Category Archives: Rationalism

I rarely read memoirs. I find personal excavation unsettling, a little too raw in its most original form but too packaged when well-edited. But Rachel Krantzs book ensnared me. Alive and pulsing with insight and self-reflexivity, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy creates an intricate portrait of a vibrant woman lost and found. I chased my roommates in and out of rooms reading out applicable dog eared portions. I saw myself, my queer friends and my straight friends in the novel. A word that comes to mind is parity, despite the distance of race, family and job experience.

Rachel Krantz is a journalist and co-founder of Bustle, who practices non-monogamy an agreed upon, consensual relationship where individuals in a relationship can seek other partners. In her memoir, Krantz seeks to understand her place in both an abusive relationship and in white supremacist power structures.

In a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily, Krantz echoed the novels introduction. Writing the book was an exercise in being the most vulnerable persons in the room and an attempt to understand how (getting lost in her relationship) happened and kind of retrace (her) steps.

Open encompasses five years of Krantzs adult life, following her introduction to Adam, a charismatic man, and through him, non-monogamous relationships. The narrative traces the development of their relationship and his extensive gaslighting. The book is structured chronologically to treat Krantz as the investigative subject in an asymmetrical relationship, providing frequent footnotes that break the fourth wall. Primary sources like typed journal entries and recording transcripts are included as tools to help readers investigate alongside Krantz as her exciting romance devolves.

Rather than be a passive subject, Krantz falls back into her usual position as an intrepid interviewer. She is too vivacious a narrator, too quick and clever a writer to let her life be the novels only subject. While readers are busy putting together the warning signs of abuse, Krantz flashes her own insecurities about her queerness and positionality in the peripheral. Its a brilliantly employed and aggressively engrossing tactic. By the midpoint of the book, the readers find themselves at a mental table opposite of Krantz, questioning the binaries they subscribe to and what liberation looks like for them.

The novel frames ideas and anecdotes through critical feminist frameworks, making reading a treasure hunt for theory and its application in the real world. Krantz is a product of elite institutions (though she does not name or reference her alma mater, NYU, in the novel) and as good practice, frequently signposts her positions and privilege. To her humility and credit, despite being an award-winning journalist, her memoir barely references her professional success. But perhaps because of Krantzs past in journalism, scenes featuring Krantzs queer friends and cosmopolitan lifestyle feel like more than incidental visits; through Krantz and her connections, the reader receives an insight into inclusive queer spaces, guided by a wonderfully expansive accepting network. In sum, the vignettes transform the novel into a conversation that branches out and touches on a great many things other than just non-normative sex and relationships.

While reading, more about Krantz herself emerges, keeping her equally as compelling as the broader narrative. The realizations mimic the constant self-reflective and self-reflexive thinking Krantz anxiously cycles through as she struggles with questions of hierarchy, whiteness and womanhood. In a novel supposedly all about her non-monogamous lifestyle and experience being gaslit by a long-term romantic partner, she seamlessly interjects theses about biphobia and power structures before hitting readers with her own lucid considerations of queer imposter syndrome and what it means to be liberated in the 21st century.

Krantz comments that there is an under representation and dismissal of (bisexuality) with gatekeeping within the queer community. If youre a woman who, like me, has always had these feelings, but youve only dated men seriously, it can have this effect where its like no one believes you, and so, then you start to not believe yourself.

In her novel, Krantz constantly references new literature and reevaluates how an individual can live in an overdetermined, oppressive world without upholding the patriarchy and other oppressive systems.

And this is not an accident. Rather, its through these power structures and critical theories that Krantz processes life. During our conversation, Krantz articulates how learning about anti-racism and power structures influenced how she processed her relationship with Adam.

Learning throughout the last few years a lot more about how to be anti-racist and also just the kind of traits of white supremacy culture, Krantz said, provided a lens (through which) to view my relationship with Adam.

She also noted paternalism, rationalism, either/or binary thinking, the idea that progress is bigger or more, worship of the written word, and a disavowal of the emotional all fall under the cultural umbrella of white supremacy. Though patriarchy does not only exist in white supremacy culture, it is a trait of white supremacy.

Reading Krantz felt like getting coffee with the right side of my brain, if it were smarter and more well-read. Rather than salacious, this memoir about sex, queerness and non-monogamy felt comfortable and inclusive. Krantz successfully made a space for me and my life and others between her vivid narration and asterisked advice and notations.

Daily Arts Writer Elizabeth Yoon can be reached atelizyoon@umich.edu.

Link:

A Conversation with Rachel Krantz, author of 'Open' - The Michigan Daily

Books are always arriving at the wrong time in Olga Tokarczuks The Books Of Jacob. The 18th-century Eastern Europe and Mediterranean through which this novel charts its course is a thoroughly multilingual environment. Its not uncommon for characters to juggle Polish, German, Yiddish, Turkish, and Ruthenian within a single conversation. Accordingly, writing moves at a much slower pace, and printing is often a matter of great personal cost. Official edicts take years before theyre translated into popular language, and heretical books are subject to censure and often burned. The Books Of Jacob also details prescient volumes that arrive too soon, and for that amount to prophecy. Its appropriate then, that it should take a monumental amount of time, and deft translation work from Jennifer Croft, for this 965-page novel, which first appeared in the authors native Poland in 2014, to make its way into English.

It comes with the recommendation of the Nobel Committee for Literaturewhich, in another example of bibliographic mistiming, retroactively awarded Tokarczuk the 2018 prize a year late, due to resignations at the Swedish Academy amid a #MeToo scandal. In the Anglosphere, little of Tokarczuks work had been made widely available at that time, and most reporting on the prize was devoted instead to 2019 laureate Peter Handkes controversial support for Slobodan Miloevi. The Books Of Jacob appearing now feels like a long-promised setting to rights, an occasion for English readers to experience a genuine global artistic event: the publication of a genre-broadening contribution to the historical novel.

