Shunya's Notes

Frans de Waal on Primatology

Here is a wonderful essay by primatologist Frans de Waal that illustrates how cultural presuppositions are inseparable from our investigations of nature, that ontology (in this case our a priori view of 'animal nature') underlies the questions we ask, the answers we get, and what we make of them. Even categories like “reason” and “logic” are inseparable from culture (or metaphysics, more specifically), a point so often missed, including by so many self-avowed rationalists.

In 1952, when European ethologists still worked on instinct theories and American behaviorists still trained rats to press levers, Imanishi [the founder of Japanese primatology] wrote a little book that criticized the view of animals as mindless automatons. He inserted an imaginary debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might have culture. The proposed definition of culture was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may, over time, become different from that in other groups, thus creating a characteristic culture. Soon thereafter, his students demonstrated that the potato washing started by a juvenile female monkey on Koshima Island spread to other members of her troop. The troop had developed a potato washing culture.  [Photo, taken by the author, shows Japanese macaques on Koshima Island are still washing potatoes half a century later.]

Imanishi was also the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.

More here.  Speaking of primates, check out a short post I did on our trip to Sumatra last year to see orangutans in the wild.

Mahabharata: A Conversation

Ashis Nandy and Gurcharan Das discuss the Mahabharata (in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3; total ~25 mins): 

"Final Solution" by Rakesh Sharma

The 2002 communal riots in Gujarat may well go down as the darkest chapter in the first decade of 21st century India. An estimated two thousand Muslims were murdered, many burned alive. But what makes this a particularly dark event is the fact that it was methodically planned ahead and actively supported by the state government of the Hindu nationalist party BJP, led by Narendra Modi, still popular and in command in Gujarat. As this Human Rights Watch report, published a month later, notes: 

Between February 28 and March 2 the attackers descended with militia-like precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist-Hindutva-groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties, information obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs' way. A key BJP state minister is reported to have taken over police control rooms in Ahmedabad on the first day of the carnage, issuing orders to disregard pleas for assistance from Muslims. Portions of the Gujarati language press meanwhile printed fabricated stories and statements openly calling on Hindus to avenge the Godhra attacks.

In almost all of the incidents documented by Human Rights Watch the police were directly implicated in the attacks. At best they were passive observers, and at worse they acted in concert with murderous mobs and participated directly in the burning and looting of Muslim shops and homes and the killing and mutilation of Muslims. In many cases, under the guise of offering assistance, the police led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. Many of the attacks on Muslim homes and places of business also took place in close proximity to police posts. Panicked phone calls made to the police, fire brigades, and even ambulance services generally proved futile. Many witnesses testified that their calls either went unanswered or that they were met with responses such as: "We don't have any orders to save you"; "We cannot help you, we have orders from above"; "If you wish to live in Hindustan, learn to protect yourself"; "How come you are alive? You should have died too"; "Whose house is on fire? Hindus' or Muslims'?" In some cases phone lines were eventually cut to make it impossible to call for help.

I had long heard of Rakesh Sharma's Final Solution, the acclaimed documentary film about the riots. A few months ago I found it on Google Video and I can't praise it enough. It is an outstanding record that expanded my understanding of the riots—from the political rallies before the riots, to the minds of the Hindutva ideologues, to their many grassroots organizations in the Sangh Parivar. Using eyewitness accounts, Sharma reveals how the events then unfolded, how the madness spread, and the stories of the people caught in its wheels. A must see for anyone interested in the politics of hate that grips humanity from time to time (duration: 150 mins).

Working the Double Shift

Emily St. John Mandel on striking a balance between writing literary fiction and paying the rent:

Most novelists have day jobs, even the published ones whose books get good reviews. Writing is my second career, and one of the very few things that it has in common with my first career—contemporary dance—is the necessity of maintaining secondary employment. I’ve been supporting myself since I was eighteen years old: I’ve made sandwiches and cocktails and uncountable lattés, put price stickers on wine glasses, supervised the unloading of trucks at 7am on Montreal winter mornings, sold everything from clothing to furniture to vases in three cities, run errands for architects, scheduled meetings, designed and coded websites, written reports and managed offices; all the strangely varied occupations that a person accumulates when the primary objective is not to establish a career, per se, but just to pay the rent while they’re working on a novel.

