Wikipedia links
3. Arcology
The powder was also applied to solve the longitude problem in the suggestion of an anonymous pamphlet of 1687 entitled “Curious Enquiries.” The pamphlet theorized that a wounded dog could be put aboard a ship, with the animal’s discarded bandage left in the trust of a timekeeper on shore, who would then dip the bandage into the powder at a predetermined time and cause the creature to yelp, thus giving the captain of the ship an accurate knowledge of the time.
5. Rocket mail
On 8 June 1959, [US Navy Submarine] Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile — its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two Post Office Department mail containers — at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida.
Varieties of mental illness
There was an interesting article by Ethan Watters in last week’s New York Times Magazine claiming that we are exporting not just movies, fashion, and fast food to the rest of the world, but treatments for mental illness and, in fact, mental illnesses themselves.
The idea of culture-bound syndromes, though controversial, has been around for a while. The DSM-IV lists two dozen of them, from genital retraction syndrome in East Asia to brain fag in the West Indies. But this phenomenon suggests a much bigger thesis: that all mental illness is culture-bound to some degree, and hence that the Americanization of culture means, among other things, the exchanging of indigenous mental illnesses for Americanized ones:
In the end, what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness.
That’s an interesting, not-implausible thesis that raises all sorts of questions about where mental illness comes from and, more generally, about how culture exerts its influence on the individual. Unfortunately, over half the article is devoted to a rather different topic: the relative inadequacy of certain American treatments for mental illness. Watters argues that schizophrenics often fare better under indigenous treatments than they do under American ones. The latter, with their emphasis on the underlying biology, can leave patients feeling depersonalized and socially isolated. Another interesting, not-implausible thesis that raises important questions about how aggressively American psychiatry should be spread.
But though they’re related, these two issues–the identity of mental illnesses, and their treatment–are quite separate, and Watters’s article does a poor job of distinguishing them. For Watters, the thread connecting them seems to be that illnesses themselves change with the culture because ideas about how to treat them do. Any course of treatment presupposes certain ideas about the nature and meaning of the illness. These ideas, which structure how doctors approach treatment, inevitably get taken up by the patients themselves as a way to understand their conditions. But this happens in such a deep way that the patient’s new understanding of the illness changes the nature of the illness itself. This passage sums up Watters’s position as well as any:
Whatever the trigger, however, the ill individual and those around him invariably rely on cultural beliefs and stories to understand what is happening. Those stories, whether they tell of spirit possession, semen loss or serotonin depletion, predict and shape the course of the illness in dramatic and often counterintuitive ways. … This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche.It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host.
This looks to be Watters’s explanation for why mental illness is culture-bound: culture shapes the patient’s understanding of illness which in turn shapes the illness itself. But this obscures the line between the understanding of illness and the illness itself. Treatment for mental illness should take into account the patient’s understanding of her condition, but this is probably less because it changes the underlying illness and more that it simply makes the burdens of illness easier to bear. To the extent that culture-bound syndromes are really different illnesses and not just different understandings of the same illness, Watters’s explanation is almost certainly inadequate. It overestimates the role of doctors’ ideas about illness. If an individual’s mental illness is malleable enough to be shaped by a culture’s ideas about mental illnesses it is almost certainly malleable enough to be shaped by the culture’s ideas on morality, sex, money, death, love, God, and a host of other important matters.
A motto
Louis Menand, from the preface to his book American Studies:
It’s true things aren’t always what they seem, but what they seem is always part of what they are. … Appearance, mystique, aura, reputation: these are all aspects of the things that interest us, and they are as real as anything else. It is good not to be fooled, but there is a difference between being disenthralled and being disillusioned. Criticism that denies the subject its surface appeal is unsuccessful criticism, and if something doesn’t seem more interesting after it has been taken apart, then it wasn’t worth taking apart. The last word–though only the last word–should be one of appreciation.
There is a third, little-trod way between illusion and disillusion. It’s not some mixture of the two, but an alternative to both. Finding it is the task of the engaged intellectual.
