Shunya's Notes

The Death of a Salesman

Yes, I too had that youthful phase when I dabbled in poetry. From 17 to 27, I too wrote imaginary heartbreak poems, gooey lovesick poems, metaphysical angst poems, faux disenchanted poems, pseudo-sophisticated poems, aloof ironic poems, woo-the-maiden poems, voluptuous sorrow poems. Most that survive I can scarcely read now without wincing, but I cannot bring myself to delete them from my computer (they are safely encrypted though—without my consent, they are like ashes in the fireplace!). Below is one I still like enough; I wrote it in an office cube and it's from the tail end of my poetic phase. Not that poetry has gone out of my soul; I think it has found home elsewhere in my imagination. :-)

The Death of a Salesman

One fine morning, the salesman died,
an event well beyond his foresight.
Death would come one day, he felt sure,
but to him after the others,
for he believed in his exemplary life,
in the larger human cause,
not just his own, as his critics surmised.

He had traveled far and wide,
with samples of fir, linen, wool,
calico and even cow-hide.
To everyone he was polite,
for he saw in every human,
a sale personified.

For all those near and dear,
he gathered many a souvenir:
beer mugs, glass beads, and miniatures,
in anticipation of their joyous tears.

Alas! the man died
before the end of the quarter.
But there was plenty he left behind —
a fistful of modest dreams,
a big blue house, two spiffy cars,
and bona fide bone china for his wife.

At his funeral, his friends countrywide,
met to commiserate and unanimously decide,
the dear man would have met his quota,
if only he had survived.

        — 2 Aug, 1995.

The Eichmann Within

Hannah Arendt's landmark Eichmann in Jerusalem documents the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi nabbed by the Israeli secret police in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem, where he was tried and executed. Arendt's clear-eyed reportage covered a good deal of the historical and moral territory of the Holocaust. By peering into the heart of a man and a system held synonymous with evil, she examined the very notion of the word: What exactly is the face of evil?

I've also watched (twice) Eyal Sivan's documentary on the trial of Eichmann, The Specialist, much of it courtroom drama that sheds powerful light on the man. Eichmann emerges as a self-absorbed mid-level bureaucrat, neither intelligent nor reflective, devoid of courage, deferential to authority, eager to please his bosses and quick to take pride in a job done well, and with no special antipathy towards Jews. Indeed, he seems quite ordinary in his insecurities, sentimentality, and the capacity to delude himself about his responsibility for the suffering of others.

Arendt's analysis of the banality of evil led Stanley Milgram to devise his now famous experiment to study the harm most ordinary people would willingly (without coercion) do to their fellow humans under a different configuration of power and authority. This is what he found:

I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Milgram essentially confirmed Arendt's analysis. But today, almost two generations later, have things really changed? One might argue that today "there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience", which might provide a bulwark against such evil. Well, a new study has just "replicated" Milgram's experiment and its findings are not encouraging. It'll be published in American Psychologist next month. For now, we have media reports (including this CNN video):

Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks.

More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150 volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person's cries of pain, professor Jerry M. Burger concluded in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist. "In a dramatic way, it illustrates that under certain circumstances people will act in very surprising and disturbing ways,'' said Burger.

More here (and here). Also check out this TED talk by Philip Zimbardo (23 min), where he discusses both the Milgram experiment and his own famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment which too showed ordinary people willingly turning into monsters, how these studies help explain Abu Ghraib, and his interest in understanding the counterpoint to Arendt's banality of evil, i.e., the banality of heroism.

Thomas Nagel on TM Scanlon

Sifting through my bookmarks, I ran across Nagel's review of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other, and read it profitably once again:

On occasion we are faced with acute moral choices – whether to join the Resistance or stay at home and care for our widowed mother; whether to run off with Vronsky or remain with Karenin. But largely, morality shapes our lives in ways we don’t even think about, in fact it does so partly by excluding certain options from our thoughts. Most of us, for instance, wouldn’t even consider (a) threatening to expose a colleague’s adulterous affair to his wife unless he votes our way on a contested appointment or policy issue; (b) extracting some cash from the pocketbook of an interior decorator as she inspects our house, because we think she is overcharging us; (c) stealing a kidney for a friend who needs a transplant; (d) selling all we have and giving it to the poor. It isn’t that we weigh the pros and cons and determine that the cons outweigh the pros. These things are not on the menu of options among which we feel we must choose. Such exclusions, as well as restrictions on what may legitimately be taken into account in some decisions but not others (prohibitions against nepotism, for instance), typify the complexity of moral standards and suggest that an accurate account of morality and its role in life will not be simple.