For her subject matter Tokarczuk takes on the real-world figure of Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who, beginning in the 1750s, claimed to be a messiah before leading his followers down a path of mysticism, apostasy, and often-dangerous adventure. Believed to be a reincarnation of the previous messianic claimant, Sabbatai Tzvi, Jacob Frank preaches a doctrine of liberation from the Talmud, Mosaic Law, and nearly every other cornerstone of conventional Jewish faith. In extraordinary times, according to Franks teaching, it falls to the messiah to transgress the old law and so herald the new. Scandalously, the Frankists convert to Christianity and face excommunication from the Jewish community. Only shortly thereafter, theyre accused of Christian heresy, and Frank is put in front of a tribunal. Religious disputation and changing political winds then find these true believers alternately embraced, embattled, imprisoned, or on the road within the roughly 40-year span of The Books Of Jacobs principal action.

The magic of the novel is that an encyclopedically researched account of a fringe schismatic denomination from nearly three centuries ago should feel so wildly contemporary. At times, the long and abstract asides on Kabbalism can seem remote from modern readers concerns. But when the true believers establish their communitarian peasants republic on the site of a town abandoned by its previous inhabitants after a bout of plague, something of our own times apocalypse is brought into relief. The Books Of Jacob is studded with similarly affecting moments, in which both the proximity and the distance of the past are thrillingly, simultaneously affirmed.

In a certain sense, Tokarczuk is concerned with letting you see the sweat on her product. The book concludes with a note on sources, and every period detail reads as faultlessly placed. The Books Of Jacob projects verisimilitude. Simultaneously, fictional composites exist alongside the historical personalities. Novelistic convention is subtle here, but ever-present. Frequently present, too, are reproduced paintings, lithographs, maps, and long blocks of direct quotation. Archival documents and pure invention share page space in a way that invites commentary and endless interpretation, putting into formal play the very questions of allegorical and mystical meaning that feature as the novels content.

Reality becomes increasingly difficult to parse from fabrication, and the power of narrative, its clear, lies in the resonances and connections that artifice can reveal between known facts. As one late passage has it, Over time, moments occur that are very similar to one another. The threads of time have their knots and tangles, and every so often there is a symmetry, every once in a while something repeats, as if refrains and motifs were controlling them, a troubling thing to notice.

Within the Enlightenment period that Tokarczuk presents, much progress was made in the study of optics. Jacob Franks preaching is depicted alongside Benjamin Franklins invention of the bifocal, the publication of Newtons physical observations of light, and the popularization in Europe of the camera obscuraa technological precursor of the photograph. The suggestiveness of this choice in images for The Books Of Jacob is rich, as light and its manipulation come increasingly to be explained in the terms of the incipient Scientific Revolution. One story that the book has to tell is then of the undecidable encounter between eons-old faith and a growing rationalism.

At the same time, its a virtue of mysticism to be contradictory and puzzling, and in Jacob Frank, Tokarczuk has a hugely confounding figure. Most of the novel observes him in a broad third-person. Occasionally, there are diaristic asides from Franks disciple and biographer, Nahman of Busk. Perhaps the most interesting and reaching of the perspectives on offer here is that of Yente, Jacob Franks comatose grandmother: Hovering somewhere between life and death after a debacle involving an amulet, she dispassionately observes the entirety of the plot as a disembodied spirit. She synthesizes the diversity of otherwise random events, cutting out of them an intelligible figure. In this way she most resembles the author, as The Books Of Jacobs art is restoring and activating that recognizably human movement thats always present beneath the inert, static material of facts.

The Books Of Jacobs choices can sometimes be daunting. The books scale; its hugely populous cast of named characters; its reverse-ordered page numbers, done in honor of Hebrew convention; and the intense pitch of human suffering so often achievedit all makes for less than hospitable reading. In many ways, its the contents of the past itself thats the source of this difficultyobdurate as it is, and liable to unpredictable change. If theres one thing that Joseph Frank, the messiah, is concerned with imparting, its the provisionality of all earthly things. In her clear-sighted rendering of enormous historical momentum, pitilessly displaying the dissolution of both national borders and whole systems of belief, Olga Tokarczuk achieves much the same objective.

Author photo: Lukasz Giza

Drew Dickerson lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Read more from the original source:

In The Books Of Jacob, a Nobel laureate tells the epic story of a self-proclaimed messiah - The A.V. Club

One day in the early-1980s,when I was in my late-teens,Ibought a couple of books and brought themtoNYU Medical Center. Iwas a frequent visitor tothe hospital, given family health conditions and thatmyuncle,BobSilber,headed the hematology division.The books wereThe Creation, by P.W. Atkins, andModern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, by Paul Johnson.These reflected diverse interests Id developed; as ascience enthusiastabsorbed with questions aboutphysics and free will; andas alibertarian conservativefor whomgrowingdisaffectionwith the rightlay far in the future.

Both books shaped my views of science-related matters. And so did the environment where I began readingthem, a major hospital with research and teaching arms.

The Creationoffered a worldview of extreme rationalism and militant reductionism, as the dust jacket put it. Atkins, an Oxfordphysical chemist,sketchedout a universe with no role for a creator;whereinnatural processes arise from a purposeless collapse into chaos,andcomplex phenomena concealan underlying simplicity.Atkins held thatperfect freedom generates its own constraints, such thatevenspace, time and physical law are products of chance.He noted a debate that would intensify in later years,onclaims thatphysical constants show evidence of fine-tuningfor compatibility with life,buthedismissedthat idea as an illusion.

Atkins sawtheuniversehe describedas compatible with free will. The singular property of the brain is that its response to circumstance is to a degree under its own control, he wrote,though he added that this capacity was ultimately just purposeless dispersal of energy.The Creationwas a fascinating read, with an appealing formatwherethe main narrativewason right-hand pages while left-hand pageshadmore-technical comments.The book bolstered myskepticismtoward claims that scientists had uncovered, or were trying toevade,evidence of the divine; such claimslater became a staple of conservative magazines.

