Shunya's Notes

Pangea Day

This afternoon I spent four hours glued to my computer screen watching the live stream of the Pangea Day broadcast, a global film festival hosted simultaneously in Mumbai, London, Cairo, Kigali, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, showcasing short films from new talent all over the world. Interspersed with the short films were video montages of people speaking about universal human experiences—love, anger, sorrow—and short commentaries on human nature and human experience by scientists, activists, and others. The thrust of the event was to promote human understanding by simply presenting a broad sweep of stories that humanize the Other, that break down the categories of "enemy." And as it meandered toward it's final minutes, the focus drew increasingly toward the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

It proved to be a most rewarding way to spend a Saturday. The films, especially, were frequently touching, thoughtful, and moving in surprising ways. I was drawn into the sense of a global experience of discovery that was unfolding at a million points simultaneously across the world, as millions watched and learned and cried together. And (it must be said) laughed together.

But the coup de gras was during the final moments when a Palestinian and an Israeli member from The Bereaved Families Forum stood up together and told their own stories of loss and forgiveness, and this was followed by excerpts from the documentary Combatants for Peace, by the young Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, previously known for her excellent documentary Control Room (2004).

Indeed, the entire Pangea Day event was organized in fulfillment of Ms. Noujaim's dream. When she won the TED prize in 2006, in which the winners are asked to make a wish that the TED community can bring to reality, she asked for a global day of film to break down the barriers and misunderstandings that divide us.

I believe that over the coming days the organizers will post the event highlights along with all of the films, speakers, musical performances, and more, incase you missed them or want to see them again. Or read their blog. Or check out the viewers' stream of consciousness (you may need to click "View the Latest Media").

Thanks, Ms. Noujaim, for your brave and beautiful dream.

On American Jingoism

Shortly before the "shock & awe" attack on Iraq, and for months after, public support for the war was high in the US. This was reflected in the 70-80% approval rating for Bush, who had no doubt hoped that the war would turn him into a great president and American hero. Alas. But even today, many US politicians who once supported Bush but now criticize him, do so with the logic that they didn’t support this kind of war, one that would be so badly run. Bush, they say, should have sent in more troops and supplies, and planned "to win the peace". In other words, they supported an operationally smarter war. They reflect not on the idea of war itself, but on a war that America would have won.

A minority of Americans did oppose the war from the start and called these politicians irresponsible, ignorant, and morally complicit. But what about the other 70-80% of Americans who had also approved? Most of them even re-elected the same politicians, knowing their devious course of action. Are they any less irresponsible, ignorant, and morally complicit? 

It's not enough to argue that Americans were lied to about Saddam's nukes and his links to al-Qaeda. With the exact same "evidence", why did Americans support the war, when much of the rest of the world opposed it? Why was the threshold for using the military option so low in the US? Aren't the same people now receptive to the saber-rattling against Iran (including casual threats of obliteration)?

What is it that makes Americans, and hence their politicians, so jingoistic? This jingoism, combined with US military might and the ordinary American's ignorance about the cultural complexities of much older societies, is today a blight upon the world. In Iraq alone, it has helped kill perhaps a million people and turn millions more into refugees, creating the "most catastrophic refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian diaspora of 1948".

In the excerpt below, professor Tony Judt offers a compelling explanation for why "the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military":

Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

Breaking the Galilean Spell

The scientific mind holds it as self-evident that all natural phenomena are bound by the laws of nature. We study such laws in physics and express them in the language of mathematics. The idea that all natural phenomena are also reducible to a sum of their parts, that micro components (iteratively down to sub-atomic particles) both describe and predict macro behavior, is called reductionism. Introduced by Descartes, its current proponents include Dennett, Dawkins, and Pinker.

The idea that reductionism has limits, particularly for highly complex systems like the biosphere and human culture (a wholly natural phenomenon), has also been around since at least Aristotle ("the whole is more than a sum of its parts"). Emergentism, as this hypothesis is called (or holism), claims that the fundamental laws of nature eventually run out of descriptive and predictive steam—not due to the inadequacy of our science but due to irreducible and unpredictable properties inherent in complex systems. Both reductionism and emergentism remain epistemological (as opposed to scientific) claims, though reductionism can boast of some inductive success on the verification front.

Stuart Kauffman, a scientist at the forefront of the idea of emergence, has written a new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, where he fleshes out this concept in more detail. Here is a brief excerpt:

Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives. Emergence, already both contentious and transformative, is but one part of the new scientific worldview I embrace.

Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment.

More here.

When Languages Die

I have previously argued the importance of human diversity, including in the context of languages. Over half of the 7,000 languages in the world today are poised to die in a few decades, an event without parallel in human history. In a recent book, When Languages Die, author K. David Harrison asks: "What is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever?" Here is a review by David Perlman:

A tiny community of reindeer herders in Siberia holds intimate knowledge of the lives, the foraging and the rutting season of their priceless animals, and it's the kind of information that is vital to anyone concerned by the loss of human cultures -- and to biologists worried about the loss of species diversity anywhere in the world.

Of the 426 members of Siberia's isolated Chulym people, only 35 still speak Tuvan, their ancient language, fluently, and they're all older than 50. Everyone else speaks only Russian, according to K. David Harrison, an adventuresome linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Harrison has lived with the Chulym and hopes to preserve their vanishing language.

The Chulym can fully describe a "2-year-old male castrated rideable reindeer" with only the single word chary, and to Harrison, that not only shows how ancient languages differ from their modern counterparts, but is symbolic of a worldwide loss in important cultural diversity.

More here. 

Additional reviews here and here, an interview with the author, and Colbert's take on the topic. Also check out the ambitious Rosetta Project, "a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of ALL documented human languages."

Is India a Science Superpower?

