ISLAM & THE IMAGINATION: NOTES FROM AN AMERICAN ARTIST IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Zain Alam in The Miami Rail:

I am a Muslim. Minutes after I was born at the Flushing Hospital in Queens, New York City, my father whispered the shahadah into my ears: La ilaha il-Allah—There is no God but God. I was introduced to Islam with the world, and the rhythm of La ilaha il-Allah took the place of my mother’s heartbeat. All other experiences were subsequent to the rhythms of Islamic verse. In my childhood home of Kennesaw, Georgia and in cities across South Asia, I’ve heard the shahadah repeated daily in the azaan, which calls believers to prayer. No one disputes the beauty of the sound—the strong and sonorous voice of the muezzin casting a spell on its surroundings. At home, recorded azaans are played back by apps that have re-placed miniature mosque-shaped alarm clocks that double as home decorations. But their intention is the same: to invite us to prayer regularly, five times a day.

I am a musician. My songs take on new lives apart from me the moment they are shared. The long process of songwriting is how I try to do justice to what begins as a melody in a dream. My task as a composer is simply to submit to the dream, guiding it to structure and feeling it into form, through a private intuition that is informed by deep traditions. I may not know why singing songs—even when I’m alone—brings me such pleasure, but sharing them with others comes from a desire to make something that can find a life far beyond my own.

More here.

No, you’re not entitled to your opinion

Patrick Stokes in The Conversation:

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Firstly, what’s an opinion?

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”

More here.

Vaccines: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Video length: 27:14

Visualizing the global income distribution

Arun Jayadev at the OUP Blog:

The evolution of the distribution of income among individuals within countries and across the world has been the subject of considerable academic and popular commentary in the recent past. Works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century or Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality have become unlikely bestsellers, garnering a startling degree of both academic and popular interest.

The last few decades have seen a sharp increase in global integration with its attendant benefits and anxieties. Concerns about the distributional effects of cross-border flows of trade and finance have grown and are central issues in political debates worldwide. At the same time, massive global inequities, dysfunctional polities, and the most egregious outcrops of these-civil breakdowns and mass migration have become the staple of mass media.

Also in the last couple of decades, for the first time in human history, we have the raw materials to measure the living standards of individuals across the world in comparable terms. The careful collection of survey information from almost every country in the world, led by national statistical offices and multilateral organizations, and the simultaneous collation and harmonization of price data by the International Comparison Project has made it possible, in principle, to truly understand and compare the fortunes of individuals in any country or region in the world with others from elsewhere.

Figure 1 (using data drawn from the Global Consumption and Income Project) provides a simple snapshot of the distribution of income. The height of the ‘skyscrapers’ represent average incomes in purchasing power (PPP) terms in 2005 for each population decile for over 150 countries in the year 2014. That is the height of each building represents the average income in 2014 in dollars for 10% of the population of a country, correcting for the fact that prices differ across countries. The height of each bar in the chart varies along two axes: the first, the horizontal axis is a ranking of countries from the poorest (the Democratic Republic of Congo) on the left of the figure to the richest (Luxembourg) on the right; the second, from the front to the back of the figure, shows the distribution of income from poorest to richest within each country. Note that the skyscrapers for some countries such as India and China are wider. This indicates their relatively large size of population.

Figure 1: average income of each decile of the population, $2005 PPP terms in 2014. Image by CORE, used with permission

As is evident, most of the ‘mass’ of income is on the right-hand side and at the back, indicating that most of world income is held by the rich in the rich countries. A relatively rich US individual sitting on his income skyscraper looks down on a world that is very far below him in terms of living standards.

More here.

From religious reflection to mummy vlogs: diaries through the ages

John Mullan in New Statesman:

Why keep a diary? An absorbing and sometimes droll new exhibition in London surveys the history of diary-keeping, particularly over the past century, and gives sometimes contradictory answers to this question. It is a collaboration between the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College and the Great Diary Project, the latter dedicated to rescuing and archiving a growing collection of diaries. The emphasis is on “ordinary” diarists, and on the ways in which keeping a diary has been changing over recent decades. In earlier centuries, the point of ­keeping a diary was to give a minute account of yourself to God. Diary-keeping was closely related to the growth of Protestantism. No wonder that those Protestant protagonists of 18th-century novels, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, take so readily to diaries. Self-recording signalled religious self-inspection. The purpose remained powerful even as religious devotion waned. When he recommended logging 13 virtues a day, Benjamin Franklin was attempting an ­Enlightenment version of this. When he recorded his whoring as well as his intellectual conversations, James Boswell was not only boasting, but also puzzling over his own sinful nature.