Some of these jobs have been quite pleasant, and it’s nice to able to afford rent and groceries; but the phrase “day job,” of course, implies that one’s passions lie elsewhere.

Striking a balance between writing literary fiction and paying the rent is a constant struggle, and I thought it might be interesting to speak with other writers about it.

More here.

The Blight of Hindustan

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

An egalitarian ethos is not a prominent feature of Indian civilization. The Indians have long held it to be self-evident that all men are created unequal. The anthropologist Louis Dumont considered hierarchy to be so central to the Indian identity, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he went as far as calling the Indians homo hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from? 

The Origins of Caste

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—in the sense that the subgroups were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas: the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshtriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four varnas appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda, and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society.

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy, turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The principle of hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahminical ‘knowledge’.

As this new social order spread in the first millennium BCE, it encountered more settled peoples as well as forest dwelling clans. Whether by force, persuasion, or mutual advantage, more groups were brought into its fold. They too found themselves plugged into its hierarchy, perhaps loosely at first, and gradually gave up their more egalitarian ways. In doing so, they used the same principle of relative ‘purity’ to make jati and varna decisions for various units within their own societies, and by extension, to divide power and resources.[1] To sweeten the deal, the Vedic social order became flexible enough to absorb indigenous gods into its ever-growing pantheon, including perhaps even gods like Shiva and Krishna. In some cases, a whole endogamous tribe could become one jati, often regarded as outcastes. The Laws of Manu, written about 2,000 years ago, mentions many such communities: the Medas, Andhras, Chunchus, and Madgus who live off ‘the slaughter of wild animals’, the Pukkasas by ‘catching and killing [animals] in holes’, etc. 

Many modern thinkers, including Tagore, have argued that while not at all perfect, this was back then a practical way of bringing together highly diverse peoples, through which ‘men of different colors and creeds, different physical features and mental attitudes settled together side by side.’[2] By assigning religious, political, and economic power to three different classes—the Brahmins, the Kshtriyas, and the Vaishyas—the system prevented their concentration in a single dominant racial or ethnic group, thereby creating a basis for cooperation and avoiding far greater friction, open slavery, and even genocidal wars.

"An Atrocious Crime"

A thought for the Black History Month from Sydney Smith, an English writer and Anglican clergyman, in the Edinburgh Review, Dec 1818:

If nations rank according to their wisdom and their virtue, what right has the American, a scourger and murderer of slaves, to compare himself with the least and lowest of the European nations? — much more with this great and humane country [England], where the greatest lord dare not lay a finger upon the meanest peasant? What is freedom, where all are not free? where the greatest of God's blessings is limited, with impious caprice, to the colour of the body?  And these are the men who taunt the English with their corrupt Parliament, with their buying and selling votes. Let the world judge which is the most liable to censure — we who, in the midst of our rottenness, have torn off the manacles of slaves all over the world; — or they who, with their idle purity, and useless perfection, have remained mute and careless, while groans echoed and whips clanked round the very walls of their spotless Congress. We wish well to America — we rejoice in her prosperity — and are delighted to resist the absurd impertinence with which the character of her people is often treated in this country: but the existence of slavery in America is an atrocious crime, with which no measure can be kept — for which her situation affords no sort of apology — which makes liberty itself distrusted, and the boast of it disgusting.

