Category Archives: Rationalism

Tapping into capital markets to fund infra projects is a smart move but shouldn't finance minister Dr Thomas Isaac have also used the Kerala budget he presented on Friday to bring down revenue expenditure? Is he split between mai-baap populism and Marxist rationalism, has the politician in him trumped the trained economist that he is?

The crucial and contentious part of the Kerala budget presented by finance minister Thomas Isaac on Friday in the state assembly, which the LDF government has touted as an "alternative development" path, lay buried in the fine print. In 201718, the state will receive loans worth Rs 21,227.95 crore from various agencies, but 75.6% of this - i.e., Rs 16,043.14 crore -will have to be spent to bridge the state's revenue deficit. A state which has to spend threefourths of the loan amount, meant for capital expenditure, to address revenue deficit is certainly not in the pink of economic health. Rather, it may be moving to an inexorable debt trap.

Isaac justified this state of affairs by citing the stagnation that has arisen as a result of demonetisation and the corresponding need on the part of the state government to increase its budget expenses considerably. He even drew a parallel with his own 2008 budget which was announced at the time of global recession.

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Thomas Isaac budget: Split between populism and Marxist rationalism - Times of India

Serpents, owl men and demon dogs BBC News "In the 19th Century you had a high tide of rationalism and these horror stories, and these monsters, acted as a counterweight to the rationalism," he said. The devilish ne'er-do-well, who terrorised people and chased a gardener, according to a report ...

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Serpents, owl men and demon dogs - BBC News

Throughout the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump blasted China for its protectionist trade policies, currency manipulation and a number of other accusations. Indeed, these accusations were not limited to Trump as China bashing is simply standard fare for anyone seeking elected office and on the campaign trail. Much of Trumps campaign was, however, met with derision. As the election process unfolded, the derision soon turned to snickers. As the election continued, the snickers turned downright somber while Trump sailed past his Republican opponents Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and others who had been deemed more likely to become the GOP nominee.

Among the intelligentsia, the mood has turned to alarm as now President Trump has set out to do exactly as he promised during his America First campaign. To show his sincerity to the campaign promise of bringing jobs back to the United States, he kicked off his first day in the Oval Office by issuing an Executive Order that cancelled American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP was President Obamas signature trade deal. It created a free-trade zone with eleven other nations for approximately 40 percent of the worlds economy. Trump also threatened to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods if China does not behave accordingly.

Since Trumps selection of Iowa governor Terry Branstad as his ambassador to China, the president may be backing away from some of his campaign promises. Still, the fact that Trump was elected based upon the use of these rhetorical devices suggests that there is a profound misunderstanding, if not complete lack of understanding, of the symbiotic relationship between the United States and China. It is also worth noting that, had his opponent Hillary Clinton won the election, she too would have won based upon some of the same anti-China trade rhetoric.

Is ignorance dangerous?

In his book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter once wrote that after the 1952 election, the intellectual was now dismissed as an egghead, an oddity, [who] would be governed by a party which had little use for or understanding of him, and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Adding to that of Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger had remarked that anti-intellectualism (and anti-rationalism) has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. It appears that America has set a new low bar, with an electorate that is smug in its ignorance. Yet, it prides itself on knowing who best should guide the myriad U.S. policiesfrom trade, investment and currency to geopolitical strategyto achieve the national interest.

Americans always admire those that are decisive and true to their word. But those qualities are only admirable when decisions and actions are based upon a clear and unvarnished understanding of the problem. That either candidate could win an election based on attacking a trade policy that has benefitted so many people on both sides of the Pacific for so long is at best disingenuous, and at worst, exploitation. Voters need to be more informed about the policies and agendas of their candidates and politicians need to stop pandering to a political base that subscribes to a zero-sum, take no prisoners theology. Both need to develop an understanding of the historical context between the two countries.

Philosopher Sren Kierkegaard remarked that Life can only be understood backwards . . . but it must be lived forwards. In developing sensible and pragmatic Sino-U.S. policies for the future, likely the most consequential relationship in the twenty-first century, voters and policymakers must have at least an understanding and appreciation of the past.