Diary-keeping was therefore a discipline. Samuel Johnson recorded his need for a diary in order “to methodise my life, to resist sloth”. But then he never did it. This exhibition shows the uninitiated how diary apps can now make that struggle with sloth much easier. Sign yourself up, and the software will weave information about your whereabouts, the weather and contemporary events into your record. Just a few words from you can make an entry look rich. Modern diary-writers can bring to the form some of the self-seriousness that was quite proper in an earlier, religious age. A magnificently solemn quotation from Susan Sontag adorns one of the walls. “I know I’m alone, that I’m the only reader of what I write here,” she announces – to ­herself. “. . . I feel stronger for it, stronger each time I write something down.” Among the handful of celebrity diarists whose work is on show, the actor Kenneth Williams has something of the fierce purpose of self-investigation. A few pages of his copious journals display, in his appropriately fastidious script, his social unease, his frequent ennui and his fascination with his every physical ailment.

More here.

How quantum trickery can scramble cause and effect

Philip Ball in Nature:

Albert Einstein is heading out for his daily stroll and has to pass through two doorways. First he walks through the green door, and then through the red one. Or wait — did he go through the red first and then the green? It must have been one or the other. The events had have to happened in a sequence, right? Not if Einstein were riding on one of the photons ricocheting through Philip Walther's lab at the University of Vienna. Walther's group has shown that it is impossible to say in which order these photons pass through a pair of gates as they zip around the lab. It's not that this information gets lost or jumbled — it simply doesn't exist. In Walther's experiments, there is no well-defined order of events.

This finding¹ in 2015 made the quantum world seem even stranger than scientists had thought. Walther's experiments mash up causality: the idea that one thing leads to another. It is as if the physicists have scrambled the concept of time itself, so that it seems to run in two directions at once. In everyday language, that sounds nonsensical. But within the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, ambiguity about causation emerges in a perfectly logical and consistent way. And by creating systems that lack a clear flow of cause and effect², researchers now think they can tap into a rich realm of possibilities. Some suggest that they could boost the already phenomenal potential of quantum computing. “A quantum computer free from the constraints of a predefined causal structure might solve some problems faster than conventional quantum computers,” says quantum theorist Giulio Chiribella of the University of Hong Kong. What's more, thinking about the 'causal structure' of quantum mechanics — which events precede or succeed others — might prove to be more productive, and ultimately more intuitive, than couching it in the typical mind-bending language that describes photons as being both waves and particles, or events as blurred by a haze of uncertainty. And because causation is really about how objects influence one another across time and space, this new approach could provide the first steps towards uniting the two cornerstone theories of physics and resolving one of the most profound scientific challenges today. “Causality lies at the interface between quantum mechanics and general relativity,” says Walther's collaborator Časlav Brukner, a theorist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, “and so it could help us to think about how one could merge the two conceptually.”

More here.

Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon Turned Their Life Into a Rom-Com

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

The comedian Kumail Nanjiani was a teenager in his native Pakistan when he first fell madly, deeply in love with the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. Around the same time and several large bodies of water away in North Carolina, the writer Emily V. Gordon was cultivating a lifelong affection for films like Say Anything, Heathers, and Raising Arizona. It wasn’t until they were both in their late twenties and living in Chicago that the pair met at one of Nanjiani’s stand-up shows, embarked on an uncertain affair (she was newly divorced; his strict Muslim parents expected that he’d marry a Pakistani woman), and eventually wed, but only after Gordon came down with a mysterious, life-threatening illness that landed her in the hospital in a medically induced coma for eight terrifying days. (In the end she was diagnosed with a manageable but rare adult-onset autoimmune disorder called Still’s disease.)

Later this summer, the couple will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. And for exactly half their marriage, they’ve been working together on The Big Sick, a romantic comedy that they cowrote and based (with artistic license) on their real love story. In the film, Kumail (played by Nanjiani) and Emily (played by Zoe Kazan) meet cute at a comedy club (she heckles him on stage), start sleeping together casually, and against their better judgment, begin to fall for each other. But then Emily discovers that Kumail has a cigar box full of photos of Pakistani women—possible matches in the arranged marriage his parents (Zenobia Shroff and Bollywood star Anupam Kher) intend to broker for him. (Kumail:”Do you know what we call arranged marriage in Pakistan? Marriage!”) They break up, she falls ill, a friend alerts Kumail, and he’s the only one present when the doctors need a signature authorizing them to put his ex-girlfriend into a coma. For the latter half of the film, she lays unconscious as Kumail holds vigil at her bedside, works his feelings out in an abysmal stand-up set, bonds with her bereft parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), and questions how willing he is to risk his relationship with his own family for a girl he may already have let slip through his fingers.