Modern Timeshad a different sensibility. Johnson, a conservative journalist and historian, sawmuch calamityinthe 20thcentury as having arisen from displacement of traditional religion by secular or atheistic ideologies. The book took a tack ofseparatingsciencefromsuch ideologies.It opened with the idea that the modern world began in 1919 when Einsteins theory of relativity was confirmed by solar-eclipse observations. Johnson proceeded to lament that this physics theory helped spur cultural trendsthat underminedtraditional morals and standards. He wrote:Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably,relativity became confused with relativism.

Johnson wrote with verve, putting forward a sweeping historical tableau resonant with Thatcherite and Reaganite conservatism. I was generally receptive to his interpretations, though in retrospectI findthe books tendentiousnessoverwrought, as with Johnsonscontention that Warren Harding was an exceptionally shrewd president,orthatWatergatewitch-hunterstoppled Nixon in what might be described as a mediaputsch.Modern Timess sympathetic treatment of the Franco regime in Spainisan ominous portentin light of right-wing affinities for authoritariangovernments in the 2020s.

Johnsonevinceda disdain for the social sciences as left-wing endeavors to remake society. Economics, sociology, psychology and other inexact sciencesscarcely sciences at all in the light of modern experiencehad constructed the juggernaut of social engineering, which had crushed beneath it so much wealth and so many lives, he wrote. He expressedapprovalthat such disciplines had faced growing disesteem in the 1970s but regretted ithad taken so long.

The effects of the social science fallacy will therefore still be felt until the turn of the century,Johnsonwrote. But its influence will steadily diminish and never again, perhaps, will humanity put so much trust in this modernmetaphysic. This argument influenced menegatively, I now believe, as itfostered a contemptuous dismissal of subjects about which I knew little.(I did, nonetheless, choose economics as one of my majors at NYUa year or so later, seeing it as partly exempt from the negative tendencies that Johnson had described.)

Johnson closedModern Timeswith an encomium to sociobiology, a school of thought led by biologist E.O. Wilson that emphasized genetic factors in understanding human behavior. According to Johnson, sociobiology was an exact science that was opposed by the radical social scientists, especially the Marxists because it suggestedthat their work and beliefs were no more than a metaphysics, a form of superstition. The books final paragraphwondered whether the whole process of seeking social and economic equality might run counter to a beneficial biological process under way in every second of creation, as humans evolve.

I thought back to thatpassagerecently amidallegationsafter Wilsons deaththathe hadracist ideas,a contretemps Ive previouslynoted. Wilson expresslydisavowedany such connection, writing that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social[behavior].Still,Wilsons work could be interpreted in bizarre ways, as with Johnsons suggestionto avoidsocialreforms so as to keep out of the way ofbiological improvementsover vast periods of time.Nearly two decades after readingModern Times, IreviewedWilsons bookConsilience, which sought to link various disciplines into a comprehensiveworldview, with sociobiologyas an important connector.Id maintained skepticismthatthis gene-centeredapproachwas an exact science.

Spending time with Uncle Bob at NYU Medical Center gave me a view of science and its messy realities I couldnt get from books. One day, he asked a young woman who worked in one of the labs to show me around. At one point, she unlocked a door so I could see where the monkeys are kept. Inthat room, the lab animals were in cages on shelves, andtheyreacted with rage at seeing us. At another point, we passed containers of blood, which had a strong smell.

Bob told me stories about scientists he knew. One of them had become well-known as an AIDS researcher andoncetold Bob hewas headingto another scientists lab as there was something theotherwanted him to see. Later, there was a dispute between the two scientists as to whod seen something first, and the well-known guys claim of credit wasfalse. Another anecdote was about a scientist whod bullied another,even overturning the guys desk and scattering his papers. When I asked what motivated this, my uncle described the bully as a psychopath.

There were more inspiring colleagues, such asLinda Laubenstein, famed for her work with AIDS patients.She used a wheelchair because of childhood polio and was called a bitch on wheels for her assertiveness with other doctors. I met her at a hospital party, and she was very nice.

Uncle Bob published over 100 science papers, withafocus on developing treatments for leukemia and other diseases. He was also a popular professor at the medical school. Treating patients was his overriding passion, though.He and they often formed close connections.

One day, I walked into the hospital, and to my surprise heard my name over the paging system. Calling the specified extension, I reached Bob, who told me that a terminally-ill woman he was treating enjoyed milkshakes of a particular type; he recited a list of ingredients, and asked me to get such a shake made. I went to a deli andinstructed a dubious counterman about the elaborate concoction, then brought ittothe womans hospital room, fulfilling her dying wish.

Kenneth Silber is author ofIn DeWitts Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canaland is on Twitter:@kennethsilber

View post:

Encountering Science in the 1980s - Splice Today

Macbeth, a new film adaptation of the tragedy of William Shakespeare after those of Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, is the first film made by Joel Coen alone, without the collaboration of his brother Ethan. It is therefore the feature film that marks the unprecedented separation between one of the most decisive, brilliant and influential couples of contemporary American cinema: the definitive split has not yet been formalized, but Ethan has in the meantime decided to devote himself to something else and an indirect confirmation has also come from their composer and collaborator habitual, Carter Burwell.

The transposition, produced by the fertile production house A24, standard-bearer for the new territories of genre cinema, and with protagonists Denzel Washington And Frances McDormand in the role of Lord and Lady Macbeth, he re-reads the raw and bloody soul of the work of Bard, not a little freezing instincts and impulses and letting the sound of the cynical and anti-humanist detachment typical of the works of the Coens (a strong stretch of discontinuity, undoubtedly, compared to the previous versions for the cinema of Macbeth).

