Locating Value in the Natural World

by Michael Lopresto

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The idea of objective value has come into disrepute in some quarters. We have an image of the natural world, well defined by physics—a world of mostly empty space filled sparsely with unimaginably tiny objects (an umbrella term for particles, fields and waves) that are governed in law-like ways. Indeed, this world, given precise definition and overwhelming empirical support, is often thought to be radically different to the world we know from experience—the world of vibrant colours and sounds, tastes and smells. The fact that our perception of the world seems to be so profoundly impoverished has led many to despair at the prospects of genuine knowledge of the world. So, this line of reasoning goes, the natural world given to us by physics has absolutely no room for objective values, as pure “atoms in the void” exhaust all of reality.

I think this line of reasoning is wrong, and shows the desperate need for philosophers to make sense of the natural world as defined by physics, with our place as human beings firmly as part of that natural world. To use a term from Wilfrid Sellars, it's the job of philosophers to navigate the way between the scientific image and the manifest image of the world. The scientific image is the “atoms in the void” picture of reality, where ordinary objects like tables and chairs are really just near-empty lattice like structures of atoms. The manifest image is what is presented to us in experience, where tables and chairs are solid objects, we have rich conscious experiences of music that touches us deeply, and, as I'll be focusing on in the remainder of this essay, objective values that bind on us whether we like it or not.

In his superb book, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (1998), the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson develops some tools for navigating our way between the scientific image and the manifest image.

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HOMELAND INSECURITY

by Brooks Riley

142578_image_37955-cropWhat happens when an Israeli prisoner of war comes home after 17 years in a Lebanese prison? He gets interned by his own people to find out if he’s been ‘turned’ during all those years with the enemy. What happens when a US prisoner of war comes home after 8 years in captivity? He becomes a congressman! Only in America.

The difference between these two destinies illustrates perfectly what is so right about Hatufim (Prisoners of War), the magnificent Israeli TV series, and what is so wrong about Homeland, the strident, glossy, walnut-decorated US remake which Der Spiegel has described as “hysterical CIA agents in a hysterical country,”

7455564,property=imageData,v=3,CmPart=com.arte-tv.wwwI can’t blame Gideon Raff, creator, writer and director of Hatufim for selling his idea to Hollywood, but I have to wonder what he was thinking as co-scriptwriter of Homeland‘s pilot episode. His own Hatufim is a riveting piece of television verité which unfolds in an atmosphere of quiet, desperate ongoing disambiguation. Its characters are far removed from the cookie-cutter casting principles of Hollywood TV, its walking wounded and their eclectic circle of friends and family all persevering without benefit of make-up or break-down, their voices rarely raised in anger, horror or outrage. As a drama, it seethes below the surface, the fear and uncertainty discernible and deeply discomforting. I can’t wait to see the second season.

Homeland, on the other hand, can’t seem to rise above a worn-out, predictable post-9/11 scenario. To add some spice, it features bi-polar disorder as a gimmick, and mania as a vehicle for facial contortions and histrionics. Watching Claire Danes as Carrie saving the nation, you can almost hear the director say, ‘C’mon Claire, give me a grimace!’ What John Lahr (in a New Yorker puff piece) called her ‘volcanic performances’ and others, her ‘tsunami of emotion’, come across as Mt. Aetna in a teacup, in-your-face close-ups of wide eyes and twitches to make sure Carrie’s pathology gets across to the viewer.

I had seen Claire Danes only once, in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, where she gave a fine performance. To give her the benefit of the doubt, her performance in Homeland may have had more to do with directorial overkill than a deficit of talent.

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Epic Malaise, Bro! How ‘epic’ lost its meaning — and what it means for the fate of humanity

by Ben Schreckinger

This past November, they held the sixth annual EPIC Summit in Toledo. As the name implies, it was “a day of career-enhancing training and networking.” Epic!Hubert_Maurer_-_Circe_und_Odysseus

Use of the word “epic” has exploded in recent years, but the incidence of actual epic things has not. Now, as likely as not, “epic” refers to the quotidian, the small, and the mundane Need proof? Take the actual first result in my Twitter search for #EpicFail: “Just realised I forgot to buy crumpets for breakfast in the morning….so no toasted buttery crumpets for me!! Boo! #epicfail.” Some of my friends work for a company called Epic Systems. It does health care IT. I’ve been eating at a food hall in Dublin that advertises its epic club sandwich. It’s no wonder the top definition of epic on Urban Dictionary calls it “the most overused word ever… Everything is epic now.” Something has gone terribly wrong.