More here.

Check out this video of a younger Kumail, it is less than two minutes long:

William Deresiewicz explains how an elite education can lead to a cycle of grandiosity and depression

Lauren Cassani Davis in The Atlantic:

The former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz stirred up quite a storm earlier this month with his New Republic essay “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”—a damning critique of the nation’s most revered and wealthy educational institutions, and the flawed meritocracy they represent. He takes these arguments even further in his upcoming book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Part cultural commentary, part philosophical treatise on the meaning of education itself, the book reads like a self-help manual for ambitious yet internally adrift adolescents struggling to figure out how to navigate the college system, and ultimately their own lives. Deresiewicz, who is also the author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter, spoke to me on the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon.

Lauren Cassani Davis: How does the phrase “excellent sheep” describe the typical student at an elite college today?

William Deresiewicz: The most interesting thing about that phrase is that I didn’t write it myself. It came out of the mouth of a student of mine, and just seemed perfect. They’re “excellent” because they have fulfilled all the requirements for getting into an elite college, but it’s very narrow excellence. These are kids who will perform to the specifications you define, and they will do that without particularly thinking about why they’re doing it. They just know that they will jump the next hoop.

Davis: Do you see a connection between this “hoop-jumping” mindset and other trends, like mental-health issues, on college campuses?

Deresiewicz: The mental-health issues, absolutely. People have written books about this—adolescent therapists like Madeline Levine, who wrote The Price of Privilege. These students are made to understand that they have to be perfect, that they have to do everything perfectly, but they haven’t turned to themselves to ask why they’re doing it. It’s almost like a cruel experiment with animals that we’re performing—every time the red light goes on, you have to push the bar. Of course they’re stressed.

This is also why they’re sheep, because they have never been given an opportunity to develop their ability to find their own direction. They’re always doing the next thing they’re being told to do.

More here.

Compassionate Systems: A Conversation With Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman at Edge.org:

These days I’m reflecting a lot on what a compassionate system would be. People generally know too little about systems, let alone about science. That’s one reason the current government may get away with enormous cuts to science.

I was talking to the dean of science at Columbia, who also runs a program at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia, which is in our backyard. He said research there—it’s a world leader in climate science—may get cut by 80 to 85 percent, which is astounding. It’s a huge crisis. Someone else I was talking to who runs a neuroscience lab says he's expecting a 20 percent cut. Twenty percent itself is crippling.

Why is it that a government can get away with this? Why isn’t there uproar beyond a narrow circle of scientists? Why is it that so few people understand science, per se? Part of it has to do with a general lack of awareness of the systems in which we’re enmeshed. The systems of energy and of technology, the systems of economics and of culture; the systems that would make more clear why science itself is so essential to the betterment of our own lives and of society, and what a researcher in a lab has to do with any of us.

There’s a huge disconnect.

More here.

Think of Calvin: A short film by Kelly Amis which shows how racial profiling and "stop and frisk" policies can have a devastating impact on average citizens and their families

Video length: 18:36

Hayek Meets Information Theory. And Fails.

Jason Smith in Evonomics:

Friedrich Hayek did have some insight into prices having something to do with information, but he got the details wrong and vastly understated the complexity of the system. He saw market prices aggregating information from events: a blueberry crop failure, a population boom, or speculation on crop yields. Price changes purportedly communicated knowledge about the state of the world.

However, Hayek was writing in a time before information theory. (Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society was written in 1945, a just few years before Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948.) Hayek thought a large amount of knowledge about biological or ecological systems, population, and social systems could be communicated by a single number: a price. Can you imagine the number of variables you’d need to describe crop failures, population booms, and market bubbles? Thousands? Millions? How many variables of information do you get from the price of blueberries? One. Hayek dreams of compressing a complex multidimensional space of possibilities that includes the state of the world and the states of mind of thousands or millions of agents into a single dimension (i.e. price), inevitably losing a great deal of information in the process.