Partners in peace

The generally understood starting point for Americas trade relations with China begins in 1784 when the privateer Empress of China set sail from New York Harbor for Canton (Guangzhou). In fact, trade relations had already begun during the seventeenth century. However, while Chinoiserie did exist in America at that time, direct trade with China was limited by the English Parliaments Navigation Act of 1651. It was not until after the 1783 Treaty of Paris that the Patriot war financier Robert Morris decided to establish trade between the new Republic of the United States and China to encourage others in the adventurous pursuit of commerce. Free from the mercantilist policies of England, Morris sent the Empress of China on its maiden voyage to China. In doing so, a tectonic shift was created for the Republic as it severed its commercial obeisance to the United Kingdom and embarked on a new relationship with the Middle Kingdom.

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Why America Can't Afford to Get Into a Trade War with China - The National Interest Online

The Indian Express

The Ideas Election The Indian Express This terminology of rationalism, vivekvaad, secularism, freedom of speech, Hindu terrorism, anti-superstition became the weapons of (mass) culture destruction. The cultural politics of progressive activists, bound by NGOs indulging in festival ... and more »

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The Ideas Election - The Indian Express

13 Feb 2017, 12:34 p.m.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that has been defended by Mr Joyce's federal Liberal partners.

Prime Minister and Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull with Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop. Photo: Andrew Meares

Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has defended One Nation's record defending the government, while Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has warned the deal could cost the Liberal Party government in WA. Photo: Andrew Meares

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that is splitting opinion in the federal Coalition ranks.

Striking a different note to Liberal colleagues, former prime minister Tony Abbott agreed with the argument that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was a "better person" today than when she was previously in Parliament but said the Nationals should be preferenced above all other parties.

While Mr Joyce described the deal as "disappointing", cabinet colleague and Trade Minister Steve Ciobosaidthe Liberal Party should put itself in the best position to govern and talked up Ms Hanson's right-wing populist party as displaying a "certain amount of economic rationalism" and support for government policy.

Mr Joyce said the conclusion "that the next best people to govern Western Australia after the Liberal Party are One Nation" needed to be reconsideredand the most successful governments in Australia were ones based on partnerships between the Liberals and Nationals.

"When you step away from that, there's one thing you can absolutely be assured of is that we are going to be in opposition," he told reporterson Monday morning.

"[WA Premier] Colin Barnett has been around thepoliticalgame a long while and he should seriously consider whether he thinks that this is a good idea or whether he's flirting with a concept that would put his own side and Liberal colleagues in opposition."

The deal will see Liberals preference One Nation above the Nationals in the upper house country regions in return for the party's support in all lower house seats at the March 11 election.

The alliance between the more independent WA branch of the Nationals and the Liberals is reportedly at breaking point over the deal, which could cost the smaller rural party a handful of seats.

"Pauline Hanson is a different and, I would say, better person today than she was 20 years ago. Certainly she's got a more, I think, nuanced approach to politics today," Mr Abbott told Sydney radio station 2GB.

"It's not up to me to decide where preference should go but, if it was, I'd certainly be putting One Nation ahead of Labor and I'd be putting the National Party ahead of everyone. Because the National Party are our Coalition partnersin Canberra and in most states and they are our alliance partners in Western Australia."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to criticise the deal, stating that preference deals in the state election were a matter for the relevant division who "have got make their judgment based on their assessment of their electoral priorities".

Mr Ciobo joined the Prime Minister and other federal Liberal colleagues in defending the WA division's right to make its own decisions.

"What we've got to do is make decisions that put us in the best possible position to govern," he told ABC radio of the motivations of his own branch in Queensland.

After Industry Minister Arthur Sinodinos called the modern One Nation more "sophisticated" now, Mr Ciobo also praised the resurgent party.

"If you look at, for example, how Pauline Hanson's gone about putting her support in the Senate, you'll see that she's often voting in favour of government legislation.There's a certain amount of economic rationalism, a certain amount of approach that's reflective of what it is we are trying to do to govern Australia in a fiscally responsible way.One Nation has certainly signed up to that much more than Labor."

When in government, former Liberal prime minister John Howard declared that One Nation would always be put last on how-to-vote cards.

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The story Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation - Eyre Peninsula Tribune

Architectures biggest award has gone not to a star, but to a group of three Spanish designers deeply committed to creating a sense ofplace.

The Hyatt Foundation announced Wednesday that Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta, who lead the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes, had won the $100,000 (U.S.) Pritzker Architecture Prize. Often called architectures Nobel Prize, it has previously gone to many leading figures in architecture, among them Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and the late ZahaHadid.

Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and RamonVilalta.

