Shunya's Notes

"Like this only India will progress"

Satire may well be the best way of dealing with this latest absurdity in a culture obsessed with fair skin. This piece by Suchi Govindarajan in Himal is brilliantly funny!

I am very much connected to Internetworks these days. My friends are sending me every day new new links, and I am expanding my world too much. But yesterday one shocking video I saw. One married girl is thinking about those shame-shame areas of her body, that too while having coffee with her husband! Some animation is coming when she is bathing, showing all brown parts shining and becoming like snow-white, and then she is gallivanting like anything with the husband wearing chaddis. I was shocked. But my friend Kiccha is saying, "So what, there are so many fairness creams these days, and that too for different-different parts of your body: underarms, ears, elbows, teeth, brain, etc."

See, I am very much in favour of fairness and just society. Fairness is very much important even to break caste, creed and religion. You are knowing Ramaswamy's daughter? She went off and married American Christian boy. Aiyyo, it was big scandal, and parents completely cut her off. They didn't even say that she is married. But within one year, the couple were blessed with fair-skinned issue. Seeing such a white baby (blue eyes also), their hearts and all melted. Now they are even wheeling the baby in a pram on famous Besantnagar beach in Madras. All are envying them now. This is the real power of fairness.

But why you want to marry Americans? You can even solve this problem with age-old wisdom! If pregnant ladies are taking saffron with milk, it will be reducing melanin production in the baby and it will come out like a ball of maida flour. This saffron science is all proven and published on email. If you want, I can forward.

More here.

The Evolved Apprentice

Kim Sterelny, a leading philosopher of biology (and author of the bestseller Dawkins vs. Gould) has a new book, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique. Here is a brief description (and an essay by Sterelny):

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.

Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.

Chris Schoen on Free Will

The old debate on free will has lately flared up again. Are we "biochemical puppets, swayed by forces beyond our conscious control", or "authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires"? Or something in between? The Chronicle of Higher Education recently invited several thinkers to weigh in on the question of free will, which then spawned additional commentaries. One that I really enjoyed reading is this essay by my friend, Chris Schoen. The Iris Murdoch quote he provides with commentary towards the end is particularly insightful.

Sometimes people have arguments they don't want to have in order to shore up some principle they wish they didn't have to defend. Actually, most debate can probably be characterized this way, though it doesn't always nestle up against outright absurdity the way that the argument I will speak of here is so prone to do, namely the argument that something called "Determinism" means that something else called "Free Will" cannot exist.

This is a rather hot debate right now, largely because advocates of the "incompatibilist"  or "hard determinist" view I have just described believe they smell blood in the water and have moved in for the kill. Sam Harris, the smartest man who was ever wrong about everything, has a recent book out on the topic ("Free Will,") and Jerry Coyne, the smartest horse ever to be led to water while steadfastly refusing to drink, has made this topic a regular staple on his blog.

The conversation has lately found its way into the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which recently featured five essays on the debate by Coyne and some of the top names in neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

More here. Also check out a previous link post on this blog, Eddy Nahmias on Free Will.

A Film on Bismillah Khan

A friend pointed me to this wonderful 1989 film on the life and times of Bismillah Khan (1916-2006), a musician as great as any that India has produced. It reveals Khan's enduring sense of place, his syncretic faith, his modesty and egalitarianism, and his extraordinary talent and devotion to music. The film presents many vanishing old world values, stories, and traditions of musical learning, with footage of the narrow alleys of Varanasi and its ghats by the Ganga, which Khan loved and missed on his travels. Though a pious Muslim, he also revered the Goddess Saraswati and often played at the famous Vishwanath temple on the ghats of Varanasi. (90 min, Hindi, no subtitles.)

It so happens that Bismillah Khan presided over the union that made my existence possible in the world! He played at my parents wedding in 1959, when he was a rising star, as a favor to my maternal grandfather who was a pretty senior official in the UP state bureaucracy. The photos on the right are from that occasion.

Undercover in a Slaughterhouse

How do self-professed animal lovers reconcile their love of animals with eating them? To eat animals today is to almost always participate in a gigantic cycle of industrialized violence and brutality against animals. Animal lovers eating animals—despite today's plant alternatives—now strikes me as one of the more unsettling examples of self-deception, denial, and moral blindness in human affairs. Yet another instance of the banality of evil? In Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat, who took up a job in a slaughterhouse to learn how society normalizes violence against animals, describes his experiences. Here is an interview with the author.

Avi: What are the main strategies used to hide violence in the slaughterhouse?

Timothy: The first and most obvious is that the violence of industrialized killing is hidden from society at large. Over 8.5 billion animals are killed for food each year in the United States [nearly a million per hour], but this killing is carried out by a small minority of largely immigrant workers who labor behind opaque walls, most often in rural, isolated locations far from urban centers. Furthermore, laws supported by the meat and livestock industries are currently under consideration in six states that criminalize the publicizing of what happens in slaughterhouses and other animal facilities without the consent of the slaughterhouse owners. Iowa's House of Representatives, for example, forwarded a bill to the Iowa Senate last year that would make it a felony to distribute or possess video, audio, or printed material gleaned through unauthorized access to a slaughterhouse or animal facility.

Second, the slaughterhouse as a whole is divided into compartmentalized departments. The front office is isolated from the fabrication department, which is in turn isolated from the cooler, which is in turn isolated from the kill floor. It is entirely possible to spend years working in the front office, fabrication department, or cooler of an industrialized slaughterhouse that slaughters over half a million cattle per year without ever once encountering a live animal much less witnessing one being killed.

But third and most importantly, the work of killing is hidden even at the site where one might expect it to be most visible: the kill floor itself. The complex division of labor and space acts to compartmentalize and neutralize the experience of "killing work" for each of the workers on the kill floor.

More here (via The Browser). Also check out my previous posts on this topic:

1. Slaughter in America
2. The Lives of Animals
3. Asian Food for Thought
4. Flesh of Your Flesh

Update: Read an essay I wrote in mid 2012, On Eating Animals, which generated animated discussion on 3 Quarks Daily.

Jinasena on God the Creator

In 9th century CE India, a Jain teacher called Jinasena composed a work called Mahapurana. The following is a quote from it.

Some foolish men declare that [a] Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If god created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now? No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an immaterial god create that which is material? How could god have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally. If god created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will made nothing else and who will believe this silly stuff? If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything. If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then god is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created out of love for living things and [in his] need of them he made the world, why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune? Thus the doctrine that the world was created by god makes no sense at all.

One thing led to another, as it often does on the web, and I ended up ordering Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World.

Is There a Universal Grammar?

Do humans have an innate universal grammar, i.e., are we all born with certain foundational rules of language "hard-wired" in our brain—and which we don't need to learn? The dominant theory in linguistics, long associated with Noam Chomsky, says yes. However, this is not entirely accepted in the field, and challengers have only increased. Many now lean away from innate universal rules, and towards innate capacities or instincts that are shaped by culture into rules. Here is an excellent article on the debate and the work of a leading challenger, Dan Everett.

A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined to understand the people he's come to respect and love.

Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language these people speak doesn't follow one of the fundamental tenets of linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head, undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to communicate, and dethrone the discipline's long-reigning king, who also happens to be among the most well-known and influential intellectuals of the 20th century.

More here. Some discussion on this article, including by Everett, took place here. This builds upon a really good New Yorker essay from 2007, The Interpreter (which carried the photo above). Also check out The Myth of Language Universals, which argues that the "claims of Universal Grammar ... are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict universals."