And Abraham Lincoln in a letter to Joshua F. Speed, 24 August 1855:

As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except the Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Platonic Love

(A poem by Curt Anderson)

We dine at Adorno and return to my Beauvoir.
She compliments me on my Bachelard pad.
I pop in a Santayana CD and Saussure back to the couch.
On my way, I pull out two fine Kristeva wine glasses.
I pour some Merleau-Ponty and return the Aristotle to Descartes.
After pausing an Unamuno, I wrap my arm around her Hegel.
Her hair smells of wild Lukacs and Labriola.
Our small talk expands to include Dewey, Moore and Kant.
I confess to her what's in my Eckhart. We Locke.
By this point, we're totally Blavatsky.
We stretch out on the Schopenhauer.
She slips out of her Lyotard and I fumble with my Levi-Strauss.
She unhooks her Buber and I pull off my Spinoza.
I run my finger along her Heraclitus as she fondles my Bacon.
She stops to ask me if I brought any Kierkegaard. I nod.
We Foucault.
She lights a cigarette and compares Foucault to Lacan.
I roll over and Derrida.

Thapar on the Indo-Aryan Migrations

Here is a transcript of a 1999 lecture by Romila Thapar. She examines quite well the substantive evidence for the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic (transcript has a few typos). Also see my earlier post, which I hope to turn into a more polished article, incorporating all that I have learned since about the topic.

Let me begin by saying the obvious, that the Aryan question is probably the most complex, complicated question in Indian history. And it requires very considerable expertise in handling both the sources and the questions that arise. The expertise consists of knowing something about at least four different fields, first of all archaeology, because a lot of the remains, of almost all the cultures, come to us from excavations and there is the continual attempt to try and identify such cultures with the Aryans.... I mean that it is not enough simply to say that you pick up a list of items from excavated sites and say that the Rigveda has some items, therefore … they are identical cultures. When I talk about archaeology I am also talking about the way in which the total society functions and how these elements are integrated.

The second area of expertise is linguistics and here I would like to emphasize, very strongly, that it is not enough merely to know Sanskrit to be able to say that you can handle the questions that come up in the interpretation of the Vedic texts. There is now, since the last thirty years, there has developed a huge body of information which comes from a discipline called linguistics. Those in this discipline do comparative studies of different language structures...

The historical context, this relates to a whole series of questions, how society is defined in the past — agro pastoral, agrarian, urban… What is the meaning of these terms? What is the interaction between ecological, social, economic, cultural, religious forms? These are all aspects of a historical problem and when you are studying a total problem like the so-called the Aryan question you have to go into the interaction of all these different aspects. Is there a difference between a cattle rearing society and a society which carries out overseas trade? And these are fundamental questions in historical analyses. You cannot avoid them. You cannot just say there is reference to cattle in the Rigveda and cattle are depicted on the Indus seals therefore there is a similarity. It is the function. The function, both the actual function, the ritual function, the role that cattle play in a particular society in terms of its economy, its rituals and so on.

And the fourth discipline which I think is important ... is social anthropology...

Two Articles and a Contest

Here are two recent articles I found thought provoking and insightful (via 3QD). I'd also like to draw your attention to a new contest for the best blog post in Arts & Literature.

Why Do Humans Reason?

Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found.

How to Defend the Enlightenment (a conversation between Tzvetan Todorov and AC Grayling):

ACG: Hume and Kant both wrote about reason. We think of the Enlightenment as privileging reason, but for Hume and Kant their question was: what are the limits of reason? Hume was sceptical about the capacity of reason to solve our problems in metaphysics and elsewhere. And so indeed was Kant. For me, this is the reason why both Hume and Kant are central Enlightenment figures, and of course Kant is the author of the great essay "What is Enlightenment?" People ask, if they are Enlightenment thinkers, why are they looking for the limits of reason? The answer is that before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, the source of knowledge was authority – the authority of the deity, the Bible, the Church. If we are going to exercise authority over the acquisition of knowledge, we have to understand our instrument. That is why we need a critique of our mental powers. Look also at Locke, a major figure in stimulating the Enlightenment. His question was, "What can we know? How much can we know?" 