Amazingly, Pat Robertson goes to NEW lows
A few days ago, Pat Robertson said this about Haiti:
And you know, Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it, they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince, true story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free, and ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor…
What surprises me about this is not that Robertson thinks the earthquake is retribution for godlessness. So much we should expect by now, hateful though it is. This, after all, is the same man who agreed with Jerry Falwell’s statement, made on Robertson’s own program, that 9/11 was punishment for atheism, feminism, and homosexuality. It’s the same man who thought abortion probably caused Hurricane Katrina. No, what surprises is that the curse is supposedly hereditary. Haitians aren’t being punished for anything they did, but for something that supposedly occurred almost 220 years ago. I suppose it’s not such a great leap from thinking that God punishes nations for their collective sins to thinking that God punishes nations for their ancestors‘ collective sins, but, still, this reveals just how medieval Robertson’s mind really is.
Christians traditionally struggle to reconcile their god’s benevolence with the mass suffering of innocents. But when it’s other, distant people who are suffering the problem becomes easy: the “innocents” must really be sinners deep-down, and when the “innocents” are god-fearing people, well, it must be their ancestors who sinned.
Are natural disasters opportunities?
David Brooks says here that the devastation in Haiti is an opportunity to rebuild it bigger and better and more prosperous than ever before. That can be done, he says, only by aggressive programs that change the culture from the ground up, something like the Harlem Children’s Zone for a country of 10 million:
It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.
Note that after Hurricane Katrina, Brooks said the exact same things about opportunity, poverty, and the value of cultural engineering:
[Katrina] separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty. It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn’t working.
The only chance we have to break the cycle of poverty is to integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior.
Now ending poverty almost certainly means ending certain poverty-infected cultural patterns. And I suppose any time is the right time to think seriously about poverty. Indeed, there may be some advantage to raising these issues when people are already focused on Haiti for other reasons. At the same time, though, Brooks’s prescriptions seem sort of naive.
First, and most obviously, Brooks is probably way too confident about the value and feasibility of large-scale cultural engineering.
Second, Brooks’s vision is ambitious, and that’s admirable in a way, but it’s also possible that even if cultural engineering is the long-term answer, focusing on it now just impedes the pressing nuts-and-bolts short-term improvements that are preconditions for its success.
Third, I’m inclined to be skeptical of the hopeful thought that natural disasters offer special opportunities for rebuilding in all but the most literal sense. On the critical assumption that appropriate funds and know-how are available, the destruction of buildings and infrastructure does offer the opportunity to rebuild them better than ever before. But as for rebuilding culture and civil society on better terms, it seems to me likely as not that improvement is just made that much harder by mass chaos and suffering. We shouldn’t abandon the project, of course, but we should be clear-eyed about whether its chances are improved or worsened in the wake of catastrophe. In any case, it’s an interesting social science question that someone much more qualified than I should take up: is there any evidence that natural disasters offer special opportunities for improving culture and civil society?
(Another interesting question is whether Brooks-style ambition in the wake of natural disasters is a persistent feature of the Right’s response to such disasters (George W. Bush said similarly ambitious things about rebuilding New Orleans) and, if it is, how this rhetoric affects their actions. My naive impression is that even after Bush’s speech the federal government did not acquit itself very well.)
Information about how to donate to Haiti relief is here and here.
Jews, Sarah Palin, and anti-Semitism
Jennifer Rubin has a ridiculous piece in Commentary purporting to explore Jewish people’s special personal hatred for Sarah Palin. Jews, we are told, find her intellect lacking and her values alien, and this in turn is because Jews are overrepresented among the urban, meritocratic professional class. Here are the key passages:
- “American Jews are largely urban, clustered in Blue States, culturally sophisticated, with more years of college and postgraduate education than the average American. … It is not surprising, then, that Jews historically have not warmed to politicians who do not project intellectual sophistication.”
- “She comes from the wilderness, brags about hunting and eating native animals, and is a proud gun owner.”
- “Palin and her husband had labored at jobs most professional and upper-middle-class Jews would never dream of holding”
- “Palin calls herself a “hockey mom” and brags aloud about the athletic prowess of her children, while Jews are more likely to sport “My child Is an Honor Student” bumper stickers.”
- “Outside the Orthodox community, where large families are increasingly the norm, having five children, as Palin does, is aberrant to American Jews.”
- “Palin’s oldest, Track, has joined the military, while many Jews lack a family military tradition.”
- “Trig [Palin’s youngest son, who has Down Syndrome] was not a selling point with many Jewish women who couldn’t imagine making a similar choice—indeed, many have, in fact, made the opposite one.”