Not quite, says Meera Nanda, philosopher of science, in this 2005 article in Frontline, which ends with these words:

If India wants to become a genuine "science superpower", Indian scientists will have to do much more than just get integrated into the global pecking order of corporate research and development. They will have to develop a genuine culture of open, fearless questioning and experimentation within their laboratories and in the larger culture outside the walls of the laboratory.

This will require an overhaul of science education so that science is not treated as merely a matter of rote learning of technical formulas, but is integrated into a new secular understanding of nature and life. It is not enough for the institutions of higher learning in India to produce doctors and engineers who can perform well in the West, or in the IT/BT jobs imported from the West. They must produce critical thinkers who are engaged with larger issues that affect the cultural climate of their societies.

Until then, India will remain the "pseudo-science superpower" of the world.

I haven't read much by Nanda. While this article seems reasonable, other bits I've read—like the opening pages of Prophets Facing Backwards—seem to me rather shrill and simplistic, and her analysis of modern India too reliant on caricatures of both "postmodern intellectuals" (ascribing them too much influence in India) and the religious. It was no surprise when I noticed Dennett's endorsement of her book, which her publisher has paired with Dawkins' on Amazon. To her credit, she has sharply distanced herself from Harris. If I can motivate myself to read her forthcoming, God and Globalization in India, I'll attempt a proper review.

A Memorial: My Lai, 1968

Forty years ago today the people of a little village in Vietnam, called My Lai, were subjected to unspeakable atrocities at the hands of a group of young soldiers who were there to persecute America's war against communism. The massacre was ended by the heroic actions of a 24 year old helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, who stepped in to save the villagers, backed by his 18 year old gunner, Lawrence Colburn, and their 20 year old Crew Chief, Glenn Andreotta.

According to the Seattle Times, these were the conditions:

AFTER THREE MONTHS in Vietnam, Charlie Company (Task Force Barker, 11th Brigade, Americal Division), had suffered 28 casualties, including five killed, and was down to 105 men. All the casualties were from mines, booby traps and snipers rather than battles in which troops could clearly identify an enemy. The day after a booby trap killed a popular sergeant, Charlie Company was given orders to invade an area believed to be a North Vietnamese stronghold. Though it is generally agreed commanders ordered soldiers to destroy the villages and "neutralize" the area, there is controversy over whether the directive included killing civilians. The U.S. military's official report found that "from 16-19 March 1968, U.S. Army troops massacred a large number of noncombatants in two hamlets of Son My Village, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of Vietnam. The precise number of Vietnamese killed cannot be determined but was at least 175 and may exceed 400." Later reports tallied 504.

In the spirit of not forgetting, not papering over what war really does to people—civilians and soldiers, both—here are the words of Lawrence Colburn, recalling that day:

Slaughter in America

A recent Humane Society sting operation at a California slaughterhouse brought to light some very cruel treatment of farm animals (see the investigator's video; viewer discretion advised). The media attention caused a minor outrage and the largest beef recall in the history of the nation. Many wondered if cruelty is all that rare in the American meat business. Donations to animal rights groups followed (not unlike the spike in donations to charities following ads of emaciated children in god forsaken countries). Guilt assuaged, let's do pork chops for dinner.

Curiously enough, what bothered people most was the cruelty itself, and the nutritional safety of meat from downer cattle. In other words, if all USDA rules were followed, in letter and spirit, the complaints would dissolve and people would go back to maintaining their equanimity about the industrial-scale raising, killing, and processing of animals for food and things. Notably, the USDA—US department of agriculture—regulates this industry. This is on par with agriculture? What does this reveal about the American society's relationship with animals? How many little Eichmanns now thrive among us, within us?

Nearly ten billion mammals and birds are slaughtered each year in the US alone (a million per hour). How are they processed? The time-lapse footage below from the visually resplendent film, Baraka, has some details for chickens, mixed-in with scenes from modern life (a more disturbing one here. Also check out cartoonist Mark Fiore's, Doreen the Downer.)

Halloween in the Castro

Here is some anthropologically curious footage I shot in the Castro district of San Francisco on Halloween night, years before the famous event was forced to downsize due to a violent incident in 2006.

Wolfe on Porn

A thought-provoking article by Naomi Wolfe on the impact of porn on men and women:

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

More here.

Small Thrills

Cross-posted from Neutral Observer

As I grow older, I seem to get an unusual kick out of small discoveries - something I remember from my childhood. Maybe it is because I have become cynical about grand insights and world-changing ideas.

Many years ago, I had heard this song, from the Hindi film Ek Musafir Ek Hasina.  The song is  unremarkable, except for this refrain in Asha Bhonsle's voice:

zaban-e-yaar man turki, man turki namidanum

I never knew what it meant. It was clearly in some foreign language, but it nevertheless stuck in my head. Recently, I was reading a book about the history and culture of the Mughals by Annemarie Schimmel. Imagine my delight when I read that the strange sounding line was a lament first penned by Amir Khusro, the great poet, musician and scholar who lived from 1253 to 1325 CE. He lived during the first century of Turkic rule in Delhi and its environs. Though his ancestors were of Turkic origin, he himself was unfamiliar with the Turkish language as it was spoken by the Turks in India at that time. He wrote this line in Persian, the literary language of northern India from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century. Translated, I believe it means:

The tongue of my friend is Turkish, but I know no Turkish.

I have no idea why Shewan Rizvi, the lyricist, included this line in the Hindi film song. It has absolutely no connection that I can fathom with the rest of the song.

So, Amir Khusro wrote the line sometime in the 13th or early 14th century, Rizvi incorporated it into a ditty in 1962, I heard it for the first time in the 1980s, and finally discovered the meaning in 2008. Thanks to the internet, you can listen to the song (the audio is not great), read the lyrics, and speculate on the beauty of it all.