Finally, 3 Quarks Daily has just announced the last of their four annual contests for the best blog post in Arts & Literature. Nominations open on Feb 22 and the judge is former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Read more about the contest and nominate your favorite blog post!

Seafaring Hominids?

Archaeology seems to be undergoing an explosion of new finds in the past decade or so. More and more, new information is completely scrambling old assumptions about human evolution and early modern human and hominid culture.

The latest amazing find was written up yesterday in the New York Times:

Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.

That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.

Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.

This is part of what I love about archaeology: Just when you think you've got it all figured out, new evidence comes to light, which overturns our ideas, and deepens them too. Whether or not it turns out to be the case that Neanderthals were ancient mariners, I, for one, have a strong suspicion that we substantially underestimate what our ancestors were capable of and just what was going on 50K, 100K, or 200K years ago. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The Century of the Self

Watch this remarkable BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self. It examines how those in power in the last century—including PR professionals and politicians—exploited Freudian insights into human nature to make money, engineer consent, and manage the masses. It raises profound questions about the "Self" that we all believe we inhabit and shape ourselves, the tectonic shift occurring in our roles from citizens to consumers, and its implications for Anglo-American democracy. It looks at the routine use of focus groups to classify consumer demographics in a culture of increasingly self-absorbed individuals and "shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population." It also has some rare archival footage. (Thanks to my friend Louise Gordon.)

Read more here. Below is part 1, here are part 2, part 3, and part 4, each about an hour long. It's well worth the time!

View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

"An Unworldly Assumption"

An excerpt from Mary McCarthy's 1947 essay, "America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub".

This republic was founded on an unworldly assumption, a denial of "the facts of life." It is manifestly untrue that all men are created equal; interpreted in worldly terms, this doctrine has resulted in a pseudo-equality, that is, in standardization, in an equality of things rather than of persons. The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness appear, in practice, to have become the inalienable right to a bathtub, a flush toilet, and a can of Spam. Left-wing critics of America attribute this result to the intrusion of capitalism; right-wing critics see it as the logical dead end of democracy. Capitalism, certainly, now depends on mass production, which depends on large scale distribution of uniform goods, till the consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make house-room in his soul. The buying impulse, in its original force and purity, was not nearly so crass, however, or so meanly acquisitive as many radical critics suppose. The purchase of a bathtub was the exercise of a spiritual right. The immigrant or the poor native American bought a bathtub, not because he wanted to take a bath, but because he wanted to be in a position to do so. This remains true in many fields today; possessions, when they are desired, are not wanted for their own sakes but as tokens of an ideal state of freedom, fraternity, and franchise. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is a vulgarization of Jefferson's concept, but it too is a declaration of the rights of man, and decidedly unfeasible and visionary. Where for a European, a fact is a fact, for us Americans, the real, if it is relevant at all, is simply symbolic appearance. We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub. One such humanist I used to hear of on Cape Cod had, on growing rich, installed two toilets side by side in his marble bathroom, on the model of the two-seater of his youth. He was a clear case of Americanism, hospitable, gregarious, and impractical, a theorist of perfection. Was his dream of the conquest of poverty a vulgar dream or a noble one, a material demand or a spiritual insistence? It is hard to think of him as a happy man, and in this too he is characteristically American, for the parity of the radio, the movies, and the washing machine has made Americans sad, reminding them of another parity of which these things were to be but emblems.

The Other Swastika

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.

The word swastika can be translated as wellbeing (from the Sanskrit su, meaning good, and asti, meaning to be, plus the diminutive suffix, ka) and in most of the world the identical symbol (by whatever name) has long been associated with wellbeing and good luck. In South Asia, the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 4,500 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it frequently occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association that persists to this day throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.

Embrace Your Inner Girl

In this passionate talk, Eve Ensler declares that there is a girl cell in us all, which we have all been taught to suppress.

What Would You Do?