The expressive hold is very remarkable and dazzling, with the complicity of black and white bruise photographed by the always excellent Bruno Delbonnel in 4: 3 format, while glacial elegance, although constantly on the edge of the patinated, fortunately never disperses the black heart, archetypal and universal, of the events of a man convinced by a trio of witches to be next king of Scotland, flanked and overwhelmed by a ambitious and furious wife.

The terrible and tyrannical spiral of violence thus translates into one dissertation on purely visual power, with a punctually unhealthy pallor, pushed towards abstraction by a geometric and spectral rationalism of forms. At the base of the operation there is after all an idea of macabre and sardonic thriller, in full Coen style, with a provocative and destabilizing approach to the psychoanalytic impulses of the classic text.

In fact, the protagonists face their own personal challenge for absolute power as they watch their mutual hopes inexorably unravel under the weight of a collapsing world and emotional landscape. The result is human portraits torn and deep contrasts, which are not only applied in the aesthetic packaging, indebted to so much German expressionist cinema and the Danish master Carl Theodore Dreyer, but also in the reflection on the case and fate of individuals crushed by a blind and unfathomable fate, ready to blow the bank of any reasoning.

All themes very dear, in the past, to Coenian poetics, with respect to which Macbeth is, in filigree, a sort of cold return to origins, of an ideal prodrome, of a literary rib noble in which all the characters are aware of their own physical and inner deterioration, as well as bearers of an exhaustion that passes from introspection as much as from framing.

Photo: A24, IAC Films

REPRODUCTION RESERVED

Read this article:

the review of Joel Coens film with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand - D1SoftballNews.com

Its easy, especially now, to imagine a bleak and withered future, and thats largely what our storytellers are doing. Whether its in novels, TV shows, films or video games, speculative imaginings of the world were heading toward tilt strongly to fatalistic despair. And while I cant say with much conviction that I have hope for where our current path may lead, I have wondered why more artists arent pushing back and composing visions of the future in more than just minor keys. (Lord knows we could use it.) One artist who has done that over the course of his career is the best-selling sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson. His books, the best known of which are probably the cyberpunk thriller Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, an opus about money and code-breaking, have long dealt in apocalyptic events and malevolent uses of new technology. But and this is particularly true of his latest novel, the climate-change-focused Termination Shock their renderings of the future also include potential solutions (morally and technically complicated though they may be) to the problems of living in a radically changed world. That is to say, their imagination extends beyond the edge of the cliff. To portray a more utopian future, says Stephenson, who is 62 and, to be clear, far from starry-eyed, is to lay oneself open to a certain level of mockery from critics and skeptical audience members. Whereas there doesnt seem to be any level of grim dystopian imagery that will make the fans and the critics say enough already.

Were facing a potentially apocalyptic event in climate change, so it makes sense that post-apocalyptic dystopia is where peoples heads are at as far as sci-fi and speculative fiction. But were also surrounded by incredible technologies that make our lives better, and were going to need new technologies to help combat climate change. So why dont we see much creative output that points toward the future in more hopeful or aspirational ways? I think a lot of it and this is going to sound like a funny argument is a pretty simple economic calculation on the part of people who produce screen entertainment. Im looking over your shoulder on this Zoom and seeing an office building. It would be easy to blow that building up in a science-fictional setting. We could knock holes in it and break the windows and dirty it up, and it would look dystopian and wouldnt require a lot of detailed imagining. If we were going to replace that building with a futuristic building from a more utopian vision of New York City, it would be necessary to design a new building from scratch and make it look convincing structurally and do it in a way that was consonant with an art directors scheme for the production design. The latter approach is simply harder and more expensive, and its easy to strike the wrong note and come up with something that doesnt work whereas everyone would recognize the Empire State Building after having been hit by a nuclear strike. Weve also got in the habit of thinking that by showing that kind of future, the artists are sending a message about how hard they are: Im not some rose-colored-glasses sap. Im a badass thinking dark, mean thoughts about our dark, mean future.

Neal Stephenson at home in Seattle in 1998. Robert Sorbo for The New York Times

What about the story were telling as a society beyond art about climate change? Is there a way we could be talking about it thats more likely to motivate the kind of mobilization we had, say, during the Second World War? The difficulty is that its hard to get lots of people to change their minds. The United States did mobilize in a massive way during World War II, but we didnt start getting serious about it until 1942. There had been a huge war raging since 1939, and the Brits were tearing their hair out waiting for the United States to get more involved, and it wasnt until Pearl Harbor that there was a tipping point in public opinion that made it possible for Americas political leadership to declare war and to enter into it in a serious way. So the question asks itself: What might be a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor? Were already having little regional Pearl Harbors all over the place. We had our heat dome in Seattle over the summer, we had the mega tornado supercell that passed from Arkansas to Kentucky. These little pinprick Pearl Harbor events happen here and there, but its difficult to imagine one that would impact an entire country the size of the United States if it did, it would be a really bad thing. We dont want to put ourselves in the position of wishing that something terrible would happen. Its also natural to assume that the CO2 problem is similar to other air-pollution problems weve had before. In the 50s, there was a disaster in London because of too much coal smoke in the air, and they cleaned up the air by burning less coal. In the 70s, a lot of the smog problem in L.A. was cleaned up by putting catalytic converters on cars and cutting down on hydrocarbon emissions. Theres a similar story around the ozone hole. Were accustomed to thinking that all we have to do is stop emitting the pollutant, and then nature will clean up the air. But its not true in the case of CO2 in the atmosphere. People confuse CO2 emission reduction or elimination with solving the problem. But even if we could stop emitting all CO2, wed be stuck for hundreds of thousands of years with extremely elevated CO2 levels that nature has no quick way of removing from the air. Thats the key thing that has to be widely understood before we can actually begin envisioning ways to attack the problem.