It’s past time to add “epic” to the sad list of words that have come to mean what they don’t mean. The Oxford English Dictionary caused an uproar this summer when the press discovered it had expanded its definition of “literally” to also mean figuratively — because that’s how people now use it. That redefinition was a defeat for language purists in their battle against sloppy usage. But the bastardization of epic signals something far graver: the inescapable malaise of post-industrial existence.

The world of the true epic is one of famine and feast, terrifying monsters and awesome deities. It conveys the mysteries of the wild unknown and the joy of emerging from it to rediscover the comforts of hearth and home. The epic’s grand scale reflects the awe with which its characters view a world whose grandeur they can’t contemplate. In other words, the world of the epic is the opposite of New York City, where the diners stay open 24 hours and the drug dealers deliver. The epic hero is the opposite of the modern knowledge worker, for whom the closest thing to an existential struggle is a battle for market share. After the sack of Troy, Odysseus was lost for 20 years before he returned home to Ithaka. Now we have GPS. It’s hard to imagine The Odyssey with iPhones.

Odysseus: Hey babe, I totally killed the presentation enemy today. Looks like I’ll be home late though. Google Maps is showing some traffic on the Aegean.

Penelope: Pls hurry! These suitors are making me nervous.

Odysseus: Umm, uninstall Tinder? LOL.

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The dangers of ethical thought experiments

by Carl Pierer

159999773“Yes, I would let the five people die.”

To philosophers, and I mean to include all people interested in philosophical questions, this is a pretty standard response to a pretty well-known thought experiment: The Trolley Problem. But it is not only in philosophy that you get very uncanny scenarios when trying to clarify an idea by applying it theoretically. These thought experiments play an important role in fields as diverse as physics and arts, mathematics and literature, but the most infamous ones are probably to be found in philosophy, and in ethics particularly. Not only are they notorious, but in fact they face two challenges, which easily turn into dangers should we ignore them and base our argument on them.

First of all, thought experiments have to be distinguished from metaphors, since they serve different purposes. At first sight it might seem that they are poles apart. However, Dennett writes: “If you look at the history of philosophy, you see that all the great and influential stuff has been technically full of holes but utterly memorable and vivid. They are (…) lovely thought experiments. Like Plato's cave, and Descartes's evil demon, and Hobbes' vision of the state of nature and the social contract, and even Kant's idea of the categorical imperative.” Dennett here conflates a variety of famous philosophical scenarios under the heading “thought experiments”. Yet the structure of Plato's cave is completely different from Descartes's evil demon. In Plato's case there is no new knowledge gained. It is not a hypothetical scenario of how the world might be, but rather a more literary expression of how it actually is. The philosopher's ascent from the cave is figurative and an it does not serve the purpose of drawing some conclusion from this view, but rather to embrace the general idea that this is the philosophers' condition. It is a picture, an illustration of his idea rather than a method to develop a new belief. Descartes, on the other hand, imagines an evil demon who brings about a very sophisticated illusion of reality, making us think that all our experiences are real while they are merely his creations. It is an application of radical scepticism. Once we hypothetically accept this scenario Descartes asks whether any of our pre-demonic knowledge still stands. The difference between Plato's cave and Descartes's demon is that the former is a mere illustration of an idea. The latter, in contrast, serves to provide some new insight. Therefore, I propose to distinguish between thought experiments and metaphors. The purpose of the former has to be a more rigid one than that of the latter. We use thought experiments to test what happens if we apply our theoretical ideas. Its similarity to actual experiments should not be ignored. We peruse those hypothetical results, and only if we can accept them are we ready to accept a theory.

However, more often than not, thought experiments are used the other way round. Hypothetical scenarios are invented in such a way that our theories fail to deliver what is expected of them.

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On Reading Emerson as a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl

by Mara Naselli

“A foolish consistency,” Emerson famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I memorized this line in high school. It was one of those Emersonian zingers that gave me momentary purchase in my otherwise bewildered adolescent state. Nothing cohered in those days. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged. Literature might have been a consolation, but reading required a concentration I was often too depleted to muster. But that line—that line I held onto. How delightful the feel of hobgoblin—the labial b, glottal g and l, the nasal n rolling back and forth in the mouth like a marble.

