Rape in India: Reactions to the Protests over the Gang Rape in Delhi

In reaction to recent events in India, Anand Soondas in The Times of India:

Strange theories are floated to explain the depravity of Indian men – from greater access to pornography (that would have made Holland very unsafe for women) to a growing inclination towards noodles (think Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) – but the truth is that at the root of it all lies a culture built around hierarchies, of gender, faith, colour, caste, region.

We are, quite simply, not used to people being equal – dark versus fair, Mongoloid versus Aryan, ‘chinky’ versus large-eyed are demarcations and rankings that have almost been internalized; in many cases institutionalized. Of course, female versus male continues to be the greatest division of all – and one that cuts across all other borders of the mind.
We at The Times of India in our edition today laid out a 6-point action plan to make India safer for women – harsher punishment, sensitization of the police force, setting up of fast-track courts, better patrolling, cleverer use of technology like GPS and CCTVs and a data base of public transport personnel – but what all these measures will not address is the mindset. A mindset that since the time of that deviant philosopher called Manu has refused to see “the weaker sex” as anything but property and the receptacle of male sperms.

Though many of my north Indian friends react in agonized protest when I say this, but in the end it is also a cultural and civilisational thing. In those societies that do — or have learnt to — respect women, and consider them as equal, incidence of rape, sexual harassment, molestation is very low, if not absent altogether. In Darjeeling, for instance, police stations across the district will tell you that in the last decade they have come across only a couple of cases.

The Secular Saint

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Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Arthur Plotnik, a former student of Roth's at the Iowa Writer's Fiction Workshop, tapped into some of those deeper issues in a piece he wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. Arthur Plotnik felt shocked when he first heard the news that Roth was retiring. “I can't help feeling,” Plotnik wrote, “as if the Master — the patron saint of fiction for two generations — has let me down.” Plotnik further recalls how Roth would tell his students that he “imagined fiction to be something like a religious calling, and literature a kind of sacrament.”

I don't think this religious language should be taken lightly. Calling Roth a saint is not exactly a metaphor here — it is something deeper than a metaphor. We have to think about what a saint actually does, what role a saint performs. A saint is a person set apart for their holiness. The saint is still a human being, of course, still a sinner. There is a famous quote by Fr. Bernard Carges that says: “A saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.” But the seriousness of that trying, the relentlessness of that trying, marks the saint as beyond a normal human being. The saint thus becomes a model for everyone else struggling to make difficult choices, to behave well when there are so many motivations for behaving less-than-well. But it is even more complicated than that. It was always acknowledged, from the time of the early Christian saints, that the vast majority of human beings would never achieve a saintly level of holiness. So the saint is both a model and an impossible standard. The fact that the saint takes on the task of living life at a higher and unachievable level adds meaning to the lives of everyone else. For many centuries, human beings seem to have enjoyed stories of the saints as a way to acknowledge their own limits. People have been glad that saints exist and simultaneously glad that they do not have to be saints. There is a tension in those two feelings but not, I think, a contradiction. Confronting a saint is like confronting a better version of yourself, a version that you know you cannot ever become. The confrontation creates feelings of inspiration, then frustration, and then acceptance. Or so it was for many centuries of Western Civilization.

Then, to condense much history into one phrase, secularization happened. Saints didn't go away. The Catholic Church is canonizing people to this day. Mother Theresa lived and died and is well on her way to sainthood. Nevertheless, saints are less important than they once were. They have lost their mainstream social role. And yet, the world still holds a spot in its heart, a saint spot.

Guns and the Pain Economy

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James Livingston in Jacobin:

Why do these young white male people whom we routinely characterize as crazy—as exceptions to the rules of civilized comportment and moral choice—always rehearse and recite the same script? If each killer is so deviant, so inexplicable, so exceptional, why does the apocalyptic ending never vary?

The answer is equally obvious. Because American culture makes this script—as against suicide, exile, incarceration, or oblivion—not just available but plausible, actionable, and pleasurable. Semiautomatic, you might say.