In Termination Shock, you have a billionaire character who tries to attack that problem through geoengineering. Youve talked elsewhere about writing about geoengineering as a way of ensuring that people are more prepared for it when it starts to happen. Is that something you see as a primary function of fiction: introducing concepts or ideas to the public? Job 1 is to be sufficiently entertaining that a fair number of people will actually read the book all the way to the end. If you havent done that, then youve got nothing. If youve gotten over that hurdle, then it becomes possible to start thinking about other things. Im leery of taking too much of an instrumentalist view of art because I think that if youve got that mind-set of Im going to change peoples minds or push a particular point of view the audience recognizes that almost on a preverbal level and they lose their suspension of disbelief. Im sure you can think of examples where books somehow changed peoples minds about certain topics or ended up having some functional purpose, but I think if you set out from the beginning with a functional mentality, youre probably going to end up with a failed project.

Is being sufficiently entertaining Job 1 for you or for all novelists? The novel is a pop-culture medium just like comic books or movies. So when youre practicing an art form, you generally follow the formal rules of that art form. If youre going to write a sonnet, its going to be 14 lines long. You can choose to write hard-to-read books, like Finnegans Wake, lets say, if thats what you want to do, and its a perfectly defensible choice, but in general telling a readable and enjoyable story is a basic constraint of the form.

Stephenson speaking at M.I.T. in 2008. Daniel Leithinger

All right, heres another question about how we conceive of the world: One of the things that made the Baroque period so fruitful as a setting for you was the tensions that resulted from superstitious, medieval modes of thinking coexisting alongside the beginnings of the rational Enlightenment. What similar tensions between old and new ways of thinking are alive in our modes of understanding the world? What were seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the beginning of scientific rationalism and the idea that we can find ways to agree on what is true, which was a new development. You know, Barbara Shapiro has a book called A Culture of Fact that tells the origin story of the idea of facts, which is not an idea we always had. Another thing Ive been reading recently is The Fixation of Belief by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what theyre going to believe. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what youre going to believe and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence.

Sounds familiar. Yeah, this all sounds depressingly familiar. The next method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that youre all going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. Thats probably most common throughout history. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, lets be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if its not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus which may be totally wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when youve got solid evidence to the contrary. What youre seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition from Method No. 3 to No. 4. Youve got all these people having what seem like reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like Hooke and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But what weve got now is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. Weve got a lot of authoritarians who cant be swayed by logic or evidence, but weve also got a lot of a priori people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings what they wish were true and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. Thats kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now.

Do you see a way out of that? When people find that they can obtain lots of money and power by believing certain things and following certain ways of thinking, then you can bet that theyll enthusiastically start doing that. The reason that Enlightenment thinking became popular was that people figured out that it was in their financial best interest to avail themselves of its powers. The spread of very financially successful enterprises like, lets say, steam engines for long-range ocean navigation was a direct outgrowth of the practical application of the scientific method. To that you could also add a lot of financial apparatus that came into existence around then with the Bank of England and various ways of managing financial affairs. In other words, people dont necessarily follow scientific rationalism because theyre noble and pure seekers of the truth, although some of them definitely do it for that reason. More people do it out of self-interest.

It may be the unfortunate case that theres more obvious financial self-interest to be gained by promoting irrational and counterfactual thinking. If you dont have any perceptible downside or negative consequences, then why not sign up with or co-sign the latest conspiracy theory? I do think negative consequences definitely exist, but maybe the cause-and-effect relationship isnt immediately obvious.

What are those negative consequences? What do people stand to lose? Well, the negative consequence is our entire civilization.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Brian Cox about the filthy rich, Dr. Becky about the ultimate goal of parenting and Tiffany Haddish about Gods sense of humor.

Read more from the original source:

A Sci-Fi Visionary Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us - The New York Times

For the politically inclined, 2022 should be a year of note. With a federal election due by May, and the usual analysis and intrigue underway, the political events of the year ought to appeal. Yet the response has been remarkably tepid, with a growing number of Australiansignoring politics entirely orremaining alooffrom a process they rightly believe fails to represent their real interests.

And you dont need to take my word for it, just look at the politicians.

Scott Morrison iswarning of a hung parliament a fate which portends a dull re-run of Julia Gillards 2010 experiment. It is emblematic of the Coalitions current wafer-thin majority, the tight results of most recent elections, and a wider lack of enthusiasm with the vision advanced by both of the major parties. Indeed, the reaction of most Australians has been one of increasing apathy, a decline ininstitutional trust, and a retreat to their Monasteries of the Mind a notion coined by the great American classicist, Victor Davis Hanson.

At a deeper level, this posture is representative of a longer term despair with the status quo.

Australia has witnessed almost three decades of uninterrupted growth. If, as the free-marketeers like to remind us economic success is the sole measure of social health why has support for the duopoly that has overseen thisdropped so staggeringly? Why the possibility of another hung parliament? And why the continued presence of minor parties, a group which now garners arounda quarter of the popular vote?

Primarily, this is due to a deep disenchantment with the cosmopolitan liberalism that defines our times. Whilst the public pleads for less disruption and dynamism, and more continuity and cohesion, they are overruled by a governing class fixated on economic growth as thesine qua nonof political organisation. It is a stance entirely emblematic of Christopher LaschsRevolt of the Elites. The practical effect of this is the social fracture, quasi-anarchy, and growing ungovernability of Western states we see before us today; yet on they plough.

The main culprit in all of this is our continued insistence on mass migration. Aspollafterpollshows, the Western public want less immigration, and an immigration program thats more culturally compatible with the demographic majority. This position is obliquely observed in arecent Guardian article Australians are more negative about immigrants from India, China, the Middle East, and Africa than arrivals from Britain or European countries and illustrated in countries with a similar situation, like America or the UK.

One may wish this werent the case, and that our elite-led imposition of a largely indiscriminate immigration program was beyond reproach, yet its a view thats blind to human nature and to actual and historical experience. Indeed, in anexcellent recent essay and thorough indictment of the American experience, academic Michael Anton had this to say about mass immigration to America and the importance of non-economic criteria in social harmony and cultural assimilation:

[A]ssimilation works best among peoples with some common underlying similarity, whether political, linguistic, ethnic, religious, or cultural (preferably a combination of all these). Its effectiveness declines as the differences among the disparate peoples increase. Historically, the closer in the above categories an immigrant group was to founding-stock Americans, the more quickly and smoothly its members assimilated.

