I summarized the trajectory of disagreement that brought graduate students to the decision to strike.  Here, I’d like to provide an account of the situation at the arrival of a critical juncture.  Tomorrow marks NYU President John Sexton’s ‘deadline’ by which graduate assistants must return to work.  As a carrot, Sexton offers those who return non-union contracts guaranteeing the continuation of the gains and benefits that, ironically, were previously procured by the union (yearly salary increases, health coverage, etc.).

But the sticks are many.  By email, Sexton threatened students who choose not to scab tomorrow with the removal of both their ‘stipends’ (pay) and their spring ‘teaching eligibility’ (jobs)–the disaggregation of the two things being a rhetorical strategy meant to preserve the fiction that the stipends do not represent payment for teaching labor, despite the fact that they are disbursed to graduate teachers in the form of paychecks with taxes and social security withheld.  Of course, despite the fictive bureaucratese, firing workers for striking is illegal and generally considered a vile form of strike-breaking.  In practice it puts NYU’s graduate students in the position of almost all strikers – i.e. without pay. 

Still, it is unclear whether such a threat can be enforced, as many departments have enacted resolutions not to replace each other’s labor, leaving a very real question as to where hundreds of qualified scabs can be found.  In addition, Sexton’s email holds that students who return must pledge not to resume striking their labor, or risk losing an additional year of teaching.  Here again the response of the academic community has been one of outrage: compelling students to sign away their right to protest does not exactly smack of the vaunted ‘academic freedom’ that universities claim to defend. 

In strategic terms, NYU’s actions over the month of the strike have further inflamed many graduate students, and this current ultimatum exacerbates the trend.  No one likes to be intimidated.  As well, it has provoked faculty outrage, not least because the threats erode the faculty’s traditional autonomy when it comes to teaching assignments as well as choosing to censure particular students.  Many chairs and directors of graduate studies are simply refusing to comply with the order from the provost to reassign spring teaching in accordance with the threats.  And the labor movement in New York city has been engaged by the struggle, with Manhattan’s president saying that NYU’s actions have embarrassed the borough, and several City Council members proclaiming that NYU will receive no cooperation on land-use review until they recognize the union.  Although faculty and tertiary support are invaluable, the fate of the union will be determined by the size of the disruption caused by strikers, from which all other support will flow.  However, even were the strike to be ended without a contract, the fairly frightening glimpse into the workings of high-level university administration will have been instructive and induced radicalism in many.

To step back, the philosophical question here is quite a simple one: are graduate students workers, and thus deserve the right to unionize?  Where political discourse is concerned, the Clinton-era National Labor Relations Board held that they were, while the George W. Bush-era board did not.  No surprise there, and the decision is not binding.  But let me offer a counterexample to the view that graduate students are not workers: the fact is, they already are classed as workers at many universities, including all the SUNY schools as well as Rutgers.  The only difference is that these universities are public.  Is there, then, any significance to the distinction between public and private-university graduate students?

I don’t believe that a distinction germane to this issue can be made.  Certainly the argument that unions erode collegiality and interfere with internal academic affairs can be dispelled by a glance at Rutgers, where graduate students have been unionized since 1972 without incident.  It is also very difficult to deny that working conditions at NYU have improved since unionization.  In 2000, students in the English department were paid 12,000 dollars for teaching four classes or discussion sections, with no health benefits.  Today, compensation for the same workload is 19,000 dollars plus health coverage.  Better working conditions make for better teaching; thus the undergraduates are better served by the union as well.  Either we should have a union, or Rutgers shouldn’t.  You make the call.  If you make the one I think you will, come picket with us this morning.

Dispatches:

Divisions of Labor I
Local Catch
Where I’m Coming From
Optimism of the Will
Vince Vaughan…Eve Sedgwick
The Other Sweet Science
Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermanence

The population of India is now over a billion with an estimated 1.5 million cases of cancer diagnosed per year. The population of the United States is 295 million, and yet 1.5 million cancers will be diagnosed this year. The accompanying Table shows that the incidence of breast cancer in the US is 660/million while in India, it is 79/million. Similarly, in the US, prostate cancer accounts for 690 cases/million, while in India, it is 20/million. What is more surprising is that in a country where large numbers of people smoke, and where pollution control is not as good as that in the developed countries yet, the incidence of lung cancer in India is 30/million compared to 660/million in the US. Only Head and Neck, and endometrial cancer rates are comparable between the two countries, the former probably related to the chewing of pan and betel nut in India.