The Indian caste system has long violated some of the most basic tenets of human dignity, inflicting untold misery, humiliation, and injustice on too many for too long. In recent years, perhaps for the first time, those on the lowest rungs of the social pyramid defined by caste have begun to write and tell their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. These include the Dalits (‘the oppressed’)—formerly ‘untouchables’—numbering one out of six Indians. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt. Here is a poem by Omprakash Valmiki, a Dalit writer best known for his autobiography, Joothan, which I plan to review soon.

What Would You Do?

If you
Are thrown out of your village
Cannot draw water from the well
Are abused
In the screaming, echoing afternoon
Told to break stones
In place of real work
Are given leavings to eat
What would you do?
If you
Are told to drag away
Animal carcasses
And
Carry away the filth
Of a whole family
Given hand-me-downs to wear
What would you do?
If you
Are kept far from books
Far from the threshold
Of the temple of learning
If you are hung up like Jesus
On a blackened wall
In the light of an oil-lamp
What would you do?

The poem continues here.  Also watch this harrowing video on the plight of Dalits, I'm Dalit, how are you?

Econ 101 Rap

John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek explain the markets, yo!

A Folk Singer from Himachal

Here is a folk singer I recorded in May 2005 in the highlands of Khajjiar, Himachal Pradesh, India. He sings in a language called Pahari, derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, with many dialects across the Himalayan belt. We were near the town of Chamba, so this particular dialect is probably Chambiali, though I can't be certain. I speak Hindi, also with roots in Sanskrit, so I can make out many words—enough to say that he is addressing his beloved in the first song and his attachment to place in the second—but not enough to translate (any Pahari speakers reading this?). Such are the myriad indigenous musical forms that globalization will probably make extinct in the years ahead.

Avatar: A Review

By Usha Alexander

I look for the same strengths and value in science fiction as I do in any other kind of film. But I don't care for macho, action-adventure films; I absolutely avoid them. Avatar is an action-adventure science fiction film. But it's not macho. Which is not to say it doesn't include some macho characters. I hope the difference is obvious.

James Cameron has long been recognized as the rare writer-director whose blockbuster vision allows as much value and presence to his female characters as to his male characters. Whatever the general merits of his previous films, The Terminator, Rambo II: First Blood, The Abyss, and The Titanic, one thing they can't reasonably be accused of is celebrating the masculine at the expense of the feminine. It's not only that his strong, brave, intelligent, and resourceful lead characters, Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton, The Terminator 1984) and Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss 1989), are two among the spare handful of feminine hero(in)es one finds at all in science fiction films. It's not just that his male characters are full enough to encompass the feminine, as when he shows us Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, Rambo II 1985) crying, even succumbing to the wilderness of his grief, driven by his heart as much as his head, or as when he casts the romantic hero of The Titanic (Leonardo DiCaprio, 1997) as a man who runs from a fight, preferring to sketch pictures, instead. Cameron not only doesn't flinch from femininity or see it as weakness in opposition to masculinity, he seems hardly to notice the divide, and that's what allows his characterizations to feel natural and authentic.

Avatar is, in many ways, a larger film than any of his others. Probably his magnum opus. Outlandishly expensive to make, visually almost revolutionary, and politically loaded, Cameron took every risk with this film. Cameron is notorious for his brash ego. But it's possible no humbler person might have dared this production and this story. And what did he give us, after all? A heroic fantasy of White Guilt. The story of Pocahontas, re-imagined.

§

The story of Pocahontas is rooted in historical events, though few details are actually known. It is generally known that Pocahontas was one name of a daughter of Powhatan, the primary chief of a confederacy of Algonquin-speaking tribes in what is today Virginia, in the southeastern United States. She met the Englishman John Smith in 1607, when she was probably between 10 and 13 years old, while Smith was helping to establish Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America. Smith later recounted to Queen Elizabeth that Pocahontas had intervened to save his life when her father's people captured and tried to kill him. Pocahontas befriended the colonists in Jamestown, and even saw to it that they were provisioned with food when they were starving, earning herself great respect among them. In 1609, Smith returned to England. In 1613, Pocahontas was taken captive by the English, who hoped to exchange her for weapons which her father had stolen from them. Her father ultimately did not make the ransom. Pocahontas rebuked her father for abandoning her, married an English tobacco farmer, becoming Rebecca Rolfe, and went with him to England in 1616. She died of illness on a boat the following year, when returning to the colonies. She was survived by her son, Thomas Rolfe.