Information theory was originally developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs to understand communication. His big insight was that you could understand communication over telephone wires mathematically if you focused not on what was being communicated in specific messages but rather on the complex multidimensional distributions of possible messages. A key requirement for a communication system to work in the presence of noise would be that it could faithfully transmit not just a given message, but rather any message drawn from the distribution. If you randomly generated thousands of messages from the distribution of possible messages, the distribution of generated messages would be an approximation to the actual distribution of messages. If you sent these messages over your noisy communication channel that met the requirement for faithful transmission, it would reproduce an informationally equivalent distribution of messages on the other end.

We’ll use Shannon’s insight about matching distributions on either side of a communication channel to match distributions of supply and demand on either side of market transactions.

More here.

Mass Incarceration’s Dangerous New Equilibrium

Peter Temin in INET Economics:

Mass incarceration in the United States has mushroomed to the point where we look more like the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than the democracies of Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions in campaigns in the 2016 election. In a new INET Working Paper, I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point. Drawing on a new model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the recent stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it will hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status quo.

Mass incarceration started from Nixon’s War on Drugs, in a process described vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, in 1994:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United States, which has been directed at African Americans from Nixon’s time to today, when one third of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum, 2016; Alexander, 2010).

Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from three-strike laws to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The laws also shifted the judicial process from judges to prosecutors, from the courtroom to offices where prosecutors pressure accused people to plea-bargain. The threat of harsh minimum sentences gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge to a lesser one if the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting trial—if he or she is unable to make bail—and then face the possibility of long years in prison. And the shift of power was eased by the pattern of financing. Prosecutors are paid by localities, while the costs of prisons are borne by states. The trip to the penitentiary does not cost prosecutor at all. “Instead of juries and trial judges deciding whether this or that defendant merits punishing, prosecutors decide who deserves a trip to the nearest penitentiary (Stuntz, 2011, 286; Pfaff, 2017, 127).”

More here.

 The essential Protestantism of J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction

Adam Kirsch at The Nation: 

In Boyhood, Coetzee recalls that his own childhood relationship to Jesus was a combination of disbelief and an odd kind of intimacy. “Though he himself is an atheist and has always been one,” 
Coetzee writes, referring to himself in the third person, “he feels he understands Jesus better” than his religion teacher does. “He does not particularly like Jesus—Jesus flies into rages too easily—but he is prepared to put up with him.” Still, Coetzee finds himself drawn to Jesus, in particular when he comes to the point in the Gospel of Luke when the sepulcher is discovered to be empty: “If he were to unblock his ears and let the words come through to him, he knows, he would have to stand on his seat and shout in triumph. He would have to make a fool of himself forever.”

It is this kind of foolishness—this rejection of worldly wisdom, in the spirit of Jesus’s own exhortation to imitate the lilies of the field—that Coetzee dramatizes in his two Jesus novels. For as Childhood and Schooldays develop, it becomes increasingly clear that the figure of David is meant to illustrate, or incarnate, the scandalous freedom of Jesus’s teachings. Yet Coetzee brings out the parallels with a light, even teasing touch.

For instance, at the outset of Childhood, Simón tells everyone who will listen that he is not David’s father; rather, he met the boy on the ship that brought them to Novilla, and his mission is to reunite the child with his mother, which he is certain he can do, though he doesn’t know her name or what she looks like. Soon enough, Simón decides that he has found her in Inés, a woman with no recollection of David and no obvious qualifications for motherhood. 

more here.

It's time to bring Branwell, the dark Brontë, into the light

Emma Butcher at The Guardian:

We are currently in the middle of Brontë bicentenary mania. This year, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, we are diverting attention away from the famous sisters and focusing on the often-overlooked Brontë brother, Branwell.

We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of 31 from the long-term effects of substance abuse.

Branwell’s legacy has been shaped by sensation, such as the story that he once set his own bed on fire, or the suggestion that he died standing up. His erratic, out-of-control behaviour has contributed to his legacy as the family’s black sheep.

This year, however, the Brontë Parsonage is trying to tone down the Branwell bashing, recognising his flaws but celebrating the merits of the brother with the salutary hashtag #TeamBranwell. The poet Simon Armitage is the museum’s creative partner for this bicentenary, curating an exhibition that pairs his own poetry with objects owned by Branwell; inviting us to reflect on the workings of his mind and our relationship with this problematic fellow. At the heart of the exhibition is a letter to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Branwell, then a earnest 19-year-old, encloses one of his own poems, and expresses his hopes and dreams of building “mansions in the sky”.

more here.