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I hadn’t lived long enough to understand what Emerson meant by consistency, nor did I realize hobgoblins were both dreaded and amusing, petty little troublemakers. To my ear it was the sound of imbecility—the perfect word to describe my small suburban world that alternately objectified and ignored me. Though I hardly noticed, that sprite of a line was making light of my seriousness, skipping along with its arms swinging, like a nursery rhyme: “adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It was once practically an American rite of passage to read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in high school. Its forcefulness seemed to affirm the abundance around us. We lived in new suburbs, on land that not so long before had been open fields, and before that wooded plains. Subdivisions and gleaming, glassy shopping malls sprang up with the confidence of new money—our twentieth-century Manifest Destiny. Our world was contained within brick facades and putty-colored siding on streets with names like Kensington Cross and Buckingham Place. Bright curbs, smooth black pavement—but no sidewalks, so as not to disturb the “colonial feel.” From my Middle America blossomed entitlement and palliative consumption. Our parents had arrived. A daughter of affluence was expected to display the fruits of her parents’ achievement. Short skirts, school spirit, an absurd accumulation of extracurricular activities—the only appropriate response at the time seemed to be a feminine compliance. A silence, really. I had no language yet with which to reject the dumbing effects of material comfort.

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Muse

by Maniza Naqvi Fool's Hat

I'm in turmoil when he is there but always sorry when it is time to let him go. And why not, he is after all, such a complicated man; a beautiful man. He would have to be. After all– I have created him. Quintessential: American hero. The one, everyone hates but never quite as much as he hates himself. Still, still—certainly not as much as I, hate him. Love will do that, you know.

So, a beautiful man, my creation: gone. Gone, until, he resurfaces again suddenly. And he always has these past so many decades when the news has been and is all about dictatorships, war and the violence of subverting whole societies and I have traveled for work to places torn by war or about to be. And in this time alongside the work, and witnessing the world and watching BBC and CNN— I have written poetry and fiction. But the time for this has been limited for I am overwhelmed with visits to villages and planning and designing programs to tackle misery and poverty.

So the time I have spent with him can be stacked up as a few short chapters or even dots on the point of a pin—in relation to his and my entire lives and yet in hindsight those moments seemed to be in emotional volume disproportionately more meaningful than all the others. When he leaves, as he always does, he says: Hope to see you at some point. What point might that be? I have always asked. Those points—in the past have been scattered. Each point, in the moment, as is the point of all of this, was all that there was at that point—and breathlessly all that mattered—as in, without full stops and commas, without pauses—the time spent with him, in the margins of moleskins was always, constant and seamless. And in hindsight was always pointless.

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Sea battles, beasties in the blood, and the summer of 1665

by Charlie Huenemann

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Battle of Lowestoft, June 1665 (artist unknown)

In the summer and autumn of 1665, a German expatriate in London exchanged a series of fascinating letters with a renegade Dutch Jew. The expatriate was Henry Oldenburg, who was serving as secretary of the newly-formed Royal Society of London. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge – which, if formed today, probably would be styled far less handsomely as “RS-LINK” – was a science club of sorts. It provided gentlemen with the occasion to assemble and share their discoveries, puzzlements, and wonders – without their conversation degenerating into disputes over politics and religion. In the earliest history of the Society, Thomas Sprat described it as a respite from insanity: “Their first purpose was no more, then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age”.

It was Henry Oldenburg's job to chronicle the Society's discussions and discoveries and publish them in the Transactions. He served also as their PR man, promoting the Society to scientists and intellectuals across Europe. This latter service he did perform with dedication: in the year 1665 alone, he sent out 49 letters and received 66, and these numbers doubled over the following years. Curiously, the letters he received were addressed not to him, but to “Monsieur Grubendol”. More about that in a minute.

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In praise of drones

by Dave Maier

10ambient.450Drones seem to be in the news lately, with much negative commentary. Now, I can understand those brought up on classical and pop music wanting harmonic movement in their music, but it's not like drones are a crime against humanity. In any case (Emily Litella to the white courtesy phone) I haven't done any new podcasts in a while, so let's head out to the drone zone for another look.

Earlier posts in this series: here, here, here, and see also here (scroll down).

Our first set is another time capsule, mostly from the glorious 1970s.

1. Heldon – Virgin Swedish Blues (Heldon III)

Heldon is guitarist and synthesist Richard Pinhas with occasional help from others, the Continental counterpart to Robert Fripp's King Crimson. This track, from 1975 or so (check the hairstyles on the cover if there is any doubt of this), is an overt hommage to Fripp & Eno, but that distinctive guitar tells us who it really is. Some early Heldon is a bit raw for effective spatial journeying, but this one is right out there. Some of you may know Pinhas from that bizarre Lingua Franca article in which we hear how Pinhas so freaked out Philip K. Dick that the latter was moved to alert the FBI. True story!