But mainly to young white male people who want to kill many other white people with sophisticated weapons. Their apocalyptic endings make their deeply private states of mental anguish and illness very public. These gunmen don’t understand their mission in these terms, but they do tell us that they represent something beyond their own lives and families when they take innocents with them rather than just killing themselves—when they behave like terrorists without a political cause. They’re mute symptoms in search of a social disease, a cultural diagnosis, and a political cure.

Adam Lanza dressed the part for his first and final shootout as a man without a calling: all black, all military. He wore a Kevlar vest, he taped extra magazines to his weapons, he moved and he killed systematically; he was ready for anything in his theater of war, an elementary school. He knew how he would die that day—he knew the SWAT team would arrive soon after he started shooting—but not exactly when. He was armed against his own fear, and he was desperate to make it known.

William James saw him coming in 1910. In a Protestant culture that had defined manhood and character as the result of real work—a calling—what would happen, he asked, when such work became elusive if not altogether unavailable? Would manhood survive? Or would war then become the principal means of rehabilitating the “masculine virtues”?

Update: Lindsay Beyerstein responds [h/t: es]:

You can't read Columbine and come away with the idea that the shooters are beyond moral judgement. They knew exactly what they were doing. Cullen sees degrees of responsibility. Harris was the leader and Klebold was the follower. Harris was a malevolent young man who was bent on violence for its own sake. Klebold was a disturbed young man who might have chosen a better path if he'd gotten help for his depression. Reading Columbine, you feel sad that Klebold made such a terrible choice, but there's no doubt that it was a choice, however badly depression may have clouded his judgement.

Livingston is trying to answer the perennial question: What are so many mass shooters young white men?

Livingston argues that mass shootings are a symptom of what he calls “the crisis of American masculinity.” He thinks that young men are turning to hypermasculine, militarized displays of violence because they can no longer aspire to the traditional macho role of breadwinner in an industrial economy.

Livingston doesn't provide any evidence to support the creeping emasculation theory. He notes that William James might have predicted this particular malaise, but that doesn't count as evidence. William James said a lot of things.

For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall

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A dispiriting piece in the NYT by Jason DeParle:

Low-income strivers face uphill climbs, especially at Ball High School, where a third of the girls’ class failed to graduate on schedule. But by the time the triplets donned mortarboards in the class of 2008, their story seemed to validate the promise of education as the great equalizer.

Angelica, a daughter of a struggling Mexican immigrant, was headed to Emory University. Bianca enrolled in community college, and Melissa left for Texas State University, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s alma mater.

“It felt like we were taking off, from one life to another,” Melissa said. “It felt like, ‘Here we go!’ ”

Four years later, their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality. Not one of them has a four-year degree. Only one is still studying full time, and two have crushing debts. Angelica, who left Emory owing more than $60,000, is a clerk in a Galveston furniture store.

Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net.

Books of the Year

James Wood in The New Yorker:

BookAn end-of-year bouquet like this one offers a chance to pick some flowers that I didn’t get to this year. So in addition to re-recommending some of the fiction I reviewed in the last twelve months (namely, Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the Bodies,” Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” Edward St. Aubyn’s “At Last,” and Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”), I want to mention two books of fiction that I wish I had written about. The first is “Four New Messages” (Graywolf Press), a collection of stories by Joshua Cohen. These were a revelation. I’d never read anything by Joshua Cohen, and I fear that I have no better excuse than laziness: his last book was an enormous, challenging, eight-hundred-page novel called “Witz” (Dalkey Archive). I was attracted by that novel’s title—Italo Svevo, one of my favorite novelists, was addicted to Witze, witty paradoxes and jokes, such as his response to Joyce’s apparently smug comment that he never used coarse language but only wrote it: “It would appear then that his works are not ones that could be read in his own presence.” But “enormous” and “challenging”—especially “enormous”—too often mean, alas, in a life with young children and teaching and writing, skimming the first few pages and replacing said book on the shelf with an embarrassed sigh… some day, some day.

