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The General in Anna’s Labyrinth
(Also consider reading my related opinion piece, On Public Corruption in India.)
Mehboob Geelani has an interesting profile of Arvind Kejriwal, a well-known Indian social activist and anti-corruption crusader most often associated with the Right to Information (RTI) Act. By many accounts, Arvind is the main strategist and mastermind behind the Jan Lokpal bill that is at the heart of the currently raging anti-corruption movement whose populist (and problematic) figurehead is Anna Hazare.
Full disclosure: Arvind and I were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur. We lived in the same hostel, Nehru Hall, for four years and have met many times since, especially during my two years in India, 2004-6. Even in college he was articulate and self-confident, and had a quiet intensity about him. He was Nehru Hall’s mess secretary in his second year and was very active in Hindi debate and theater, serving as governor of the Hindi drama society in his final year. I liked him well enough. For me, he was also a fellow Hindi belter, relatively few in Kharagpur.
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Is Organic Food Better?
In Scientific American, Christie Wilcox exposes a few myths about organic food:
Ten years ago, Certified Organic didn’t exist in the United States. Yet in 2010, a mere eight years after USDA’s regulations officially went into effect, organic foods and beverages made $26.7 billion. In the past year or two, certified organic sales have jumped to about $52 billion worldwide despite the fact that organic foods cost up to three times as much as those produced by conventional methods. More and more, people are shelling out their hard-earned cash for what they believe are the best foods available. Imagine, people say: you can improve your nutrition while helping save the planet from the evils of conventional agriculture – a complete win-win. And who wouldn’t buy organic, when it just sounds so good?Here’s the thing: there are a lot of myths out there about organic foods, and a lot of propaganda supporting methods that are rarely understood. It’s like your mother used to say: just because everyone is jumping off a bridge doesn’t mean you should do it, too. Now, before I get yelled at too much, let me state unequivocally that I’m not saying organic farming is bad – far from it. There are some definite upsides and benefits that come from many organic farming methods. For example, the efforts of organic farmers to move away from monocultures, where crops are farmed in single-species plots, are fantastic; crop rotations and mixed planting are much better for the soil and environment. My goal in this post isn’t to bash organic farms, instead, it’s to bust the worst of the myths that surround them so that everyone can judge organic farming based on facts. In particular, there are four myths thrown around like they’re real that just drive me crazy.
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Glenny on Organized Crime
Journalist Misha Glenny on “organized crime networks worldwide, which have grown to an estimated 15% of the global economy. From the Russian mafia, to giant drug cartels, his sources include not just intelligence and law enforcement officials but criminal insiders.”
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Why Moral Leaders Are Annoying
Josh Rothman in the Boston Globe (via 3QD):
Moral leadership is challenging for an obvious reason — you have to know what’s right and wrong. But it’s also difficult because, on the whole, people are ambivalent about moral crusaders. Now there’s a name for that strange mixture of admiration, guilt, and defensive dismissiveness you feel when you encounter someone better than you: it’s called “anticipated reproach,” and Benoît Monin, a psychologist at Stanford, has studied it in a number of fascinating experiments. His essential finding: The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard. As he explains in a recent paper, coauthored with Julia Minson of Wharton, “overtly moral behavior can elicit annoyance and ridicule rather than admiration and respect” when we feel threatened by someone else’s high ethical standards. …Once you know how to spot it, “anticipated reproach” is everywhere, and it bedevils people who want to lead morally. Argue on behalf of an environmental cause, and non-environmentalists, anticipating your moral reproach, will think you’re stuck-up and self-righteous. Often, the anticipated reproach — driven, as it is, by fear — is exaggerated and caricatured: vegetarians, Monin finds, aren’t nearly as judgmental of meat-eaters as meat-eaters think they are. Unfortunately, one or two genuinely judgmental do-gooders can put everyone else on a hair-trigger, twisting discussion about moral issues into a vicious circle, in which both parties anticipate reproaches from one another, and put each other down in advance.
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The Lost City of Ugarit
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
With Syria in the news, I’ve dusted off an account I wrote a few months after my visit there in Feb 2001. I’ve also created an 8-min video from my archives, using music by Fairuz for soundtrack. While I look at contemporary Syrian society and politics, the bulk of my narrative is on Ugarit, a nearly 4,000-year-old city held to be the birthplace of the alphabet. We know a fair bit about it from its surviving clay tablets, written in this first alphabet. One tablet even has this timeless reminder to men: ‘Do not tell your wife where you hide your money.’
The road to Lattakia goes over the Anti-Lebanon Range. I had left Aleppo under a blue sky at noon; now a thick fog rolls in, tall conifers appear in the valleys, visibility drops. The pop Arabic music in the bus gets louder but does not deter my fellow passengers from dozing. Handsome villages with brick houses, clean streets, and small domed mosques appear now and again. The bus stops at a rest area with gift shops and restaurants and arrives in Lattakia by early evening. I take a cab to the city center and find a hotel. It is my tenth day in Syria.