Heldon

2. Tonto's Expanding Headband – Riversong (Zero Time)

Not that Tonto (which interestingly enough means “stupid” in Italian), but TONTO: The Original New Timbral Orchestra, a titanic bank of electronics assembled by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. They – and it – are best known for their work with Stevie Wonder on a string of classic 1970s albums (e.g. Talking Book and Innervisions), but they put out some music of their own as well. I'm not convinced by some of the compositions, but this track is a stunner. Incidentally, Tonto has a new home.

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Africa Attacks the International Criminal Court

Kenneth Roth in the New York Review of Books:

Roth_1-020614_jpg_600x629_q85What are we to make of the fact that in its eleven-year history, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has prosecuted only Africans? Should the court be condemned for discrimination—for taking advantage of Africa’s weak global position—as some African leaders contend? Or should it be applauded for giving long-overdue attention to atrocities in Africa—a sign that finally someone is concerned about the countless ignored African victims, as many African activists contend? This debate is at the heart of one of the most serious challenges the ICC has ever faced. If the current attack on it succeeds, the court’s future may be in doubt.

The ICC was founded in 2002, under a treaty negotiated at a global conference in Rome, as an independent judicial body that would challenge impunity for the gravest international crimes—genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Unlike the International Court of Justice, which is also based in The Hague but settles legal disputes between states, the International Criminal Court addresses mass atrocities committed by individuals. To avoid prosecution, ruthless national leaders too often threaten, corrupt, or compromise judges and prosecutors at home, but those in The Hague should be beyond the reach of such obstructionism. The ICC is meant as a court of last resort for victims and survivors who cannot find justice in their own country and as a deterrent to leaders who have little to fear from domestic prosecution. The court has now been accepted by 122 states. The United States has not joined it out of fear that Americans might be prosecuted.

More here.

The effect of today’s technology on tomorrow’s jobs will be immense—and no country is ready for it

From The Economist:

ScreenHunter_463 Jan. 19 16.43Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.

Why be worried? It is partly just a matter of history repeating itself. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital; later on, labour reaped most of the benefits. The pattern today is similar. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.

Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

More here.

Follow-up: The Infinite Series and the Mind-Blowing Result

Phil Plait in Slate:

Infiniteseries_question.jpg.CROP.original-originalYesterday, I posted an article about a math video that showed how you can sum up an infinite series of numbers to get a result of, weirdly enough, -1/12.

A lot of stuff happened after I posted it. Some people were blown away by it, and others… not so much. A handful of mathematicians were less than happy with what I wrote, and even more were less than happy with the video. I got a few emails, a lot of tweets, and some very interesting conversations out of it.

I decided to write a follow-up post because I try to correct errors when I make them, and shine more light on a problem if it needs it. There are multiple pathways to take here (which is ironic because that’s actually part of the problem with the math). Therefore this post is part 1) update, 2) correction, 3) and mea culpa, with a defense (hopefully without being defensive).

Let me take a moment to explain right away. No, there is too much. Let me sum up*:

1) The infinite series in the video (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 …) can in fact be tackled using a rigorous mathematical method, and can in fact be assigned a value of -1/12! This method is quite real, and very useful. And yes, the weirdness of it is brain melting.

2) The method used in the video to write out some series and manipulate them algebraically is actually not a great way to figure this problem out. It uses a trick that’s against the rules, so strictly speaking it doesn’t work. It’s a nice demo to show some fun things, but its utility is questionable at best.

3) I had my suspicions about the method used in the video, but suppressed them. That was a mistake.

More here.

Eminent scientist Lewis Wolpert sorry for using others’ work

Nicola Davis in The Observer:

ScreenHunter_462 Jan. 19 16.32Professor Lewis Wolpert, the eminent developmental biologist and author, has admitted incorporating unattributed text from a variety of sources in his recent popular science books.

Published by Faber and Faber in 2011, You're Looking Very Well was described as exploring “the scientific and social implications of ourageing population in an engaging, witty and frank investigation tackling every aspect, from ageism to euthanasia to anti-ageing cream”.

It has been found, however, to contain more than 20 passages that have been taken directly from academic papers, websites and Wikipedia with no indication that they were penned by any author other than Wolpert himself. The book has now been withdrawn from sale.

A champion of the popularisation of science, Wolpert, a fellow of the Royal Society, is a former chairman of the society's committee on the public understanding of science. He has written on issues such as the origins of belief, embryonic development and depression, from which he himself has suffered.

Wolpert has faced a previous claim of lifting paragraphs from other people's work. An investigation last April into a review copy of his forthcoming book Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man? also found passages taken from uncredited sources, leading to publication being suspended shortly before its release date. The book was rescheduled for release in May this year.

More here.