There's neither evidence that Pocahontas ever saw Smith again after he'd left the Jamestown colony, nor that they ever had any kind of sexual relationship, though Smith did express to the Queen a degree of respect and affection toward her. Meanwhile, the toehold that colonial powers had gained in Jamestown grew and strengthened. By the mid-1600's, Powhatan's people were largely destroyed by European diseases and warfare. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Do Medications Really Expire?

I came across this 2002 article by Richard Altschuler that answers the following questions I've had for a while:

Does the expiration date on a bottle of a medication mean anything? If a bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like "Do not use after June 1998," and it is August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its potency and do you no good?

In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us when they put an expiration date on their medications, or is the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to get us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly have "expired" are still perfectly good?

Early Islam, Part 5: Epilogue

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
Part 3: The Path of Reason  /  Part 4: The Mystic Tide

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who eventually domesticated it. Why did the reverse not happen? Why did the golden age of Islam (approx. 9th-12th centuries)—led by luminaries such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Alhazen, al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Avicenna, and Averroës—wither away? Despite a terrific start, why did rationalism fail to ignite more widely in Islam? In this epilogue, I’ll survey some answers that have been offered by historians and highlight one that I hold the most significant.

Earlier in this series, we saw how three contending currents of thought dominated the Islamic golden age—orthodoxy, rationalism, and mysticism—based on three different ways of looking at the world. Orthodoxy in Islam looked to the Qur’an to justify a whole way of life. A universal, durable code of behavior and personal conduct is an understandable human craving, and so much more comforting when God Himself shows up and lays it out in one’s own language! Orthodoxy is by no means limited to ‘revealed’ religions; it took root in Hinduism via its castes, priests, and rituals. Suffice it to say that humans have been drawn to narrow and exclusive systems of belief with a dismaying alacrity. [1] The orthodox, it’s worth pointing out, are not all that otherworldly. The mullahs, bishops, and pundits are rarely disengaged from their social milieu, as the mystics tend to be. The orthodox may covet the rewards of the other world but what happens in their own—as in what norms, practices, dogmas, and rituals are followed—is profoundly important to them. They care deeply about this world and, in their own way, struggle to improve it, sometimes even waging war over it.

The mystics are rather different. They don’t care much for holy books or religious clerics, and receive God as a subjective experience, beyond the bounds of dogma. An essential mystical experience lies in the believer’s sobering realization of the inadequacy of reason in knowing God and his design. Love and devotion—even rapturous ecstasy—help bridge the enormous gulf he sees between him and God. Happiness comes not from material pleasures but from surrendering to the benevolent divine. He deals with existential angst by suppressing his self and ego. Mystical teachers across cultures have appealed to a non-dualistic approach to nature, in which everything in existence is not only interwoven but is a manifestation of the divine. Clearly, a mystical worldview does not engender ideas like competition, personal ambition, or democracy, nor does it preoccupy itself with theories of justice or science or critical inquiry. Instead, it eschews religious orthodoxy and furthers a tolerant, pacifist, and private faith, often alongside a gentle, dreamy, fatalistic detachment from the world. [2] Such otherworldly mysticism flowered in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Eastern Christianity, but barely so in Western Christianity.