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Rethinking Secularism
Here is an excerpt from an essay by Charles Taylor in a new compilation of essays, Rethinking Secularism. Taylor’s essay is its first chapter.
We live in a world in which ideas, institutions, artistic styles, and formulas for production and living circulate among societies and civilizations that are very different in their historical roots and traditional forms. Parliamentary democracy spread outward from England, among other countries, to India; likewise, the practice of nonviolent civil disobedience spread from its origins in the struggle for Indian independence to many other places, including the United States with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, Manila in 1983, and the Velvet and Orange Revolutions of our time.But these ideas and forms of practice don’t just change place as solid blocks; they are modified, reinterpreted, given new meanings, in each transfer. This can lead to tremendous confusion when we try to follow these shifts and understand them. One such confusion comes from taking a word itself too seriously; the name may be the same, but the reality will often be different.
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On Politicians and Philosophers
A review of Mary Ann Glendon’s The Forum and the Tower, which explores the eternal tension between a life of action vs. a life of thought.
As Aristotle noted long ago, two very different and sometimes incompatible ways of life—the political and the philosophical—exert a powerful pull on the ambitious and talented members of any society. Mary Ann Glendon, who teaches at Harvard Law School, says that she sees this double attraction in her students. Some go into politics, but many turn away, fearful of the compromises and corruptions of power. Such students may go on to become teachers and scholars, but they never quite give up on the idea of “making a difference” in the wider, public world, even if they aren’t quite sure how to do it. Ms. Glendon’s “The Forum and the Tower” profiles 12 figures in Western history who struggled—not always successfully—with the conflict between an active life and a contemplative one, between “life in the public forum and life in the ivory tower.”Ms. Glendon begins with Plato, whose efforts to bring philosophy to the city—that is, to the polis or city-state—fell on the less successful side of the ledger. Two spells advising Syracusan tyrants ended in disaster: Plato’s counsel was ignored, and he almost lost his head. He had originally agreed with his teacher, Socrates, that good men had to get involved politically to avoid rule by the evil or weak. Now he felt that there could be circumstances so awful that the wise man should just “keep quiet and offer up prayers for his own welfare and for that of his country.”
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Fooled by Science
H. Allen Orr is among the most insightful writers today on the often uneasy intersection between science and culture (including religion). In this review of The Social Animal by David Brooks, he shines the light on a few follies all too common among science enthusiasts.
Science has a lot of uses. It can uncover laws of nature, cure disease, inspire awe, make bombs, and help bridges to stand up. Indeed science is so good at what it does that there’s a perpetual temptation to drag it into problems where it may add little or even distract from the real issues. David Brooks appears to be the latest in a long line of writers who, enamored of science, are bound and determined to import the stuff into their thinking.The Social Animal is an attempt to write an accessible treatment of a set of weighty topics, many of which require Brooks to stretch in a distinctly scientific direction. The book, which was excerpted earlier this year in The New Yorker, focuses on big and somewhat diffuse questions: What has science revealed about human nature? What are the sources of character? And why are some people happy and successful while others aren’t? To answer these questions, Brooks surveys a wide range of disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, education theory, and even the findings of marriage experts.
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From Technologist to Philosopher
Damon Horowitz, former technologist, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher, and a graduate of Columbia and MIT, talks about the state of AI, why he left that field, and “Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities.”
Over time, it became increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the artificial intelligence systems I was building were not actually that intelligent. They could perform well on specific tasks; but they were unable to function when anything changed in their environment. I realized that, while I had set out in AI to build a better thinker, all I had really done was to create a bunch of clever toys—toys that were certainly not up to the task of being our intellectual surrogates.And it became clear that the limitations of our AI systems would not be eliminated through incremental improvements. We were not, and are not, on the brink of a breakthrough that could produce systems approaching the level of human intelligence. I wanted to better understand what it was about how we were defining intelligence that was leading us astray: What were we failing to understand about the nature of thought in our attempts to build thinking machines?
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The Perils of Personalization
For over a decade, personalization has been a growing trend on the Internet. It feels nice, this idea of news, information, and services customized for our individual interests. But does it have any downsides? The answer, says Eli Pariser, is a resounding yes. In an interview on Democracy Now, Pariser summarizes his key arguments, also laid out in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.
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Gurgaon: Dynamism + Dysfunction
I was based in Gurgaon for two years from 2004-6, and this article resonated with me well enough:
In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world’s most respected corporations.Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.
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Alva Noë on Consciousness
In Out of Our Heads, Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, “restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and … suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.” Here is an excerpt from a review:The key assumption behind the science of consciousness is that consciousness is an internal process that occurs in the brain. Noë’s chief goal in the book is to show that this highly questionable, yet unquestioned assumption, has led the consciousness research astray; in brief, the search for consciousness has focused on where it isn’t. Noë opens by challenging this assumption, and offers an alternative picture. Instead of characterizing consciousness as an internal process (like digestion) Noë proposes a picture which takes consciousness to be an activity (like dancing). To try to understand consciousness by just focusing on the brain’s neural activity is tantamount to trying to understand dancing strictly in terms of the muscles. In the latter case, the muscles certainly play a part in the explanation, but they can hardly be the entire story. Analogously for the explanation of consciousness: brain processes are a part of the story, but they are not the whole story, even if they have been given an undue amount of attention.