…The second work of fiction that stood out was Zadie Smith’s “NW” (The Penguin Press). As everybody has commented, Smith has a restless, continuous relation with the novelistic tradition, and appears to be trying out different styles and forms in this new, Joycean / Woolfian / Dos Passos-ish work—first and third person, stream of consciousness, free, indirect style, dialogue written out like a screenplay, numbered vignettes, and so on. This seems to me pretty brave, because it risks alienating former readers who have just gotten comfy with her last work; and there is indeed something wonderful about encountering baffled responses to the book on Amazon, like this one: “I loved ‘On Beauty’ but could not get into this book… the writing style is so difficult it makes it not worth the effort.” The decentered and interrupted form feels right here, because this novel is trying to bring home a whale of a city, and to number the days of people who do not necessarily feel that they themselves possess an ordered internal calendar—who may feel, like Natalie, one of the protagonists, that they lack a continuous sense of self.

More here.

Nature’s 10: Ten people who mattered this year

From Nature:

Cynthia Rosenzweig: Guardian of Gotham

Cynthia_rosenweigAs Superstorm Sandy battered the US east coast this year, Cynthia Rosenzweig huddled with her 97-year-old mother in a suburb of New York City, not far from where she grew up. After making sure that her own home had sustained only minor damage, Rosenzweig turned her attention to the city, which had not been so lucky. Sandy had driven a 4-metre wall of water into low-lying neighbourhoods, destroying homes, flooding transportation tunnels and leaving millions of people without power. Although the damage came as a shock to most, Rosenzweig and a team of researchers had forecast those consequences a dozen years earlier as part of the first national assessment by the US Global Change Research Program. “Everything that happened is in our earliest report,” says Rosenzweig. Because of that work and many follow-on studies conducted for state and city officials, New York has incorporated climate-change adaptation and resilience into its long-term planning initiatives, which include upgrading building codes and managing parks and wetlands to accommodate flooding and sea-level rise. The actions have made New York a leader among cities working to prepare for the threats of climate change, says Rosenzweig. She is now trying to assess whether these steps helped to lessen Sandy’s impacts, which may offer a preview of the threats expected as climate change intensifies storms and raises sea levels.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Personal

Don’t take it personal, they said;

but I did, I took it all quite personal—
.
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
.
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
.
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
.
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
.
Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk
.
Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts
.
but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;
.
I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,
.
I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back
.
and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries
.
like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.
.
Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?
.
You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.
.
I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:
.
trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.
.

.
by Tony Hoagland
from Poetry, Vol. 194, No. 4, July/August, 2009

goodbye to the Mountains of Kong

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As some may recall, it was not so long ago that we got around by using maps that folded. Occasionally, if we wanted a truly global picture of our place in the world, we would pull shoulder-dislocating atlases from shelves. The world was bigger back then. Experience and cheaper travel have rendered it small, but nothing has shrunk the world more than digital mapping. In medieval Christian Europe, Jerusalem was the center of the world, the ultimate end of a religious pilgrimage. If we lived in China, that focal point was Youzhou. Later, in the days of European empire, it might be Britain or France. Today, by contrast, each of us now stands as an individual at the center of our own map worlds. On our computers and phones, we plot a route not from A to B but from ourselves (“Allow current location”) to anywhere of our choosing. Technology has enabled us to forget all about way-finding and geography. This is some change, and some loss. Maps have always related and realigned our history; increasingly, we’re ceding control of that history to the cold precision of the computer.

more from Simon Garfield at the WSJ here.

angels

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Even in the 21st century, then, angels matter. To many of us, perhaps, this can come as a surprise. Here in Britain, the ebbing of religious faith has combined with our insatiable taste for kitsch to desensitise us to the historic potency of angelology. Yet the ubiquity of angels in pop songs, on Christmas cards and in episodes of Dr Who tells its own story. “In our increasingly secular age, when the presence of angelic beings seems remote and unreal, angel imagery still holds an immense power of attraction.” So Valery Rees opens her new book, which aims to make sense of the dimension between heaven and earth, and to explain why so many people, for so long, have populated it with entire hosts of messengers. In pursuit of that goal, Rees flits across space and time with an aptly angelic facility. Ranging from ancient Sumeria to the novels of Philip Pullman, and from medieval scholasticism to Jungian theory, the breadth of her learning is formidable.

more from Tom Holland at The Guardian here.

state of the language

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Why is English spelling such a tangle? It all started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet. They had 23. (They didn’t have “j”, “u” or “w”.) Yet the Germanic Anglo-Saxon languages had at least 37 phonemes, or distinctive sounds. The Romans didn’t have a letter, for example, for the Anglo-Saxon sound we spell “th”. The problem continues. Most English-speakers today have, depending on their accents, 40 phonemes, which we have to render using 26 letters. So, we use stratagems such as doubling vowels to elongate them, as in “feet” and “fool”. With the Norman invasion in 1066, spelling became more complicated still; French and Latin words rushed into the language. As the centuries went by, scribes found ways of reflecting the sounds people used with the letters that they had. They lengthened vowels by adding a final “e”, so that we could tell “hope” from “hop”.

more from Michael Skapinker at the FT here.