American immigration policy and practice has drifted steadily away from prioritising this practice. In particular, since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act newcomers to America have become more and more distant not just from existing Americans but from one another. America now takes in, and has been importing for more than fifty years, people from every part of the globe, of every faith, speaking every language. This, too, has never before happened in world history.

Replace America and American with Australia and Australian and you have an almost exact replica of whats happened down here. Of course, the standard reaction to all of this are the usual claims of racism, xenophobia, and so on, yet the underlying principle remains. Is any nation, qua nation, permitted to prioritise who it will admit, and who will best assimilate to its norms and values? Or is there nothing left except acarte blancheopenness to all peoples of the world, under our only criteria of import: economic growth and market rationalism?

With the later the conceit weve been labouring under, and a principle that if extended, would see Danes unable to select Swedes over Somalis, or Peruvians not permitted to preference Paraguayans over Pakistanis. A patently absurd proposal given natural, linguistic, cultural, and religious difference yet one we must appear to uphold.

With immigration the main ingredient in the larger concoction of cosmopolitan liberalism; a bitter brew thats increasingly unpalatable to the existing population. To take oneexample, heres English commentator Matthew Goodwin on this dynamic at work in the UK, and on PM Boris Johnsons initial success in leveraging the votes of Remainers into a broad coalition of those antipathetic to the status quo:

Forget what people say.[This]realignment was never just about Brexit or the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn, even if these elements helped it along. It was always rooted for far more strongly in a deep and profound disillusionment with the political consensus that has dominated Britain for half a century. EU membership. Mass immigration. Hyper-globalisation. Radical cultural liberalism. And a politics built by middle-class graduates for middle-class graduates.

[With]Johnsons electoral dynamite[coming]from the fact that he was the first mainstream politician to offer a genuine break from that consensus.

The lessons in this for our major parties seem obvious, yet they appear to be ones theyll ignore. For the Liberals, Morrison has been almostentirely absentfrom the whole debate, whilst Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been reduced to little more than a narrow economic mouthpiece, trotting outanodyne op-edswhilst eschewing anything of wider import. The ALP have been hardly better, although Albaneses recent pro-workerposturedoes hold promise. Yet like other Western social-democratic parties, the dilemma of squaring a nationalistic pro-worker stance with commitments to diversity and social liberalism appears insoluble.

With the latter, the catalyst for a range of other problems that are unlikely to change after the election. Will any of the major parties put an end to the woke-led erosion of our cultural and commercial space? Will they address the astronomical increase in house prices? Will they say anything about the, not-unrelated, fall in fertility? Will they retain what remains of our European architectural inheritance as our cities succumb to the skyscraper?

Will they end the marketisation of the education sector and reverse our declining school standards? Will they stem the flood of crass commercialisation as witnessed by the proliferation of alcohol ads, gambling enticements and fast-food outlets now washing over us? Will they end our disastrous decades-long experiment with privatisation and its accrual of vast private profits at the expense of service delivery andreasonable prices?

The answer to all of these rhetorical poses is surely: no. We thus return to where we began:why bother?

If the political movement that most people want a rightward shift in the culture and a leftward shift in economics is, in effect, not on offer at the ballot box, then were condemned to a continuation of the status quo. With the major parties cobbling together a shaky governing coalition as they lose public support, and the minor parties lacking the sophistication or strategic insight to have any real effect.

The long-term durability of these arrangements is clearly imperilled. The hubris of the governing class in believing they could run a quasi-permanent program of cosmopolitan liberalism, largely under the aegis of elite-led enrichment, without public upheaval has been long suspected yet only recently seen. As now manifest in places like France a nation increasingly riven by conflict and within sight of apotential civil war and in the dysfunction that now characterises the current-day America.

The only question that remains to us here is exactly how it will all unfold? Will we see a growth in our own nationalists like France has with Eric Zemmour or Marine Le Pen? Or will the liberal establishment double-down in their efforts, like the American Democrats have with their recapture of power and their marginalisation of Trumpian populism? Yet with no indication of a change in tack from our major parties, some form of French- or America-like future assuredly awaits.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

Read the original here:

Why Bother? Australians are sick of politics and politicians - The Spectator Australia

2023 KTM 990 Duke

Images S. Baldauf/SB-Medien

990 is a bit of a magic number for KTM as it was the 990 cc LC8 V-Twin that really launced their foray into mainstream road motorcycles 15 years ago.

I owned a KTM 990 SMT, and a 990 Adventure R, had no problems with either and to this day wish I never sold them in a fit of economic rationalism.

The 990 has long been missing from the KTM line-up as the LC8 grew to 1090, 1190 and 1290.

While the void for a smaller capacity twin was filled by the new 790 and 890 LC8c parallel twins.

For 2023 it looks as though a 990 will be back in the line-up but this time around it will be in parallel twin format rather than the 75-degree vee of the original.

Some shots have already been seen of a new 990 Duke undergoing testing in Europe but today we can bring you some less disguised views of the new machine which reveal some new body work, lights, exhaust and chassis.

We hope that this will also spawn another SMT model that combines the hooligan and practical natures of the original 990 SMT.

The rest is here:

Latest spy shots of what is expected to be the 2023 KTM 990 Duke - MCNews

As an avid reader and supporter of The Port Washington Times, I am utterly dismayed that the Times would publish (Dec. 24, 2021) the long-winded and terribly inaccurate Readers Write letter titled Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump and Trump suckers. That letter, submitted by Alvin Goldberg of Great Neck, attempts to compare our former president, Donald Trump, to one of the most deranged and evil persons in all of recent history, Adolf Hitler.

Comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler is as inappropriate and wrongheaded, as it is inappropriate and wrongheaded to compare Andrew Cuomo (you remember him, dont you?) to Jesus Christ. I dont recall ever reading any prior letters from Mr. Goldberg in the Times, although I could be wrong about that. I can guess at why Mr. Goldbergs letter was unhesitatingly published by the Times, but I will have to go into that in another Readers Write letter to the Times if the Times will publish it.

Mr. Goldberg gives us a potted history of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, but in his history, he gives us a number of half truths and some absolute untruths. Adolf Hitler had a deep understanding of mass psychology and mass propaganda. Hitler took pride in being a master salesman and showman. Where, Mr. Goldberg, did you ever read such things? But then, Mr. Goldberg goes on to tell us that Trump rejects rationalism, liberalism, democracy, the rule of law, human rights and all movements of international cooperation and peace.

Please, Mr. Goldberg, do tell us where you ever learned about all of those monumental failings of our former president and do you really believe that tens of millions of Americans could have all been fooled enough to vote for someone with all of those monumental failings? Of course, Mr. Goldberg shows us how little he really knows about recent world history in the very first sentence of his rant.

Mr. Goldberg tells us World War II ended when Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies in May 1945. Sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but World War II didnt end until four months later, when in early September 1945, the Imperial Japanese government and the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, surrendered to the Allies aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. (Editors note: This error slipped through the editing process after it was marked to be corrected).

Why didnt Mr. Goldberg attempt to compare Donald Trump to the Emperor Hirohito or to the Generalissimo Tojo? Probably because at 6-feet-3 inches tall and at 260 pounds or more, President Trump just doesnt look the part of a Japanese and besides that, President Trump has let it be known that he just doesnt care for Japanese food, all that much. Of course, Mr. Goldberg may have forgotten that Imperial Japan participated in World War II and was responsible for numerous atrocities, crimes against humanity, before and during the war.

Mr. Goldberg ends his rant by urging us to Get smart and Help save America and Democracy. There is no doubt in my mind that the best way for us to do that is to reject completely the paths of turmoil and destruction offered by Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Smash and Grab, and the Biden/Harris led government.

Joel Katz

Port Washington

Here is the original post:

Readers Write: Trump falsely compared to Hitler - Readers Write - The Island Now

IN 1746, the scientist Fr Jean-Antoine Nollet, future director of the Paris Acadmie des Sciences, arranged two hundred monks in a circle roughly a mile in circumference with pieces of iron wire connecting them. He then discharged a primitive battery (a Leyden jar) through the human chain observing that each brother reacted at virtually the same moment to the electric shock, and so establishing the speed of electricitys transmission to be very high. Arguably, Nollet thereby also demonstrated that 18th-century Enlightenment was, literally, a current running through Church and world alike.

Ritchie Robertsons Enlightenment overturns stereotypes about the era, including the notion that its leading thinkers were fundamentally hostile to faith. In the main, what Enlighteners sought was a purification of theism, not its destruction: scientific knowledge was the enemy of superstition, but not of religion: only of the false beliefs that often flourished under the aegis of religion.

Enlighteners problem with religion was less metaphysical than practical. Inevitably, there was friction between their pragmatic aim (referred to in the books subtitle) of achieving happiness in this world and the Churchs belief that happiness was essentially a matter of the hereafter.

Conflict between progressive thinkers and ecclesiastics often focused on the wielding of institutional power in academe and society. Even so, Enlightened thinking was embraced by many churchmen including not only Nollet, but also the reform-minded Pope Benedict XIVth (reigned 1740-58). The latter accepted that modern science explained many supposed supernatural phenomena, campaigned against superstition, and appointed the talented female scientist Laura Bassi to a university chair.

Misconceptions about the era, Robertson argues, spring overwhelmingly from Theodore Adornos and Max Horkheimers influential Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The volume presented a polemical critique of the 18th centurys dominant intellectual currents as a dehumanising triumph of abstract rationality over natural feeling which resulted in human beings becoming viewed as means not ends.

Thus, Enlightenment, so this argument goes, presaged 20th-century totalitarian nightmares in which personal suffering was discounted before the severe geometric beauty of the perfected state order. Later critics alleged that the Enlightenment Project grounded the twisted logic of Nazi racial theory through erroneous scientific misapprehensions about biology, and also that its esteem for personal autonomy produced unhealthily atomised societies.

Robertson argues that such criticism anachronistically reads later attitudes into earlier texts and tendentiously mistakes parts for the whole. Enlightenment and Modernity, though related, are not co-terminous: much problematic Enlightenment legacy results, in fact, from highly selective ex post facto thematic development by thinkers as diverse as Marx and Nietzsche, not the actual ethos of the era. Those developments relate to tendencies understood by contemporaries as eccentric minority positions (such as Rousseaus radical political thought) or highly contested discourse (Kants essentialising view of race).

Robertson convincingly refutes the allegations of emotional aridity oft made against the Age of Reason. Indeed, by embracing the language of sensibility, Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713) and, later, David Hume (1711-76) sought to articulate the place of feeling within thought a riposte to 17th-century Cartesian rationalism.

AlamyJean-Antoine Nollet, the Enlightenment priest and scientist, teaching a physics course at the college of Navarre in 1754, in an illustration from Les Merveilles de la Science, published in 1870

The part played by emotion in cognition and thus its social value are affirmed in works such as Oliver Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer (1773), in which models of unfeeling masculinity are held up to ridicule. A theological outworking of this approach is evident in the Lutheran divine Joachim Spaldings Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The End of Man), 1748. Spalding re-established Christianity on the basis of feeling founding the religions credibility neither on rational argument nor on the self-authenticating character of revelation. Rather, Spalding appealed to Christianitys powerful emotive scope to answer humanitys innate urge towards goodness.