Thomas Scanlon’s understanding of this complexity and of its sources in the variety of human relations and values is one of the virtues of this illuminating book.... The book is about morality rather than politics, though its general method can be applied to the political domain, where some of the most heated moral arguments and controversies take place. Recent work in political theory is more widely known, but moral philosophy has been an intensely active field over the past three decades, and Scanlon’s theory addresses a number of its central questions: first, the question of the objectivity or truth of moral claims, their relation to reason, and whether or not they should be regarded as in some sense relative or subjective; second, the question of the kind of concern or respect for persons that is at the foundation of morality – what kinds of motive it calls on when it requires us to forgo certain means that would advance our personal aims, and how much it can ask that we sacrifice for the sake of others; third, the question of how, and to what extent, individual rights, liberties and prerogatives are morally shielded from encroachment in the name of the general good; fourth, the question whether modest advantages to each of a large number of people can be aggregated to outweigh a large cost to each of a much smaller number, for purposes of moral justification – a besetting problem for the intuitive acceptability of utilitarianism.

More here. If the review piques your interest, consider watching this 54 min interview with Scanlon.

On China's Confucian Revival

Timothy Cheek reviews Daniel A. Bell's new book, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (chapter one):

In nine substantive chapters and two appendices, Daniel A. Bell delivers on his promise “to uncover and explore distinctive and deep aspects of Chinese culture” in their “contemporary manifestations.” His politics are clear: a rising China needs to be understood by the world’s western powers and an appreciation of the Confucian realities of what is often referred to as communist China will help defuse misunderstandings and the dangers of unnecessary conflict between Us and Them.

Bell, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, works to foster this mutual understanding from a particular standpoint: he is a Montreal-born and western-trained political theorist, with humanist and communitarian leanings, who speaks on the basis of his professional experience in Singapore, Hong Kong and now Beijing “as a teacher and self-styled Confucian educator.”

More here. Here is another interesting review by April Rabkin.

Bell is also the author of East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in China (a lively book discussion on it is unfolding at Peony's blog). For a snapshot of how Bell's critics perceive him, read Xiaorong Li's review of East Meets West (of related interest may be Li's essay on Asian Values) and Jeremiah Jenne's thoughts on Bell reading from his new book. Below is a recent 20 min video in which Bell talks about China's new Confucianism (with a rather irritating chap from "UN University"). His articles in the Guardian are available here.

India's Dangerous Divide

Ramachandra Guha in the Wall Street Journal:

If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India's most influential political party, the Congress, of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. Nehru himself was careful to keep his distance from sectarian leaders whether Hindu or Muslim. However, under the leadership of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the Congress party came to favor the conservative sections of the Muslim community. Before elections, Congress bosses asked heads of mosques to issue fatwas to their flock to vote for the party; after elections, the party increased government grants to religious schools and colleges. In a defining case in 1985, the Supreme Court called for the enactment of a common civil code, which would abolish polygamy and give all women equal rights regardless of faith -- the right to their husband's or father's property, for example, or the right to proper alimony once divorced. The prime minister at the time was Rajiv Gandhi. Acting on the advice of the Muslim clergy, he used his party's majority in Parliament to nullify the court's verdict. After Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, became Congress president in 1998, the party has continued to fund Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.

More here. Also check out Guha's conversation with Charlie Rose. 

Wade Davis on the Human Imagination

In this beautiful TED talk, Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, author, documentarian, and photographer takes us on a tour through the wild ranges of the human imagination as manifested in the breadth of human mythology and cultural life. As members of the same human family we all share the same raw human genius and imagination, he reminds us, and while some have chosen to apply that to developing technologies, others have applied it to other mysteries of existence. Different ways of life and mythological systems are not failed attempts at being modern—at being us—but merely different human responses to the essential human questions: what does it mean to be human and alive.