- “Popular Jewish and non-Jewish female politicians—from Senator Diane Feinstein to Madeleine Albright to Hillary Clinton—have been modest to the point of frumpiness in appearance and professional in style, and therefore perfectly acceptable to Jewish women who aspired to similar positions of responsibility.”
For the sake of argument, let’s make the (big, somewhat suspect) assumption that Jews are in fact disproportionately put off by Palin. Let’s also make the (even bigger) assumption that Rubin’s sociological claims about the American jewry are true. Appropriately qualified, these assumptions may well be basically correct. Even if Rubin is speaking far too presumptuously, it’s not these assumptions as such that make the piece so repellently anti-Semitic.
The real problem with Rubin’s piece is that it encourages the thought that Jews’ dislike of Palin is some special brand of Jewish hatred rather than an instance of a completely general, unobjectionable feature of human nature: people, whoever they are, tend to be put off on a personal level by political figures they see as having dangerously defective intellects, wrong-headed personal values, and bad or immoral policies. But Rubin intentionally or not insinuates that Jews are especially insular, distrustful, and resentful, that they don’t like Palin because she’s not a member of the Tribe.
She trades on two not-totally-unreasonable premises: 1) that Jews are overrepresented among the urban, meritocratic professional class and 2) that members of the (mostly non-Jewish) urban, meritocratic professional class, Jewish or not, tend to dislike Palin. Of course, the reasonable conclusion from this is that Jews’ Palin-hate is just like everyone else’s Palin-hate (at least everyone else in the urban, meritocratic professional class). There’s nothing distinctively Jewish, or especially unfair, about it.
Sadly, lumping urban Jewish meritocrats in with their non-Jewish comrades will, in the eyes of anti-Semites, only further tar those non-Jews as “culturally Jewish” or some such nonsense. That Rubin’s article may encourage this vile form of anti-Semitic paranoia is its other, bigger tragedy.
Weird “United 93″–30 Rock connection
Is it a coincidence that three of the principal actors in “United 93”–Cheyenne Jackson, David Alan Basche, and Peter Hermann–went on to have recurring roles on “30 Rock” as, respectively, Danny the new cast member, Alan the d-bag abbreviation-loving lawyer, and Gray aka ‘The Hair’, Liz’s crush/cousin?
“United 93”, a movie without a story
Paul Greengrass’s “United 93” is remarkable, but it’s less a movie than a reenactment. It has no narrative. There are no characters or scenes, just people and events. All traces of story have been stripped away. That’s not a criticism; it’s the key to the movie’s searching intelligence and almost unbearable emotional intensity. It’s also the sign of considerable courage, both artistic and moral, and of faith in the medium. Sometimes sounds and images mean more when they don’t tell a story.
“United 93”, of course, shows us more or less what happened on 9/11 both on board the flight and in various air traffic control centers around the country. It shows the utterly mundane start to the day, the confusion and disbelief as things got worse and worse, and the horror as reality became clear. And, in its final moments, it shows the passengers of flight 93 fighting back.
When it was first released “United 93” was much praised for not being a typical Hollywood movie and avoiding the conventions of plot and style many feared it would sink to. After Iraq and the Patriot Act, people were on high-alert for yet more propaganda. Fortunately, there are no grand speeches about patriotism, self-sacrifice, or endurance. There are no love interests to add pathos or offer redemption. The famous “Let’s roll” line is an aside, not a rallying cry.
The filmmakers also employed a number of techniques to give the movie a more authentic feel. Here is a partial list. Most of it is shot with a roving, handheld camera. The music is inconspicuous. Technical jargon is simply used without explanation. The pivotal events on board flight 93 occur in real time. Subtitles appear only intermittently for the hijackers’ Arabic. The actors are all either obscure or amateur. Indeed, pilots play pilots, soldiers soliders, and flights attendants flight attendants. Some of the air traffic controllers even play themselves, including former FAA National Operations Manager Ben Sliney, who is amazing. Greengrass also used hour-long takes and extensive rehearsals to get the actors to fully inhabit their roles.