Hanif Kureishi: ‘Every 10 years you become someone else’

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

Hanif-at-home-001The first time I met Hanif Kureishi it was the mid-80s, and we talked about writing fiction for Faber and Faber whose list I was directing. Kureishi came into my office like a rock star and I remember thinking that he did not seem in need of a career move. He was already riding high on the international success of his screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette.

…His new novel, however, The Last Word, returns him to his personal hinterland. Mamoon Azam is an eminent novelist who has authorised an ambitious younger writer, Harry Johnson, to undertake his biography, in the hope that it will rescue his career and reputation. The idea that the end of a life is as interesting as its beginning is a fruitful one, with echoes of the relationship between VS Naipaul and his biographer Patrick French. But, at heart, it's really a commentary on the complicated inner turmoil of Kureishi's own career. As usual, the epigrammatic Kureishi has a good line in good lines. There are sharp asides about England, (a “wilderness of monkeys”), and art (“anything good has to be a little pornographic”), with references to Orwell, Johnny Rotten and Wodehouse. Mamoon is an engaging monster, drawn from Kureishi's grandfather, but also an idealisation of Kureishi's alter ego, an internationally respected literary man. The closing lines of the novel tell us all we need to know about Kureishi's current self-image: “He'd been a writer, a maker of worlds, a teller of important truths. This was a way of changing things, of living well, and creating freedom.”

More here.

The Humanities and Us

Heather MacDonald in City Journal:

ClassicsIt is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report, cochaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57 percent of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic Ωclosure≈ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley? No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages. The American Founders drew on an astonishingly wide range of historical sources and an appropriately jaundiced view of human nature to craft the world’s most stable and free republic. They invoked lessons learned from the Greek city-states, the Carolingian Dynasty, and the Ottoman Empire in the Constitution’s defense. And they assumed that the new nation’s citizens would themselves be versed in history and political philosophy. Indeed, a closer knowledge among the electorate of Hobbes and the fragility of social order might have prevented the more brazen social experiments that we’ve undergone in recent years. Ignorance of the intellectual trajectory that led to the rule of law and the West’s astounding prosperity puts those achievements at risk.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: a man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, knows none of this.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Three Cold Mountain Poems

1.

Don’t you know the poems of Han-shan?
They’re better for you than scripture-reading.
Cut them out and paste them on a screen,
Then you can gaze at them from time to time

2.

A thousand clouds, ten thousand streams,
Here I live, an idle man,
Roaming green peaks by day,
Back to sleep by cliffs at night.
One by one, springs and autumns go,
Free of heat and dust, my mind.
Sweet to know there’s nothing I need,
Silent as the autumn river’s flood.
.
3.

Thirty years in this world

I wandered ten thousand miles,
By rivers, buried deep in grass,
In borderlands, where red dust flies.
Tasted drugs, still not Immortal,
Read books, wrote histories.
Now I’m back at Cold Mountain,
Head in the stream, cleanse my ears.

.
by Han-Shan
translation, A.S. Kline 2006

We are all living Pasolini’s Theorem

Pepe Escobar in Asia Times:

ScreenHunter_460 Jan. 18 16.17In the early morning of November 2, 1975, in Idroscalo, a terminally dreadful shanty town in Ostia, outside Rome, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, then 53, an intellectual powerhouse and one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, was found badly beaten and run over by his own Alfa Romeo.

It was hard to conceive a more stunning, heartbreaking, modern mix of Greek tragedy with Renaissance iconography; in a bleak setting straight out of a Pasolini film, the author himself was immolated just like his main character in Mamma Roma (1962) lying in prison in the manner of the Dead Christ, aka theLamentation of Christ, by Andrea Mantegna.

This might have been a gay tryst gone terribly wrong; a 17-year-old low life was charged with murder, but the young man was also linked with the Italian neo-fascists. The true story has never emerged. What did emerge is that “the new Italy” – or the aftereffects of a new capitalist revolution – killed Pasolini.

Pasolini could only reach for the stars after graduating in literature from Bologna University – the oldest in the world – in 1943. Today, a Pasolini is utterly unthinkable. He would be something like an UFIO (unidentified flying intellectual object); the total intellectual – poet, dramatist, painter, musician, fiction writer, literary theorist, filmmaker and political analyst.

For educated Italians, he was essentially a poet (what a huge compliment that meant, decades ago …) In his masterpiece The Ashes of Gramsci (1952), Pasolini draws a striking parallel, in terms of striving for a heroic ideal, between Gramsci and Shelley – who happen to be buried in the same cemetery in Rome. Talk about poetic justice.

More here.