Reading Thoreau at 200

William Howarth at The American Scholar:

Walden is a literary accident. It began as a ragbag of recycled talks, scrapped bits of essays, and a great deal of personal venting. Many passages seem addressed to an invisible companion. Midway through his pond sojourn, Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that funded, in his view, a pro-slavery war with Mexico. After someone (possibly an aunt) paid his fine, he went to climb mountains in Maine. Caught in a storm high on Mount Katahdin, he took shelter near a patch of burnt forest, where the sight of regenerating foliage filled him with wonder: “The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense!” Thoreau rarely used italics or exclamations, but in this passage from The Maine Woods, he needed half a dozen to accept loss and seize life. “Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”

The two experiences, jail and mountain, became fodder for public lectures, but they also transmuted Walden from parochial rant into cosmic encounter. As literary historian J. Lyndon Shanley demonstrated in the early 1970s, that evolution required numerous distinct drafts, over nearly a decade. You can see the book’s outline, rising like a trout to the surface, in other early writings: his Journal entries on hoeing beans and plastering a house; a lecture on “getting a living” that argues for a simple life; a survey map of the pond, hinting at its unseen depths.

more here.

The Mind of God

John Williams in The New York Times:

In the ever-raging battle between faith and science, the neurologist Jay Lombard is one of those rare emissaries who communicate in the language of both camps. In his new book, “The Mind of God,” he uses his experience studying the brain to ask some of the largest philosophical questions: Does God exist? Does life have meaning? Are we free? Lombard writes that he is interested in a “large faith,” rather than a specific religion — “a faith invigorated and enlightened by science rather than being at odds with it.” Below he discusses the debates over brain and mind, his editor’s unpromising reaction to an early manuscript, his appreciation for Jerry Garcia and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

When I was in full-time clinical practice, and some of the most unusual cases seemed to find me, these bizarre cases that made Oliver Sacks’s look mundane. The first part of the process as a neurologist is to figure out the anatomy, and structurally where the origins of behaviors come from. That’s the first dive. But from there you ask more fundamental questions about the brain and mind, and where they interface. Trying to find the biological origins of psychiatric disease is much more difficult than for a stroke, hypertension or A.L.S. But it’s there. And you see that no matter how reduced you get, you’re left with sand going through your hands. That took me to a completely opposite place, which was to ask questions about purpose and meaning; about suffering, and about how patients themselves make sense of their suffering; and about how I make sense of it as a clinician. I wrote a screenplay about it, a tragicomedy I still have in my drawer somewhere. It was my first attempt to make sense of it.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

How much we are dependent on our own brains for whatever form of faith we experience in our lives. How reliant we are on the physical aspects of our spiritual being.

…Persuade someone to read “The Mind of God” in less than 50 words.

I believe we are living in a time of huge existential crisis in our society. I want people to ask themselves, first and foremost, if they have a sense of purpose. If they say yes, but they don’t know what it is, they should read the book.

More here.

Conservatives, Immigrants, and the Romantic Imagination

by Samir Chopra

Once upon a time in America's not-too-distant past, immigrants of the first and second generations were reckoned a safe vote for the Republican Party's brand of conservatism. It was not just immigrants with log-sized chips on their shoulders from communist countries—Russia, Hungary, Poland, Cuba, for instance—who were willing and enthusiastic consumers of American conservatism; immigrants of all stripes often showed marked allegiance to important conservative causes and claims. This history should still feature in explanations of why immigrants have not always been successful in building multi-racial alliances with African-Americans, and thus, why American anti-racism politics remains handicapped by a lack of solidarity between its demographic components. It will show how the Republican Party found a rhetorical appeal to divide anti-Republican coalitions of minorities by attacking them at one of their most vulnerable points—the divide between the ‘immigrant' and the ‘resident,'—by appealing to a sense of immigrant virtue, one cast as a conservative ideal.