The Placebo Phenomenon

From Harvard Magazine:

PlaceboTwo weeks into Ted Kaptchuk’s first randomized clinical drug trial, nearly a third of his 270 subjects complained of awful side effects. All the patients had joined the study hoping to alleviate severe arm pain: carpal tunnel, tendinitis, chronic pain in the elbow, shoulder, wrist. In one part of the study, half the subjects received pain-reducing pills; the others were offered acupuncture treatments. And in both cases, people began to call in, saying they couldn’t get out of bed. The pills were making them sluggish, the needles caused swelling and redness; some patients’ pain ballooned to nightmarish levels. “The side effects were simply amazing,” Kaptchuk explains; curiously, they were exactly what patients had been warned their treatment might produce. But even more astounding, most of the other patients reported real relief, and those who received acupuncture felt even better than those on the anti-pain pill. These were exceptional findings: no one had ever proven that acupuncture worked better than painkillers. But Kaptchuk’s study didn’t prove it, either. The pills his team had given patients were actually made of cornstarch; the “acupuncture” needles were retractable shams that never pierced the skin. The study wasn’t aimed at comparing two treatments. It was designed to compare two fakes. Although Kaptchuk, an associate professor of medicine, has spent his career studying these mysterious human reactions, he doesn’t argue that you can simply “think yourself better.” “Sham treatment won’t shrink tumors or cure viruses,” he says. But researchers have found that placebo treatments—interventions with no active drug ingredients—can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson’s.

The challenge now, says Kaptchuk, is to uncover the mechanisms behind these physiological responses—what is happening in our bodies, in our brains, in the method of placebo delivery (pill or needle, for example), even in the room where placebo treatments are administered (are the physical surroundings calming? is the doctor caring or curt?). The placebo effect is actually many effects woven together—some stronger than others—and that’s what Kaptchuk hopes his “pill versus needle” study shows. The experiment, among the first to tease apart the components of placebo response, shows that the methods of placebo administration are as important as the administration itself, he explains. It’s valuable insight for any caregiver: patients’ perceptions matter, and the ways physicians frame perceptions can have significant effects on their patients’ health.

More here.

Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?

Paul Elie in The New York Times:

A seminary student has an affair with an insurance adjuster he met in an office building near Riverside Church; then they go their separate ways — and that’s the whole story. A collective of Dumpster-diving dropouts follows an “Anarchristian” creed on the edge of a student ghetto, and in the novel about them the faith is as sloppy as the sex. In The New Yorker, a novelist describes his best seller as a work about free will written from a Catholic perspective — but the novelist is Anthony Burgess, dead almost 20 years, and his essay (about “A Clockwork Orange”) is a lecture exhumed from 1973. This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground. So are works of fiction about the quan­daries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in the United States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new ­occupants.

It’s a strange development. Strange because the current upheavals in American Christianity — involving sex, politics, money and diversity — cry out for ­dramatic treatment. Strange because upheavals in Christianity across the Atlantic gave rise to great fiction from “The Brothers Karamazov” to “Brideshead Revisited.” Strange because novelists are depicting the changing lives of American Jews and Muslims with great success.

More here.

Saturday Poem

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

.
by Rumi

Silencing the Science on Gun Research

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Arthur L. Kellermann and Frederick P. Rivara in JAMA (via Doug Henwood) (images from Wikimedia Commons):

Decades of research have been devoted to understanding the factors that lead some people to commit violence against themselves or others. Substantially less has been done to understand how easy access to firearms mitigates or amplifies both the likelihood and consequences of these acts.