COMPARISON OF CANCER INCIDENCE IN USA AND INDIA:

The cause of this discrepancy has been debated, and is felt to be multi-factorial including the genetic predisposition of the subjects, their life-styles, a uniqueness of the geography or the environment or any combinations of the above. The weakest factor in this list of possibilities is that of genetic predisposition. While some diseases are clearly more common in or restricted to certain races ( for example, Jews of Eastern European, or Ashkenazi descent carry the Tay-Sachs gene at a rate ten times that of other Americans), cancer incidence is associated with individual or familial pre-disposition rather than racial predisposition. It has also been suggested that there may be serious under-reporting of cancer cases from the third world countries, making the statistics unreliable. Frequently, patients from the remote and rural parts of the country either do not seek treatment at all, or succumb to the disease before a diagnosis is made, many more preferring homeopathic and Aryuvedic remedies. However, differences are also apparent between Asians and Americans living in the US as shown in the example of cancer statistics for males in Massachusetts:

Similarly, the incidence of cancer differs among the female population:

It is conceivable that cancers unique to an older age group such as prostate or certain hematologic malignancies may not be as common in India because the percentage of the aged population is comparatively lower, but this does not explain the well documented difference in the incidence of childhood leukemias.

Two thirds of all cancers are related to diet. Associations between the two are difficult, if not impossible, to prove because of the formidable number of variables involved. Problems with the American diet are being increasingly appreciated because of the epidemic of obesity. Meats and poultry obtained from animals that have been fattened up on hormones or chemically preserved foods may be factors that contribute to the early onset of puberty in girls, and increasing incidence of chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer. However, another possibility is that Americans not only consume (in large amounts) what is damaging, they also do not eat what could potentially neutralize and protect them against the carcinogenic effects of the former. That protective effect for Indians may be provided by their diet which is rich in spices. Garlic, onion, soy, turmeric, ginger, tomatoes, green tea and chillies that are the staples of Indian cooking have been shown to be associated with a lower risk of a variety of cancers ranging from colon, GI tract, breast, leukemias and lymphomas.

The benefits of spices have been known for millennia. As Alexander the Great was returning home after conquering the known world, the last such place being India, he fell ill and unexpectedly died in Babylon. The University of Maryland researchers have now successfully proved that he died of typhoid. Upon his death, a fight broke out between the Macedonians who wanted to take their native son home for burial and Ptolemy, Alexander’s powerful General, who was heading the conquered Egyptian territory and who wanted to bury him in Egypt. It took almost a year to build a chariot suitable enough for transporting the body out of Babylon, and during this time, Alexander’s body had to be preserved. Interestingly, even though the secrets of mummification were now known to the Greeks because of the conquest of Egypt, the body was actually preserved in spices, white pepper and honey.

Sir Thomas More was beheaded by the order of King Henry VIII and his head was cooked in water before being impaled on a spike and displayed on London Bridge where it stayed for a month, taken down only as more heads began to arrive, eventually being returned to his daughter. Margaret More kept the head with the greatest reverence as long as she lived, carefully preserving it by means of spices. To this day, it stays in the custody of one of his relatives. Since 1500s, the vault containing the head was last opened in 1837, and it was still in reasonably good shape.

Spices have been used for ages as food preservatives. Mothers knew millennia ago that meat spoils quickly in hot climates, and their children died if they ate left-over food. Being a rich source of protein for their children, meat was a precious commodity, especially in hunting gathering days and needed to be preserved. Mothers learnt through experience that adding spices could accomplish this goal. Geographically speaking, the number of spices in food has been shown to be directly proportional to how hot the weather is. In contrast, food is either chemically preserved or frozen in the Western countries. Spices kill germs, and are therefore highly effective as preservatives.