Javier LorenzoDomnguez

RCR are little-known outside of Spain; much of their work is in Catalonia, concentrated on their small hometown of Olot, where they set up shop in 1988. While several recent winners of the Pritzker have focused on humanitarian issues designing social housing or temporary shelters RCRs win signals a turn back to interests in craft and, in particular, site and culture. It is a victory for slowarchitecture.

All their works have a strong sense of place and are powerfully connected to the surrounding landscape, the award jury said in a statement. This connection comes from understanding history, the natural topography, customs and cultures, among other things and observing and experiencing light, shade, colours and theseasons.

Bell-Lloc Winery, Palams, Girona,Spain.

Hisao Suzuki

The Pritzker jury cited specific projects, including outdoor space at Les Cols Restaurant in Olot and the firms own office in a former foundry. These projects use the local volcanic rock; at the restaurant, it is in dialogue with pristine glass cubes that evoke minimalist sculpture and Japanese modern architecture, and berms of earth. The space is quite literally rooted in theground.

Similarly, their most recognized work, the Soulages Museum, is carved into the crest of a hill and forms a sort of sculpture in dialogue with landscape. The museum, in the southern French town of Rodez, is devoted to the work of the painter Pierre Soulages. It is a line of blocks clad in weathering steel, the material made famous by the artist Richard Serra. Yet it articulates the local geography, turning a face of glass towards a park and the historic centre of the town, while presenting a tougher, impermeable face toward modern commercialdevelopments.

La Lira Theater Public Open Space in Ripoll, Girona, Spain.(2011)

Hisao Suzuki

We are used to reading the site as of it had its own alphabet, Pigem says in documentary video produced by the Pritzker. And she says elsewhere, A great motivating force is to be able to discover the treasure of each place, or where the magicresides.

These traditional concerns of architecture were sometimes set aside by the Modernist movement of the 20th century in its push for rationalism and efficiency. The past three decades in architecture have been a dialogue between work that is driven by more personal agendas like Frank Gehrys and work that draws from its place. The latter tendency is a strength in Canada, where firms such as Shim-Sutcliffe, Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple and Patkau Architects have developed strong bodies of work that are somewhat local in theirapproaches.

Sant Antoni-Joan Oliver Library, Senior Citizens Center and Candida Perez Gardens in Barcelona, Spain.(2007)

Eugeni Pons

And then, more recently, architecture has taken a turn toward social concerns. The Pritzker has reflected that, beginning with the 2014 choice of the architect Shigeru Ban, whose work has bridged high design and humanitarian concerns. Last years award went to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, best known for social housing that allows residents to contribute their own labour to the process. In social housing, there is no time for whats not strictly necessary, he told me. There is no arbitrariness. Aravenas win seemed to cement a shift in values for the prize to a type of design that aimed to change the world. It was an award for a set of values rather than pureaccomplishment.

Aranda, Pigem and Vilalta represent a gesture the other way, back toward architecture as a medium for subtle and slowcraft.

Row House in Olot, Girona, Spain(2012)

Hisao Suzuki

Their win also breaks ground in that there are three of them, and that one is a woman. Since its beginnings in 1979, the award has almost always gone to an individual, with only two exceptions, and only two winners have been women, which has generated contentious debate within a profession where women are underrepresented in many professional roles. In 1991, the Pritzker went to Robert Venturi, the American architect and theorist but not to Denise Scott Brown, who has been his lifelong collaborator in the office Venturi Scott Brown Associates. In 2013, a group of students at Harvard University organized a petition; they proposed that Venturis Pritzker should retroactively be shared with Scott Brown. The prizes organizers shot that ideadown.

Yet this years award recognizes the value ofcollaboration.

Ideas arrive from dialogue and collaboration by more than one person, says Vilalta in another video. Its almost a reaction against the contemporary world, which has promoted, in an exaggerated way, the value of theindividual.

Indeed architecture is, now more than ever, a collaborative art. And the Pritzkers newest laureates seem ready to confirm that in an atomized and globalized age, there is power in working together, and going slowly, and stayinghome.

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Architecture's Pritzker Prize lauds Spanish trio for 'a strong sense of place' - The Globe and Mail

MARCH 1, 2017

IN HIS FINAL YEARS, the late historian Tony Judt spilled much ink lamenting the decline of Western social democracy. In a series of articles and talks that culminated in his final book Ill Fares the Land (2010), he argued that in an age of market fundamentalism, the achievements of the European welfare state had been vastly understated. Not only did its social safety nets underpin the long economic boom of the decades after 1950, but by promoting equitable growth, they also foreclosed the return of extremist politics to Europe, ushering its industrialized western half into a halcyon era of prosperous security.