For example, background checks have an effect on inappropriate procurement of guns from licensed dealers, but private gun sales require no background check. Laws mandating a minimum age for gun ownership reduce gun fatalities, but firearms still pass easily from legal owners to juveniles and other legally proscribed individuals, such as felons or persons with mental illness. Because ready access to guns in the home increases, rather than reduces, a family's risk of homicide in the home, safe storage of guns might save lives. Nevertheless, many gun owners, including gun-owning parents, still keep at least one firearm loaded and readily available for self-defense.

The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.

To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out.

Why Nate Silver is Not Just Wrong, but Maliciously Wrong

Signal and Noise “It does require maturity to realize that models are to be used, but not to be believed” – Henri Theil

Cathy O’Neil argues that Nate Silver is wrong over at Naked Capitalism (via Alyssa Pelish):

I have major problems with this book and what it claims to explain. In fact, I’m angry.

It would be reasonable for Silver to tell us about his baseball models, which he does. It would be reasonable for him to tell us about political polling and how he uses weights on different polls to combine them to get a better overall poll. He does this as well. He also interviews a bunch of people who model in other fields, like meteorology and earthquake prediction, which is fine, albeit superficial.

What is not reasonable, however, is for Silver to claim to understand how the financial crisis was a result of a few inaccurate models, and how medical research need only switch from being frequentist to being Bayesian to become more accurate.

Let me give you some concrete examples from his book.

Easy First Example: Credit Rating Agencies

The ratings agencies, which famously put AAA ratings on terrible loans, and spoke among themselves as being willing to rate things that were structured by cows, did not accidentally have bad underlying models. The bankers packaging and selling these deals, which amongst themselves they called sacks of shit, did not blithely believe in their safety because of those ratings.

Rather, the entire industry crucially depended on the false models. Indeed they changed the data to conform with the models, which is to say it was an intentional combination of using flawed models and using irrelevant historical data (see points 64-69 here for more).

In baseball, a team can’t create bad or misleading data to game the models of other teams in order to get an edge. But in the financial markets, parties to a model can and do.

Rio goes its own way, and Brazil reluctantly follows

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‘My God,’ I thought, completely absorbed by my role as astronaut stranded on a hostile planet, ‘I’ll never get inside this implacable city. It’s too big, too alien.’ I don’t think I’ll ever forget my ride in that car whose destination I’d forgotten or which at least had stopped mattering to me. I have to say the therapy did work over the long run, and it was perhaps at that moment when it began to work. It was also exactly then that I began to love Rio, falling flat on top of the hard nucleus of disconsolation it hides: that mixture, that inhumanity, probably transforms it into the most terribly human city in the world. Of course, I ended up living there for two years. Myriad times, later on, I traced that same route in both directions: on foot, on a bike, in my own car or other people’s cars, in taxis that no longer seemed headed directly to hell or limbo. Later I learned to call each neighbourhood by its own name, to recognize in each one the buildings and windows of friends, to recognize my favourite buildings, which were also friends – and there are so many beautiful buildings in Rio, the city with the most joyous architecture of the twentieth century.

more from Javier Montes at Granta here.

Aisha’s Cushion

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In ‘Among School Children’, W B Yeats wrote that ‘Both nuns and mothers worship images’, a line calculated to send shudders of outrage down the spine of any zealous dogmatist, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim. To worship an image is to engage in idolatry; it is to see a divine presence embodied in an object made by human hands. Nevertheless, as Jamal J Elias shows in considerable detail in Aisha’s Cushion, his engrossing study of figural representation in the Islamic tradition, the issue is far more ambiguous and nuanced than Biblical or Koranic condemnations of idolatry might suggest. In fact, even these condemnations are not always what they seem to be. Are idols to be smashed because they are false gods or because they are the ‘wrong’ gods – that is, gods in competition with the ‘right’ god? With regard to the subtler and more intricate subject of icons, are these to be seen as spiritual ‘windows’ opening onto a transcendent realm, and to be venerated as such, or are they idols in camouflage, worshipped for their own sakes (and not only by ‘nuns and mothers’)? As Elias rightly notes, in the end, and perhaps perversely, it is the iconoclasts themselves who ‘are the ultimate affirmers of the power of images’.

more from Eric Ormsby at Literary Review here.