The precise mechanism by which spices prevent the development of cancer is not well understood. Spices are some of the best natural anti-oxidants, and may be acting by protecting the cells from DNA damage. There is a documented association between germs and cancer; estimates are that ~15% of cancers globally are caused by micro-organisms. It is possible that many cancers are initiated by pathogens and spices prevent this from happening by killing off the germs. More importantly, natural substances like onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, red chilly, tomatoes, and black pepper have now been scientifically proven to interfere with the very intracellular signaling which accounts for the excessive proliferation and loss of maturation in cancer cells. The bio-chemical properties of these substances are being widely investigated now, with over 1000 papers published in highly respected medical journals on curcumin and ginger in the last few years alone. In summary then, spices may act to prevent the various stages of cancer initiation and development through a combination of their anti-oxidant, anti-pathogen and anti-proliferative properties.

Plants of the ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe, Zingiberaceae) family, one of the most heavily consumed dietary substances in the world, have been shown to inhibit tumor promotion in mouse skin. The substance called [6]-gingerol is the main active compound in ginger root and the one that gives ginger its distinctive flavor. A review of recently published studies indicate that among a host of other activities, gingerol induces apoptosis (cell death) in leukemia cells, can prevent the development of colon cancer cells, protects against radiation induced lethality and acts as a blood thinner via platelet activation inhibition (similar to an aspirin-like effect).

Curcuma longa or turmeric, responsible for the yellow color of curry powder, is a herb belonging to the ginger family and curcumin is its most active component. Turmeric has been widely used in India for centuries as a panacea for a variety of ailments. In summary, curcumin has been found to interfere with key cellular signaling pathways to arrest the unchecked proliferation of cancer cells, induce apoptosis, sensitize them to radiation therapy, and stop the formation of new blood vessels, a mechanism by which cancer cells are known to spread. These are the very effects desired to achieve growth arrest and eventual regression in a malignant process.

At least 9 clinical studies with curcumin have now been reported in humans in diseases ranging from cancer to rheumatism, uveitis, inflammatory diseases, leukoplakia, metaplasia of the stomach, and as cholesterol-lowering agents. All studies show that curcumin is extremely well tolerated in doses ranging from 4-8 grams/day, although up to 12 Gm/day have also been administered. Clinical responses of varying degrees have been reported in almost all of these clinical trials. Similarly, gingerol has been widely used for its biologic and chemopreventive effects for centuries, with more controlled clinical trials in recent years.

While spices may prevent cancer initiation and expansion, could they also be of therapeutic benefit in already established tumors, especially if given in very high doses? The intuitive answer is that the earlier the treatment is instituted in the course of the disease, the higher the probability. Two obvious possibilities are the pre-malignant conditions marked by abnormal morphology called dysplasias, or established malignancies such as low grade lymphomas and chronic leukemias where the course is so slow that a watch-and-wait policy is usually practiced. Over the ensuing years, the diseases change character, becoming progressively more lethal, at which time intervention is undertaken with aggressive and toxic approaches like radiation and chemotherapies. A good place to start may be the use of these natural substances in such conditions, especially in the earliest stages of disease evolution. The benefit from natural substances is likely to take time, a luxury which cannot be afforded in the case of rapidly growing malignant diseases, therefore the sooner this intervention occurs, the better.

We were curing malaria long before we knew what caused it. It was an empirical observation that victims of malaria who chewed on the bark of the Cinchona tree improved dramatically which led to the extraction and isolation of quinine. If we wait for a complete understanding of every abnormal signal and molecule in a cancer cell, then effective therapies may be a long way off. On the other hand, taking an observation such as the role of diet in preventing cancer can help develop some novel therapies as well as define preventive measures. As evidenced by the campaign against smoking, it will take a long time to bring about the social change required in making major lifestyle adjustments such as alterations in diet. While such changes are essential in the long run, it may be advisable to combine the best of what the East and West offer by using the natural substances to treat earlier stages of cancers and use the latest DNA microarray technologies and the results of the Human Genome Project to understand the precise mechanism of action of these spices.

Studying age old Eastern remedies, or “complimentary” medicine runs the risk of being branded as voodoo. Upon hearing of my current interest in treating cancers with Masala after so many years in cancer research using the most sophisticated scientific tools, a beloved family member in Pakistan remarked in wonder, “But I thought you went to America to become a rich doctor, not a witch doctor!”

Previous Rx Column:
The War on Cancer