Consequently, Judt viewed the eclipse of the welfare state by privatization and free market economics in the late 20th century with great consternation. In his last public speech in late 2009, he expressed concern that the embrace of the market faith was pushing Europe and North America toward a new age of insecurity one foreshadowed by the financial catastrophe of 2008. Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse, he said. Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

Well, the deluge is here. In the United States, a wave of populist nativism has swept Donald Trump into the White House. Across the Atlantic, the ghosts of nationalism have returned, casting shadows over the future of the European Union. The same, and worse, is happening in places that never enjoyed the benefits of European-style social democracy in the first place. Cultural chauvinism is resurgent in Russia, India, and Turkey, while large parts of the Middle East are in the grip of chaos and a horrifying extremism. Everywhere, Pankaj Mishra argues in his new book Age of Anger, the driving force is the same: a deep disillusionment with economic globalization and its beneficiaries, which, far from spreading prosperity and universal civilization around the globe, have created dislocation and inequality on an unprecedented scale.

At the same time, this provocative book argues, our current malaise is nothing new. The worlds present turmoil from the rise of ISIS in the Middle East to the populist forces reshaping global politics echoes the Wests own violent transition to modernity two centuries ago. If Western pundits persist in seeing these changes as unprecedented, it is because they cling to a faith that under the influence of modernization, the world is slowly converging toward a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, and liberal democracy. But as Mishra argues, these assumptions overlook both the contingency of the current liberal order what Tony Judt came to recognize as a late 20th-century parenthesis and the Wests own extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity. In simplifying history, he writes, we have adopted a dangerous illusion.

Mishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment. For more than two decades, the Indian essayist has grappled with the epochal question of what it means to be modern. His first book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995) chronicled the effects of the global free market on the rhythms of small-town India. In From the Ruins of Empire (2012), he documented how Asian intellectuals grappled with the challenge of Western imperialism, responding with a mixture of resentful mimicry, cultural humiliation, and reactionary nationalism. Like the British philosopher John Gray, Mishra has become one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the West: a sort of anti-Thomas Friedman who tears down the reigning clichs of our political and intellectual elites.

Written after Narendra Modis election in India and completed right before the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, Age of Anger offers a scathing broadside against the historical provincialism of our current moment. Since 1989, Mishra writes, we have lived in an Age of No Alternatives, in which all the key questions about human affairs are deemed to have been settled. Francis Fukuyama famously argued the collapse of the Soviet Union had led us to the end of history, a world in which the prosperity and liberal democracy of postwar Western Europe and North America was seen not as a hard-won contingency, but as something like the resting state of humanity. These bland fanatics of Western civilization, as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr termed them, posited a self-reinforcing pattern of global convergence: as economic growth accelerated, national borders would melt away and societies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa would become, like Europe and North America, more secular and rational.

These dangerously misleading ideas, Mishra argues, not only elided the carnage and bedlam that accompanied the Wests own transition to modernity; they have also made us spectacularly ill-equipped to explain the current global turmoil. Trying to account for the rise of al-Qaeda and the spectacular violence of ISIS, Western pundits have fallen back on cultural explanations, many positing a worldwide clash of civilizations in which Islam is pitted against the West, and religion against reason.

Age of Anger argues that the roots of our current turmoil lie much deeper: in the contradictions of modernity itself. Since its origins in 18th-century Western Europe, Mishra argues, secular modernity has held out the promise of freedom, equality, and the transcendence of history only to repeatedly fall short of the mark. Everywhere, the creation of a modern commercial society has been experienced as both a dizzying excitement and a wrenching dislocation. Disrupting old religious and social structures, but often failing to fulfill its own promises of emancipation, it has created powerful countercurrents of what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, an existential resentment of other peoples being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.

Mishra traces this contradiction back to the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the first Enlightenment thinkers to take aim at its shortcomings. A gruff outsider once described by Isaiah Berlin as the greatest militant lowbrow in history, Rousseau repeatedly faced off against Voltaire and the philosophes, staunch advocates of secular rationality and the commercial society then emerging in Britain and France. Rousseau argued that the urbane philosophes forerunners of todays TED-talkers and networked elites had deposed superstition and religion only to replace it with an alienating new world of wealth, privilege, vanity, and endless striving. In its place, Rousseau tried to articulate a social order in which virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics, a community in which the tension between mans inner life and his social nature could be resolved, even if this part of his argument remained somewhat vague.