The immigrant's imagination, tinged with a hint of the romantic, bears some explanatory responsibility for his political predilections. The romantic imagination sees man pitted alone against the awesome, stifling forces of nature and society; the immigrant considers himself confronted by the formidable foes of unfamiliar languages and cultures, class relations, and sometimes political forces that colonized his former home. Modern revisionary descriptions of conservative intellectuals as a species of romantic reactionaries suggest immigrants—who tell stories of transformative journeys of arrival and accomplishment—and conservatives are united by a species of self-conception in which they are outsiders who subvert and master a dominant system that has inflicted a heavy and painful loss upon them. Like the conservative, the immigrant suggests the ladder be ‘pulled up' now that he has been hauled aboard—in his mind by an effort whose credit is solely his. The immigrant sympathizes with an unsympathetic conservative vision of others ‘like him' because, like the conservative, he sees himself as an outsider who has ‘made it' despite suffering a terrible loss.  

I should know, for I was one such ‘loser.'  

Continue reading "Conservatives, Immigrants, and the Romantic Imagination"

Origami Numbers

by Jonathan Kujawa

Invicta by Robert Lang

Last time at 3QD we talked about constructible numbers. We followed in the footsteps of the ancient Greeks and asked what sorts of numbers we can get as the lengths of line segments made using only a compass and straightedge. In the end we found that starting with a line segment of length one, a compass and straightedge, and enough patience, we can make any rational number, the square root of any rational number, and, indeed, any number which can be made by a finite sequences of additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions, and square roots. Even crazy numbers like √(13/2 +14.3(√7)) are constructible. In short, compass and straightedge constructions are equivalent to being able to solve arbitrary quadratic equations.

On the other hand, that's it. Logarithms, exponentials, π, and even the roots of higher powers are all impossible. No matter how hard we try, the cubed root of 2 is not constructible. The 2000-year-old challenge to double the cube is forever out of reach.

An ellipse (from Wikipedia).

But, of course, this all depends on our initial decision to only allow a compass and straightedge. If you also gave me two pins and a string I could use them to make an ellipse. "So what?", you say. After all, what does the ability to draw an ellipse buy you? Well, it has been known for centuries that you can double the cube and trisect the angle if you are allowed to use parabolas and hyperbolas. In 1997 Carlos Videla determined exactly which numbers are constructible using a straightedge and the conics (circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, and parabolas). In short, the addition of the conics allows you to take cube roots. No more, no less. Remarkably, in 2003 Patrick Hummel proved that the hyperbolas and parabolas are redundant. Every number you can construct using a straightedge and the conics can be constructed with just the compass, straightedge, and ellipses.  Give me an ellipse and I'll solve your cubic equation!

Of course, this is all very Euro-centric. We use the compass, straightedge, and conics because we are in the Western tradition and that's what the Greeks used.

But what about those of us who grew up in Japan? There the ancient geometric tradition is origami. We could just as well ask which numbers are constructible using paper folding. We can make a straight line in the form of the crease made when we fold the paper. If two creases intersect, this makes a point. If we've made two points, we can make the straight line which connects them by folding a crease through the points. Since we can make lines and points, we can say a number is origami-constructible if we can start with a one by one sheet of paper and use paper folding to make a line segment of that length; much like we did for the compass and straightedge.

Which numbers are origami-constructible?

Surprisingly, despite the centuries of effort in understanding the mathematics of Greek geometry, the mathematics of origami has only really taken off in the past few decades. Nevertheless, lots of progress has been made!

Continue reading "Origami Numbers"

Messing With The Founders

by Michael Liss

The Founders are having a collective posthumous fit—and it's not because of Donald Trump.

Yes, it's true, Trump is not ever going to be one of the guys on Mount Rushmore—unless he buys the place and converts it to a luxury spa and personal shrine. He's just not a Rushmore type. We want our Presidents brave, eloquent, decisive, visionary, caring, gracious. That's not Trump. They need to have the intellectual ability and knowledge to integrate multiple sources of information to facilitate making complex decisions in rapid real time. Still no. Plus the emotional pliancy to cope with wrenching moral choices as a surrogate for the nation, taking upon themselves the responsibility for life or death choices and providing absolution for the rest of us. Yet another no. And a thick skin that enables them to do all these things with equanimity as a polarized electorate and a media hungry for scoops and gotcha tear at them. Definitely, absolutely, not our Donald.

At the risk of offending roughly a third of the electorate, let me make an obvious point: Whatever his talents in business or otherwise, as a President, Trump is a disaster, utterly unfit to hold the office. To offend the other two-thirds, I am going to suggest something radical: Unless he literally blows up the world (admittedly, not completely impossible) it doesn't matter. The Trump Presidency is a temporary problem—a big one, likely to be remembered for emotional vandalism, a hard-right agenda, and some crushing disappointments for his loyal base—but a temporary one. His Presidency will end. We will have another election, pick someone new, rebalance ourselves domestically, and reintroduce ourselves to the world as the rich, powerful, and reliable partner we were before. And to be truthful, the world isn't going to have that much of a choice, because we are still the Indispensable Nation—and because we really can be the good guys when we try.