"All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life, itself.... making for completely different possibilities of existence," he says. And as such, the breadth of human cultural variation is a treasure trove of imaginative insights and knowledge. If we discard our human diversity, we lose a hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about ourselves and our planet. Modern western culture is hardly 300 years old, he cautions, and it's folly to imagine that in those 300 years we've learned as much as we need to face the challenges of living.

By way of example, he tells us about—and treats us to some stunning photography of—several completely different indigenous cultures from around the globe, including the following:

Polynesians, who can read wave patterns the way a forensic scientist reads fingerprints, enabling them to identify land that's far beyond the horizon. Wade suggests, "If you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia."

Buddhists, who have spent 2500 years engaged in empirical discovery of the nature of mind.

Andean peoples, whose engineering prowess and intimate familiarity with their sacred mountainscapes guided the building of their great cities. Their ancient lore is alive today, enacted in ritual, including, for one tribal group, the annual performance of a breathtaking, high-altitude marathon—undertaken by boys who are pumped up on coca—that affirms the strength of their community.

(video 19 minutes) Here's more on Wade Davis at TED. Wade Davis is actively involved in educating people about the richness and value of human cultural diversity. To this end he maintains a website, Cultures on the Edge.

Candles in the Dark?

Beyond Belief, an annual symposium that seeks to promote the constituency of reason in society, was held this year from October 3-6 in La Jolla, CA. One weekend recently, I watched all 44 of its talks and panel discussions now available online (each about 25-30 mins). The theme this year was Candles in the Dark. Participants were asked "to propose a Candle — a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion." The symposium was organized around sessions that focused on science's contribution to five human preoccupations: politics, morality, happiness, money, and law.

If the anthropologists stole the show in 2006, this year belonged to the lawyers, or rather law academics who actively seek to incorporate science in their methods. By far the smartest group of people in the room, they evinced the most nuanced understanding of the difference between science and metaphysics in general, and the limits and ethical implications of neuroscience research on criminal law, in particular. Other presentations I enjoyed came from Jonathan Haidt, Beatrice Golomb (her animated talk on how money is corrupting medical research was also the scariest), Philip Zimbardo, and Jonathan Glover. Strategies for promoting science in the public sphere—via Washington lobbies, media outreach—were presented and debated but only peripherally mentioned was the one I think can make a more fundamental impact: a "next-generation Carl Sagan" to seduce young minds by showing them the wonder and power of science, using the best available multimedia and teaching aids.

The least inspiring session was the opening one on Human Flourishing/Eudaimonia. Disquisitions on happiness somehow managed to neither define happiness, nor how to measure it. Individual speakers who irked me the most included Patricia Churchland, a snake oil seller at the crossroads of neuroscience and philosophy, and whose thesis was effectively destroyed by a sharp observation from Nita Farahany, a lawyer; Sam Harris, the Dick Cheney of the symposium, who understands neither science nor religion but is wholly unaware of it. Why does he get invited every year? For the tawdry drama he adds to the proceedings? Peter Atkins, a textbook example of what a scientist without humility can become. Last year he fatuously proclaimed the impending demise of philosophy and the coming reign of science, adding that "We've got to get rid of philosophy because it is really such a ball and chain on progress ... a philosopher is really just a nuisance." Choosing Atkins to end the symposium with his talk was a real downer.

The first two symposiums (2006, 2007) were dominated by scientists taking cheap potshots at religion and sparring over it. This year's format made that difficult but the symposium's lack of diversity remains a serious problem—nearly all of the participants continue to be white Anglo-American atheists to whom religion means Abrahamic rule books. Excluding a handful of multidisciplinary researchers, intellectual breadth also remained a problem—many scientists demonstrated yet again that outside their narrow specialties, they aren't necessarily smarter than their hairdressers. Some new faces I'd like to propose for the symposium next year include H. Allen Orr, Mark Lilla, Reza Aslan, Ashis Nandy, Nicholas Maxwell, Jill Bolte Taylor, Michael Sandel, Amartya Sen, Meera Nanda, Jonathan Spence, Sudhir Kakar, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Hubert Dreyfus.