But these observations go only part way toward explaining “United 93” ‘s unique effect. All the technical tricks could have been used in a much more conventional movie. And it’s not just that the story of United 93 is told in a subtle, honest, or apolitical way. It’s more that story as such has gone missing. David Denby started to get at this when he called Greengrass’s work “existential filmmaking”: “there is only the next instant, and the one after that, and what are you going to do?” That’s basically accurate–indeed, what could be more appropriate for a day when everyone was confused and scared?–but it can give the false impression that the movie has a psychological narrative it completely lacks. It depicts all manner of emotions with utterly convincing intensity, but it makes no attempt to place these in a larger structure or give them any meaning outside themselves.
So more than just realistic filmmaking, filmmaking without illusion, this is filmmaking without allusion. The camera is never concerned with anything but precisely what it shows. People are constantly talking on the phone trying to piece things together, relay information, or say goodbye. But we never see the other end of these conversations. As far as I can tell we never even meet the other parties. And we barely know the characters themselves. They have no back-stories. No one is typed as the loving family man, the bull-headed military man, the spunky firecracker, the loser who finally makes something of himself. Those are conventional character types, but it’s not as though there are unconventional character types either. There simply are no characters. The details about the passengers that we do get–one guy likes golf, another rugby, two old people are going to Yosemite, an old woman needs to take some pills–are fleeting, stolen, and of course completely insignificant. Even the salient details, for example the fact that passenger Jeremy Glick was a judo champion or that it was Ben Sliney’s first day on the job, are completely left out.
The movie of course lacks a moral as well as a story. There is no agenda behind the images, not a hint of geopolitical context nor even a gesture toward world-historical significance. This, together with the anonymity of the characters, actually annoyed a lot of critics (see, for example The New Republic: “Never is there a moment of repulsive sentimentality or exploitation, but neither is Greengrass able to realize an ultimate purpose…United 93 leaves us pretty much where we were before it appeared” and Andrew Sarris, who absurdly thinks that the hijackers come out looking more realized and more sympathetic than the passengers). Manohla Dargis nicely sums up both charges:
But that narrow focus, along with the lack of fully realized characters, and the absence of any historical or political context, raises the question of why, notwithstanding the usual (if shaky) commercial imperative, this particular movie was made. To jolt us out of complacency? Remind us of those who died? Unite us, as even the film’s title seems to urge? Entertain us? To be honest, I haven’t a clue. I didn’t need a studio movie to remind me of the humanity of the thousands who were murdered that day or the thousands who have died in the wars waged in their name.
2006 was of course a different time. There was still a high-stakes war to shape the narrative of 9/11. (For better or worse, current battles seem largely focused away from the meaning of 9/11 and more on other, broader aspects of Islamist terror). “United 93” doesn’t offer a narrative large or small, but why should it? Narratives, whether about good and evil or about cowardice and persistence or about ordinary lives tragically interrupted, were hardly in short supply. If 9/11 didn’t change everything, it certainly changed the way people talked and the stories they told. So if “United 93” needs any justification it might be this: that it preserves for us the clarity and confusion of the pivotal moments before they were hurriedly covered over with other meanings.
Leon Kass is disingenuous
I haven’t read much of his writing, but based on this essay, Leon Kass is sort of a blowhard. That’s mostly just a complaint about style, but the content also betrays a certain self-satisfied disingenuousness.
First off, he’s got a couple different balls in the air:
- The humanities tackle Big Questions that science just can’t answer on its own, questions like “What makes an organism into a unified whole?”, “What is a human being, really?”, and “How should we live?”
- You need more than knowledge to live a Good Life.
- Great Books, including religious ones, and the Bible in particular, offer valuable assistance in answering the Big Questions.
All good points, points that reasonable people should (and probably already do!) agree on regardless of how they come down on the Big Questions. That’s because all three points are perfectly compatible with a plethora of different Big Answers. What bothers me about the essay is that Kass has his own Big Answers, and, most importantly, he tries to pass them off as reasonable inferences from the unobjectionable premises above, when in fact they are nothing of the sort.
Well, what are Kass’s Big Answers? On first pass, they’re either elementary, obscure, or vague. On the nature of the human organism, the key lesson is that the body’s various activities, in which we might include things diverse as sight, appetite, anger, and thought, are not fully intelligible through science alone, but instead require humanistic reflection on the lived experience of such activities:
Sight and seeing are powers and activities of soul, relying on the underlying materials but not reducible to them. Moreover, sight and seeing are not knowable through our objectified science, but only through lived experience. A blind neuroscientist could give precise quantitative details regarding electrical discharges in the eye produced by the stimulus of light, and a blind craftsman could with instruction fashion a good material model of the eye; but sight and seeing can be known only by one who sees.