While Rousseaus existential yearning had its own dark side Mishra shows how it would inspire future generations of exclusionary nationalists in Germany and elsewhere he was the first person to think seriously about the problems of the new secular, commercial society. He saw the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges. Conducting a swift tour through the work of key 18th- and 19th-century thinkers from Diderot and Dostoyevsky to Rimbaud and Tocqueville Mishra charts the march of commercial society as it migrated eastward to Germany and Russia, and then, at the point of a Western gun, to societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As he shows, ressentiment was never far behind.

It is this, Mishra writes, that connects todays terrorists from lone-wolf operators like Timothy McVeigh to the bearded scions of al-Qaeda and ISIS to the generation of anarchists and messianic revolutionaries that emerged from the maelstrom of modernizing Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These include half-forgotten figures like Giuseppe Mazzini, who promoted militant nationalism as a replacement for religion, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who saw history as a blank slate on which the visionary individual could inscribe his own destiny through theatrical acts of violence.

Mishra depicts the smartphone-toting fighters of ISIS as radically modern figures, the canniest and most resourceful of all traders in the flourishing international economy of disaffection. Poorly versed in Koranic scripture, they resemble less the flock of the seventh-century Prophet than the followers of Gabriele DAnnunzio, the Italian nationalist poet, who, in 1919, took over the Adriatic town of Fiume and proclaimed a proto-fascist free state, complete with black uniforms and the raised-arm salute a comic opera preview of the real fascisms to come.

Today, as powers center of gravity shifts east, Mishra argues that the Wests own fateful experience of modernity is playing out globally. From Egypt and Syria and the slums of Mumbai, hundreds of millions of people herded by capitalism and technology into a common present have become marginal to the workings of global capital, creating powerful new vectors of ressentiment. It has also returned with a vengeance to the West, the homeland of secular modernity, where the mythic Volk Make America Great Again has reappeared as a spur to solidarity and action against real and imagined enemies.

We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world. It will be a time of blunt reckonings, Mishra writes, one calling for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world. Beyond this, he offers little in the way of solutions. But the wisest response may be to accept that the modern contradiction is unsolvable, and get to work erecting bulwarks against the deluges to come.

Sebastian Strangiois a journalist and author focusing on Southeast Asia. He is also the author of the bookHun Sens Cambodia(Yale University Press, 2014).

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Pankaj Mishra on the Violent Transition to Modernity - lareviewofbooks

In his latest bookTo Be a Machine, Mark OConnell probes the impulses, personalities, and technology of the people who believe the human body, particularly its stubborn insistence on dying and abdication of Moores law, is a system ripe for disruption. Meet the transhumanists.

OConnells book takes himdeep into the heartland of the professional disrupter class mostly the Bay Area and the cities, like Austin, eager to take in its spillover to meet with and discuss the ideas of everyone mostly men from billionaire tech CEOs and venture capitalists, to researchers at top-tier universities, to otherwise aimless loaners, apparently eager to extend their time in a world they scarcely seem to enjoy.

OConnell goes in as no diehard spokesman, and his report is not one of a jaunt through an imagined imminent utopia. Instead, its a journey that, like the books title, invites questionsWhat does it mean to be a machine? and speculative answers to them.

OConnell lives in Dublin. When I called him, we struggled at first to get a clear connection, an irony of relatively simple tech failure that was not lost. Once clearly connected, we discussed the possibility and consequences of a future where we are in some form machine and in some form potentially totally destroyed by machines.

SIGNATURE: You dont come out of the book as a devotee to transhumanism. When you started out, what were your thoughts on the movement?

MARK OCONNELL: My initial position was skeptical. At the same time, I never wanted to go in with a skeptical attitude and just come out with skepticism confirmed. I dont agree with the methods or ideology or the place where those transhumanist ideas come from, yet that almost childish horror that we get old and die, thats something I kind of share and I think a lot of people do as well. It is sort of basically unacceptable that we have this in our future. So there is something very compelling about the notion of people deludedly or otherwise thinking that this is a problem that can be solved.

SIG: A lot of it seems to be focused on this idea of not just overcoming death, but also overcoming general human inefficiency.