The 2008 Shunya's Notes Best Speaker Award at the Beyond Belief Symposium goes to Amanda Pustilnik, a brilliant woman who conducts research and teaches in the area of law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. She spoke about where neuroscience can make a contribution to legal doctrine (video below, 17 mins).

Views on Mumbai Terrorism

In this past week since terrorists struck Mumbai, a lot of Indians have poured their hearts out in newspapers, magazines, and blogs. A lot of their writings are angry, hawkish, and nationalistic; many are gushing, mawkish, and oozing with purple prose; a handful offer vignettes of courage or heartfelt pain. Below are some of the more significant and less popular viewpoints I've encountered:

Enough is Enough by Badri Raina:

"As I have listened to the outrage pouring out from a diverse assortment of some celebrity Mumbai citizens whose haunts habitually remain restricted to the affluent South Mumbai—a zone of peace and prosperity that has had its first rite of passage to the ugliness that afflicts the rest of the city, indeed the rest of India, and rest of the world—I find myself asking the question "who is it saying ‘enough is enough', to whom, and why now"?" (thanks to Ruchira Paul)

Mumbai Atrocities Highlight Need for Solution in Kashmir by William Dalrymple:

"In the months ahead, we are likely to see a security crackdown in India and huge pressure applied to Pakistan to match its pro-Indian and pro-Western rhetoric with real action against the country's jihadi groups. But there is unlikely to be peace in South Asia until the demands of the Kashmiris are in some measure addressed and the swamp of grievance in Srinagar somehow drained. Until then, the Mumbai massacres may be a harbinger of more violence to come."

The Fires in South Asia by Vijay Prashad:

"Bombay is not virginal. It is experienced. But this violence has struck at the heart of the enclave of the elite. When they say that this is Mumbai’s 911, it is true. This is an attack into the heart of the zones of comfort in Indian cities. Other dates resonate in other neighborhoods. Some of them refer to events forgotten or unresolved: killers remain at large, justice remains unfulfilled. Almost a thousand people died in the riots of 1992-1993. They died in places like Dharavi and Pydhonie. Two hundred thousand Muslims fled the city in its aftermath"

Fresh Blood from an Old Wound by Pankaj Mishra:

"[In a phone call, a] gunman invoked the oppression of Muslims by Hindu nationalists and the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Such calls were the only occasions on which the militants ... offered a likely motive for their indiscriminate slaughter. Their rhetoric seems all too familiar. Nevertheless, it shows how older political conflicts in South Asia have been rendered more noxious by the fallout from the “war on terror” and the rise of international jihadism."

Democracy Now's panel discussion hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez:

"A discussion on the attacks in Mumbai ... with South Asian History professor Vijay Prashad, New York City-based activist Biju Mathew, veteran journalist and commentator Tariq Ali and award-winning activist and journalist from Mumbai Teesta Setalvad."

A Poll for You News Junkies

Here is a thought experiment for the readers of Shunya's Notes. Let's say you have been cut-off from all news for a long weekend and have just been informed that 200 people died in India yesterday from a single event. The only other detail given to you is that the event is one of the following:

1. A bubonic plague in the city of Nagpur.
2. Indiscriminate bomb blasts/shootings by Pakistani terrorists in Mumbai.
3. A Naxalite guerrilla attack in Chattisgarh against the police and "class enemies".
4. Shortly after takeoff, a plane crashes outside Chennai. 
5. Food poisoning at a big marriage party in Trivandrum.
6. Indiscriminate bomb blasts/shootings by Indian Muslim terrorists in Mumbai.
7. A Hindu-Muslim communal riot in Hyderabad.
8. A levee breach that floods and drowns a few villages in Bihar.
9. A Hindu pogrom against Muslims in Ahmedabad with tacit support from government officials.
10. A chemical industrial disaster in Kanpur (poisonous gas leakage).

Reorder the list such that 1 is the event you find most upsetting, 10 the least (yes, they're all upsetting but some more than others, right?). I have used copy/paste to create mine in the first comment; add yours too — but don't look at mine just yet; finish your own ordering first!

(Photo: "India: Liberty and Death" Time Magazine Cover, October 27, 1947.)