Even the passions of the soul are not reducible to the materials of the body. True, anger, as ancient naturalists used to say, is a heating of the blood around the heart or an increase in the bilious humor — or, as we now might say, a rising concentration of a certain polypeptide in the brain. But these partial accounts, stressing only the material conditions, cannot reveal the larger truth about anger: Anger, humanly understood, is a painful feeling that seeks revenge for perceived slight or insult.
As a bit of metaphysics, Kass’s conclusion is controversial and his argument for it suspect. But of course Kass’s main point is more pragmatic than academic: that we live better, richer lives when we attend to the experience of anger, not just its biological basis. That might be true even if anger were reducible to biology as a matter of metaphysics. In any case, my point is that even if you accept Kass’s precept and the philosophy behind it whole hog, you really haven’t accepted very much. It’s at most the prelude to an Answer: you’ve established what the Answer is not, namely a certain biological explanation, but not what it is.
Things improve a bit when Kass turns to ethics, where he is an unabashed Aristotelian:
We are inclined today to praise as excellent one or the other of two human types. Utilitarians [sic] esteem the shrewd and cunning man who knows how to get what he wants. Moralists [sic] praise the man of good will, the well-intentioned or good-hearted fellow bent on doing good. But these views, Aristotle shows us, are both inadequate.The highest human excellence in the realm of action requires both that one’s intentions be good and that one’s judgment be sound. Never a slave to abstract principles or rules of conduct, never a moral preener espousing ‘ideals’ or doctrines, the prudent man knows that excellence really consists in finding and enacting the best thing to do here and now, always with a view to the good but always seen in light of the circumstances. He is truly a man for all seasons and occasions.
Ignore the fact that Kass apparently doesn’t know the meanings of the words ‘utilitarian’ and ‘moralist.’ Even if you accept his ethics wholesale, you simply haven’t accepted very much. As before, you know where the Answer isn’t, namely in moral principles, but not what it is.
The last in Kass’s triad of Big Questions is the proper form of human culture. Kass spends most of this part of the essay giving us reading lists: on eating, see Herodotus, Erasmus, and Isak Dinesen; on romantic love, see Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen; on these and everything else, see the Bible. So Kass kindly tells us where the Big Answers may be found but is obscure about what they are. He does offer a few concrete prescriptions drawn from the Bible–don’t get too wrapped up in money, retain a sense of wonder at the world, respect the sanctity of the family–but as before these points are so basic and broad as to be almost empty. The hard, important work begins only when we move beyond such truisms.
If on first pass Kass’s Answers are a bit elusive, on second pass a thesis emerges: for Kass, the pursuit of the Big Questions through Great Books is the Big Answer. This is why Kass says so little of substance and spends so much time telling us what to read and what not to read: the Good Life is just one spent reading Great Books. This is how Kass performs the feat of drawing a coherent set of lessons from a bunch of wildly disparate texts: the texts are themselves the lesson.
This view has both attractive and repulsive features. It’s attractive because it recognizes as valuable something that really is valuable, namely the pursuit of the Big Questions. And it’s especially seductive to academics because it elevates their work ethically above all others. But it’s also pat and self-regarding and suspiciously self-congratulatory when spouted from the mouth of an academic. It also directly contradicts most of the classic texts it purports to venerate. To take the most obvious example: reading Great Books is not what Jesus would do.
But whatever the merits of the Great-Books-as-Big-Answer thesis, it simply cannot be deduced from the premises 1) that there are Big Questions and 2) that the Great Books can help us answer them. That the Great Books help us toward or even contain Big Answers does not imply that they are the Answer. In fact, if you agree that knowledge is only one component to living a good life, you should be as wary of fetishizing humanistic as scientific knowledge. If Kass is trying to obscure this point, as I suspect he is, then despite his high-minded aims he is probably doing the public more harm than good.
Humboldt Squid
While the total size of the invading horde is still unknown, observations from autonomous submersibles and sonar indicate that they often swim in dense schools of at least 100 individuals. “We’ve seen densities as high as eight per cubic metre,” says William Gilly, Stewart’s supervisor at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.
(via The Rumpus)
axe, pen, & bell 