MO: When you talk to transhumanists most of them have a real, basic frustration with the human body and with the limitations of their sort of meat brains, thats the term you come across again and again. I suspect, it comes from an over-identification with computers. A lot of transhumanists are programmers and engineers and they spend a lot of time around computers, seeing systems, and thinking of efficiency and intelligence in a very machine-based way. Transhumanism makes perfect sense logically if you already think of yourself as a machine. It makes perfect sense to want to be a better machine, to want to be more efficient. It seems to me like being ultimately quite an insane way of thinking about human nature and thinking about what it means to be human. Thats really what interested me about transhumanism, is that it comes from this really strange notion of human existence that I think is kind of a confusion of the boundaries between the machines and the humans.

SIG: What do you see being lost in this view of man as machine?

MO: A sort of glib answer would be everything that doesnt involved a very narrow view of intelligence. Transhumanists have this battle cry that you hear over and over again that is optimized for intelligence and thats the bottom line for every metric of progress. Intelligence is the most important kind of value in the universe. I think thats a really narrow way of thinking about what it means to be human. It is also a very narrow view of what intelligence means, because when they talk about intelligence they tend to think about computational power. But I think being human is obviously a very messy, very inherently unquantifiable thing in terms of what makes it worthwhile. I suspect it has something to do with not being a machine and with not being ruthlessly efficient and productive and intelligent. But thats not a very good answer. As much time as I spent thinking about this stuff, and talking to these people, I never really came up with a satisfying answer to what it meant to be a human being.

SIG: One of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading the book, and you touch on it too, is that there is some similarity between transhumanism and millenerian thinking. The idea that since there is going to be this great reward at the end, that the contemporary world as it is now is kind of pointless. The problem of this, Ive always thought from the religious perspective, is that it deemphasizes solving the problems of today because its so focused on this thing that is going to come. I was wondering, did you find that transhumanists were very concerned about contemporary problems?

MO: The short answer is no. Because most of the time you are dealing with rationalists who are so extreme in their rationalism that it becomes insanity in a way. I wont say theyll dismiss things like climate change, but theyll say, oh yea climate change is a problem, but its fairly well served and there is a lot of people working on it and its not going to wipe out all of humanity, so lets not worry about it too much. They talk about it in terms of future lives. The lives of the people who are yet to be born are just as important or are given just as much weight in the moral calculus as people who already exists, which I guess as a utilitarian and sort of rigorously rationalist claim does make a kind of sense, but for most actually living human beings, it is kind of weird to think of things in that way, for me certainly. I find it hard to care about people who will be born in one-hundred years time as opposed to people who are alive now. Maybe thats wrong, maybe thats morally a bit dubious, but it seems to me strange to prioritize the lives of people who have yet to be born over those who are living and suffering now.

SIG: It seems like one obvious criticism of transhumanism is that if what they really want to do is extend human life, then they should be focusing on the things today that really shorten it like war and poverty and inadequate medical care.

MO: Yea. But to these folks like Aubrey de Grey, who I talked to for the book, you are just looking at it all wrong. To them, death is an ongoing holocaust that we deal with everyday and if we bring forward the cure of mortality by however many days, its thirty September 11ths a week that weve prevented. Its really hard to argue with that kind of extreme rationalism, I find, because youre kind of talking different languages altogether.

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Meet the Group of Extreme Rationalists Bent on Cheating Death - Signature Reads

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By Heartwood, Everett Public Library staff

Target in the Night by feted, recently deceased, Argentinian author Ricardo Piglia is a beautifully constructed novel featuring a number of interrelated stories, distinctly individualized characters, and stylish storytelling.

On its surface we have the murder of Tony Durn who came from the U.S. to a provincial town outside of Buenos Aires with lots of cash and a connection to the twin Belladona sisters. Attempting to solve Durns murder is Croce, the quixotic, Holmesian detective who has a long history of butting heads with local prosecutor Cueto.

The murder involved a knifing and the apparent use of a defunct dumbwaiter to lower down cash from the victims hotel room. The latter may also have provided the means of escape for a small person. Indeed the chief suspect is a Japanese jockey by the name of Yoshio, and his alleged act is being called a crime of passion. Other suspects include various members of the Belladona family, and a different jockey, who may have been paid to make the hit as he was in need of cash to buy a beloved, injured horse.