Robertsons analysis ranges from the conceptual Happiness, Reason and Passion (Chapter 1) through to the concrete, and bloody, Revolutions (Chapter 14), traversing Sociability (Chapter 7), Aesthetics (Chapter 9), for example. Readers may especially appreciate Chapters 3-5, covering, respectively, Toleration, The Religious Enlightenment, and Unbelief and Speculation.

Enlightenment is impressive, but overwhelming. The encyclopaedia was the 18th centurys literary product par excellence. At more than 1000 pages, this volume nods to that genre. Indeed, neat sub-chapters on topics such as Empire and Voltaire read like crisp dictionary entries. Readers might profitably approach Enlightenment as a reference work rather than a narrative history: this book is best enjoyed by dipping in rather than reading through.

The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.

The Enlightenment: The pursuit of happiness 1680-1790Ritchie RobertsonAllen Lane 40(978-0-241-00482-1)Church Times Bookshop 36

View post:

The Enlightenment: The pursuit of happiness 1680-1790 by Ritchie Robertson - Church Times

Far from pushing for social and economic equality, the state is fanning systems and principles to strengthen the divide

The latest edition of the World Inequality Report (https://bit.ly/3Fx8vv4 and https://bit.ly/3EvazlY) has confirmed that the world continues to sprint down the path of inequality. Global multimillionaires have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth growth over the past several decades: the top 1% took 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, whereas the bottom 50% captured just 2% of it. Indias case is particularly stark. The foreword by Nobel laureate economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, says, India is now among the most unequal countries in the world. This means that the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 50% is widest for India among the major economies in the world. The gap is wider in India than the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and France.

The journey of this inequality over time reveals that socialist-inspired Five Year plans contributed to reducing the share of the top 10% who had 50% of the income under colonial rule, to 35%-40% in the early decades after Independence. However, since the mid-1980s, deregulation and liberalisation policies have led to one of the most extreme increases in income and wealth inequality observed in the world. While the top 1% has majorly profited from economic reforms, growth among low- and middle-income groups has been relatively slow, and poverty has persisted.

In recent years, on the economic front, India, post-2014, seems to have got into a phase of an even greater reliance on big business and privatisation to fix economics and the result has been to beget even more inequality. The latest World Inequality Report firmly concludes that the bottom 50% share has gone down to 13%. India stands out as a poor and very unequal country, with an affluent elite.

But beyond all this, what bears emphasis is the observation by Aunindyo Chakravarty, in The Tribune, about what was happening to the income of the bottom 50% in India since 1951. This grew at the rate of 2.2% per year between 1951 and 1981, but what is telling is that the growth rate remained exactly the same over the past 40 years. This makes it clear that irrespective of the economics or politics at play, the state of the bottom half of India barely changed, with an abysmal rate of income growth. That inequality in terms of the immobility of those at the bottom (at least one half of India) stood, irrespective of the economic policies adopted, is an irrefutable fact. It was because of the social conditions and constraints in India.

Clearly, the very social structure that underpinned India, encouraged and fanned this inequality. Plenty changed after Indias Constitution was adopted. In the Nehruvian years and after that too a bid was made to battle the basic absence of social democracy in India, but it remained confined to States and regions. Therefore, one sees a little more mobility and well-being in States such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Parts of Karnataka and Andhra also recorded attempts at smashing social structures that had pushed those at the bottom to a life in perpetual poverty and deprivation, and those attempts showed in better economic prospects. So, beyond these economic policies which have been fanning inequality, it is the ruling party tying faith directly into politics and backing of old social structures far from getting rid of them, strengthening them each day that should set alarm bells ringing. The linkages between our social structures and income inequality and poverty must be faced up to.

Globally, the economic transformation of people and particularly the lessening of inequality has never happened unless socially regressive mores have been challenged. Path-breaking research across 106 countries in 2018 tackled the elephant in the room when researchers from the Universities of Bristol in the U.K. and Tennessee in the U.S. used data from the World Values Survey to get a measure of the importance of religion spanning the entire 20th century (1900 to 2000) and found that secularisation precedes economic development.

Furthermore, the findings show that secularisation only predicts future economic development when it is accompanied by a respect and tolerance for individual rights. That can only happen when beyond sufferance of diversity or tolerance, a society is able to see all shades of humans, of varying castes, creeds, faith, colour, gender and choices as equal. The central aspect of secularisation is delinking of religion from public life. It leads to respect for each citizen irrespective of their faith and for science and rationalism. This is clear from the European experience over centuries or of Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea and others the old social structures need to be smashed and not resurrected.

The rapid movement of India in the reverse direction of secularisation, with the Union governments now-stated policy to prioritise members of one religion and one language, has severe economic consequences too and the widening income inequality only reflects that. The quick descent into a One size nation, does not fit its many diversities. The avenues available for all kinds of citizens to make a life, informal if not formal, is deeply inhibited by Indias social fabric being torn by the Governments new priorities and policies. Far from pushing for social and economic equality, which can be done by dismantling old shibboleths in which Indias rank social and economic inequalities are anchored, the state is now fanning systems and principles to further them. This fundamentally distorts the hard wiring that had made modern India possible.

Criminalising the freedom of religion and choices, which is what the Indian compact is based on, by hunting out the diverse, mixed or cosmopolitan as inauthentic has consequences, both social and economic. It was exactly this that B.R. Ambedkar had warned of: In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?

B.R. Ambedkar had issued a grim warning in 1949 that if we continue to deny social and economic inequality for long, we could blow up the structure of political democracy. We risk much more. There is no destiny of nations foretold. Choices are made and destinies created. By choosing to reverse the idea of modernisation, linking religion firmly into the public sphere, trying to unmake the modernity India had tried to set for itself as an ideal, we may be already setting ourselves on a narrow path which ends in places that scores of nations in the world and several in our neighbourhood have already arrived at, only to their peril and dismay.

Seema Chishti is a journalist-writer based in Delhi

Link:

The cold truth about India's income inequality - The Hindu