We will get through the Trump Presidency. I say this because I have faith in our system. The Founders anticipated a Trump problem and built into the Constitution a variety of checks and balances that would either keep him from office (through the Electoral College), remove him (if he merits impeachment), or legally constrain him and limit the institutional damage he could cause if elected. And if all else fails, he still has to face the electorate in 2020. Sooner or later, he's going to have to take his Twitter account and his golf clubs and go home.

So, why are the Founders spinning in their graves? Because of the one man who, under the radar, is doing a lot more damage to Madison's delicate mechanism than Donald Trump. That would be the Senior Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. He's the guy with the can of gasoline and the box of matches burning down Independence Hall.

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perceptions

Otobong Nkanga. Alterscape: Playground. 2005-2015.

Materials: eucalyptus leaves, parrafin wax, a table, white shirts, singed and gilded, the sound of opera, a vaporizor,

a tree branch, ashes.

More here, here, and here.

Correctness, appropriateness, and truth

by Dave Maier

Here’s a joke I remember from my childhood. A man takes a taxi. The fare comes to $9.63, so the passenger gives the driver nine dollars, two quarters, a dime, and three pennies. The driver looks at the money dubiously; whereupon the passenger asks “Isn’t that correct?” The driver’s answer: “It’s correct, but it ain’t right.” Here the driver is distinguishing correctness from moral rightness in particular. That’s not quite the distinction I want to talk about today, so let’s instead use a word which wouldn’t make the joke quite so funny: appropriateness.

Our context is that of the nature of truth. Pragmatists are often accused of reducing truth to appropriateness or utility. (William James invited such attacks with his supposedly pragmatic slogan that “truth is what works.”) Yet it certainly seems possible to say something true which is not appropriate or useful. There are many types of case, but for now as an example of “inappropriateness” try tactlessness: “Why yes, that dress does indeed make your butt look big.” While clearly effective against James’s slogan, this is not the refutation of pragmatism that it appears. We must look more closely at what determines what it is appropriate to say, and why.

* * *

After 9/11, President George W. Bush emphasized that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not wars against Islam generally by claiming that, as he put it, “Christians and Muslims worship the same God.” He got immediate pushback on this from some Christian leaders (Richard Land is the one who sticks in my mind, but there were others), who disputed this claim. More recently, a professor at a Christian school got into hot water when, as a way to show solidarity with Muslims, she made that same claim. In each case, the objectors quite plausibly pointed out that the Christian deity and the Muslim deity have many conflicting characteristics – for example, that the former is triune and the latter not – so how could they possibly be the same entity?

This presents itself as a disagreement about the correctness of a manner of speaking, or a matter of fact, one which is difficult even to word properly so as not to beg the question: is the entity (are the entities) which Christians call “God” and (Arabic-speaking) Muslims call “Allah” the same entity or different entities? Bush says they are the same and Land disagrees; so it seems that one of them must be wrong, depending on how the world actually is. Let’s examine the arguments and see if we still think this when we’re done.

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Sympathy For The Donald — A Deeply Wounded Devil

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash 

How to explain Donald Trump?

I'm going to try something I've never seen or read anywhere, until a good friend, a black female school principal spoke to me about when she was teaching the children of rich, privileged parents, and discovered that those parents never raised their kids themselves, but relied on nannies to do all the heavy lifting.

In other words, those parents never loved their children on a day-to-day basis.

My friend knew such extremes as one wealthy divorced mom who would go to Paris for a month of high living, and leave her child with the nanny back in New York.

My friend's theory is that Trump is such a child, who might have been more or less ignored by especially his Dad when he was a very young boy, and is therefore a deeply wounded man. His wounds have created an irrepressible need for adoration, to make up for an emotional orphan-like existence as a child.

Although my friend feels great animosity towards Trump and his policies — heck, she is a middle-aged black woman, so what he is, strikes at her very core — she also feels a deep compassion for him and his suffering.

1. Trump As A Deeply Wounded Man

So this then is the theory expounded in this essay: a man so thin-skinned, he gets upset with beauty queens (and a man so insecure, he never stops bragging) is a man who lived a childhood of psychic trauma.