Woven into the story are scenes at the racetrack, the Belladona brothers and their fortress-like factory for cutting-edge automotive prototypes on the outskirts of town, a reporter (Renzi) from the city who has come to report on the murder, and a slowly unfolding history of the town and life on the Argentinian pampas that brings to mind Garca Mrquezs mythical town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Belladona family are prominent citizens in the community but are described as being currently at war with each other. We learn of their family history in ways that are fascinating and add layers of intrigue. For example, Renzi has a long talk with the twin, Sophia (eventually leading to intimacy), which unfolds episodically throughout the novel. And Renzi discovers more details about the Belladonna family with the help of the towns efficient archivist, Rosa, revealing a family schism and the attempt to appropriate the Belladona factory and surrounding lands through a corporate takeover.

In addition to all this, Piglias various characters have peculiar interests that include a fascination with language and syntax, dreams and the work of Carl Jung, literature and philosophy, quasi-mysticism, rationalism, madness, perception and the ide fixe. Target in the Night is a wonderful amalgam of detective story and classical tragedy told in voices that vary from Chandler to Pynchon to Bolao. Readers in need of cleanly wrapped up narratives should probably look elsewhere, but for those who are open to ambiguity and enjoy finely realized characters, myriad subject matter, and punchy yet graceful writing definitely give this book a look.

Blanco nocturno (Target in the Night) was awarded the prestigious Rmulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 2011. For more about the author see the Piglia Dossier in the first issue of the new journal, Latin American Literature Today.

Be sure to visit A Reading Life for more reviews and news of all things happening at the Everett Public Library.

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Review: 'Target in the Night' is punchy, graceful, ambiguous - The Daily Herald

Courtyard full of devotees didnt care that just over a week ago, a suicide blast killed 88 in that very place

SEHWAN SHARIF:In a world of logic and rationalism, there often occur moments which defy any explanation. Its the moment when a devotee glances at his place of worship, his spiritual guidefor the first time. Its the moment when a thing of beauty comes to life in front of your eyes like watching evolution give shape to the world, or looking into your firstborns eyes moments after birth. I had a similar experience on Saturday night when I visited the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan.

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It involved neither God nor evolution, but rather something more powerful that abides within us: love and peace. I have lived over two decades with the mind of a cynic, questioning and making sense of the nonsense around me and it has only happened a few times that I stop and just feel things as they are, without any judgment. It happened when I was kayaking in a lake surrounded by mountains in Yeongwol, South Korea. It happened in the mountainous Buddhist temple of Naksan where Buddhas spirit lived in the winter fog and watched over his devotees. And it happened again in the ethereal presence of Qalandar.

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A courtyard full of devotees who did not care that just over a week ago, a suicide blast had killed 88 people in that very place. I was there, moving to the rhythm of Lal, whose four lamps never extinguish. I was there to light the fifth one.

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Watching people go into a trance to the sound of dhamaal was a moving experience. What followed was a peace jam by Sounds of Kolachi and percussionist Abdul Aziz Qazi, marking the first time any band has performed inside the Qalandar shrine.

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The heart-touching sound of Gul Muhammads sarangi combined with Ahsan Baris guitar, Qazis cajn, and Ahmeds vocals served as a call, an azaan of sorts. In no time, people gathered around to witness the manifestation of a peaceful gesture in the face of fear that had swallowed the world. In fact, it occurred to me that, apart from the tighter security at the entrance, the public did not even worry about the blast anymore. The power of peace had set into them so heavily that it wasnt going to stop them from visiting the pilgrimage site.

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Each musical note and each expression of the people in witness exclaimed, No blasts or killings can conquer peace and love. The shrine was a canal, where musicians took inspiration from the people and gave them back through music an ecosystem, a cycle of peace. Its even more interesting that no person objected to it. Music was a whole another prayer, similar to what the regular devotees did at the shrine. To top it, two local musicians joined in with nagaras of their own like dervishes joining a group of dervishes in the dance of zikr.

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The performance, which lasted over 40 minutes, saw people even dancing to the rhythm in a trance-like state, as on the path to enlightenment. It reminded me of the Heart Sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Swaha (Gone, gone, gone beyond altogether beyond, Awakening, fulfilled!).

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It talks about love and mental peace where nothing, no worldly chatter and noise can touch you. One of the most important sutras in Buddhism, it talks of Bodhi, which is awakening. If the entire experience of Qalandars shrine can be summed up in one word, its awakening.

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When a guitar and Sarangi took over Qalandar's shrine - The Express Tribune