The rational current of Islam, as also in Western Christianity, was sparked by a small group of philosophers, scientists, doctors, liberal theologians, explorers, poets, artists, and their royal patrons in a fortuitous window of peace, prosperity, and cosmopolitan culture. They drew inspiration from ancient Greek texts, adapting them to their own milieu. A great intellectual ferment led to notable advances in areas like navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, which became the bedrock for later European advances. The bold thinkers who led the Islamic golden age profoundly inspired later Christians, including Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. What then explains the fate of al-Farabi’s rationalist tradition? Before considering some answers, let’s briefly revisit the Greeks to remind ourselves of a few defining features of their society.

Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador

For its size, Ecuador may be the most geographically diverse country in the world. Besides the volcanic islands of Galapagos, it has three distinct regions: a coastal belt, the Andes mountains, and the sparsely inhabited El Oriente, or the Upper Amazon Basin to the east. El Oriente is mostly primeval rainforest, merging into cloud forest in the eastern foothills of the Andes. It teems with rivers that feed the mighty Amazon, the lifeblood of the "world's richest and most varied biological reservoir, containing several million species of insects, plants, birds, and other forms of life, many still unrecorded by science. The luxuriant vegetation and wide variety of trees include many species of myrtle, laurel, palm, and acacia, as well as rosewood, Brazil nut, and rubber tree." As in parts of Brazil, the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador is also shrinking, led by the usual economic motives (timber, petroleum, etc.) and new human settlements.

About six years ago, Usha and I went to El Oriente. We took a bus from Quito to the tiny town and jungle outpost of Tena, where we hired a taxi and went further east to a point along Rio Napo called Puerto Barantilla, where we took a boat to our jungle lodge near the mouth of Rio Arajuno. Over the next three days, we explored the region with local guides, including a memorable all-day hike through primordial forest, buzzing with streams and massive diversity of life (it rained hard that afternoon, making our hike path quite treacherous). We also went river rafting one day after assembling a raft out of logs with our guide's help, and hiked to amaZOOnico, an animal rescue and rehabilitation center run by local and overseas volunteers. Here we saw some of the great variety of Amazonian wildlife, including macaws, toucans, trumpet birds, tortoise, many kinds of monkeys, jaguars, ocelots, peccaries, tapirs, capybaras, agoutis, etc. The lodge served all of our meals. Dinner staple was fish with vegetables, rice, yucca or plantain, and tropical fruit, served by candlelight (the lodge had no electricity). The mosquitoes were large and vicious. The forest comes alive at night with the sound of a gazillion crickets.

The 10 min video below is based on the footage I took there (turn on HQ mode after it starts playing; a QuickTime version is here).

Refining Rawls

Adam Kirsch reviews two books by Michael Sandel and Amartya Sen that seek to augment John Rawls' magnum opus:

Since John Rawls published [A Theory of Justice] in 1971, its ideas and language have exercised an extraordinary hold on the imagination of political thinkers. Just look at Justice by Michael J. Sandel and The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen—two books, coincidentally appearing at the same moment, by leading political philosophers, both of them professors at Harvard (as Rawls was). Justice is the more accessible work, based on Sandel’s popular introductory course in Harvard’s Core Curriculum, while The Idea of Justice is more ambitious, treating a range of theoretical and practical problems in political economy. Yet both books are, at heart, responses to and revisions of Rawls, and their titles deliberately allude to Rawls’s magnum opus. Just as the nineteenth-century critics of Hegel were still known as Young Hegelians, so these critics of Rawls are essentially post-Rawlsians.

The power of A Theory of Justice, which functions in Sen’s and Sandel’s books like the Freudian father who both must and must not be slain, comes from the way Rawls gave theoretical form to the core assumptions of late-twentieth-century left-liberalism. Rawls’s version of social contract theory is almost as well known by now as Hobbes’s and Locke’s. The only way for us to design a truly just society, Rawls argues, is to imagine ourselves behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing what our actual place in society will be—more, that blocks off our view of our own abilities, desires, and values. People negotiating in this “original position,” Rawls holds, will necessarily agree on two basic principles: first, that the liberty of every person will be inviolable; second, that economic disparities will only be allowed if they serve the advantage of the worst-off in society.