Today I came across this brilliant talk by Noe in which he explains his key ideas about consciousness to a general audience, and which seem to me exactly right, though I submit that they are not so new as some reviews suggest—perhaps Noe’s particular exposition and focus on the topic create that impression. His line of thinking in fact goes back directly (via philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus) to Heidegger, as well as to Wittgenstein. Enjoy the talk—if you like it, check out this conversation and a talk on Edge.org.
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The Culture of Gaming
Broadcast on public radio, an interesting “look at the history, the culture and the future of video games. Whether you know it or not you’re likely a gamer and games are creeping into nearly every aspect of life; an hour on how far video games have come and where they’re going.”
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Mexico and the War on Drugs
Al-Jazeera has this sad and chilling report from Ciudad Juaraz, a border town in Mexico now embroiled in the absurd American war on drugs:
Once known as a booming industrial city and a model of economic progress in Mexico, the border city of Juarez has become infamous as the murder capital of the world. More than 8,000 people have been killed there since 2008, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to carry out his offensive against the drug cartels.
The official story is that the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels are fighting for the city and the access it provides to the multi-billion dollar US drug market only a few hundred metres away. On this episode of Fault Lines, Josh Rushing travels to Ciudad Juarez, and asks how human life there came to be worth so much less than the drugs being trafficked through.
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Rao on Indus Valley Inscriptions
Rajesh Rao on the challenge of deciphering the 4000-year-old inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization, including whether they represent a linguistic script or a non-linguistic symbol system. Using computational approaches, he suggests that the inscriptions represent a language, possibly a forerunner to the Dravidian languages (for a refutation, see this; more food for thought in the comments section of this post).
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Indians Abroad: A Story from Trinidad
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A shorter version appeared in Himal Southasian, Oct-Nov 2011.)
I’ve managed to write a long essay on Trinidad without mentioning cricket, rum, or the steelpan. Can I be forgiven for that?
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In April this year, I visited the Indian Caribbean museum near the town of Chaguanas in Trinidad. Set in a large hall, the museum had no other visitors at the time. Its curator, 69-year-old Saisbhan Jokhan, came out to greet me and quickly proved to be a trove of information. As I began taking notes, he asked if I was a journalist. I told him that I represented a venerable publication called 3 Quarks Daily, and intended to write about the Indo-Trinidadian experience. His eyes lit up and for the next ninety minutes, he accompanied me in the museum, explaining and answering my questions.Categories: Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, History, Justice, Photography, Politics, Travel -
Man is Not Cat Food
Barbara Ehrenreich reviews a few books on the inner lives of non-human animals and our longstanding relationship with them:
In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. Whales have been known to enact what look, to human divers, very much like rituals of gratitude.The discovery of all these animal talents has contributed to an explosion of human interest in animals — or what, as the human-animal gap continues to narrow, we should properly call “other animals.” We have an animal rights movement that militantly objects to the eating of nonhuman animals as well as their enslavement and captivity. A new field of “animal studies” has sprung up just in the last decade or so, complete with college majors and academic journals. Ever since the philosopher Peter Singer’s groundbreaking 1976 Animal Liberation, one book after another has attempted to explore the inner lives and emotions of nonhuman animals. Bit by bit, we humans have had to cede our time-honored position at the summit of the “great chain of being” and acknowledge that we share the planet — not very equitably or graciously of course — with intelligent, estimable creatures worthy of moral consideration.
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The Danger of a Single Story
This talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie is not to be missed. I think it’s worth the time for anyone interested in stories, language, reading and writing, not to mention class, politics, history, cultural and imperial hegemony, mental colonization, and so much more.
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The Epidemic of Mental Illness
Marcia Angell has a great essay on the “epidemic” of mental illness in America. It persuasively argues that there is no real science behind the drugs that attempt to treat psychological conditions by fixing “chemical imbalances” in the brain. Meanwhile, the number of children now diagnosed and treated with psychotropic drugs has increased 35-fold in two decades. What can explain this astonishing development?
It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it…. Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?
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Arthur Benjamin’s Mathemagic
Many Indians surely remember Shakuntala Devi from their school years, whose books their parents bought in the hope that she would inspire in their progeny a love of mathematics. How often it did so, or had the opposite effect, is hard to say. But there is no doubt that some people are born with a freakish capacity for rapid calculation. For instance, Shakuntala Devi is on record for multiplying in a mere 28 seconds two 13-digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779) picked at random. I can’t even enter the two numbers in a spreadsheet that fast! And I say this as an Indian, which, as we all know, means that I am a naturally gifted mathematician.
I came across this video in which another mathemagician, Arthur Benjamin, does a few tricks before a TED audience.