Bear with me as I continue this line of utterly unsupported non-scientific speculation, which goes beyond the usual profile you may have read about Trump, which depicts him as suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder, and possible sociopathy if not outright psychopathy. (Though the shrink who invented the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder says Trump does not have a disorder, because he is successful, and people who suffer from a disorder live crippled lives: according to this fellow, Trump is a supreme narcissist, but does not suffer from an actual narcissistic disorder.)

At least now, with the theory of Trump As The Deeply Wounded Man, you are reading something about Trump that you have never read before. So indulge me for my originality, or rather, the originality of my educator friend.

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On Awareness, pt. 1

by Evan Edwards

There’s a zen koan about master Nan-in and a younger monk, Tenno, who had been studying with his teacher for ten years. Tradition went that a student had to study this long before they were qualified to begin teaching, and Nan-in had invited Tenno over for tea to celebrate his pupilship coming to an end. Since it was raining that day, Tenno wore clogs and brought an umbrella, and left them by the door when he entered Nan-in’s home. After his guest had sat down, Nan-in asked Tenno, “I assume that since it is raining, you brought an umbrella. Correct? And did you put it on the left or the right of your clogs?” When he didn’t have an immediate answer, Tenno stood up and returned to the monastery in order to continue as a student for six more years.

The story is usually interpreted as an illustration of the value of attention and, more importantly, what we might call ‘awareness.’ Because Tenno was unable to recall the position of his umbrella, or perhaps better, because he was unaware of how he had arranged his things in the other room, he was not practicing “every-minute zen.” In other koans, the theme of the significance of attention and awareness return again and again. A student asked Master Ichu to write him something of great wisdom. Ichu took up his pen and wrote “attention.” The student asked Ichu what “attention” meant, and he responded that “attention means attention.” This theme seems to be so recurrent because, as individuals in the Vipassana school argue, nirvana, as a kind of “Budda-consciousness,” has to do with a particular state of vijnana, or “consciousness.” This kind of consciousness is a state of perfect awareness.

Certain strains of ecology and western environmental philosophy, also, stress the importance of awareness. In the work of Henry David Thoreau, we see an intense attention to nature that has been described by several commentators as an attempt to integrate himself more fully, and therefore live more authentically, within the web of life.

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CATSPEAK

by Brooks Riley

The tyranny of things and how virtual reality will set us free

by Sarah Firisen

Recently, I dropped my iPhone on the sidewalk. I have a case with a bumper on it, but even so, I guess it hit the sidewalk in just the wrong way and, the next thing I knew, I had a $130 trip to the Apple store in my immediate future. Now clearly, like many thing iPhone, Apple could quite easily make a shatterproof screen. We have shatterproof windshields after all. They could also make water resistant phones (as other companies do), but then think of all that lovely lost income from phones dropped in the toilet or tangled up in bedding and put through the washing machine - yeah, I’ve done that as well. The trip to the Apple store was quick and pretty painless, they’re a well oiled machine with a steady incoming stream of people with pretty similar issues to mine. It would be interesting to stand there for a few hours and try to count how many people come in with either cracked screens or water logged phones, I bet it’s high.

The “things” we can’t live without; for most of us, our phones are pretty high on that list. And so of course Apple, as happens in a capitalist society, exploits this need, some might say addiction. And of course, our phones are not the only screens we’re addicted to: TVs, laptops, tablets, Fitbits, Apple Watches, and more.

Magic Leap, the most incredibly secretive and highly anticipated startup in the VR/AR (virtual reality/augmented reality) space seems, at least from its demo videos, to be working on a product that could, in principle, do away with all these screens. There will certainly be a headset of some sort to begin with, but it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where we’re all wearing contacts lenses instead. Then you can not only have a screen that you can’t smash or drop in the toilet, you could have many of them, at once. Every screen, devices beyond screens, could, at least in theory, be replaced overnight. If I was a company producing laptops, or TV screens, I might be a getting a little nervous. And while I realize that there is a whole social dimension, and probably legal and moral ones, around whether we want a world where people can be looking at virtual screens (unbeknownst to those around them) at any point, we sort of almost live in that world now. 15 years ago our current levels of smartphone usage was unthinkable, but it turns out that these technologies have a way of worming themselves into our daily lives and suddenly the unimaginable becomes the impossible to live without.

I recently ran a workshop on emerging technology and virtual/augmented reality was one (or two) of the technologies we looked at.

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