More here. (Definitely watch Sandel's Harvard course and BBC Reith lecture—links here. He also has a great talk on Markets and Morals.)

Merry Christmas!

"I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." 
~Charles Dickens

"I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays--let them overtake me unexpectedly--waking up some fine morning and suddenly saying to myself: 'Why this is Christmas Day!'"
~ Ray Stannard Baker, pseud. David Grayson (1870-1946), American author, journalist.

"Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall.  We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space." 
~Dave Barry

Harvesting Water in the Thar Desert

"With wisdom and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India's Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today—and are often superior to modern water megaprojects." Water harvesting in the Indian subcontinent dates as far back as Dholavira, a 5,000 year old metropolis of the Indus Valley Civilization.

Queerer Than We Suppose

Here is an insightful lecture from 2006 by Prof. Richard Dawkins on the kind of world evolution has prepared us for, how it limits what we are capable of imagining, and why the universe will likely remain queerer than we suppose. This is from his days shortly before he gained notoriety for his brand of militant atheism (via Chris Schoen on 3QD):

The Hubris of Humble Oil

In 1962, Humble Oil and Refining Co., which later merged with Standard Oil to become Exxon, ran the following ad in Life Magazine:

EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!

The giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supplies—if converted into heat—could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second. To meet the nation's growing energy needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature's resources to become America's Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research Humble provides energy in many forms—to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the "Happy Motoring" Sign is the World's First Choice!

ExxonMobil today produces about 3% of the global oil; in case you are wondering how many tons of glacier ExxonMobil can potentially melt today, the numbers are 79 million tons each day and 914 tons per second (source). Enjoy while such boasts make sense.

Science and Religion in the US

A recent survey of public attitudes to science in the US challenges the persistent idea in parts of the scientific community that science is under siege in the US, that a large and growing religious minority distrusts science, and that scientists get a bad rap among the public and in pop culture. The results suggest the opposite—the vast majority of even evangelical Christians respect science and scientists.

"The United States is the most religious industrial democracy in the world. At the same time, the U.S. is a science superpower, leading the world in many key areas of scientific research and in most fields of technological development. While this combination of widespread religious commitment and leadership in science and technology could be a potential source of conflict, evidence from a May 2009 survey of public attitudes toward science conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that most Americans, including most religious Americans, hold scientific research and scientists themselves in high regard.... 70% of U.S. adults think scientists contribute "a lot" to society" [placing them beneath only members of the military and teachers].

"Indeed, while there are a few areas of conflict between science and religion in the United States, particularly regarding questions of life's origins, more than eight-in-ten Americans (84% in the recent Pew Research Center survey) say they view science as having a mostly positive impact on society. Among those who attend religious services at least once a week, the number is roughly the same (80%)."

Curiously, as this article on the above survey notes, "While the public holds scientists in high regard, many scientists offer unfavorable, if not critical, assessments of the public’s knowledge and expectations. Fully 85% see the public’s lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science, and nearly half (49%) fault the public for having unrealistic expectations about the speed of scientific achievements."

On Sexual Slavery in India

Sunitha Krishnan has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery, a multimillion-dollar global market. In this courageous, impassioned, and moving talk, she tells three powerful stories, as well as her own, and calls for a more humane approach to helping these young victims rebuild their lives. What is the single biggest challenge she faces in her fight in India? Listen to find out. Also check out this earlier post on global human trafficking.

Dance to Change the World

At TEDIndia, Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer, actor, and politician, tells a transformative story in dance—and argues that the arts may be the most powerful way to effect change, whether political, social or personal. Sarabhai played Draupadi in Peter Brook's Mahabharata.

Tariq Ali on Afghanistan and Pakistan

In this lecture, British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian Tariq Ali disagrees with Obama's strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, describes what is happening in the two countries, and raises more than a few significant and awkward questions (via 3QD).